Das Tagebuch Murnaus

 
I was in Washington DC on election night, and the day after. 
The general attitude was one of stunned grief. 

Meanwhile, as the new Cabinet takes shape it appears we are in a William S. Burroughs routine come alive, for the second time.

Roosevelt after inauguration:

Immediately after the inauguration Roosevelt appeared on the White House balcony, dressed in the purple robes of a Roman Emperor and leading a blind, toothless lion on a gold chain, hog-called his constituents to come and get their appointments. The constituents rushed up, grunting and squealing like the hogs they were; men who had gone gray and toothless in the faithful service of their country were summarily dismissed in the grossest terms, like:

“You’re fired, you old fuck, get your piles out of here,” and in many cases thrown bodily out of their offices.

Hoodlums and riff-raff of the lowest caliber filled the highest offices of the land. When the Supreme Court overruled some of the legislation perpetrated by this vile route, Roosevelt forced that august body, one after the other on threat of immediate reduction to the rank of congressional lavatory attendants, to submit to intercourse with a purple-assed baboon so that venerable honored men surrendered themselves to the embraces of a lecherous, snarling simian while Roosevelt and his strumpet wife and veteran brown-nose Harry Hopkins, smoking a communal hookah of hashish, watched the immutable spectacle with cackles of obscene laughter. Justice Blackstaff succumbed to a rectal hemorrhage on the spot. Roosevelt only laughed and said coarsely,

“Plenty more where that came from.”

Hopkins, unable to contain himself, rolled on the floor in sycophantic convulsions saying over and over,

“You’re killin’ me chief! You’re killin’ me!”

Now Roosevelt then appointed the baboon to replace Justice Blackstaff, deceased. So henceforth the proceedings of the court were carried on with a screeching simian; shitting and pissing and masturbating on the table and not infrequently leaping on one of the justices and tearing him to shreds.

“He’s entering a vote of dissent”, Roosevelt would say with an evil chuckle.

The vacancies so created were invariably filled by simians, so that in the course of time the Supreme Court came to consist of nine purple-assed baboons. And Roosevelt, claiming to be the only one able to interoperate their decisions, thus gained control of the highest tribunal in the land.

Then Roosevelt gave himself over to such vile and unrestrained conduct as it is shameful to speak of. He instituted a series of contests, designed to promulgate the lowest acts and instincts of which the human species is capable. There was ‘The Most Unsavory Act Contest’, ‘The Cheapest Trick Contest’, ‘Molest-A-Child Week’, ‘Turn In Your Best Friend Week’, (professional stool-pigeons disqualified), and the coveted title of ‘All-Around Vilest Man of the Year’.

Roosevelt was compelled with such hate for the species as it is that he wished to degrade it beyond recognition.

“I’ll make those cocksuckers glad to mutate”, he would say, looking off into space as if seeking new frontiers of depravity.

So let us all scan the horizon for new frontiers of depravity; this is the space age, and we are here to go!

Goodnight children, everywhere.

- Uncle Mac

I hate reading stuff like this.
It's so discouraging.

*****

• Only 40 per cent of Canadians say they trust their MPs to do what is right, and only 42 per cent place some trust in political parties.


• Sixty-two per cent feel politicians only want their vote.


• When asked to rate MPs across six areas of responsibility, Canadians gave failing grades in five categories, including helping people in their riding and explaining decisions made in Parliament. The only passing grade was for "representing their parties' views."


• Thirty-one per cent of Canadians say they have contacted an elected official in the last year.


• Thirty-nine per cent of Canadians say they haven't had a single political conversation in a year, online or off.


• Many see politics as irrelevant

This is one of those things that I want to post here, otherwise they'll be lost as I go poking around for "that thing I saw that day that was so good..."

But it is that good, it is really starting to disturb me how "we" are sitting back and taking it, when we're not actually on board with what's going on and being done in our name....

1984 in 2012 – The assault on reason
By Allan R. Gregg | Sep 8, 2012 8:35 am |

Allan Gregg is Chairman of Harris/Decima, and is considered a pioneer in the integration of consulting, public-opinion research, public affairs and communications. A frequent commentator on radio, television and in print, he is also an entrepreneur with diverse interests in Canadian culture. He was one of the founding shareholders of Canada’s children’s network, YTV, the Chairman of Toronto Film Festival, past Chair of the Walrus Foundation (publisher of 2007 Magazine of the Year, “The Walrus”) and has executive produced documentary television as well as recordings by Canadian artists such as The Tragically Hip, The Watchmen and Big Wreck. He serves on the General Motors of Canada’s Advisory Board and the Bank of Montreal’s Advisory Council on Retirement.

The following speech was delivered by Allan Gregg on September 5, 2012, at a celebration of Carleton University’s Faculty of Public Affairs and its move to the new River Building.

( Read more... )

Oh dear, and another month slips by. It has been such a busy year, at least since May, and there are only a few weeks left in 2011.

But not time for end-of-year accounting and 2011 memes yet.

Chronological accounting-for-myself:

October 10 (Thanksgiving) - we gave this a miss because Aki had his wisdom teeth out a few days before and couldn't chew - and I was not about to make a turkey smoothie for him. He had five (!) taken out, they are a lot bigger than I remember. The procedure is different now too - when I had mine out, about his age, it involved day surgery in a hospital with a general anaesthetic. He had it done in the dentist's office, with IV sedation. He bled for a day or so and recovered very quickly. The following weekend we had a proper dinner at my mother's.

October 19-22 - I went to the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey California. Dear Readuhs will remember the conference I went to in early August, and how well one of my games went down at the demonstration period there (http://ltmurnau.livejournal.com/237527.html). Well, out of that I got an invitation to go to the NPS and talk to them about using digitized versions of this and other games of mine, in a project related to another, much larger project they have going on. I got to make a lunchtime presentation to their Irregular Warfare students, mostly Special Forces captains and majors - I was kind of nervous about this but they were very friendly and interested. I spoke for less than half an hour and they filled up the rest of the time with questions, so I didn't get a chance to talk with them which I really wanted to do. I did have a quick chat with a Marine Corps major who had trained in Armor, and instead of charging across the desert dealing death to enemy tanks from two miles away found himself and his tank company in a neighbourhood of Baghdad, working out which streets would have priority for garbage collection and which block leaders could or couldn't be trusted.

If anyone wants to look at my script or Powerpoint slides, they are here: http://brtrain.wordpress.com/2011/10/24/presentation-at-naval-postgraduate-school/ . This is another blog I have started that will be confined to my game design and "serious games" development and other stuff. Not much there yet though, as it has not proven possible to port my game-design related entries on LJ over to Wordpress en masse.

Anyway, the ensuing discussions with the project team went well, I came up with some new ideas for games for them that I will be working on and I put them in touch with emperorkefka who has made up a version of Guerrilla Checkers for Android mobile phones, and will probably do the technical work for the team on what they need for the project. See a screenshot at Little Viking Games.

A "guided gaming session" went less well, I tend to forget that a game I regard as being comparatively simple (especially if I've designed it) is still quite complex to people who have grown up playing ordinary board games or just computer games. As much as I tend to dislike computer games, a lot of the complexity and fiddliness of a game design can be subsumed into the structure and interface of a game. Players do not need to remember what pieces can move where or how, when the program will simply not let them do it, so they can concentrate on playing the game - and that's enough for most players, but there needs to be some explanation of why this or that thing can't happen, or the penalties for doing so. And it's a lot easier to change a sentence to two in a rulebook than it is to rewrite hundreds of lines of code. Anyway, I left them with a big bag of playable copies of my games.

Monterey is a beautiful little town, and Friday night I went out to look around. The NPS is just a few blocks from downtown, so I walked down to the big pier that is full of shops and restaurants. I looked at I don't know how many cheap t-shirts, and got a pound of salt water taffy for Aki (and a bunch of cheap assorted candy from the Walgreen's downtown later). I had a plate of completely ordinary chow mein at a small Chinese restaurant where this huge Mexican family was having dinner - I think it was someone's birthday or something. "Dad" was at the head of the table, obviously the patriarch and wearing the biggest hat - they were having a great time. Later I walked back by a different route but did not turn when I needed to, and ended up walking by this highway to a gigantic shopping mall with no way out except the way you came in, and the buses had all stopped running - in the end I did get out and back, but had walked five miles more than I had planned!

I went back on Saturday the 22nd - the NPS had actually paid for my flight and hotel, which was great. My flights were well spaced so I didn't have to hurry at all; and I have resolved to hand-carry my luggage from now on if I can possibly help it. You can get a lot into a small bag if you roll it right. (I saved even more room on the flight down by forgetting my good pants at home! Luckily I remembered this in the air on the way to San Francisco, and got a pair of acceptable golfing slacks at the pro shop in the airport - otherwise it would have been pretty embarassing.)

October 24 - was my 47th birthday, which we didn't really bother marking except for a good dinner at San Remo. I'm feeling rather more middle-aged now, and while I'm happy to have outlived George Orwell, I don't have TB and haven't come near to matching his output.

October 29 - was "Grave Situation II", the second annual Gothvic Halloween party. (entry in respect of the first: http://ltmurnau.livejournal.com/225987.html). Lianne came out for this one too, and we had a nice time. I was supposed to DJ for the first hour and a bit, but the person who was supposed to bring the CD players didn't show up until late so for the first while I had to improvise some with what Gray had on his laptop, using Mixxx which was not-bad software. No one was dancing anyway, so it was OK - can't post my setlist right now but will later.

October 31 - we just left the lights off. I didn't see any kids out and about. Very disappointing. Aki went to play computer games and have some pizza with his friends.

November 4-6 - We went to deepest darkest Surrey, for BottosCon 2011 - the fifth annual board wargaming convention put on my Rob Bottos. It's small, maybe 60 people came this time and that was the biggest yet. About half of the attendees were Advanced Squad Leader players, who usually don’t play much else (or at least, they came to the convention to play ASL only), and the other half were people playing practically everything else, from non-wargames like Urban Sprawl to Angola or Storming the Reich.

I don’t go to many conventions, and when I do I usually don’t play games – I spend my time talking to people, catching up with friends or trying to interest people in my new designs in the hope of snagging playtesters. Guerrilla Checkers (http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/71035/guerrilla-checkers ) proved to be a hit again, and someone expressed an interest in writing an iOS application for it so it can be played on iPad, iPhone, iKettle etc., which would be great. I also played out a few turns of the brigade-level version of my Finnish Civil War game (http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/68072/finnish-civil-war ), which prompted someone to say that he thought he’d seen everything now, and did a complete run-through with a playtester of a newly written 2006 scenario for my Third Lebanon War game – it worked well and concluded on time, with a marginal Hezbollah victory. A minor revision to two to the rules and they’re even better – the basic designs are quite sound.

We also went out to one of Surrey's many industrial zones - the whole area looks like it's composed of strip malls, suburbs, and warehouse districts, there's more than that but that's what you see form the highway as you're whizzing through - to get 25 pounds of Cerrotru, the metal I use for casting my miniatures. It's gone up in price a lot, and this will probably be the last time I buy it for quite a while. I kind of like going to these industrial parks, reminds me that things are still made or at least assembled here.

Anyway, I went for the gaming and metal, Lianne went for the shopping. The con hotel was next door to the last Skytrain station, so it was easy for her to get downtown without aggravation. She went to check out the Occupy Vancouver campsite at the Vancouver Art Gallery, what she saw and what I've seen of our own Occupy Victoria site makes me think that perhaps it's time to fold the tents and continue the next phase in the fight. The continued and enlarged presence of conspiracy crazies (Truthers, chemtrail people etc.), deinstitutionalized mental health cases, homeless, criminals and drug addicts at these camps are just the sort of thing the detractors of the Occupy movement want to see (and in fact have even been encouraging, as NYPD cops regularly send these people from other parts of Manhattan to Zucotti Park, and police in other cities are infiltrating different Occupy campsites to instigate trouble themselves). Yes, I am fully aware that these people are just as much products of the version of semi-feudal corporate capitalism as anyone else camping out down there, but continuing to sleep out in tents like this will tend to make it easier to trivialize the whole movement as, well, sleeping out in tents.

I'm not going to say anything more about the Occupy movement itself; anyone who reads this has already read what I would say, in many other places and probably better phrased. I was looking up some George Orwell the other day and found this telling chapter from The Road to Wigan Pier, which he wrote in 1936 - he makes some good points, and this chapter contains some of his more spiteful writing, but it's also interesting to look at this from 75 years in his future.

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As usual, The Onion says it all... honestly, it's like C. Montgomery Burns is writing the world-script right now.

***
Governor Walker Should Be Flogged For His Inability To Control His Underlings

By T. Herman Zweibel
Publisher Emeritus (photo circa 1911)
February 24, 2011 | ISSUE 47•08

By any civilized measure, this should be a golden age for America. My editors inform me that the gap between rich and poor is the greatest in history, which is a comfort, as I wish the coal-smudged wretches as far from me as possible. So, too, are we in a vast recession, meaning I am allowed to appear fiscally pious and unusually virtuous as I refuse to share even a parcel of my staggering wealth with the less enriched. Best of all, the lack of spare spending-pennies among the general population has put every-one in such a foul demeanor that the good people of Georgia may soon pass a law decreeing that any woman over 13 who is not pregnant must be put to death, and about time, I say. Truly, it is a good time to sell news-papers, as people do lap up the repeated failures of their society like a dog its vomit.
But for one noxious exception: This governor of Wisconsin and his glaring impotence in constraining the state's wretched hirelings.

You may imagine my rage when I was informed that the Governor was facing down seventy thousands of angry state workers after informing them that they had lost their right to bargain for Union contracts! He allowed them to rise up like so many aspirational prairie-dogs, without fear of lashing, the gibbet, nor public humiliation! Wisconsin, as we all know, is a hinterland of ruddy-faced, venison-gnashing peasants, so naturally the in-ability of this man to rule there infuriated me so greatly that my iron dentures clashed together with a force sufficient to spot-weld them closed. We have come to a pretty pass in this country when common citizens feel they have the right to assemble in public and shout any God-damned thing they want!

Once I had been calmed and my jaws freed by my house dentrifice-monger, I discussed the matter of the Union workers with my solicitors. My first question, of course, was whether or not these Union toilers could be replaced with vastly less expensive workers under the Confederate model, but I was informed that for various complex reasons this may not be feasible for several years. I was much heartened by the news, however, that Walker was trying to drag the Union work-men down to the level of the average slobbering working person, which should be the goal of every Governor. After all, I would not build a lead-slurry plant in Wisconsin if I can pay the workers in New Jersey a few cents less, and unions make that very difficult. Therefore, if they care one whit about cheap and thank-less jobs, the 48 governors of this nation ought to be scrambling to see which state can beat its citizens into the most hopeless, miserable, and pathetic conditions possible. The governor with the most desperate citizens will then get all the lead-slurry plants and be hailed as a hero. That, as any news-paper will tell you, is how America works, God damn it!

Yet what little blood still seeps through my calcified and brittle veins was brought near to boiling when I was told that minions, lackeys, and servants were threatening to assemble publicly and make their opinions known in the neighboring cesspools of Ohio and Indiana. If this madness were to spread, the grotesque accumulation of capital I and my brother barons so cherish would be under some feeble threat. What would these workers demand next? A six-day work week? Nonsense!

I was quickly informed, however, that many of the plow-and-hammer types actually support their asparagus-spined governor, apparently from the impulse that it is easier to tear others down than to lift yourself up—a principle I wholly support, as it is the foundation upon which journalism and democracy are built.

So while this near-treasonous Governor should resign for slackening the customary iron grip on his state and allowing the common rabble to have a voice, I believe that this will be only a brief setback. The people of Wisconsin have been reasonable, civil, and articulate, I am told, despite the fact that many among them are mere laborers, and, what is even worse, teachers. And if there is one thing I have learned from my time on this God-forsaken Earth, it is that reasonable, civil, and intelligent people have not left much of a mark on history.
Now, get back to work!
***

In other news, I scored a very nice pair of Corcoran jump-boots with zippers down the sides at Value Village - they fit well, but I have to break them in a bit more. They look like this, but shinier:

I post this here because I know I'll wnat to refer to it later, and I'll forget where it was.

I saw it on http://www.dangerousminds.net/index.php, a place I peruse a lot lately, but ultimately, it came from http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2010/02/becoming-third-world-country.html

Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Becoming a Third World Country

In the course of writing last week’s Archdruid Report post, I belatedly realized that there’s a very simple way to talk about the scope of the brutal economic contraction now sweeping through American society – a way, furthermore, that might just be able to sidestep both the obsessive belief in progress and the equally obsessive fascination with apocalyptic fantasy that, between them, make up much of what passes for thinking about the future these days. It’s to point out that, over the next decade or so, the United States is going to finish the process of becoming a Third World country.

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Interesting points raised here. Further below in the comments, someone posted:

"Over the past couple of decades, gangs and their turf wars have spread far from the inner cities and large population areas of the northeast and west where they first gained a foothold, into the south and areas much more sparsely populated and rural. Case in point, a small city near here with no more than 15K in population, tucked deeply inside the local "potato belt," now has a gang problem ! A gang problem complete with graffiti border markings, drug trafficking and murder of rival gang members. It seems that gangs are now well established in most areas of the country. And the sheer number and variety of gang affiliations out there is mind-boggling, to say the least.

So, it occurred to me a few weeks ago that in many ways, this gang phenomenon echoes the turf wars and civil wars that often break out in third world countries and work to keep the populace hounded and terrorized, drain the economy of some of its last shreds of normal productivity and continually disrupt normal trade operations. If the US governing infrastructure weakens significantly - as it well may because of funding issues, many cities and counties are already cutting back their police forces - I worry that the vacuum will be rapidly filled by this ever-present "criminal element" and that these rival factions will plunge many areas of this country into a situation very like the one Mexico is currently dealing with where the civilians in some areas are literally trapped between armies in an ongoing and vicious war over turf and political control....."

I post this here for historical interest.

Opposition wins landslide in Japan election

Last Updated: Sunday, August 30, 2009 | 4:02 PM ET CBC News

After 54 years of nearly unbroken rule, Japan's ruling conservative party conceded defeat Sunday to the left-of-centre opposition in parliamentary elections.
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Perhaps some interesting changes coming; perhaps not.
But having one party run your country for 55 years is no sort of democracy at all. The LDP even had the electoral districts so gerrymandered that one farmer's vote was worth three city-dwellers' votes. They got the votes, they dished out the lolly, until the roof finally fell in.

Certainly it is now common knowledge that Glenn Beck is Losing It Big-Time, but I missed this segment of his show that aired in February 09 where they more or less fantasize about insurrection against their own duly elected government.

Didn't you ever wonder what had happened to the militia movement, who used to supply all the stock bad guys and wackos for the crime shows back in the Clinton Years?

***
Sunday Feb. 22, 2009 07:36 EST
Fox News "war games" the coming civil war

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Link with other links and references:

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/02/22/militias/

More on Glenn Beck, Fox News and conspiracies:

http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/135541/