Tag: politics

Major Barbara (slight return)

My new job is in the neighborhood next to the airport where all the aerospace companies sit. It’s creepy.

Raytheon and Northrop Grumman and Boeing and the others all have huge compounds of factories and offices. Silos emit gusts of white gas, roofs grow antennas and dishes, and big trucks arrive and depart with lumpy tarp-covered cargo.

Satellite systems, missiles, aircraft, God knows what else all come out of these compounds. The bearded 50-ish guys I see going to lunch make this stuff. They remind me of the dads of my friends from childhood, but these guys are now just 10 or 15 years older than I. They look worn. From my own experience I know that some of them are drinking themselves to death or just eaten up inside from the awful machines they design and build.

The only cheap lunch in walking range is a choice among some bad fast-food chain places around the corner: generic pizza, Subway sandwiches. Today at the Starbucks there I had one of my odd imagination moments in which I see an overlay on the scene in front of me. I imagined the Hellfire missiles and cluster bombs and lasers and supercannons and 2000 lb bombs arriving on this mini-mall scene: flaming debris and shrapnel, screams, office people writhing in burning Dockers, blood spatter on the Z Pizza sign.

There is what people now call a “disconnect” between the sterile and pleasant mediocrity of the Starbucks patio and the horrors of war machines. I’ll go back to just drinking my half-good coffee and taking a break, and that shocking filter on the camera will go away at least for a while.

It’s instructive to be closer to the business end sometimes. I’m too wimpy to be radical and it’s easy to relax and avoid big problems too. Maybe a few more reminders will help me change?

PROJECT!

I want to write a self help book.

And it will be for america’s ruling upper middle class.

And it will be called:

OFF WITH YOUR HEAD: BUILD A BETTER AMERICA AND A BETTER WORLD BY BEING SLIGHTLY LESS LIKE MARIE FUCKING ANTOINETTE

The Masque of the Wing Nut

Could everyone please tone down the crazy a little bit with regard to the influenza?

Strains of influenza virus like this show up. It’s happened before and will happen again. This one might go big and cause a lot of suffering, and probably won’t. The WHO and national agencies are doing a good job of coordinating and sharing information. All you can actually do right now is hope things go well and not cough on each other, and wash your hands regularly. That’s it. Really.

Conspiracies, fakes, government-created viruses, the national politics of your country and others, the bad behavior of pharmaceutical companies, and the current oncoming worldwide financial depression are possible but unlikely sources of the problem. None of these exciting things are necessary to explain an influenza outbreak.

Conspiracies do exist, and many are successful. They are boring, and unsurprisingly they don’t show up on CNN. Fat white men in suits conspire to start wars, fix prices, steal natural resources, poison people, and crush the rights of individuals. They get away with it most of the time. Keep your eye on those bastards.

These guys don’t need to create an influenza pandemic, or fake 9/11’s plane crashes, or kill Princess Diana, or hide the UFOs. Those are things that happen in movies where our heroes run in slow-mo from an explosion at the end.

In short, it’s very unlikely that the swine flu is engineered by some shadowy cabal. It’s much more likely that it’s an outbreak of a nasty flu strain.

But almost everything about your daily life is in some way made worse by those fat white men in suits cutting deals with your birthright. Maybe they deserve more of your attention.

Hey, you know that Rich Santelli rant?

You know, the one that’s being passed around in email, the one your dad wants you to watch, the “chicago tea party” thing?

It’s poorly concealed astroturf from the usual billionaires. Just so you know.

EDIT: It appears that the Playboy article, which has now been pulled from their site, was at a minimum poorly researched and may have been slanderous. The Koch connection has not been proved. Please see my later entry.