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    hardie karges 3:26 pm on April 19, 2008 Permalink | Reply
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    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
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    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
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    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
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    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
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    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
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    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
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    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
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    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
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    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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