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    hardie karges 7:34 pm on April 15, 2008 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , OPIUM   

    OPIUM WARS 

    The Opium wars continue, countries being forced to open their markets at the point of a gun. Beware of what you ask for; you might just get it. Money brings us down to its own pathetic level. Share the wealth or lose it. Everything is for sale. The shoe fits many feet. The opium you forced them to buy now makes addicts of your sons, in attics and lofts and empty rooms full of dust and webs and Internet intrigues. Conspiracy can bring down empires with just a whisper, a rumor, the power of suggestion. What’s worse, the rotten core or the outside bruises? The battle-ax people are walking wounded from their own self-inflicted traumas, the curse of consciousness, guilt and responsibility, no longer a genetic advantage as hordes gather on the steppes and knock on a battered door.

     
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    hardie karges 9:44 am on April 14, 2008 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , POPULATION   

    BIG BALLPARKS 

    Much gets said about over-population, but not much gets said about inflation of population figures. It seems almost no one is content to give accurate figures for anyone’s population. If all the ‘ball-park’ estimates of population were added up, the world would have at least ten billion souls. No ballpark in the world is that big. Admittedly it’s difficult to maintain accurate information with situations like the Thai futile system in which people are counted as residents of their ‘home of birth’ regardless of where they actually live. Still there seems to be a natural tendency to exaggerate figures wildly, as if that were some kind of editorial machismo: “My city’s bigger than yours.” Mexico City had ten million, fifteen, twenty, and now it’s back to fifteen if you count all the suburbs very carefully. It seems it was never really the biggest city in the world after all, despite all the press. Or if it was, it’s since been surpassed, sort of like skyscraper races. Somebody puts a microwave tower on top to take the lead. Who cares? Half those buildings are empty anyway. I would confess to some vicarious satisfaction at seeing the Twin Towers fall, to be honest, if no one had been inside. No one needs that big of an erection.

     
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    hardie karges 5:56 pm on April 13, 2008 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , populations,   

    Races to the Finish 

    Racism begins at home, in the bed and in the head. We Gringos talk about 1.2 billion Chinese as if the very jaundice in our eyes were the direct result of some insidious ‘yellow peril’ virus seeking us out to invade and infect, DNA in a bio-degradable condom, a Trojan horse time-released to explode once inside, douching us with yellow rain, slanted eyes and a distinct preference for rice and noodles in slurpy broth. I assure you they’re much more justified in worrying about the 1.2 billion Gringos who dominate half the world’s landmass surrounding them. Figure India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Nepal as a racial unit and you’ve got another 1.2 billion Indians right there. All races are in a dead heat, and the world shows approximately the same power distribution that it has for the past two thousand years, except for the Middle East. Religion comes in where race leaves off. Islam gets its billion by crossing more borders and impacting more lives than a capitalist Free Trade Agreement, oil being the secret weapon to grease the wheels of commerce, jihad being the dagger that forces the intransigent into submission. Ideology died with Communism, and religion as a unifying force in the third millennium is a long shot at best. It remains to be seen whether everyone can share equally in a market-driven world, and anyway, nobody’s going to wave a flag for capitalism. It’s strictly trickle-down theory, intravenous drip, better than nothing. Still, it works, if slowly, and almost anything is better than racism. The best way to end racism, of course, is to end race and blend the races. It can be fun, too, the cosmic blender. Just imagine: tropical blends, single-country blends, “John and Yoko’s”, café latte’ slurpees, trail blends and rocky roads. The expanding universe is now contracting, equal opportunity employment. Create the world in another’s image and likeness for a change.

     
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    hardie karges 1:07 pm on April 12, 2008 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , COOPERATIVES   

    COMMUNITY-ISM 

    In a nod to Communism, maybe the government should sponsor model villages just in case somebody isn’t sure if they’re ready for the dog-eat-dog world or not yet. The villages would have to be at least self-sufficient, but totally top-sponsored so that the really lame don’t have to make big decisions or otherwise take an active interest in their own lives. I think this idea could really fly. If it’s truly self-sufficient, then the government could stay out of it totally. It could operate under the principles of free enterprise, producing a product for sale to the “outsiders”, while members worked and lived in close proximity to themselves and their work. It would be like a company town with a company store, except with a conscience. Members would be like employees, except motivated. It would be like a commune, except competent, and successful. It would be like communism, except voluntary. The problems are the problems of human nature itself- greed, envy, selfishness, and especially, boredom.

     
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    hardie karges 12:44 pm on April 11, 2008 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: ,   

    POLITICS 

    Politics loves a vacuum; it sucks. Politics sucks in the best and the brightest and turns them into utter fools. No less than Einstein himself dedicated a large portion of his life to political activism, only to have it come to no avail, his best theories used for military ends, he himself advocating its use for one side’s advantage over the other. How do you know who the bad guys are anyway? Democracy may win by default, simply the best of bad systems. Let the law of large numbers rule, and everything should average out okay, safer than the eccentricities of dictators. But when governments start fighting over who gets to pump the gas, then you know something’s wrong. The struggle for power has always been about power. More and more these days that means, “oil”. The party’s over; now we gotta’ start paying for it, through the hose, through the nose. That’s the price we paid to win the cold war- we had to cut everybody else in on the deal. Now they want oil as much or more than we do. China and India have got some catching up to do, and they’re jamming on it. What happened to the days when government promised to create a perfect world for us, rather than just guard the pumps? I’m not complaining, mind you; I know we’ve never had it so good, but many are falling through the cracks of a world they can’t fathom.

     
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    hardie karges 1:13 pm on April 10, 2008 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: ,   

    BLACK SPEED 

    The oil crisis deepens as the price of oil climbs to record highs, now topping $100 a barrel for the first time in history. People aren’t jumping out of windows yet, but they might soon. Of course, others are jumping for joy. Jihad grows fast in oil, biting the hand that feeds it; that we know for sure. So does conspiracy, also biting the hand that feeds it. Oil is the anti-hero of a thousand faces. Like a good whore, it can be whatever you want it to be. 90% octane flows through the nation’s arteries like junk flowing through the morning news. The Black Speed is a hard habit to break and invariably leads to the hard stuff, guns and money. Even if you can kick it, you can’t forget it- the smell, the taste, the iridescent wet spot in the driveway. The withdrawal symptoms will be difficult. Witness the phantom orgasm of Saturday night red-light racers trying to shift the gears of a car that no longer exists. It’ll take a phased withdrawal, peace with honor, retroactive logic to convince ourselves that we like riding the bike instead.

     
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    hardie karges 7:44 am on April 9, 2008 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , ROBBER BARONS   

    MONEY 

    Money is the root of all evil, not the love thereof, but the thing itself, green and crispy, infinitely malleable. Paper money is the best kind, inherently worthless except as fuel and toilet paper, legally tender in illegal tight spots. It comes from a checkered past of magic ritual undercurrents and shamanistic overtones to its present status as currency for pawns and plaything for bishops. The future is pure monopoly, hotels on the Boardwalk and houses on Park Place, rides on railroads and you get out of jail free. The new robber barons replace the old robber barons, and the world creeps forward on unsteady feet.

     
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    hardie karges 7:26 am on April 7, 2008 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , wealth   

    THE RICH 

    Prejudice against rich people is the only prejudice I’ll cop to. It’s not that I want their money; I don’t. It’s just that I don’t like the mother fuckers; that’s all. It’s not just that they’re arrogant; many of them are downright EVIL. Their fortune is other people’s misfortune. But what I dislike most is the pretentiousness. People that wouldn’t be caught dead doing manual labor will put on their brightly colored exercise suits and dance the aerobic two-step while their personal trainer calls out the songs. These same people who would disdain to form a bead of sweat in public will sit in the sauna until their veins are ready to burst. Many of them are downright stingy. They might respond that that’s how they got rich in the first place. That’s part of it for sure, the ability to have money and not blow it. Another part of it is acumen, whether actual measurable talents or merely general ‘people skills’. Another part is pure dumb luck, just happening to be in the right place at the right time. Another part, probably the biggest part, is vision, the ability to see the future and its probable trends, and the ability to deliberately position your self in the right place at the right time. That’s probably my forte’, that and my fierce bottom line. My only true skill is linguistic, and that’s of limited importance in the age of Pidgin Shit. I have no problem with any of this. I am in business, after all. We have to be pragmatic. But somewhere free enterprise gets perverted into capitalism and society falls prey to modern robber barons like T. Boone Pickens, Michael Milken, Ivan Boesky, George Soros, and other infinitely forgettable millionaires who contribute nothing to society, but manipulate ‘the system’ for personal gain and to everyone else’s detriment. Top executives in Europe don’t make hundreds of millions of dollars a year like in America. This will be America’s downfall, and rightfully so.

     
  • Unknown's avatar

    hardie karges 6:48 am on April 6, 2008 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , ,   

    CAPITALISM 

    Capitalism’s moment of glory barely lasted ten years. Without Communism to keep it honest, capitalism no longer is. The rip-roaring leveraged-buyout corporate-raiding inside-trading era of 1980’s American capitalism only subsided when the more creative Internet era of computing rose to dominance. But by then it was too late. The capitalists had shown their colors too often and made too many deals with too many devils. The colors were the black of oil and the green of money and the devils were too many corrupt leaders of too many corrupt regimes, increasingly those in control of major oil-producing countries. As with yin, so with yang, the seed of one is in the other, the universal law of retribution. The West’s refusal to embrace energy technologies other than oil has funneled money into the hands of Muslim fundamentalists with oil-derived wealth. Islamic fundamentalism is not likely to subside until their oil-derived wealth subsides. If they move us all back into the 14th century in the process, well so be it. That was a golden age for Islam.

     
  • Unknown's avatar

    hardie karges 7:04 am on April 5, 2008 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , ,   

    RUSSIAN TO NOWHERE 

    Things are too crazy now. After two or three generations of institutionalized repression in Eastern Europe with pretensions to world domination, Communism has fallen flat on its ass with hardly a moment to spare. Though the reasons for the sudden collapse are complex and varied, I suspect more than a little thanks should go to Japan, who flooded the world with cheap VCR’s and other communication devices that made Berlin Walls seem not only outmoded and irrelevant, but incapable of hiding anything. More than that, they also showed that the for-members-only club of industrialized nations was not only not exclusive, but was not limited to European countries and their immigrant offspring. Leave it to capitalism to overcome racism, doing what religion not only had never accomplished, but which had frequently instigated. This mitigated the USSR’s attraction as the model of development for third-world countries. Of course the USSR was largely European itself, so its lag behind the West’s, and now Asia’s, leaders was particularly ironic. Forged in the pan-Slavism of the 19th century, the USSR is perhaps best seen as a noble experiment at that, despite its ineptitude as a world leader.

     
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