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  hardie karges 2:04 pm on April 21, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: ADDICTION ( 2 ), BUSINESS ( 2 ), sex ( 39 )   

  BUSINESS AND SEX 

  Business is a disease infecting my soul like the heartbreak of psoriasis. The virus is clever; not only does it allow you to reproduce fully, but it even allows you to survive in some reduced capacity as a worker drone. It infects early in the teen-age years so that it can’t be readily distinguished from the multitude of other desires begging for your attention and sweet caress. It’s a disease of the soul, like alcoholism, like HIV; it infects the pleasure center, so that you want it even though you’ve already got it. You want it even though it’s bad for you. Business is a monopoly game, in your dreams, building empires and getting you out of jail free, just like Thailand. When rich people here get busted, they run for office. Business is the opium of the rich. Business and sex cancel each other out. The more I get of one, the less I need of the other; same with opium. The pleasure centers are the same, though no evidence of cross-tolerance. They all affect your ability to have a good shit. I’ve tried going cold turkey from business, but stuffed in whole-wheat bread, hold the mustard. The results are inconclusive, maybe too lofty an approach. Probably better to try sex as a substitute, a sexual maintenance program. Sex in the morning is the real thing, the hard-on you’re stuck with, rank like the smell of bacon to a vegetarian, the dark side of appetite. Good sex is like a good shit, nature’s dirty secret. Opium will plug you up like sticky rice, something like sticky mind. The antidote is physical work, high fiber, and fear. That’ll clean you out and get you up.

   

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  hardie karges 2:55 pm on April 20, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: ISLAM ( 67 ), MONEY ( 7 )   

  SOME THINGS ARE FREE 

  The medium is the message: MONEY, dragging us all down to its own pathetic level of 0’s and 1’s for ease of computation and digital logic. Its best defense is a good offense, get there first with the most and close the door behind. Share the monopoly board with your arranged marriage partner. The dirtiest most untouchable thing in the Dark Age of religion now grabs us by our genitalia and leads us down dark alleys with weird characters. Chinese pictographs and ancient petroglyphs are scrawled on walls in a conspiracy of silence, telling us what we already know in a language we’ve long forgotten. Muslims got the male suicidal death wish down pat: me against my brother, me and my brother against our father; the three of us against our neighbor. OK, love your neighbor in a nod to Jesus as the next to last prophet to actually turn a profit, but forget the others and their other brothers. So on and so forth, relationships’ strengths run in inverse proportion to the square of the distance from the source of separation. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, bad cosmetic surgery masquerades as high desert philosophy masking macho misogyny. If you gotta’ put a veil over your wife’s head, why not just try some makeup instead?
   
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  hardie karges 3:26 pm on April 19, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Europe ( 19 ), history ( 42 )   

  EURO SHUFFLE 

  Europe has multiplied and divided until there’s no cards left to shuffle, so time to deal. If Europe can indeed unite, they’ll be pulling off the greatest political turnaround in history, from World Wars to world government with a stroke of the pen and a shrug of the shoulders. The fruits of capitalism can overcome a multitude of sins, but it’s first come first served. The guy who owns the stadium definitely has the home court advantage. India is like Europe without the money, so an easy target for cheap shots. Is there something in Indo-European language that lends itself to divisiveness, individuality, and caste systems? Loosely divided into two major races and more strictly divided into two major religions, India has as many languages derived from Sanskrit as Europe has from Latin, and ends up relying on English to get by. Ditto for Europe. Go fig.

   
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  hardie karges 12:52 pm on April 18, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: communism ( 21 ), Europe ( 19 ), history ( 42 )   

  MONDAY MORNING COMMUNISTS 

  It’s a good time to be a Communist, now that it’s totally discredited and can be re-discussed without mention of the Soviet Union. The Soviets never had a clue as to what they were doing, but Marx definitely did. He might have even been half right. Societies have come a long way over the last five thousand years in terms of human rights and physical wellbeing. Even Chomsky will admit that. The problem is that there is no guarantee of further improvement. Slavery only became eradicated when it became clear that there were better ways to reduce people into draft animals; i.e. cram them into cities. Communism is great at distributing wealth; it’s not so good at creating it. Europe did better with their social democracies, a multi-level system that allowed for individual initiative while still providing a vast umbrella and safety-net for everyone in society. That kept the Communists at bay, but put Europe at a competitive disadvantage with a resurgent US and UK, and a rising Asia, where labor unions are weak or non-existent. Though paralyzing labor strikes seem to have diminished sharply in the last twenty years simultaneous with the death of Communism, all is not well. Too many people in the US are either filthy rich or filthy poor, falling through the cracks, mitigated only by the vastness of the country and the fact that there are plenty of places to fall. Europe is more egalitarian; it has to be. Europe is probably the next best hope for mankind.

   
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  hardie karges 2:46 pm on April 17, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: China ( 14 ), communism ( 21 )   

  COMMUNISM DU JOUR DE RIGEUR 

  Communism did for measures what Napoleon did for measurement. Hamburgers are weighed and measured in Romania, to prevent hamburger corruption, I assume. An iron curtain hides nothing. We all know what you were doing back there, getting shit-faced drunk and acting Chinese, pretending you’d wait out the tides of history to catch a wave into the White House. You don’t become Chinese by reading a book. You gotta’ be born there. Communism is a perversion of Nature everywhere but China, where it’s the nature of perversion. Slavs are still Europeans even if they were slaves and serfs and slow to leave the farm. It’s as if the Lord said “Go forth and divide”, and the rest is history, roads leading to nowhere, and reasons to follow them to their logical conclusions. The urge to merge occurs only in sex and religion. To perceive divisions in the world is human; to perceive unity takes a mystic.

   
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  hardie karges 1:54 pm on April 16, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: communism ( 21 ), MATERIALISM ( 2 )   

  GRAY MATTER 

  Communism stops the clock if nothing else. Once the curtain was lifted and the wall came down, it was like opening a time capsule. I missed East Europe in the early days, but Vietnam and Laos were revealing, with their Bolshevik architecture, Minsk motorcycles, and Russian cultural centers. Gray is the color of communism, unfinished concrete and cellblock apartments. All the joy is gone from life in a world devoted to dialectical materialism. Time stands still in a world without profit nor prophecy. Alcohol takes on new importance and sex is more than just going through the motions. You take what pleasure you can find in as much family as you can afford and hope for things to get better.

   
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  hardie karges 7:34 pm on April 15, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: drugs ( 7 ), history ( 42 ), 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: CITIES ( 5 ), 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: history ( 42 ), populations, racism ( 10 )   

  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: communism ( 21 ), 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.