in response to “The please like us Party”

Once again I must congratulate the Crack Emcee. I love how he puts it all together. Short and sweet sentences, pictures that say more than a thousand words, easily digestible and easier to follow. It’s just hard to read at work, people wonder why I am checking out “Give ‘em Hell, Harry” Truman and Easy Rider pictures while I am supposed to be diligently cogging away in my cube.

The analysis of Clinton and Gore as war mongers who wanted to increase the Offense Budget, while not inhaling, and of Mini Bush (this is an age categorization, when you measure the Bushes by their fuck-ups, he outshines daddy like a stadium flood light would a candle) as the humble Foreign Policy guy, who never really wanted to fly that damn plane anyway, let alone in Vietnam really surprised me. I must have been dreaming when I saw all that “weak on FP liberal” dirt thrown at them. And I must have been dreaming when it was assumed that George Bush would be strong on National Security and proceeded to fumble his way through every international situation like only a Bush can (head in soup in China, planes shot down in front of China, non-signatory of small arms treaty).

However entertaining the above reversal of roles is, the salient point seems to be that once a President is in office, he can not afford to cater to either his hard right or hard left anymore. Real Politik sets in, and the world has to be taken seriously and with as little ideological baggage as possible. The USA is not in an easy situation, the most powerful nation on the planet, everybody wants a pie(ea)ce of her – you know this if you ever played Civilization. Mostly we seem to be running around like a schizoid teenager, who wants nothing more than to be loved for her loyalty and friendship (export of democratic freedoms), yet is painfully aware that if make-up (oil) is not secured in the short run she will loose power, and that for that reason her grand station in this high school (world) relies on dominating commerce and the procurement of certain lipsticks (metals) and mascara (resources). Morals and walking over dead bodies to get the resources you need in order to impose your will is difficult to pull off at the same time, at least not without smallish PR fallouts. Especially while remaining the good guys the USA used to be after WWII - for which I personally am hugely grateful, as I would have grown up either a Nazi Youth, or behind the Iron Curtain.

I suspect that the same situation vexed Truman and grand old Roosevelt, the difference being that not every Joe Blow was blogging their ass off about it, JFGIing every bloody comment while digging up divorce statistic and old campaign buttons. The lies don’t fly as easy anymore. And lies are part of the game. Whether you are Democrat or Republican, you need to play an international game of chess with people who are absolutely ruthless and with their backs to the wall. That’s like putting me in the ring with a rabid, wounded Doberman. I know you gave me a gun to defend myself, but most likely that bitch will be way faster than I can ever hope to be.

I think we should leave the ideology behind, leave the campaigning behind, leave all the rhetoric behind, and judge both Republicans and Democrats by their results. This gets hard when you consider that a lot of these wars stretch out over opposing administrations. But lets try: It would seem that WWII was rather well done. Korean War, was a write-off, probably quite useful though. Vietnam, a big clusterfuck. And the Gulf Wars could only be described as silly, if they wouldn’t be so expensive. What is the thin red line through all these wars? I believe it to be that the USA does better the more right she is. I am all for kicking some ass around the world, and nothing annoys me more than my Euro Friends who just yadda after their media and hate everything the USA does, BUT it seems that when the dust settles and we actually consider if we had a right to enter into a war, we can directly correlate that to our success with it. This makes me hopeful. In fact I rejoice that the USA always looses when she looses her moral compass. It makes watching all those tedious Hollywood happy endings bearable, as it seems as if really only the good guys can win in the end. And whenever even our glorious behind is wrong we fall on it, just like the Ruskies did and hopefully the Chinese will soon.

We did not have the right to invade Iraq. If you base that argument on human rights, you need to ask your congressman (the ones with the actual power to declare war) to invade China right now. And you should have done the same when every single democratically elected government in South America was overthrown with our help. If you base it on WMD, let’s go to N. Korea, and Pakistan right now. Both of which are a lot more unstable and actually HAVE some, compared to Iran for example. If you think that our current success (I measure success by not seeing white boys dying on the beaches of the Korean Peninsular) in N. Korea is based on hardass Foreign Policy you are plain wrong. It is based on what you would call lily-livered democratic “please like us” party principles, which was only initiated because we saw that kicking ass didn’t work in the Middle East, and because we ran out of money. I am not sure which reasoning I prefer.

You, the citizen, were conned into going to war in Iraq; remember Colin Powell and his little sample of whatever-the-bloody-hell scared us just so in front of the UN? Although I do believe that every citizen bears responsibility, and that in this regard you failed only a little less than Colin Powell, I will halfheartedly grant that you were conned into sending your boys to die for nothing. For this reason we need to present a bill for the huge error of judgment and arrogant group-think that was the result of a bunch of neo-cons getting together and trying to reorder the world in their image.

This is not a somehow diffuse case, with lots of competing variables to consider. Just look for the people who planned and implemented the war. They are gone. Their own party, their own President has forsaken them. This is not a liberal conspiracy. If they would have been right, they would still be dancing victory laps on The Mall. And don't tell us we didn't tell you so. We did, Obama for example. The people of the USA were tired of being conned back then, and they are pissed at being conned now, and they will present a bill to the Republican Party who is, as I write this, running for the hills (yup, an undisclosed location). The upcoming bill will be the second part of a lay-away bill, the first part of which was presented during the last mid-terms.

I think McCain’s story is absolutely fascinating. Nobody can even come close to imagining what it is like to spend 5 years at the Hanoi Hilton except for Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago. I have tried, but I gave up. I admire his politics of the past years even if most died-in-the-wool Republicans wanted to vomit in their mouths when he was driving campaign finance reform. And he was nominated exactly for these reasons. He won the Republican nomination because he is the most Democratic of all Republican candidates. So please spare me all that talk of why Republicans are better on FP. They are not; they conceded that by nominating McCain. Campaign Finance Reform? Bring it on! Marrying one hot woman who looks just like the last one he dumped? Bring it on! (I am Austrian; I have no problem with how he lives his private life. You do though, you hated Clinton's BJ, so be honest.)

But supporting the President unconditionally in regards to the failed policies of the Middle East? That is unacceptable. The Republican Party and John McCain have to learn that lying to the people will cost them dearly. It might even usher in a new Democratic Age, how ironic that would be, and so sweetly and justly making Carl Rove rotate in his little southern (yup, undisclosed as well) plantation grave.

hot

Its about 200 degrees in Phoenix right now. even if you do not believe in Global Warming, that makes you want to move to Canada.

lame phishing attempt

Seriously, you will have to do better than this if you want steal my ID.

the population bomb

My boy Yukes in his blog against the human right of vampiring our sweet little planet points out that there are just too many people on it. I agree, although it makes me uncomfortably fatalistic to do so. I mean, once you agree that there are too many people what is the next logical step that either we or nature will need to take?

For this reason I want to give a shout-out to The Population Bomb. Hip Hip Hurrah! The Bomb has finally exploded in our none-believing (or willfully stupid) faces. The Bomb reminds me of a war relic from WWII. It dropped, never exploded, in a weirdly Freudian manner proceeded to bury itself in our fertile moist earth, was subsequently forgotten, later stumbled upon by farmers, and finally, while being ridiculed for its outdated mechanism, decided to ram its message so far up our asses that to call it an enema of epic proportions would be a, well, epic misunderstatement (this last malapropism is for you W). The Bomb will flush our shitty humanity down the toilet of the universe.

As recently as 2003 The Intercollegiate Studies Institute (all three of these words are individually and taken together oxymoronic in regards to this hive-mind) rated it the twelfth worst and harmful book EVER published. Without wanting to digress too much, this list makes nice bed time reading for your normal (IQ higher than 72) mind. What should be on it instead of their choices are books such as Mein Kampf and the Bible.

I want to ask a couple of questions: Members of the ISI, when you go to your local Wall Mart, do you throw a hard cover edition of the Population Bomb at each other while fighting over the last packet of, as you think, over-priced rice? Do you stand at your local gas station and take the name of your stupid lord in vain when cussing out your silly little hive-mind because you voted for your republican soulmate W, who after all, made oil four times as expensive as it was when a lily-livered, bleeding heart, blowjob-enjoying liberal was in the White House? Will you wonder why you can’t afford your god-damn cooling bill for your stupid, none-insulated, redneck shack anymore, now that the masses of colored people on this globe use up your precious energy before you can steal it out from underneath them? Are you outraged that the multitudes blame you for this and say “I told you, when you took our condoms away, that your bloody abstinence crap DOES NOT WORK! Now we got AIDS, can’t afford food for our 15 children anymore, and to add insult to injury you made Kyoto a joke“? When you cry over another one of your stupid proselytizing sisters getting raped and murdered in Africa or Afghanistan do you remember that you are the only country in the world that voted AGAINST the Small Arms Treaty of 2007? Abstaining wasn’t good enough for you. Do I need to list the horrific regimes that did not take this step alongside you? Did you really need to make it official that you finally realized that nature wasn’t killing off the condom-less multitudes fast enough, so you wanted to lend it a gracious, christian, helping hand?

Do not be outraged that I am lay all of this at your doorstep. Do consider that your right-wing, fanatic religionist, irreparably fascist ass voted EN BLOC for the current lame-duck administration, which is driving all of these policies with your whole hearted prayerful approval. TWICE!

Where was I? Oh yeah, conservatives, republicans, believers, whatever you want to call yourself: You are always wrong! History makes a joke out of you. The other country in which books like the ones on your list are forbidden is Iran. Look at the past 200 years in the USA. You liked slavery, you liked segregation, you like the A-Bomb, you like guns, you like greed. All of which have been proven wrong and are also mentioned in passing, so to speak, in your curse-them-to-god seven deadly sins and dumb commandments. And even though you put a guilt trip the size of a super kancho on the rest of humanity you keep acting against your own morals, against your spurious, so-called christian values (What?! Do you make a living using oxymoronic names?) that you expound on in your vacuous publications, with which you seek to cover the real truth of your sad existence: That you are the bane of humanity. That you hate knowledge. That you hate sharing this planet with all peoples. The only bomb you ever disliked was The Population Bomb. And thankfully that one has been airmailed back to you, compound interest included. I only wish that my liberal behind could just this once be as wrong as you are on a daily basis. Then we could all survive this mess you have unloaded on us.

blogging for hope

our human right

lucky coincidence of birth
uneven in distribution
fused to our geography
instead of our humanity

luck is in short supply
three billion short

my cobalt overrides
your water
my nickel rules
over your bread

I care not for your hunger
nor your sickness
your suffering leaves me cold

you call it luck
I call it destiny
that yoke is yours
that silver mine

my human right

Russia, the newest member of the EU

It is not my fault that Russia is on my radar now. They started it with that silly parade. Showing off their rusted, wrinkly, underpaid cojones. That is what you get for raising the ire of one immensely (three readers) popular blogger, yes I am talking about me. HAH, take that!

Anyway, if any of you knew that a chunk of Russia sits right smack in the EU I will give you a ticket to - Kaliningrad/Königsberg, former capital of Ost Preussen (German Ur-Staat), and birth place and lifelong residence of one Immanuel Kant. You wouldn't want to go there though, I am sure. It is a nasty joint, and to get there you would have to take the train via Belarus with a bunch of sheep herders, fermenting yak milk barrels and Vladimir Putin. That last one is toxic, I hear, and once you have it, you will never get rid of it. Kinda like Herpes.

forget roulette

aryan mum bitch slap

This is funny:










This is funnier:







Well, what else do you expect:






Apparently too much:





Aryan Mum Bitch Slap:

commemorate your cog

I am sure I know exactly what my employer wants to tell me by putting this into my cube over the weekend. Michel Foucault would have a field day. I refuse to internalize. I shall not be disciplined, nor punished.

the EU, such a small country

Being such a small country as Europe is, it is really amazing that you speak, like, so many languages there. I mean, we have, like, 40 % Mexicans in this country and we don't even speak Spanish", says the eternally surprised, marginally endearing, like, stupid woman. I will not dwell on this specific achievement of intellectual absenteeism, but instead share with you the traps of deer eyes.

This is the second time in three weeks that I am looking into a pair of huge orbs of liquid. Exquisitely shaped, lovingly manufactured they nevertheless remain pits of emptiness which manage to briefly distract from the rest of the sagging façade. At first I think “My, what big eyes you have”, then I realize the façade is just that - a Potemkin Village melting into the mud it arose from, the window frames remaining the only solidity left behind. They, the pits of emptiness, or if you prefer, the huge orbs of liquid, do not however distract from the other pair of orbs gently nudging me a little lower - equally exquisitely shaped and lovingly manufactured. I have your attention? I know I do, nothing garners attention in this large country (it’s a country, right?) of linguistically challenged prudes as the mention of over sized lovingly manufactured orbs.

Because of that I will now dwell after all. To state the obvious, sort of like her empty orbs, Europe is not a country. I might as well gently nudge you and tell you that yours does not contain 40 % Mexicans. Even though I know you like to exaggerate, again, sort of like your orbs gently nudging me, this is too much. Just because there are a lot of Latinos in Arizona, doesn’t mean there is an equal amount in the rest of the USA. If you would be correct in your estimate, there wouldn’t be any white people left. Some might say this would be for the better.

Also, if you would bother to take a closer look at any minority in any of Europe's many none-integrated countries, you would find that neither do those countries learn that minority's language, nor does a minority have anything to do with the fact that Europe harbors a gazillion different languages. Please stop trying to impress me with your none-existent suave worldliness. If your biggest goal in life, and some might say that this is for the better, is to have blue-eyed children you should probably be glad to be born in this wasteland of the mind. I certainly am, that you are. Your gently nudging orbs and lack of response to outside stimuli will be quite sufficiently impressive in their own rights to reduce me to the quivering mass of meat that I try to lift myself above on a daily basis. Thank you for making it easy.

live it baby

how to spend you economic stimulus check

Today I was imagining what to do with my economic stimulus check. I thought how nice it is that I will be getting back an additional $ 600 that I can spend freely on improving my economic outlook. Of course the smart thing to do would be to put it into a savings account, or even an IRA. But since I figured these are $ 600 less that the government will give to Israel to drop cluster bombs on little Lebanese children or use to launch rockets from ships into central Africa or -insert your favorite terrific sci-fi weaponry horror here - I should do something appropriate to make that initial divestment from governmental irrationality go a little further. I was going to get some compound interest so to speak.

The first thing that came to mind is that I should buy a gun and shoot a redneck. However, my logic-minded room mate Tom (you can’t beat him at this, he teaches LSATs at Kaplan) pointed out, that since I would thereby be joining the class of rednecks I really would not be lowering the total number of rednecks in this country. In fact, I would just be replacing one red neck with another, ergo keeping the numbers even. Additionally, since I would join the rednecks with this action, I would essentially be removing myself from the, what I deem as the normal, as in not inbred gene pool, actually lowering sanity levels, and keeping insanity levels even.

This bothered me; mostly because I already picked out a target. My neighbor whose church music I was forced to listen to one night. The next night, when he was up on his balcony talking to the local security weenie/snitch/despicable piece of horse manure, he followed the church music evening up with blathering about how the right to bear arms (all seven of them) is written in the constitution. He actually said “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.” The security guy answered that he hardly left the house without his flak jacket anymore. Those roadrunners down here really are quite frightening, and you must protect yourself from the constant onslaught of their suicide attacks – against the grill of your car.

You can imagine my sincere disappointment; since logic now dictated a different course of action. So decided to drown my sorrows in Vegas and blow the night away with a bunch of hookers. Just because it is the thing that would piss the gun-toting, church-going, fun-hating, single-mother-producing redneck population off the most.

blow your hair back

citizen soldier

Now, I am not saying that

this


reminds me of

that



Well, obviously, that reminds me of this. I wonder though, if this is preaching to the choir. I wonder, if someone whose family has signed up, or who is thinking about it themselves looks at these two videos and thinks, "I don't know what he is trying to tell me with these two videos here side by side. One is a cool song with people in it who I want to be like. The other kinda makes fun of that, but still is a kick ass movie about kicking ass." I wonder, if my idea that people who sign up for the armed services are victims to clever marketing campaigns and jaded appeals to patriotism is correct. Are they just too removed from my way of thinking to even register the irony I see in these videos? Likewise, do they think that I just don't get it? That I do not understand sacrifice and carrying a heavy burden for my country? I don't know, but it sure seems that way.

Heinlein wrote Starship Troopers in 1959. Now, I am not saying that this either means that we haven't learned anything new in the last 50 years, or that we seem to have a really bad memory for having such a large waste of space between our ears. But... well, thats exactly what I am saying. I feel slightly ethically challenged to be reminded of our morals by a Sci-Fi writer. Funnily enough Heinlein seems to have written this in support of getting some, but I completely missed that. The propaganda segment above must be one of the most sarcastic pieces of self-flagellation known to man - he was making fun of himself without even knowing it. He was doing his part!

So even though I completely missed out on the fact that Heinlein meant his story as propaganda for citizenship to attained only through willingness to ultimate sacrifice, which means that I myself am too far removed to get the warrior's point, I nevertheless want to ask you, the warrior, to consider what it would be like not to head the call to arms. Let us nevertheless try to understand a fact or two about the history of propaganda and warfare of the last 70 odd years?

For example, why is it always the citizen who is doing the dying? What it is it that makes all of us volunteer to go get some? In this modern enlightened world should we not be able to move beyond that? Or is our biology too overpowering, are we too much a victim of evolution to leave the fights over whose religion disproves evolution best behind? Is our need to be in constant competition too strong? Ah well, maybe soon we can make a Warrior Caste. You say we have one already? Na, if that was the case why would we need to see videos such as the one above to convince us of the validity of our morality and honor?

And why is someone who dies for the place that he lives in, more valid than someone who teaches the children and nurses the sick in that same place, just to name another couple of bland favorites of public benevolence. How much more useful could he have been as a patriotic teacher, still alive, instead of being six feet under? We do accord respect according to usefulness right? Otherwise our incentives would be rewarding the wrong action. If we would elevate sacrifice over utility, we could all die a hero's death but no mother would outlive her sons. What would be the point of that?

And why the bloody hell, are we still dying for the places we live in? have you ever thought of maybe just not doing that? We do not live in a feudal age anymore, in which you were completely beholden to your master's will, who said frog so you hopped.

And finally, why can I not turn in my passport and still travel the world?

Are you doing your part?

you are nothing but a cog!

In recent month I have had the pleasure to like working where I am. I generally like what I do and the people that I work with. But in the end it was always just a job. Just as I am just a resource for my current employer – no hard feelings. But lately simple measures on the part of my employer have led to an emotion akin to gratitude. Surprising I know, but stranger things have happened, like the Suns coming back from the brink of elimination. We were treated to free fruit at the entrance, and if you knew where to look you found yourself some free snacks, coffee and soda as well. Now all that free stuff is official, and available in the cafeteria. Unfortunately, my employer has decided that this is also a good time to implement a little segregation. Contractors are now not welcome anymore to enjoy those benefits. Understand, as a contractor I am used to zero benefits, comes with the territory. But giving me free fruit, in essence telling me that you care about my health, and then taking it away again is, I don’t know, cruel and unusual punishment? Don’t toy with me, you are not the god, I refuse to believe in, who supposedly “giveth and taketh away”.

In this spirit I should be forgiven for taking the following memo seriously:

"Following the announcement that the free fruit will now be for blue badges only, it has been decided that all drinking fountains on the third and fourth floors will also be blue-badge exclusive. However, green badges who wish to drink during the day will not be restrained from bringing in their own water bottles. In order to apply a consistent policy throughout the building, elevators 2 and 3 will be off-limits to green badges. Since you are not getting any free fruit anymore, we thought that you should maintain your health by walking the stairs. Finally, all bathroom stalls will also be “BLUE ONLY”. Urinals will remain open to Green badges for sanitary purposes, but Green Badges wishing to defecate during work hours are encouraged to bring in their own port-a-potty. In order for this segregation to be clear to all there will be signs “BLUE ONLY” posted in all relevant areas. And we are not referring to your eye color here, that would be racist.”

There really are signs like that :(

master in the sky

“A long time ago all ships were propelled by sails only”, the Skymaster of the excuse for a ship that I lucklessly find myself on after leaving Talinn behind tells me somewhat redundantly. His cabin is a mess, his beard a tangle and his eyes perpetually crossed. But his kite is perfect. He reminds me of those honorable gauchos who would feed their horse before feeding themselves.
At some point after a long time ago, ships were powered by one or another derivative of hydrocarbon. Then it ran out. Now ships are propelled by a combination of wind and solar power. The Skymaster’s job is to fly the enormous kite attached to the bow of the ship. The Solmaster looks after the solar panels.
“There is no justification for that lazy good-for-nothing narcissist’s existence on this ship”, he informs me as we make our way up what would have been the quarterdeck 400 years ago. I worry about his eyes doing a 360° rotation in his head.
From this I gather that the Skymaster and the Solmaster don’t get along. It seems to be a tradition of sorts on ships; stemming from their inherently different psychological makeup (insert any large number of favorite neuroses here) required by the skills that essentially are fundamentally, directly and even diametrically opposed. Basically, to use my least favorite garbage word, the Skymaster needs to be a control freak, never not having his full attention on the kite. The Solmaster goes for a tan amongst his solar panels while they suck up the juice. Needless to say that lazy good-for-nothing narcissist is the nicest thing a Skymaster has to say about a Solmaster.
“Used to be I was kiting just for the heck of it. Strap myself in, float above water, say hello to the gods.”
“Are all Skymasters former kite boarders” I ask.
“I wouldn’t say that all Kite Boarders become Skymasters. But all Skymasters certainly are Kite Boarders.”
Since we are about to head up to the SkyCon, the lookout from which the Skymaster controls the Kite, I decide to overlook his slightly cryptomanic Sagan reference. The SkyCon is raised 20 feet above the bow on a spindle of a pole. I am afraid to get up into it at the same time as the Skymaster. It looks flimsy.
“It only looks like it will be carried away with the slightest breeze. There is some nano-shit in there, keeps it from getting ripped out”. He proceeds to tell me in much too much detail how the kite is attached to the SkyCon. None of which I believe because how can the power from a 5000m² kite be transmitted to a ship displacing 10k tons through a spindle of a pole, no matter how much really small shit is in there? If you don’t believe me, wrap a kite line around your index finger and let a 2m² kite drop down into speed.
In the SkyCon the Skymaster straps himself into a climber’s safety harness on steroids which is suspended in the middle of the SkyCon by six lines of fiber that are too thin to see. The lines from this low-grade spider web lead through small holes to the outside.
“Step back into that recess, unless you want your head lopped off by these lines. There is some nano…”
“… shit in there, keeps it from being ripped off, I know, I know” says I as I step.
“Right, let’s grab some sky.”
He taps a button on the floor with his left big toe (he is barefoot) and a trap door opens below the bow of the ship. After small clanking noises ebb away, a piece of fabric starts to unfurl from the trap door. It seems to be suspended by nothing and raised by magic. Then I notice the morning sun glinting of the lines leading from the kite over various pulleys to where I stand. In fact the lines attached to the kite are the same lines leading from the low-grade spider web out the holes of the SkyCon. I have to fight a sudden urge to vacate the area as I have visions of nano-shit strengthened lines snapping and reducing the Skymaster and me to small heaps of steaming meat and puddles of slowly cooling blood. The Skymaster proves that he smells my fear because he snaps the lines in the wind which is catching in the piece of fabric that at this point does not look like a kite but like a used Pariser (you need to be from Vienna to get this, sorry). The nano-strength snapping sounds like a 45 going of behind my left ear. I tell him where he can shove his practical jokes unless he wants me to perform nasty forms of ritual rape and torture on his firstborn. He doesn’t take this seriously, probably because he is twice as large as I am, but nevertheless stops snapping the lines. My guess is that that’s just not good for all the nano-shit, and who would want that to hit the fan?
Slowly, the kite unfurls to its full size, which is intimidating. No wonder this guy thinks he is the king of the world in his little SkyCon above the bow. It takes an hour to deploy the kite fully, at which point it is suspended 500 meters above the ocean, making lazy eights in the sky. He calls it m8ing.
By the time this is achieved I have come to understand a simple truth about Skymasters. They are a higher evolved species then you and I. Strapped into their harness on steroids, suspended a couple of inches above ground by invisible lines, they perform a ballet more elegant than the Bolshoi. They calibrate the monster at the end of their lines with such finesse as to boggle the mind. At this point I could emasculate you with certain intimidating mathematical formulas that describe to you in detail the staggering power that is transmitted from this kite to the ship, while the interface between the two is a single human who is attached to both by lines that you can’t see. But I won’t. Suffice it to say it’s like having a medium-sized jet engine strapped to your ass with twine.
Two of the lines are attached to the harness at his hips and one each to his arms and legs. Every time the Skymaster pulls on a line in his spider web, turns his hips slightly, traces a circle with his left leg, or produces any number of cryptic movements, the kite in the sky obeys. I am entranced as this superhuman performs pirouettes in the SkyCon while the kite leverages his every move. Complicated patterns that only become apparent at their midpoint leave me undecided if I would rather watch a hairy, dirty, cross-eyed sailor perform ballet that is mildly influenced by Arabesque and fully suspended in midair, or a condom the size of a soccer pitch m8ting in the sky.
In the end I only resolve that we seem to still evolve. Even though we may not see it for our perspective is too limited.

America, my favorite catholic schoolgirl

have at first blush nothing in common. In fact many of you will yell “Au contraire!” After all, wasn’t it hard for JFK to convince voters that it is ok to vote for a catholic? Funny, that. And it surely has to be depressing for the pope to visit the USA. One mass in Rio has 100 times more attendees than three weeks of christmas here. Similarly, and to this day, I, being the eurotrashy anti-religionist that I am, do not understand how people here are all part of one christian sect or another but can’t stand what is the original christian sect. The ones who got thrown to the lions way back when.

But as with all things catholic, many contradictions have to be weighed and balanced against each other. If you disagree, just read on, and at least have a good laugh. This might be hard for you if you are either American or catholic. If you are both, and still laugh at the end of this, congratulations. Please send me a note and I will try to insult you better next time.

So let’s get to the second blush, the one where we get down to the nitty-gritty or as an American cartoon character would say the “the gigidy-gigidy”. Here, I believe, the similarities between the USA and a Catholic School Girl can not be denied. Even though catholics are weird to you Americans, the prim and properly boring nature of your relationship with your lust is decidedly catholic. You need to be more at peace with it.

For example:

• The USA always thinks that she is being attacked by an evil doer who wants to take her virginal (you think nobody else has it) freedom away by force. Girls here think that what they have is constantly craved by the next guy, and only to be given away under certain tightly defined circumstances. With which I have two problems: first, who says I want it so bad that I am willing to convince you that you do too? Second, when will you grow up and learn that it is yours to enjoy instead of give away? The tightly defined circumstances you are yoked to have nothing to do with your own needs or wants, and everything with certain catholic-seeming societal dogmas. Liberate yourselves to enjoy yourselves. Since you are still running into the glass ceiling, you might at least have some good sex, which contrary to local popular believe is your own to achieve.
• The USA always has the biggest guns, just like Pamela Anderson’s breasts.
  
• The USA always comes to help those in need, but only after imposing strict none-preventative measures of birth control. Reminds me of, I don’t know, every girl that I ever was with in this country. Sho really wanted to be there with me, just not really at the same time as me, if you catch my drift… out. If you did not catch it, let me quote Billy Connolly, “20 wild horses could not make me go the other way!”
• Every once in a while (read: all the time) the USA goes on a bloody rampage, causing mayhem in various more or less uncivilized places around the globe, and then spends years feeling guilty about it. If that doesn’t remind you of a catholic school girl nothing will. Mayhem = epicurean pleasure principle, or what feels good must be good; where the Nation drops bombs in righteous anger, and the girl discovers that her body is a temple of untold, numberless and mind-blowing pleasures. Uncivilized places = with a boy. Years of guilt = self explanatory.

So, now that we can all agree that if one would want to define the USA by way of an example from our human experience, the closest we can get to a true simile is a Catholic School Girl. The only cure for this lamentable condition is a thorough undermining of all previously, misleadingly so, held puritanical notions in order to help you establish a peaceful relationship with your lust. Barring this, a good fucking will do.

godlovesjoshnraul

and so shall you

USA needs you Mara

We need more politicos like Mara in the USA. Not just because she would slap our homegrown public personas in shape real fast. If our puritan closet freakish men and women would be distracted by tits and ass a little more, maybe they would forget about figuring out new ways to drop scifi weaponry on stone age civilizations.

You think I am kidding? How many murders does a child see on day-time TV before age 14? How much tits and ass does the same child see? Which one of the two viewing habits is more naturally conducive to peace, love and happiness? How many years did the average continental European, the one you think of as a perverted freak, spend in some leafy jungle or some scorching desert chasing some imaginary enemy? How many children of your tits and ass hating nation have you sent to die in those places?

If your boys, your men and your leaders would be a little more comfortable with sex, with nakedness, with themselves, it is quite possible that they would not feel the need to go out into the big world and prove themselves as real men in the only way they have seen and learned from a young age.

Instead they could revel in the joys of their's and their lover's body - I just wanted to write that at least once in my life :) Does that sentence make you a little uncomfortable? Is that why you laugh a little forced now?

Don't get me wrong. I am not talking about hard core porn on day time TV (that should only be on late at night:) Being an American that is naturally the only way you can think of a naked body. To you it always is dirty, it always is demeaning, it always is something that your little girl/boy would never do. I am talking about a scene on TV, where it is implied that two people just got down, but somehow the girl covers her breasts after coitus. Now, why would a girl cover herself AFTER she just fucked the living daylights out of the hunk, whose hung you would definitely never-ever-never-ever get to see on American TV (now I realize why the girls always look so surprised)? The result is that you think to be naked is unnatural; it makes you think what just happened was dirty and wrong.

Instead of this farce it would be nice to see people act the way they really do after having sex, when waking up in the morning, when going to the master bathroom or when doing any number of things in life that happen to involve some degree of nakedness. It would also be nice for your children not to be subjected to endless gory repetitions of bullets exploding out of heads, knifes slashing throats and land mines leaving a fine red mist behind.

So let's bring on Carla Bruni, I mean Sarkozy, and lets bring on Mara Carfagna. If you don't like their breasts, maybe you can go for their lovely names. And maybe one day your son's eyes won't perpetually pop out of his head on his first Euro trip. And maybe a couple of years later he won't come home in a body bag.

PS: Do click on the image above.
PPS: Do run this query with your teeny-weeny adult filter off.
PPPS: I wouldn't actually vote for a girl that decides to go into politics because she only placed 6th in the Miss Italy competition. If I lived in Italy, that is. Strikes me as a bad choice for a future legislatress. On the other hand, here in the USA, she would be a welcome addition to our... uhm... body politic
PPPPS: Ok, If I would vote for her, I would watch C-Span even more than now.

by the numbers

Provided by Josh, in case you ever go on a quizz show.

number of questions the average four-year-old asks in a day : 400

number of ways to make change for a dollar : 293

percentage of women when walking into a department store immediately turn to the right : 90%

percentage of people who wash from top to bottom in shower : 75%

percentage of people who flush the toilet while still on it : 33%

number of years of our life we spend asleep : 24

rate at which the earth orbits the sun (miles per second) : 18.5

number of times the average person laughs in a day : 15

number of people who die every year from shaking vending machines : 13

age most people stop believing in Santa Claus : 8

age most people stop believing in politicians : 7

average life expectancy (in seconds) of an enemy soldier in a Chuck Norris film : 4

number of useless statistics left : 1

number of U.S. presidents that were an only child : 0

confuse and castrate

Sex in the City is not a TV show that I watch diligently. So when my Dutch friend told me that she sometimes thinks that our lunch conversations resemble those of your dear heroines, I was naturally inclined towards suspicion. Because, or maybe in spite of this, during this particular lunch we chatted about the reasons for humans having such an enlarged thought processing unit, when compared to other mammals. Namely, the seemingly futile effort that both human species have been engaging in for eons: to find a rudimentary understanding of the other.

This conversation happens after another one of my episodes of Dating the American Woman, which usually provide hours of highly entertaining plotlines. Never mind the details, just know that it’s funny and that most of the time I try to tell myself that I enjoy contradictions. If you picture yourself starring in the movie “Sideways”, with a bottle of wine, and a feeling of emptiness where your cojones would usually be located, you are halfway to the embitchenated state that the American male finds hisself in. Which is what I try to avoid.

As a small side note: I have not seen this movie. My prejudice against movies about the castration of the American male is large and my patience limited. All I remember of the trailer are doe eyed dudes in convertibles drinking red whine and wondering where their balls went after the last one chopped them off and sacrificed them on her Altar to Confusion. Unfortunately, the girls here think they can bring the same strategy of Confuse and Castrate to the euro trashy boi that I am.

The husband of my Dutch friend is the envy of all men in my group. What is usually referred to as a woman’s insanity or propensity to wreck dramatized havoc in an otherwise pleasantly uneventful life is seemingly absent from his. She tells me this is so because Dutch men do not put up with the drama, they will simply leave when the girl tries to throw them for a loop. Before you cry wolf, know that when the guys try something that doesn’t fit into the rational pattern of human interaction developed by the low-landers the women do the same thing.

Now imagine young leetle Hansje, walking down a tulip infested street in a village just next to the canal, and this lovely leetle Marietje comes rolling along on her bicycle (which my Germanic grandfather grudgingly returned as part of the last war reparations in 1998). They see each other. They like each other. They agree to meet for coffee. They drink coffee and … (one month interlude here, they are good people, not HOs) kiss. They agree to meet again. Before that happens she lets him know that she thinks it’s not a good idea to keep going in that kissing direction, that she needs more time. But when they meet again, instead of this being true, it is only a matter of proving Hansje’s honorable intent; the game that ensues is a test. If, and only if, he jumps through any number of emotional hoops, he will get to kiss her again. If not, she will deny him. Now, if this would happen in Castration Central (CC) Hansje would gamely try to pass the test, jump through the Emo-Hoops and please his leetle Marietje to no end, just to get some satisfaction. Which, of course, he can't get. But since this is the low country he decides to keep his cojones around a little longer and moves on to a Marietje that puts her money where her mouth is… namely, between her legs (I don’t actually mean that, it just flows nicely, she can put her money in a piggy bank if she so desires). This being her fifth Hansje, Marietje learns that drama is unacceptable if she wants to hold on to a Dutch guy. And Hansje is similarly relieved of whatever silly macho notions he had about how to act around Dutch girls.

Seems to me that for the low-landers it is not about dominance, about castration or about who is on top. Instead it simply is alright for them to demand respect and to give it.

Which explains why the Flying Dutchman is the only one who doesn’t chime in when we share stories from the trenches of dating in CC, and why I am looking for a Dutch mail order bride catalogue. Feel free to send me one at any time.

bangladesh or niederlande

Niederlande is what we call Holland in German. It means Low-Lands. When the East Antarctic Ice Sheet melts I don't know what would be worse: to be in Holland or in Bangladesh. Check out the Sea Level Rise Explorer I just picked up from Salon. The darker the color, the bigger a snorkel you will need. Have a look around and see what happens to your favorite shoreline.

You may think that this is slightly sarcastic on my part, to be posting this map, when I live in high and dry Phoenix. However, if you would scroll down my contact list, you would see at least one person in each of the worst spots on the planet, except for Bangladesh. It makes it personal.

I guess the Dutch will just build higher dams. Maybe if they are sweet, they could form a modern East India Company that helps the Bangladeshis, who happen to be east of India, dealing with their low-land issue as well.

On a side note: Do you think that even Google should refrain from making money from some of its content? I find it macabre to be subjected to Global Warming related text adds while looking at the end of the world as we know it. Which happens to be created by too much consumption of too much stuff by too many people.

before i forget

The WB wants your feedback. If you are any good at any of this do give them a holla. We don't want to just be bitching, do we now?

zoellick makes me regurgitate my own vomit

Why is the World Bank in the news so much this last week? Especially internationally and energetically running around the globe, giving away money, and asking for more funds to lend to the developing world? Building power stations, demanding more support to subsidize rising food prizes and generally appearing as good global citizen numero uno. And why is the WB telling you at the same time that the US economy is going down the tubes and that the rest of the world will follow. No, this is definitely not the carrot and stick strategy. No, it's not the WB telling you that you are so far up shit creek, that only the latest technocratic babyhawk, who accidentally happens to happily row by in his shit dingy, can pull you out of the putrid cesspool of international finance. What is surprising about this is, that Zoellick thinks the WB's main task is the fight against world poverty, when little old me thought they are responsible for it.

I get sidetracked. So why is Zoellick, my knight in shining armor galloping around the globe on his steel-horse? Why is the shit stuck to his boots appearing to be marginally if not magically cleaned off by a recent stint at Goldman Sachs? After years of being a good Bush clan henchman, suddenly a clean little boy is presented to us as the savior of the masses, worried about their caloric output and intake. Ah, that's right, Wolfowitz is out and Zoellick is the new Bu-shite at the helm of the WB. We need some PR, and fast!

No time to waste to throw some money at the poor brothers, never mind that debt servicing cost the third world 540 Billion USD in 2006. Let us increase the high-risk loans (not at all similar to ARMs here) to high-risk debtors, asking for high-risk premiums (no, not like ARMs either), and suing them if they do not pay up (well, taking their planes or ships - when they land in our ports trying to sell their meager harvest at our subsidized dumping prizes - because we don't want their mud huts). Did you know that the surviving Rwandans are at this moment paying of the machetes that were used to chop of their sisters, brothers, fathers, mothers, sons and daughters limbs one by one (financed by and now being payed off to Credit Lyonnaise; produced, sold and shipped by China)? I know this is completely unbelievable, falls under the term "odious debt" and if you do not believe me => JFGI. I for one would prefer to spend the US Offensive Budget on debt relief as opposed to buying cluster bombs for Israel.

It doesn't strike me as strange at all, that when I first heard about Zoellick loving the 4 gigawatt power station in India, I immediately and instinctively was overcome by overwhelming nausea (the German "Brechreiz" is so much more descriptive of this condition). I had not been tracking Wolfowitz's Fenstersturz, news such as this is hard to track in the US, nobody reports it, and so I thought Zoellick was just a footsoldier. Now my lily-livered liberal soul is, if not surprised, at least and unfortunately justified in its disgust with the status quo yet again. What really annoys me is that I do not see an article such as this in the NY Times or anywhere else for that matter (www.marx.com doesn't count). Here is today's front page of the times:

Tasteful, eh?

And do not dare to tell me that I should go to the WB myself and change the system if I am so disgusted by it. You know just as well as I do that one such as I is not allowed into those hallowed halls of world corruption. In order to enter, one must first sell one's soul then cut off one's own cojones and generally cease to be a human being - all done voluntarily of course. Which would usually make me pity the babyhawks, but since they induce eruptious, uncontrollable vomiting, I do not. I get tired of having to clean up my keyboard and computer monitor after each article that I read.

manifesto of the enraged

"Freedom is nothing but a vain phantom when one class of men can starve another with impunity. Equality is nothing but a vain phantom when the rich, through monopoly, exercise the right of life or death over their like. The republic is nothing but a vain phantom when the counter-revolution can operate every day through the price of commodities, which three quarters of all citizens cannot afford without shedding tears."

This comes not out of the Favelas of Rio. This is not a call to arms in the shanty towns of Kibera. It was not spray painted on the mud walls of slums in Istanbul or Mumbai. You will certainly not find it in Communist China, that place makes a farce out of the brotherhood of labor.

You would have to travel through time to come across it, yet how much truth would the hungry of our day find in it still? How meaningful would it be to the mother who can not feed her children in Manila? Where is my Red Priest today? A few billion people are looking for you. The Haitians of the 21st century would follow your fiery oratory as their ancestors appreciated their freedom from the French yoke. As long as bread accompanies your words of steel you shall reign over the Republic yet.

Jacques Roux, where are you?

zoellick makes me vomit in my own mouth

Please see my post a little lower. Somehow “I told you so”, just doesn’t say it right. There was hope; as usual it was a false hope, that maybe my future would be considered. Unsurprisingly, the fat cats and the big hats think only of their checkbooks, which I am sure aren’t fat and big enough by any standards. And the bastard Zoellick dares to try disguise it by saying that he just wants to hook up his poor brothers in India with some power. How many solar panels can you buy with four billion dollar? In case you are trying to answer that question; it does not matter, because that would mean decentralized energy production, which is not under the control or part of the profit scheme of Herr Zoelick and his henchmen. Ergo, it won’t happen.

It boggles the mind, to know that locally produced and used renewable power is possible, viable and just bloody smarter, than pumping out four gigawatt of power via burning a lot of coal and shipping it from one end of a country to another. California Edison is about to install 6.5 Million SQF of Solar panels on commercial buildings in Southern California. That power feeds directly into the grid, no need for mile long cables that loose power and cause cancer. What does the World Bank do? Thinking of your welfare is certainly not it. Maybe they need an Austrian at the top, instead of a babyhawk.

Do you know how much water a four gigawatt power station uses? I don’t, but I bet you anything in the world that the fat cat’s cousin is already rubbing his hands together in anticipation of the profits from selling water to poor Indians because the naturally occurring water is sucked up by his cousin’s power station.

Do you know how much CO₂ belches out of the smoke stack of a power plant like that? I don’t, but I am telling my friends to sell their beach front property. It’s a good thing I don’t have any Bangladeshi friends, because I would just have to tell them to go &@%$ themselves, like Zoellick just did, since their whole country is so low that it qualifies as beach front property. Except it ain't a beach you want to be on. They recycle your crappy scrap metal on it. I guess the alternative for them would be to just move on out, get themselves some property on Fifth Avenue, start lobbying their local congressman to build more power stations in India and China, hope that increased entropy in our climate system will not affect us on our fair and far away shores, and wait for Armageddon. Oh, I forget, they don’t have any money. I guess it's back to option one, “You and your children can go &@%$ yourselves!”

“Zoellick, are you familiar with the term Armada Storms?” I know you are not, so JFGI baby!

mental (f)loss

My boy Stamati linked me this site Mental Floss. He picked a bad day to do that. The first entry is about the Cosby Show and why the little girl is a little girl instead of a little boy. I hate TV. “Are you kidding me man? You send me a link on TV trivia? ME?!?!?! Have you flossed too hard?” FYI: most of the TV that I watch is C-Span.

Scrolled down and don’t mind it so much after all.

ARGHH, I take that back, I just went to the blog section and the top entry is a bonus (thank you SO much) quiz. Guess about what: The Office. The second entry is some stupid fucking quiz about nine actresses. Please forgive me not going there, and not adding flossing to I LIKE – not that my two readers care so much about what I do anyways.

How much further do I have to scroll on this site in order to actually find something interestingly intelligent, instead of mental masturbation? I mean it would have been reasonably funny to watch an oxygen tank explode through a little kid’s head (NOT!!!), but that video didn’t work.

I invite you to prove me wrong. Send me some links on Mental Floss that do not inundate me with inanity.

And please somebody tell me when my writing reaches fatuous qualities of similar proportions.

PS: Ok, I will go and get the magazine. Will let you know my exalted opinion later.

rannofo

The river Rannofo is in the south of India. Four tributaries pay their nasty tribute to this once mighty giver of life in a great churning mass of chemical processes kicked off by various reactive particles at the more aggressive end of the Periodic Table of Elements. The levels of pollution in the tributaries are not unusual by Indian, Asian or even global standards of water pollution. One of them, the Supar, is a muddy cesspool with the olfactory properties of one of those Yellowstone mud-holes, the ones that smell like a million stink bombs had been thrown into a vast vat of vapors-inducing vapidity by especially ugly redheaded stepchildren. The second one used to be called Viriditas, the Greening Power. Today nobody remembers why it was called Viriditas. It greens no more, and nobody remembers when people started calling it something else. The new name cannot be mentioned in polite company or in front of your mother. The third one is not really a river anymore. It is not a tributary in the natural sense, where water happily springs forth from a meadow in the high Alps, or seeps out of the ground in a swampy sweet smelling marsh with dragonflies buzzing and little birds flying lazy loops in the air. It used to be all that. But now its headwaters are the spouts of a mighty coal burning power station, that produces four Gigawatt of electricity. The financing of which was approved by the World Bank on Monday April 7th, also known as the day that humanity signed its own death warrant. The fourth tributary is on fire more days than not.

Originally, I set out to write this story as a metaphor of hope in the tenacity of humanity and our amazing ability to survive horrible situations. The four tributaries would miraculously clean each other up in this great churning mass of chemical reaction. I wanted to brush the cobwebs of my old mental periodic table, and come up with a process where this becomes reality. But now that I set all the ugly veritas down on paper, I don’t want to anymore. Because if I do, somewhere some idiot will take it as a metaphor, not of destruction and willfulness, but of some magical way that we will by pure chance happen upon, enabling us to pollute the living daylights out of our home planet and happily survive in a clean world anyway. Well, it won’t so I don’t.

Your little future Gandhi of the green movement will not bath in the soothing waters of the Rannofo (orig. ran-more-four => Ranmofo => mama would wash my mouth with soap, so => ran-no-four => Rannofo), and will not discover nature’s wonderful self-cleansing ways, and will not apply his newly found idea of green resistance the world over, and will not save humanity from itself.

Instead he will die of a large amount of chemically induced ailments at a very young age. His parents knowing the reasons for his death, but nevertheless powerless to stop it, will not be able to find recourse from the polluters. The polluters are the whole entire world, and how do you sue something like that? The financiers at the World Bank, the planners of factories, the consumers of products, the drivers of cars and the users of cloth driers. It is one giant tragedy of the commons, and that description has never more hit the last nail in our coffin right on the bloody head.

1 is a tragedy, 1 million a statistic

60 minutes

die qual der wahl

Interesting things are happening at my current place of employment. It seems the new goal is to motivate the little cogs in the machine instead of just chaining us to a big ox cart whipping us into shape with a cat o’nine tails. I am sure it has nothing to do with Google hiring away the best and brightest, to luxuriate in free food and massages while working 15 hours a day (they are just not very efficient I think).

In my prison building the fourth floor has been remodeled. It now has an open friendly feel to it. The walls are painted some other, more colorful color than Navajo white (the ugly eggshell colored mix of left-over colors used in most cheap rentals), the cubes are lower and one can actually see his work mates (Why anyone would want to see the assholes they work with is beyond me though).

The best thing about the new zeal to please us little cogs are the free cog vending machines on only the fourth floor. It is a veritable snack, drink and coffee cornucopia. In the beginning it was a secret. Not everyone was initiated into the Free Snack Brotherhood by ritualistic means. A whisper, a wink, a knowing nod would pass in the hallways. All but the Swede, who from 30 feet away, in our unfriendly cube world on the third floor would happily intone at jumbo jet decibel levels, “Pete! I see you been to the fourth floor again!” would try to keep it on the down-low. Needless to say that by now all four floors go to get their sugar kick on the fourth floor, leaving the cafeteria manager wondering why his crap food and sodas are not selling anymore.

As your favorite closet sociologist I draw several conclusions from this:

• My employer must be tripping by now. You may rely on the fact that they have secret productivity measures in place to see if the fourth floor cogs are more happily churning out more stuff. Now that the whole building (and probably some expats from the rest of the campus as well) goes there, these metrics are completely unreliable.
• It is much better to openly grab the free stuff, instead of feeling guilty about the sneak snack snag.
• The line to that little kitchenette is getting ridiculous.
• When people have the opportunity to choose from 30 free snacks, 20 free sodas and 25 different coffee mixtures it takes them much longer to choose than when they have to pay. When you buy your snack you will only take what you really want. But when you can slowly work your way through the whole selection, you take your time and consult your mood before choosing that yogurt coated raisin snack.

In any case, I love that we are getting free fruit at the entrance to the prison now as well. Suddenly I find myself eating apples, pears and bananas all day long. This is a nice win-win for the cog and the machine.

spousal matchup

Today I enjoyed watching speeches by the democratic presidential spouses. To make a long story short, I think Mrs. Obama is a skilled orator. She is self possessed, she has good cadence and she knows English much better than the current Prez, even though he is married to the first librarian. But putting her up against old Billy is like putting me in sumo ring with the current Yokozuna.

For that reason I think it would be fair to establish a handicap for presidential spouses. Similar to golf, where a player’s handicap allows all players with different skill levels to play against each other competitively this would level the playing field in the spousal matchup of 2008.

With that in mind I propose Bill Clinton, who after all is used to addressing the nation and the United Nations, to be categorized as a handicap -2. Which on the Illetschko-Volo Electoral Spousal Scale means that he may not use the letter L. This should put him on equal footing with Michelle Obama, who may use all vowels and consonants indiscriminately. So when she rhetorically asks the crowd “Why am I leaving my kids at home running around with my husband, running for president?” Billy Goat may only respond by saying “Goba cimate change is neary as bad as No Chid eft Behind”. With the successful adoption of this scale you can look forward to Mr. Clinton introducing his wife with “I woud ike to introduce my wife, Hiary…uhm. My wife Senator Cint… this is just not fair! My wife, the junior senator from New York.” It should add much needed levity to this year's presidental contest.

In other news, Bi Cinton compained heaviy about the imiatations of the ietschko-Voo Eectora Spousa Scae as impemented in this very bog. He obviously thinks it is a “Repubican Conspiracy”.

shoe size?

7 + 7 = 49

My piggy bank did not last long enough. I fervently believed in its goodness, as proclaimed by various relatives who would sarcastically drop a couple of pennies into it, reminding me that soon enough I would be wealthy beyond imagination, or at least able to buy that face-sized lollipop I had been craving.

Why is that important? Well, if they would have explained compound interest to me back then I would have had a happier chance at happiness through accumulation of base Mammon (also known as cash). As it stands it took me the view of a few adult years to understand compound interest.

However, my money is not the only thing that supposedly doubles every 7 years (I now have $ 2 to my name). My chance of contracting a deadly disease apparently increases at the same rate. By the time I reach 70 I will have a 2¹⁰ chance to grab some more or less tedious increase in entropy in the enclosed system that is me.

So if you play your cards right, your cash will double just enough every 7 years for you to afford the cure to the latest POS disease your vessel decided to run with when your telomerase shortened yet again. This will not be the case with me, because the doubling of the money has barely started while the doubling of the diseases is on its 5 iteration. I am banking on good genes and long telomerase.

Be that as it may, it fascinating that compound interest is on the same schedule as aging is programmed into our DNA. There must be some magical property attached to these coincidences. We need to bring back Alchemy, I hear Newton was quite taken by it. If I could just get some sage to explain to me that all of this has something to do with people dreading the seventh year of marriage I will start having children right away (So that I may have seven. And so that the seventh son of the seventh son will spawn some sort of godhuman, or at least turn water into wine and, in that order, gold into lead).

PS: In order to find out how this turns out, please get in touch with me in 7⁷ years. Call Bill Bryson if you need a translation of that number.

phoenix is a great place

Most people who visit the United States of America bypass Phoenix. Most Americans, people traveling to and from California, do so as well. While all of them probably think that the climate is unbearable and so they should not have to stop I would like to draw your attention to another fact of this dusty western town.

Like the Phoenix, perpetually rising out of the desert landscapes next to Sky Harbor, this town rose out of the ashes. In 1940 Phoenix had a hot 65,000 inhabitants. Compare that to the explosive growth of Southern California in those days and one has to realize that it couldn’t have been all those beach bunny California girls and fruit picking jobs that made people move there instead of Arizona. Nope, you guessed right, it was the heat. You can fry an egg on the side walk here – at 8am. You park your car 2 blocks from work so that you can get the only shady spot available, and at lunch time you rotate parking spots with the shade. Roadrunners routinely run in front of your car, preferring suicide by tire to having their brains boiled – all you hear is a tired Beep Beep.

As soon as air-conditioning and Motorala arrived so did the people. And did they ever come. Every decade it seems as if this joint at least tries to break another population growth record. It is a human fungi spreading over dry land. From 1997 till now the Phoenix population has increased by 39%. That’s like Mumbai on Crack, at least for US Standards.

Its location is perfect, a town that can grow to its heart’s and boosters’ content, hardly any natural boundaries inhibiting its burb-mania. I still think that the only reason that they built their state capital here, instead of in a sensible place like Flagstaff is that there are no limits to sprawl here. Phoenix can look to LA and learn how not to build roads and freeways. It can pick up a thing or two of how to handle population spurts from cities all across the country. How to move the masses, how to cool the masses, how to feed the masses and how to house the masses.

Phoenix has indeed learned a lot from cities who have grown to its size much earlier. Do not take it for granted that crime is low here. It would have been easy for this town to degenerate into a lawless city state reminiscent of old Western Towns. Traffic is bearable, it’s not perfect, but it is by far better than at least 8 other metropolises in the USA. Love the Suns, so even the immigrants (Steve Nash) are kinda hip here. Higher education is somewhat lacking, but with typical USA enthusiasm for profits that will be remedied pretty soon. In the northern and somewhat cooler enclaves of the rich and the boobjobed one can even find a good cup of coffee on occasion. Forgive this town the heat, it’s not its fault and in fact it is outstandingly perfect for nine months out of each year. Not a cloud in the sky, the whole world wants to come and play golf here when its freezing everywhere else. Those baby-boomer snowbirds follow the warm weather south en masse. To summarize, this town is perfect for the way of life that most citizens of this country enjoy.

But damn the punk neighborhood planner jerk who sits in city council after city council, real estate development company after real estate development company. They should all be lined up and shot in their unimaginative gluteus maximus. They do not actually design anything. They ejaculate whatever is left of their never highly developed, now completely stunted creativity on a piece of paper – through their sphincter muscle! Style is the red-headed stepchild that Phoenix did not just leave behind at the last bus stop in New Mexico. They literally kicked the poor thing out on the street, reversed over it a couple of times to make sure it was dead, and then kept collecting alimony. You like to say that the 80s is the decade taste forgot? Well, Phoenix declared taste to be public enemy number one.

Every street, every corner, every mall, every shop in every mall, every person who works in every shop in every mall - they are all the bloody same! They look the same, they think the same, they talk the same. And they live in houses that all look the same. I don’t know why they bother buying a house. A house is supposed to be a man’s castle, something individual, not a carbon copy of his neighbor’s house. People might as well live in a termite hill for all the diversity in architecture here. They eat in restaurant chains that I have incorporated into one of those nightmares where you keep falling of a skyscraper over and over again; only I get served the same lame piece of artificial sushi before I wake up screaming. I call dining in this town regurgiteating. It all tastes the same, looks the same and the girls who serve the meal all go to the same titty surgeon. By all that you hold dear in life, please understand that regurgiteating is not actually a pleasant thing to do. Just talk to that cute Penguin from last year’s summer hit, or a cow. If you must know; you have throw up before you can regurgiteate.

This town had a chance. One of the greatest minds of architecture this country has ever seen decided to live here. Don’t ask me why, this was before air-conditioning, he probably hoped that nobody would follow him. But he did not just want to live here. He created a school of architecture, the brilliance of which only slowly emerges in our midst. Taliesin isn’t just the culmination of Frank Lloyd Wright's lifework. It isn’t just a school that architects the world over aspire to attend to this day. It not only incorporates living in harmony with the desert and ecology. It is also beautiful. I would live in it. And so would you. You would feel cradled in its protective arms. You would feel expansive yet close to nature at the same time. You would feel authentic. Food would taste ambrosia-like. Songbirds would sweeten your morning. Wine would run in the fountains and pools. Phoenix never cared.

Instead one ill-insulated McMansion springs up next to the other. 3.56 people living in 3000 sqf. It boggles the mind how ugly and wasteful it is. Henry Ford would probably think that this conveyor belt produced way of living is good economies of scale. I just want to vomit in your front yard. At least it would add a little color.

You say that the market has spoken. This is what people in Phoenix want to live in. This is what they want to eat, this is what they want to see and this is where they want to go shopping. I don't know who is guiltier in this chicken and egg puzzle – the buyers or the sellers. I am sure though that this architecture reflects on the people and vice versa. There is a symbiotic relationship between a human and the environment she lives in. A man becomes what he sees and that which he sees takes on his soul. Q.E.D Phoenix never really got rid of those ashes. Those feathered wings never took on their new shine of brilliant colors.

This bird is a lost cause. Short of turning all those stupid Home Owner Association hoods into slack and rebuilding it all from scratch nothing will help. It is like making a crater on the moon into something that you want to call Home Sweet Home. So instead of trying to make it look good, let’s do something practical and useful. Let’s put solar roofs on all those ugly abodes. At least if it is not that nice to look we could turn it into a mirror and power the rest of the United States of America with it.

nice sunday

Emily said that there is always one video from a trip that you will keep watching over and over. We agree.

reflection

Just looked at my last two posts and noticed that they are not the most feel-good propaganda. Really, I am not trying to give you a complex, it just so happened that I saw these two data points floating on the web. Now they might as well be linked in spirit as well as in location, on my grand world renown blog. The moral of the story? The people nowadays don't just want bread and games (to spell it out: McDonald's and Superbowl) for them to let you control them. They also want the freedom to be as wasteful as they want to be. So if you let them drive their Hummer to Mickey Dees and order large amounts of pizza and Soda on Sundays you are gtg on the surveillance business.

guilt trip

Because we don't get to see enough of this kind of Data in the USA. Not that we are all necessarily moral human beings, but if you do lay claim to such morality, you better start taking the bus. For more and to learn German go here.

how surveilled are you?

This should give my American readers pause. It gives me chuckles. Apparently our semi-communist , but definitely socialist, eurotrashy america-bashing heartlands of the EU never really knew freedom the way Americans did. It also explains why we are so jealous of America (must stop listening to FOX). Us Europeans of course have always known that it is an illusion that privacy in America is much more highly valued and defended than in other western countries.

According to this graph from The Economist (scale is 1-5, 5 being the least surveilled) Americans have less privacy then all EU countries except the Brits, but they like to spy on each other, and are only slightly better of than Russia and China.

Bloody hell, I just saw that ROMANIA, not even two decades after Ceausescu's execution, does nearly three times as good as the USA. Thats embarrassing. Not so much because it is happening, but because people in the USA are too dumb and arrogant at the same time to realize this and keep telling the rest of us, how they are trying just their absolute best to bring the joys of freedom to our poor, backwards, super-surveilled, un-free, undemocratic nations. And because they are feeling especially magnanimous they will throw a color TV in as well, since they know that us poor saps don't know what those are either.

franchise this

Stamati tells me of a business venture. It’s coffee. Not just any coffee. It’s Sonoma Coffe Café. Actually has a nice ring to it. You can get a franchise. The guy selling you the franchise tells you to do some research on franchising, see if you are fit for this kind of work, some call it indentured. Tells you to go online, to read some books. You think that's a reasonable thing to do. So do I. So you do. Apparently, the best book on franchising, and the coffee franchise rep profusely apologizes for this monumental lapse by the CPD (cliché prevention department), is unfortunately but all the more hilariously “Franchising for Dummies”. Seriously. No, really.

zis. i like

killing prudes

The freshly showered man enters the locker room – with a towel around his waist. The towel stays wrapped around his waist as he twists himself into a pretzel and pulls his boxer shorts over his knees in a supremely awkward manner (he had just worked on his Latissimus and Gluteus Maximus). All of this contortion to shield his oh-so-privates from the prying looks of men. Usually one can only witness the other species of humanity do this on the beach, but then it is a pleasure. Considering that the freshly showered man just spent 2 hours chained to so many machines in order to improve his masculinity it is indeed surprising that the best of such symbols may not be shared with other similarly equipped humans, even though presumably that’s where the competition lies.

The freshly trained man walks down a dusty road – with a machine gun around his shoulder. The machine gun comes off in a flash as he falls to the ground and fires a stream of bullets with supremely devastating effect (he just did the work of a citizen). All of this carnage to shield our private interests from the prying hands of humanity. Usually one can only witness this happen to those other, mediocre tribes, but then it is a guilty pleasure. Considering that the freshly trained man just spent 2 months in boot camp, chained to so many of his compatriots in order to improve our masculinity it is not at all surprising that we share this symbol with other dissimilarly equipped humans, because that’s where the competition lies.