America will be the same country in 2020 that it was in 2016. The vast majority of the US is rural and suburban folks who have no access to information other than Fox News and Facebook. The Democrats are a mess right now and they're likely to do something stupid like run Clinton again or Wasserman-Schultz or some other establishment stooge that everyone hates. The Democrats won't even admit that they fucked up the 2016 election; instead they are blaming Russia and James Comey and everybody they can think of except themselves for Trump's win and Clinton's spectacular loss.
There is also a historical track record for this. America reelected George W Bush in 2004 despite his extreme unpopularity, his having started a ridiculous war that has still not ended, his bumbling mispronunciation of everything, and his having lost the popular vote the first time he won. We also reelected Ronald Reagan by the biggest landslide in history despite all his shit, and the Conservatives still play him up like he was a good president.
Whether they like to admit it, the vast majority of Republicans are in favor of Trump because he is aligned with their values. There are a thousand examples and I'm too lazy to list all of them, but to make a short list: Trump hates the environment, he hates "regulations" a.k.a. any kind of government oversight on corporate behavior including environmental cleanliness and workers rights, he's dumb enough to think pulling out of the Iran deal was a good idea, he's anti-Europe and anti-Canada and anti-healthcare, he likes to blame Obama for things, he gets all his information from Fox News, he's in favor of policies that funnel money away from the poor and over to the rich. By eliminating regulations, he is showing that he is against the Rule of Law; he wants to neuter the federal government's ability to say no to corporate powers and so hand the country over to billionaires and multinationals. Conservatives love this shit. Trump is the Republican party's wet dream, which is why their voter base went to the polls and overwhelmingly selected Trump over fifteen other (as Trump's friend Kim might call them) dotards who were either ideologically the same as Trump or more extreme. His popularity plummeted when he was first elected but now it's rising. No matter what Trump does, Fox News will claim it as a success. He's had a number of great publicity stunts, including this Korea thing. He's constantly in the media. His supporters love him like a cult, and - say what you will about the man - he is charismatic. He's turned the office of the POTUS into a show-business thing and America is eating it up. Even Stephen Colbert and Trevor Noah are loving it.
There is nobody, nobody, the Democrats can come up with who will beat Trump in 2020. They had the chance in 2016 and they fucked it up, they dropped the football. Think of all the famous Democrats. The obvious picks are the Establishment favorites, such as a revamped Hillary Clinton or Debbie Wasserman-Schultz. Maybe they could have gone with Al Franken but he's out. And he wouldn't have beaten Trump. The Establishment is still very much in control in the Democratic Party, so they won't dare running someone like Bernie Sanders - who would lose in 2020, though he could (not necessarily would, but could, unlike Clinton) have won in 2016, and they are not likely to run someone like Elizabeth Warren, who is more palatable than Clinton but still wouldn't beat an incumbent Trump in a general election. The only hope for the Democrats is to find some young guy (or girl), an Obama or a Macron type of person, someone with massive charisma and youthful energy who becomes famous at the last minute before the election as Obama did. This candidate would also have to distance him/herself from the Establishment Democrats, who did a spectacular job alienating half of the Democrat voter base during and after 2016. That person will need to talk about subjects which are taboo within the Democratic party, as Bernie Sanders did, which will piss Hillary Clinton off, and the Establishment Democrats will need to have the courage not to sabotage his or her campaign, which is not likely. Furthermore, all of the states with closed primaries need to switch to open primaries. It doesn't make any sense to prevent general election voters from participating in the candidate selection process. As it stands, the primary and general elections are two different worlds, and the exclusion of independent voters from the primaries was yet another nail on the coffin for a 2016 win for the Democrats.
Alternatively, the Democrats could follow the Republican strategy and do a "clown car" in the primaries leading up to 2020. The clown car strategy was the key difference between the Republican and Democrat campaigns, and ultimately it was the clown car that catapulted Trump into office. The Republican voting public had a genuine choice about which candidate they wanted to send to the general election. With so many candidates to choose from, Republican voters flocked to their man, and gave the United States a candidate that - perhaps for the first time in 240 years, and as a result of the emergence of social media - was genuinely chosen by the people. Granted, Trump was chosen by a bunch of ignorant "deplorables" who eat Fox News for breakfast, but that is America; Trump was chosen by the people.
On the Democrat side, there was no clown car, because unlike the Republicans, the Democrats had strategized and selected in advance the candidate they wanted. Of course it was Clinton. Everyone wanted Clinton in the White House. Obama, who should have known better, but chose Clinton due to his close personal relationship with her and her performance as Secretary of State. Elizabeth Warren, who really should have known better, but chose Clinton because she is a woman or something - and here I do not mean to imply that Elizabeth Warren is a relevant member of the Democrat Establishment. But as far as the Democrat Establishment was concerned, Hillary Clinton and only Hillary Clinton was to be crowned Queen Candidate in the general election. To give an illusion of choice, some charisma-free bureaucrat from somewhere like Ohio whom no one but himself now remembers was allowed to run and participated in a few debates.
And Clinton was competent. In a vacuum, she might have even won. She was not only educated, but informed. She was capable of processing information. Her scandals were so boring compared to Trump's. She was an Obama ally. Her corruption, her ties to Wall Street billionaires, her actual flaws would likely have been ignored by the Republicans, who would not have seen those things as issues, and they'd have been more likely to have focused on stupid shit like "Benghazi" and "But-Her-E-Mails" and then lost the election, even with Trump as their smirking mascot.
But the Democrat Establishment plan was upended by exactly the same societal forces that upended the Republican Establishment: Social Media.
It's worth mentioning that the Republican Establishment has not been upended at all. Marco Rubio made a fool of himself, but he's young. He can run again when he's 50, when he's 60, when he's 70. Ted Cruz was never relevant and lost every single state but Texas. The relatively sane Republicans, such as Ron Paul's brother or son or whoever that was, and John Kasich, never had a chance with Republican voters, because those candidates were relatively sane, so they didn't stand a chance among the constituency. Maybe Kasich won Ohio, I don't remember; it doesn't matter because Ohio still overwhelmingly swung Trump in the general. And the openly-nutjobbed nutjobs, like Ben Carson and Mike Huckabee, never had a chance, despite having the same views as Trump; they lacked his charisma and his showmanship.
Back to social media: The 2016 presidential election was the first election in US history in which social media played a major role in the flow and dispersal of information. "Fake news" is irrelevant because Fox News is fake news and they've been at it since the 1990s. Even as recently as 2008, Facebook had only just started to become popular around 2007. By 2012 Facebook was big, but Obama was bigger and Mitt Romney was so bereft of charisma that he forfeited the election before he even lost. (That's who the Democrats are most likely going to come up with in 2020: A Mitt Romney.) 2016 was the first election in American history in which humanity had a technology with which they could distribute information themselves. All previous elections before that were won and lost on cable news. Under ordinary American tradition, Fox News selects the Republicans and CNN selects the Democrats and they are pitted against each other in the all-out brawl we know as the general election. 2016 was different because the dominance of cable news over American politics was broken like breakfast eggs on bacon. Donald Trump has been running for president since at least the 1980s and 1990s, but nobody took him seriously because cable news didn't give a fuck about him and he never had a Twitter account with which he could shitpost his way into the American public consciousness, and there was no Facebook through which screenshots of his tweets could be distributed by those who would eventually become his political following.
The impact of social media on American politics has manifested itself on both the Republican and Democrat side of the spectrum, in the persons of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. On the Republican side, it was spectacularly easy for Trump to jump into the clown car, talk shit as he always does, and rise to the top as King Turd of Shit Mountain. Republican voters were given a real choice, and they chose Trump.
On the Democrat side, Sanders' campaign reached overwhelming popularity through Facebook activism groups and Reddit AMAs. Sanders went from being a totally unknown senator from a state of wilderness to having a massive cult following in less than a year. He talked about issues that terrified Clinton and the Democrats, and he mobilized the energy of the apathetic youth. People showed up in droves to give a shit about Bernie Sanders. In Miami where I'm from, where people pride themselves on not giving a shit about politics, groups formed with regular meetings about how to participate in Democracy; people did things like canvassing and registering people to vote. Hundreds of thousands of independents, including myself, joined the Democrat Party just so that we could vote for Sanders in the primary. He captured the zeitgeist. He was not afraid of Clinton. He had the charisma of Trump, but the sanity of a Democrat. The only problem was that on the Democrat side, there was no Shit Mountain. There was Hillary Clinton and only Hillary Clinton, having already been chosen by the Establishment. For the Democrats, the primaries were nothing but an annoying formality, a small hurdle before crowning Queen Hillary as the main candidate for the general election.
For decades, America has been a stagnant country. It's not even controversial to say our democracy has not been working. Our electoral process was controlled by the wealthy elite, the corporate lobbyist machine, and the clowns in the mainstream media. Everyone was aware of this, on all sides of the political spectrum. Everyone was angry about this. Everyone was sick of the Establishment in the Democrat, Republican, and Other sides of the spectrum.
Remarkably, it was the Republicans, and not the Democrats, who pulled through in our first social media elections. It was the Republicans who broke through the stagnation within their own party - and they lost nothing. All the big Republicans are still in power. Paul Ryan retired on a fat paycheck. Mitch McConnell is still at the top flinging shit at Democrats who are no longer in power. The Republicans are pushing an agenda identical to the one they had before Trump became a visible candidate. People keep asking "Why don't the Republicans speak out against Trump?" What kind of bullshit is that? Why on Earth would they speak out against their star player? Trump is a better Republican than everybody else they came up with. He's got the extremism of Cruz and Rubio, but the charisma of a real celebrity who can say racist and sexist things directly from his smartphone to the American people before breakfast without ever getting in trouble. He's a Republican superhero, and his policies are aligned perfectly with theirs. Nothing could have been better for the Republican Party than Donald Trump.
The Democrats have nothing. They won't even acknowledge that they failed. Despite being the clear better option to any educated person - the minority of Americans - the Democratic Party has played stupid power games and fucked itself. Arguments can be made that they did or didn't intentionally sabotage the Sanders campaign through a wide variety of implicit and explicit means, including closed primaries (implicit - a structural problem that needs to be fixed, as it can be observed that Sanders won more states with open primaries) and preventing large groups of people from voting in places like Nevada and Brooklyn (explicit - the Establishment will never admit this to the American people directly, but if they say it in private e-mails, oops, the Russians did it! Russia Russia Russia!).
And furthermore. This blame the Democrats have that they are heaping onto Russia is only hurting themselves more. They are not apologizing. They are not admitting their mistakes. They refuse to accept that American people in the overwhelming geographic majority of the country went to the polls on Election Day and selected Donald Trump. No. In Democrat World, Hillary Clinton lost her entitled position in the Oval Office chair because Russia. Did Russia shitpost on Facebook and Twitter? That's irrelevant: Everybody shitposted on Facebook and Twitter. That's what Facebook and Twitter are for. They are for shitposting. Why is Russian propaganda any more toxic than the propaganda that comes from Fox News and CNN? Did Russia hack into the US electoral system and artificially inflate Trump's numbers? No one is saying they did that. What US intelligence agencies are saying is essentially that Russia shitposted on Facebook and Twitter and thus misled the American public. They made fake accounts pretending to be Americans and started dumb online fights that would have happened anyway. They spread misinformation that had a pro-Trump slant - shit, all they had to do was repost articles from the Fox News website to accomplish that. Had Russia supported Hillary Clinton, Trump still would have won, because he represents the American people in a way that Hillary Clinton never will: He says things which are racist and sexist, he is poorly educated and ill-informed about almost every major issue, he likes to talk shit, he wants you to believe that climate change is not a real thing, he's in favor of bringing back coal, he's willing to violate common sense by pulling out of the Iran deal because Iran is full of scary Muslims. Trump is the Republican Party's golden egg. He is their grandchild and their grandfather. He is their product. He is the perfect representation of everything that has happened in America outside the major cities since the end of World War II.
It was not the Russians who fueled Christian extremism in the United States. It was not the Russians who cut funding to education, who banned the teaching of evolution and critical thinking in public schools. It was not the Russians who decided it would be a good idea to let university tuition skyrocket, cutting off access to higher education to the majority of Americans. The Russians didn't come up with this system that keeps students eternally in debt. Did the Russians decide that America should be the only developed nation on Earth without access to healthcare? Did the Russians knock on doors and convince one hundred and fifty million Americans to disbelieve in climate science? Did the Russians make American teen pregnancy rates skyrocket by enforcing a policy of abstinence-only sexual education and restricting access to birth control? Those genius Russians. Was it the Russians who destroyed every vibrant American city center in the entire country, to replace it with congested highways and warehouses, dispersing the population into desolate suburbs where people spend their lives watching Fox News in isolation? Did the Russians stifle American urban growth, trapping it in suburbs, and thus preventing the progressive ideas that occur in cities from spreading? Was it the Russians who turned all of our major city centers into the parking lots they are today? Did the Russians ban abortions and birth control to increase the population size in a climate of declining industry, thereby creating a situation of mass unemployment and angry, ignorant, isolated people who live and breathe Fox News and Breitbart and are ready to vote for a candidate who spews the same ideas they've been fed? Are the Russians been behind all this?
Or was it decades of Republican policy that turned America into what it is today?
We live in this world. This world now has social media. Why did social media benefit the Republicans while it hurt the Democrats? Because the Democrats were not willing to change. Neither were the Republicans, of course, and their party tried to keep Trump out of the election for sure. But it was that difference - the Democrats stopped Sanders, but the Republicans could not stop Trump - that gave Donald Trump the White House.
But wait a minute. The Senate and House are full of Republicans, too. So are the state governments. Did the Russians do that as well? Has Vladimir Putin been stalking the cornfields of Missouri at night, whispering into the ears of Conservative voters? Why should he? Fox News is doing that job for him. Now they have access to Facebook, which opens up a world of misinformation that Fox News never could have dreamed of - such as Breitbart. And the gentleman with the gay frogs. And all the conspiracy websites about Illuminati and aliens and YouTube comments and all these bizarre things that could sooner or later become a part of mainstream American political discourse. If Mr Putin had tried to influence the election, he wasted his time doing so, because Trump would have won anyway, and Hillary Clinton's team made sure of that. She had no support! All of the Republicans - fifty percent of the country - loathed her for stupid reasons such as that she is a Democrat and a woman and close to Obama and "pizzagate." And half of the Democrats - an additional twenty-five percent of America - disliked Clinton for real reasons, such as her proximity to the Wall Street billionaires who caused the 2008 crash, and her anti-environmental stances such as support for fracking (okay but at least she believes in climate change!). That's a maximum of twenty-five percent of Americans remaining, who are willing to vote for the former Secretary of State, with seventy-five percent against. Sure, Bernie Sanders was not perfect. Now that the Chinese have consolidated their power in all of Afro-Eurasia, it seems that staying in the Trans Pacific Partnership would have been a good idea. Clinton was willing to change her position, to lie and say that she was against the TPP during the campaign, because the cool candidates were against the TPP. And that's why nobody voted for Clinton: Everybody fucking knew she was a big liar. She wasn't trustworthy. She kept secrets. She told the public one thing and e-mailed her colleagues a different thing, and when exposed she cried "Russia! Russia! Russia!" and the mainstream media echoed it but it was 2016 and nobody gives a shit about the mainstream media anymore because we have Facebook and Reddit and Twitter now and we can talk to each other in a way that was never before possible in all of human history. Did Facebook influence the election? Of course it did! It facilitated human interaction in a way that American urban planning does not. It got humans to talk to each other. And what do humans talk about on years during which there are big elections? They talk about politics! Some of the biggest subreddits are specifically there for people to talk about politics. And you better believe that people who go on Reddit, or Facebook, or Twitter, to talk about politics, are going to have their views shaped by what they read on their online platforms. This is different from 2008 because before social media, our political views were handed to us by the mainstream media, which also lied to us. So is the social media world an improvement or a devolvement from the previous status quo? It doesn't matter, because nothing short of a full-scale nuclear war or a 1984-style internet lockdown will return us to the world without social media. The Kremlin has the right to go shitposting online. So does the White House. So do Canada and Europe and John Smith from Canberra and whoever the fuck else has access to the internet. It's freedom of speech in an anarchic international order. America exists in a world that has Russia in it. Russia will shitpost on Twitter. That is what Russia will do. This is reality and you have to face it. This is the world we live in. Hillary Clinton refused to face it, and when she lost the election she had lots of blame and no responsibility. Bill Clinton just showed up on the Stephen Colbert show the other night and blamed "Vladimir" again. If America is to be a strong democracy, it needs to revitalize its education systems in all 3,000 counties, from elementary school to high school to university, and it needs to make education accessible, as Europe does. Sanders was right when he pointed to Denmark. If the Russians have such a powerful propaganda machine, why couldn't they install Le Pen in France and Wilders in the Netherlands? Could it be because those countries have strong democracies and America does not? A corrupt DNC has no place in a strong democracy. Russia will say what Russia will say, it's America's responsibility to be strong enough to conduct the democratic process with integrity at home no matter what the propaganda machines of other nations are saying. The only way to achieve this is through an educated population trained in critical thinking skills. That is not the direction in which our country is headed. And all of this is based on the assumption that America's support for Trump was imposed on us from outside by a hostile force, and did not develop organically within the United States by the American people ourselves. America's dislike for Hillary Clinton comes from America. We already mistrusted her on both sides of the political divide, long before Russia allegedly exposed her e-mails. Clinton was applying for the job of President of the United States and she couldn't even handle a routine hacking from a foreign power. Why should we have voted for her? Because she wanted to escalate the Syrian war? Her public and private personas were too different from one another for her to ever be widely admired. Say what you will about Trump - he's dumb - but there is nothing that goes on in that little head of his that isn't all over his Twitter feed for all the world to see. Trump doesn't "tell it like it is" in the sense that his statements and reality often hold wildly different accounts of what's going on in the world, Trump "tells it like it is" in the sense that every human being on Earth knows exactly what's going on in Trump's brain at all times. We all knew Trump was going to pull out of the Iran deal. We all knew Trump didn't mean it when he cancelled his meeting with Kim. We can all predict, with a reasonable degree of accuracy, how Trump will react to any given situation. Trump is Trump, with the door open or closed. He's shitty, and he's going to fuck up the economy through deregulation, and his service is to the rich men of this country and not to the dotards and poverty-stricken human beings who voted for him, and he's doing everything the Republicans want, and he's picking fights with Canada while making friends with North Korea - but we know all this about him already. Trump has no secrets. Even the things he tries to keep secret, like his tax returns, are not secrets because we already know he doesn't pay taxes because no billionaire pays taxes, except the cute do-gooder billionaires like Bill Gates, probably. Maybe if the Democrats pick Bill Gates they can beat Trump in 2020. But even that seems unlikely. The Democrats are the party for the poor, even though the poor votes against the Democrats.
By the way, we are now in the era of celebrity presidents. The second black president is most likely to be either Oprah or Kanye West. The precedent has been set, I'm calling it now. We're going to see a few more celebrities in the White House before the public gets sick of it and starts electing boring guys in suits again. Personally I'd give my vote to a president Marshall Mathers, even when he tries to convince us all not to vote for him. We are the internet, we can make this happen. Mr 305 will be on the ballot, too. I would vote for Will Smith if he can prove that he is not a Scientologist. And if you think Twitter presidencies are bad, you are not going to enjoy when Instagram starts putting people in the White House. President Kanye will make Trump look the way Trump makes George W Bush look. Everyone who is on the internet now saying Trump has dementia will come back during the West Administration and say things like, "At least Trump was an adult." The rule of Republicans is that every subsequent president makes the previous Republican look sane. George Bush made Ronald Reagan look sane, George W Bush made his father look sane, and Trump is doing a fine job now making George W Bush look sane. So the next Republican president will be another nightmare that will make us all remember Trump fondly.
To prevent this, America has to be educated. America is not educated, because America does not have access to education. America lives paycheck to paycheck in desperation, under the Sword of Damocles, constantly running from the precipice of eternal homelessness and invisibility in the streets. America is terrified because it has no healthcare. America starts bleeding from weird places and the procedure is to drink some water and hope it goes away, while Europeans in that situation just go to the doctor. America's kids aren't learning biology because the bible says fuck dinosaurs. America's high school graduates are getting fast food jobs to support their families and then getting into crystal meth on a record scale. America is desperate for auto repair money, because America has close to zero walkable urban centers per state and no public transport, and therefore very little human interaction and abject car dependence. America is losing its middle class. According to NPR, America's middle class has been shrinking constantly since the 1960s and in 2015 crossed below fifty percent of the country. America has the developed world's lowest life expectancy and the highest rate of maternal childbirth mortality, because America does not go to the hospital to give birth. America is crazy-addicted to prescription opiates right now for some reason. Oh right, it's because it's cheaper for insurance companies to allow doctors to prescribe opiates than to give real treatments and surgeries. Hillary Clinton would have you believe this is Vladimir Putin's fault. And that is why she is not the president.
America is not a country that will go to the ballot box and make smart choices. We are not educating our kids, as Germany and Finland and the other Europeans are educating their kids. America is punishing its kids with Marianna Trench-loads of debt for trying to get educated. And so when Mr Trump - commonly described as the poor man's idea of the rich man and the dumb man's idea of the smart man - comes along and says "Vote for me!" America will say, "Wow, what a rich man and a smart man! I will vote for him!" And if your only source of news is Reddit you'll see everyone collectively complaining about how fantastically incoherent Trump's policies are. But if you look at America, America loves Trump. America will vote for Trump again. His only competition is the Democrats (because rather than a proper democracy we have a two-party system) and the Democrats fucking suck right now. Maybe we'll get a Democrat in 2024. Or maybe we'll have so many Republicans in elected positions by then that they'll blow away term limits like the seeds from a dandelion flower, bye bye term limits, there they go, and Trump will be reelected two and three and four more times like his beloved heroes Xi and Putin and Erdogan and little Kim. And it will be up to the European Union to save the world.
Thursday, June 14, 2018
Saturday, July 29, 2017
Monday, April 24, 2017
What Trump should do in North Korea, plus a bizarre and tangential rant about a Bering Strait Bridge
North Korea's relationship with the world has been shifting uncomfortably through the new Trump administration.
This is what Trump should do - and I'm not a Trump supporter by any means. Trump should tromp in there with his hat down and offer to build a bunch of Trump Hotels in Pyongyang and all up and down the mountainous coasts of North Korea and turn the country into a massive tourist attraction and invite the whole international community in droves - even Americans plus Canadians, Europeans, Saudis, the whole international community - and create a whole tourism industry; invite other non-Trump competitors like Marriott or whomever, insert huge amounts of jobs and money into the country, and North Korea could change radically overnight. It would be comparable to Izmir, at the western coast of Turkey, a liberal bastion in a country which has been descending into chaos. But North Korea is much smaller than Turkey, so the country could transform overnight. As more North Koreans gain access to monetary resources, they will gain the freedom/ability to do all sorts of things:
- Visit other countries
- Study abroad
- Live in other countries
- Return home with education
In addition, it would be very comical if Trump could stroll in there like a Loud Howard, establish rapport with this Jong-Un, and hold a big press conference him and his buddy Dennis Rodman. Trump and Jong-Un are natural allies. They could shake hands and grin like jerks in front of 1940s-looking cameras as Trump monteizes the shit out of North Korea. Even the Jong-un regime will be happy with their new cash cow. Imagine Koreans on both sides free to work and study on both sides of the demilitarized zone, maybe even get those land mines out of there. As North Korea develops a middle class it will gradually drift towards democracy. Death camps will be exposed and closed.
What will China think of all this? China needs to be on our side because they know they can't control this guy. You know what would be great? Or terrible? If USA and China establish some big bilateral trade deal while Japan and Australia and everyone else goes ahead with the TPP and these two economic blocs try to rival each other; that is to say, imagine if Trump jump-skips the US like a jet ski from the TPP side to China's side but have everything else remain more or less the same. The Philippines will follow us. Why does China even need a US buffer? Perhaps a reunification of Korea could occur, in the decades to come, perhaps even as a highly-functional democracy with which both China and the US agree to respect that - *as a democracy* - it can and will pivot frequently between radically pro-USA and pro-China agendas. Perhaps one day such shifts won't matter.
And don't forget the Russians. The current flair of tension is because Hillary Clinton and the DNC have chosen to blame Russia for there being a President Trump, rather than take responsibility for their own actions. It's less about the Syria war, which has more or less maintained the status quo since Trump hit Assad. Let's predict something. If LePen wins, will the mainstream blame Russia? It's still early enough to take bets. I'd put it on yes, they'll blame the shit out of Russia, but we can only see, if that happens. My point is that countries with healthy and strong democracies and social systems have not pivoted towards Russia; Wilders lost, support for AfD is waning, and now we're all just waiting to see if France goes one way or the other. Either way, Europe will survive, even without France, they'll survive; the other 26 plus a strong Euro currency backed by reliable and dependable Germany will maintain the participation of tons of awesome states like Spain and Czech Republic and maybe one day Serbia and Albania and still stand as a bastion of things like European values and a government that recognizes the reality of climate change and giving a shit about the environment and workers rights while the United States continues to hand itself away to corporate powers. France will be France. The UK will be the UK. The UK needs to urgently fix its housing crisis by building more Londons and less suburbs, and France, too, needs to combat ethnic segregation by building additional highly-functional urban centers (additional to the highly-functional urban centers France already has) in which all religious and ethnic groups can buy flats in the same neighborhoods and sit in benches in the same parks. It is in fact the recent decades of high suburbanization in Europe, as in the United States, which has led it into this political, economic, and social turmoil. You can blame ethnicities from the desert, and you might have a point but the youth are radicalized at home. Only integration can combat segregation, which a lot of European countries have a high degree of. Ethnic segregation leads to separate schools, separate neighborhoods, separate cities, separate streams of cultural communication, separate societal mythologies which become about one another.
My point is that after this cycle of elections will subside, perhaps we can collect cohesion between Europe and the ARC Arctic Powers; America, Russia, and China; to form a kind of EARC (pronounced like 'ear'). Canada is like the South Africa of this. This is the point I've been getting to the entire time: Let's right now today build a Bering Strait Bridge. Let's make certain it is for passenger trains and for bicycles, and then for automobiles, which are necessary to include humanity's enormous driving segment, especially in one of the two countries of my proposed bridge, good old USA. Trump, you're smart, I *dare* you to build this bridge. *This should have been done already.* It's time for a Bering Strait Bridge. Some men want to put the world on this or that calendar; some want to start a cult; I just want there to be a Bering Strait Bridge, even if somebody else builds it, in fact especially that way because how the fuck am I going to build a bridge, but that's why I'm saying it must necessarily contain the spaces for **functional** human transport, passenger trains and bicycles rather than cars. Even self-driving cars are not functional; they do not solve the critical and long-term infrastructural problems caused by car-dependence; the massive concrete plains we have built to park our cars in have hampered our physical and psychological health and our ability ever go anywhere on foot, and together with the lawns we grew for no reason, they are preventing the trees, flowers, and flower-dependents like bees from coming back. This suburbanization is happening in many, many countries; not just USA. Why is it that the next thousand cities humanity will build are more likely to look like Detroit warehouse parking lots than, say, Prague? What effect will that have on humanity? When we land on Mars, are we going to stick everybody into groups of three in single-family-home shoeboxes in which they will be trapped forever until they run out of resources; or will they look more like, say, San Sebastian, Spain, which you should all go look at in Google Maps? Will giving humanity the ability to *walk* and *interact with their neighbors* finally start to make people well-adjusted? Everyone wants to see liberal Canada in the EU, sure, but what if we could hook up Europe to the ARC Powers on free movement of people and a passenger train? The entire world will transform overnight as average people on four continents - counting Europe with the rest of Asia as one, plus two Americas plus Africa which has also been unionizing while you weren't paying attention. This is about the Bering Strait Bridge. I will produce illustrations of this bridge. American, Russian, Chinese, even Canadian and Japanese and European and whoever else's engineers are welcome to come turn this bridge into a spectacular and world-known tourist attraction like the Golden Gate Bridge but maybe in a sleek black like the shadow of a glacier, titanium like a new bicycle - or some completely different material, I'm not on the engineering team - but earthquake resistant, attractive like the Brooklyn Bridge, or maybe even a tunnel like the Chunnel but with a bridge connecting the Diomedes Islands, who cares, even if it's some obnoxious piece of modern art, as long as it gets trains, bicycles, and (for now) automobiles through there, I want this bridge built. It's really important that all three methods of transport are included. Humanity is overdue for this. You might be thinking, who will bike all that? I fucking will, and so will tons of other people because everybody wants to do that kind of shit, and for those who don't want to bike it, just having walking-distance access to a train station which can bring you to Mexico and Portugal will inspire lots of people to just try it, young and old, and then humanity will start to flow in currents like the spiraling oceans, and we will be released from our suburban cabin fever. We need to encourage all countries to make it super-easy to bring in and send out international students and workers. In Europe they have begun to achieve this regionally, but in North America we're going to spend twenty billion dollars on a wall, and even after Mexico it's still still just more walls all the way down plus a good solid border with Canada. But South America is opening. Good for them. So is CARICOM, the Caribbean community. North America, ironically, may be one of the most difficult continents to integrate. But it's not impossible. We just have to fix the twin crises of urban planning and public transport - suburbanization - in the United States and Canada and even Mexico; in America. That brings me to my second point, which is that we are going to put the United States on the Metric System, even if I have to do it myself. There is no excuse for such a delay in this stupidly simple imperative of ours.
This is what Trump should do - and I'm not a Trump supporter by any means. Trump should tromp in there with his hat down and offer to build a bunch of Trump Hotels in Pyongyang and all up and down the mountainous coasts of North Korea and turn the country into a massive tourist attraction and invite the whole international community in droves - even Americans plus Canadians, Europeans, Saudis, the whole international community - and create a whole tourism industry; invite other non-Trump competitors like Marriott or whomever, insert huge amounts of jobs and money into the country, and North Korea could change radically overnight. It would be comparable to Izmir, at the western coast of Turkey, a liberal bastion in a country which has been descending into chaos. But North Korea is much smaller than Turkey, so the country could transform overnight. As more North Koreans gain access to monetary resources, they will gain the freedom/ability to do all sorts of things:
- Visit other countries
- Study abroad
- Live in other countries
- Return home with education
In addition, it would be very comical if Trump could stroll in there like a Loud Howard, establish rapport with this Jong-Un, and hold a big press conference him and his buddy Dennis Rodman. Trump and Jong-Un are natural allies. They could shake hands and grin like jerks in front of 1940s-looking cameras as Trump monteizes the shit out of North Korea. Even the Jong-un regime will be happy with their new cash cow. Imagine Koreans on both sides free to work and study on both sides of the demilitarized zone, maybe even get those land mines out of there. As North Korea develops a middle class it will gradually drift towards democracy. Death camps will be exposed and closed.
What will China think of all this? China needs to be on our side because they know they can't control this guy. You know what would be great? Or terrible? If USA and China establish some big bilateral trade deal while Japan and Australia and everyone else goes ahead with the TPP and these two economic blocs try to rival each other; that is to say, imagine if Trump jump-skips the US like a jet ski from the TPP side to China's side but have everything else remain more or less the same. The Philippines will follow us. Why does China even need a US buffer? Perhaps a reunification of Korea could occur, in the decades to come, perhaps even as a highly-functional democracy with which both China and the US agree to respect that - *as a democracy* - it can and will pivot frequently between radically pro-USA and pro-China agendas. Perhaps one day such shifts won't matter.
And don't forget the Russians. The current flair of tension is because Hillary Clinton and the DNC have chosen to blame Russia for there being a President Trump, rather than take responsibility for their own actions. It's less about the Syria war, which has more or less maintained the status quo since Trump hit Assad. Let's predict something. If LePen wins, will the mainstream blame Russia? It's still early enough to take bets. I'd put it on yes, they'll blame the shit out of Russia, but we can only see, if that happens. My point is that countries with healthy and strong democracies and social systems have not pivoted towards Russia; Wilders lost, support for AfD is waning, and now we're all just waiting to see if France goes one way or the other. Either way, Europe will survive, even without France, they'll survive; the other 26 plus a strong Euro currency backed by reliable and dependable Germany will maintain the participation of tons of awesome states like Spain and Czech Republic and maybe one day Serbia and Albania and still stand as a bastion of things like European values and a government that recognizes the reality of climate change and giving a shit about the environment and workers rights while the United States continues to hand itself away to corporate powers. France will be France. The UK will be the UK. The UK needs to urgently fix its housing crisis by building more Londons and less suburbs, and France, too, needs to combat ethnic segregation by building additional highly-functional urban centers (additional to the highly-functional urban centers France already has) in which all religious and ethnic groups can buy flats in the same neighborhoods and sit in benches in the same parks. It is in fact the recent decades of high suburbanization in Europe, as in the United States, which has led it into this political, economic, and social turmoil. You can blame ethnicities from the desert, and you might have a point but the youth are radicalized at home. Only integration can combat segregation, which a lot of European countries have a high degree of. Ethnic segregation leads to separate schools, separate neighborhoods, separate cities, separate streams of cultural communication, separate societal mythologies which become about one another.
My point is that after this cycle of elections will subside, perhaps we can collect cohesion between Europe and the ARC Arctic Powers; America, Russia, and China; to form a kind of EARC (pronounced like 'ear'). Canada is like the South Africa of this. This is the point I've been getting to the entire time: Let's right now today build a Bering Strait Bridge. Let's make certain it is for passenger trains and for bicycles, and then for automobiles, which are necessary to include humanity's enormous driving segment, especially in one of the two countries of my proposed bridge, good old USA. Trump, you're smart, I *dare* you to build this bridge. *This should have been done already.* It's time for a Bering Strait Bridge. Some men want to put the world on this or that calendar; some want to start a cult; I just want there to be a Bering Strait Bridge, even if somebody else builds it, in fact especially that way because how the fuck am I going to build a bridge, but that's why I'm saying it must necessarily contain the spaces for **functional** human transport, passenger trains and bicycles rather than cars. Even self-driving cars are not functional; they do not solve the critical and long-term infrastructural problems caused by car-dependence; the massive concrete plains we have built to park our cars in have hampered our physical and psychological health and our ability ever go anywhere on foot, and together with the lawns we grew for no reason, they are preventing the trees, flowers, and flower-dependents like bees from coming back. This suburbanization is happening in many, many countries; not just USA. Why is it that the next thousand cities humanity will build are more likely to look like Detroit warehouse parking lots than, say, Prague? What effect will that have on humanity? When we land on Mars, are we going to stick everybody into groups of three in single-family-home shoeboxes in which they will be trapped forever until they run out of resources; or will they look more like, say, San Sebastian, Spain, which you should all go look at in Google Maps? Will giving humanity the ability to *walk* and *interact with their neighbors* finally start to make people well-adjusted? Everyone wants to see liberal Canada in the EU, sure, but what if we could hook up Europe to the ARC Powers on free movement of people and a passenger train? The entire world will transform overnight as average people on four continents - counting Europe with the rest of Asia as one, plus two Americas plus Africa which has also been unionizing while you weren't paying attention. This is about the Bering Strait Bridge. I will produce illustrations of this bridge. American, Russian, Chinese, even Canadian and Japanese and European and whoever else's engineers are welcome to come turn this bridge into a spectacular and world-known tourist attraction like the Golden Gate Bridge but maybe in a sleek black like the shadow of a glacier, titanium like a new bicycle - or some completely different material, I'm not on the engineering team - but earthquake resistant, attractive like the Brooklyn Bridge, or maybe even a tunnel like the Chunnel but with a bridge connecting the Diomedes Islands, who cares, even if it's some obnoxious piece of modern art, as long as it gets trains, bicycles, and (for now) automobiles through there, I want this bridge built. It's really important that all three methods of transport are included. Humanity is overdue for this. You might be thinking, who will bike all that? I fucking will, and so will tons of other people because everybody wants to do that kind of shit, and for those who don't want to bike it, just having walking-distance access to a train station which can bring you to Mexico and Portugal will inspire lots of people to just try it, young and old, and then humanity will start to flow in currents like the spiraling oceans, and we will be released from our suburban cabin fever. We need to encourage all countries to make it super-easy to bring in and send out international students and workers. In Europe they have begun to achieve this regionally, but in North America we're going to spend twenty billion dollars on a wall, and even after Mexico it's still still just more walls all the way down plus a good solid border with Canada. But South America is opening. Good for them. So is CARICOM, the Caribbean community. North America, ironically, may be one of the most difficult continents to integrate. But it's not impossible. We just have to fix the twin crises of urban planning and public transport - suburbanization - in the United States and Canada and even Mexico; in America. That brings me to my second point, which is that we are going to put the United States on the Metric System, even if I have to do it myself. There is no excuse for such a delay in this stupidly simple imperative of ours.
Thursday, March 16, 2017
Moons story part III
One moon has developed three hominid species, Homo up, Homo down, and Homo sideways, which lived contemporaneously across the landscape.
Homo up lived in the mountains. They walked with their noses high in the sky. They raced through the thin air, becoming short, lean athletic creatures. Homo down relaxed in the valleys, farming themselves into absolute stagnation. Homo sideways were the weirdest of the bunch. After losing a series of wars, H. sideways launched themselves from the coast and went far, far away. But they came back. Boy, did they.
H. up and H. down never had a particularly good relationship, but they tolerated one another for long periods. Gradually H. down, ridiculed among H. up for being lowbrow and reproducing a lot, precipitated a simultaneously ecological and economic disaster due to agriculture. H. up was forced to flee into the mountains one fateful evening after a young member of their species insulted his counterpart's mother during a rap battle. H. up had barely outpaced the angry farmers.
H. down, satisfied that H. up was likely aware that they were the bitch, returned to their farming villages. However, one young man decided to start a fire.
"Don't do it," one of his neighbors had warned him. "Why would you do something like that?"
"It will be funny," said the young arsonist as he set fire to a tree. "Why not?"
The fire spread quickly up the dry forest. Hundreds of square kiloflats of old growth trees just went up in flames like it's all good like whoosh. A young arsonist of the H. up persuasion felt hot anger about this situation.
"I'm going to go kick somebody's ass," said the boy, only for one of his companions, Gary, to say something like, "Really? You want to turn around and go fighting?"
Needless to say, Gary's buddy's answer was yes, and there he went into the flaming vegetation like an idiot. And he didn't have to go far before he found exactly what he was looking for: a bunch of angry youth of the other flag's variety. "Hey, fuckers!" he greeted them.
"Hey, you dick shit duck! Why did you burn down the forest?"
"You burned down the forest, assholes," he replied.
"No, you did."
He thought about it. Had it been someone from his own group?
"You mom is fat!" he exclaimed, and ran off into the growth. The attack was effective, because the other boys raced after him. Before long, the entire lot of them arrived at a precipice. The sun rose over a glistening ocean. It was clear to the young mountain arsonist that he would have to fight or the valley gentlemen would push him over the edge. And so he fought, but they pushed him over anyway, because there were like eighteen of them.
His fall to the beach was exciting. First, he was able to bounce off tree branches sticking out of the rock. Next, he smacked the mountainside with the left half of his body and rolled like a gas station empanada across a number of smooth semi-vertical surfaces. Then, a flaming tree bark the size of a boogie board drifted next to him, and he hopped onto the thing and rode it into the sand where it was left sticking up diagonally.
"Hey, fuckers!" he called. "You're going to have to do better than that!"
And so they returned, an army of them, and quite a number of his own boys as well, some of whom were frustrated with their own speciesman for having been such a belligerent jackass.
And it was during this exact tense moment that Homo sideways returned to the mainland.
Saturday, January 14, 2017
[.:.:.•..:.:.::.] moons story
[.:.:.•..:.:.::.]
The first moon to develop life was the third one from the Planet Gasfapples, eighth around Procyon A, the raccoon star.
This life, obviously, started in the oceans.
It would not be the last.
Coming up next: Episode two.
As luck would have it, due to complex geoastronomical abnormalities, seven of the moons of Gasfapples were located in habitable zones.
Only five hundred million years later, life wiggled in another.
By a billion years in, five moons had life on them. By then, land plants had begun to carpet moon four.
Ordovician sea fauna flourished on the fourth moon first. But by the second billion years in, the sixth moon had seaweed. But nothing like the seaweed we're used to.
Transmission Three.
[...:::•::.::•:::.::•:.@...::•:..::::•:::..]
These symbols are the sun with the planets and all the moons, in case that isn't clear.
Moon four had dinosaurs first, too. And they were the first to develop mushrooms, after quite a humid carboniferous period. They were first to crack angiosperms out of land plants, nearly three billion years along.
Vertebrates developed on moons six, three, and seven roughly at the same time, a full billion years after moon four. Moon four's vertebrates crawled out of their oceans during a pangeaial desert period. In fact, crabs on that world became quite the significant land animals. They grew giant and juicy, traversing deserts as camels do. They kicked pieces of sand into the sun
As they ran. They gathered at rivers and water holes. They dug.
Nothing of the sort happened in moon six, for example. Moon six's fauna was tame to the point of boring. Though they did get quite the snapping salamander, in only the second amphibian group to show up in the solar system after moon four's. Formidable snapping salamander this guy was. Angry alien creatures who could easily ward off the enormous carnivorous fish from the depths of earlier on. So big you could ride them, those snapping salamanders. They traversed the oceans of moon six. "We're going go to go fuck shit up in this boring-fauna-ass world," they said. They fought megalodons in canyons in the deepest oceans, deeper than Earth's, but on a rock only six seventeenths her size.
Meanwhile, back on moon four, the breakup of the continental shell gave rise to lush coastal mountains, from their tropical zones all the way to their polar regions. In moon three, a non-vertebrate fish developed tetrapods. They slid along volcanic cliffs, eating the squickly purslane from the sea. Like octopi, they sluck in and out of tiny pores.
But moon four was the first to get reptiles, as you know. It just took a few vertebrate amphibians to wander into those deserts, where they were baked into reptiles. They grew and swelled into the aforementioned dinosaurs, but they were not blasted into extinction. They were hunted.
And so it went that moon four was the first to develop primates, just a few tens of millions of years after the first mammals. Humans had developed.
And in no time they were all over the planet, which by then was a bunch of small broken-up continental masses and islands, some hot, some cold - due to the presence of a continent at one pole and a semi-closed sea at the other, lucky them - and they developed quite a complex marine culture based on hunting and kayaking massive animals and distances, as well as a rich diet of seaweeds. They were also endowed with the understanding that long-distance swimming made their bodies more sexually desirable. If dolphins are chimpanzees, the first peoples of moon four were bonobos. Moon four developed religion, but it would be considered bizarre and heretical by the religions of Earth. Their religion was about boats. Boats and hoes, you might say. Moon four developed a complex boat-making culture as a result, and habitually planted a rich biodiversity of trees from the shores inward, which they needed to build their boats. Moon four's people ran through the forests. Naked. They scaled towering snowy mountains. Drunk. They urinated on each other. Sober. No. They did not do that last thing. Anyway, they learned to bathe in live jellyfish tentacles, learning to enjoy it the way Earth children love to eat atomic Warheads, and it carried quite the disinfectant effect, from the skin to the blood. In return, they attracted biting asshole fish, which the jellyfish loved. Now nice and clean, the people of moon four ran back into the forests.
Veritable coastal cultures developed next to the sparkling oceans of moon four. Adapted to both marine and terrestrial environmentalists, the monkey men and women of moon four were still hundreds of thousands of years ahead of agriculture, if it would ever happen at all. Also, they were occasionally gobbled up by dinosaurs.
Three unknown moons had developed life around the same time as moon four. Moons one, eight, and nine, far off in the darker recesses of not-that close, had also developed fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals, and, bizarrely, primates. These remarkably similar conditions drove crazy the agricultural primates of moon eight.
"He has left evidence of His work," said some groups of them, while other groups claimed that you must wear the parachute trousers twenty-four hours a day forever, or you will be acting against the rules. One day, shortly after a set of middle ages, somebody with tight pants set a telescope to moon nine - remember we're on moon eight - only to discover farmers only 5,000 years behind! Naturally, it created a great political and spiritual upheaval among the peoples of moon eight, still centuries ahead of space travel. The peoples of moon nine, of course, had no idea. They simply traded livestock for their daughters, just like here on Earth. Just like in the hinterlands of moon eight, as it was still going on when the first moon eightling pointed a telescope at moon nine and saw activity, clear as day, sharp as the shadows of men and camels treversing the steppes. For the first time in moon eight's turbulent history, there was proof of human-like life on the brown-green continents afloat in the bright blue oceans of moon nine. You could see their farmland. You could see the places they had not yet traversed; five of their eight continents were still covered in deep green forest or white ice. Neither of these two worlds would develop space travel before the people of moon one, who had reached a technological level just a few decades beyond that of early twenty-first century Earth, all while absolutely none of you were paying attention. They had launched a satellite in orbit around moon nine in their year 6968, just in time for local (and controversial) celebrations ringing in the one time in history in which the year would match everybody's passwords. People stood around in formal groups, but instead of drinking champagne, they drank fermented juice of an extraterrestrial pumpkin squash. They high-fived one another, even as people protested in the streets: leaving the peoples of moon nine alone, they demanded. Hot Claudiora Bananerson burned her bra, and all the boys gathered in a university square to watch. Bacteria, guys, come on. What are we doing?
But the satellite arrived around moon nine and hooked into orbit nonetheless. There it was. What a disaster.
A world away, the peoples of moon eight had mapped out the surface of moon nine on paper, and they published and distributed it with a Gutenberg press machine. It sparked controversy and imagination. "What if there were continents still undiscovered on our own world?" they wondered. In fact, there were three continents, plus dozens of large islands, at least two-thirds of which had anatomically-modern moon eightlings on them.
The moon eightlings were deeply affected by their observation of the satellite from moon one, orbiting moon nine. "What the fuck is that thing?" they contemplated. They came up with theories.
"It's natural!" said Karl Turnhopper of southern Whackhammer Village. "It was formed by collisions and smackages."
"It's clearly manmade," said Septembifer Chockman. "There's no way the primitive clowns of Willayner World could produce their own space machine."
"It was placed there by the Great Giggers Himself," said the Mayor, His Most Important Jackals Sandberdoo. "He watches over us all."
There were those on moon eight who were not impressed by the announcement of mysterious unreachable people on moon nine. "It's a happy accident," they said. "The presence of life on our two moons is the result of unique conditions in our lunar system, not nearly enough to imply that life may have formed anywhere elsewhere except these two places in particular."
And, of course, just as on Earth where this happens regularly even before mass announcement of direct observation of extraterrestrial life, people on moon eight would come out of the bushes with stories of probing, yonking, and no-nutter-grabbing. People on moon nine sometimes did this as well.
As far as the people back on moon one were concerned, they were <i>were</i> the only intelligent life in the universe. As far as they could tell, there was nothing out there but the wet yuckly salamanders of moon six, and the athletic smug assholes of moon four who were even behind the dumb barbarians of the eighth and ninth moons, having not produced agriculture. "Screw those guys," people liked to say, over there on moon one. Well, them and the sniveling jerks they had observed on a moon of the next planet closer to Procyon. Are you following all of this? Do you care?
Show me some signs of giving a shit, and I will continue to elaborate on this concept.
[...:::•::.::•:::.::•:.@...::•:..::::•:::..]
In 7682, the people of Moon Eight experienced a hot war followed by a cold war followed by a space race.
It was quite bizarre, however you roll the dice, that such a specific arrangement of pool balls could occur twice in the same universe, but indeed, it happened. In fact, such a situation occurs on about 40% of the worlds on which intelligent primates sprout. Other common scenarios include a space race followed by a hot war followed by chaos and destruction followed by the taking over of a delicious species of potato across new continents followed by long periods without war, and a cold war followed by a lukewarm war followed by a severe shoe shortage caused by nothing other than incompetence followed by a space race. There's no limit to the possibilities here.
In 7706, the first manned space vehicle was sent into space by one of the powers. In 7712, a crew landed on a particularly large round comet which had been in orbit around Moon Eight the entire time, which is why Moon Eight had tides in its oceans. One by one, individuals and crews were sent out into space to marvel at how stupid everybody back at home was. "Wars and environmental destruction? Really?" they said. "That is what you are going to do when you're sitting atop a rock that beautiful?"
These developments were not lost to the people of Moon One. They watched Moon Eight's space race with both amusement and trepidation. "The fools," they thought, in accordance with their local stereotypes about the people from Moon Eight. "Who do they think they are? They'll never pilot a propeller-plane, let alone a space ship. Oh? They did it? Weird. Let's keep an eye on them."
Moon Eight's big dream was Moon Nine. Imagine, they thought. Landing there. Playing pranks on the primitive locals. Breathing the air of another world.
And on Moon Nine, a Black Plague raged, but caused by a completely different category of organism and with completely different symptoms. Still, the death toll was high on Moon Nine, during their 300s and Moon Eight's 7700s. Moon Oneians, aware of the ridiculousness of the story they were being written into and unwilling to interfere, let it happen, although they did send in occasional covert biohazard guys to help clean up the bodies.
One evening in space, a contingency of biohazard guys from Moon One had a collision with a contingency of explorers from Moon Eight which had been en route to Moon Nine on a momentous and historic journey. The political aftermath of this unlikely blunder was therefore very intense.
Moon Eight's spacecraft was totaled. It was bunched up at the hood, and a spiderweb of cracks ran through the windshield and a total of seven of the side windows on both sides. Terrified and embarrassed, the biohazard crew began to discuss who was at fault.
"Definitely their fault," said the driver. "Those idiots have no idea how to navigate space. They have no business out here. Look at all these safety violations. Sending a manned crew to an inhabited planet without even properly sterilizing their equipment. Mouth breathing."
"No, this is our fault," said Leon, the ship's cook. "We're the adults here. We're the ones with navigation skills and advanced equipment. We knew they were going to be taking this route."
"Don't be daft," said the driver to Leon, the cook. "When a sixteen-year-old and a forty-year-old crash into each other on a country road, is it ever not the sixteen-year-old's fault? So they're kids. They should have been watching out. They can steer. They should be watching for objects."
"That wouldn't fly in court, they're no way this is ever going to fly in the political disaster that will surely follow. People at home are going to crucify us in the media. They'll hate us."
"Hey, look, the crew is freaking out," said Jim, the co-pilot, who had been silent until now.
The biohazard guys quickly and easily rescued the astronauts, using available technology that's routinely built onto ships in that world; namely, a vaccuum cleaner.
Political outlook 2017; 2016 quick review; 2016 - 2020 second-half-of-the-decade general five-year plan
"So how bizarre was 2016, right?" When exactly will that whole thing become a thing?
- There have been many developments in the recent past, in many fields, from jazz music to new solar system photos.
January - enero - [________]
-
February - febrero - [____]
-
March - marzo - [...]
-
April - abril - [_..._..._...]
-
May - mayo - [withasideofcheese]
-
June - junio - [......_...]
-
July - julio - [..._......]
-
August - agosto - [........:...]
-
September - septiembre - [.:.:.:.:.:.:]
-
October - octubre - [.....•......]
-
November - noviembre - [..:..:.•:.:.]
-
December - diciembre - [.:.::..•.:.:]
-
_____________________________________|
2016: .........
ad infitum
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)