SRF Heavy Industries

It’s pretty gooftacular that the Tea Party got up and going at all, launched by the Rentiers to help protect their vampiric cash machine — same Rentiers whose precious tax breaks let them siphon all the liquidity in the market into their already bulging wallets.

In case you hadn’t noticed, that liquidity is what usually pays salaries for people who actually contribute to the growth the Rentiers are currently reaping the benefits of. Now, instead of getting what you are due, you bust ass to do your job after a pay cut, also doing the job of the part-timer you’ve been asking for for years AND the job of that woman who got laid off when “we all had to make sacrifices” AND ALSO some of the duties of that old guy who got forced out before he could qualify for his pension.

You remember pensions, right? Near-mythical things now, made up of the part of your salary you’ve earned that they hold onto for you and invest it so it’ll continue to pay for a tiny house somewhere and the occasional tin of fucking tuna once you get to be too old to work. Turns out that was the easiest part to take away from you first, since you’d never even touched it and it was never actually real to you anyway.

Am I lost in a digression already? Am I really that old? Fuck me. I was talking about tea parties.

The first one was when a bunch of people got tired of “their betters” making all of the rules, including setting up taxes to siphon money out of the wallets of the citizenry without them have anything to say about it. They were just colonist peons, sproutlings plopped down on fresh soil to bear fruit and get mowed down for the benefit of the colonies’ financial investors — the [alleged] people whose parents and grandparents took the actual financial risk to build ships and hump them over the Atlantic and showed some small amount of concern when the colonists were freezing their asses off the first couple of wild winters. But the people making the rules during the times leading up to the first tea party did nothing but manage property — and treated the people under their care as property. Livestock. If you dig up their old letters, you read grumblings about keeping them fed and mucking out their shit and finding new and creative ways to milk them and, when they got fat, or uppity, slaughter them.

They wanted more money. The colonists they were taxing were starting to struggle under the burden. The governors tightened the screws. And the “livestock” snapped, dressing up as natives, busting their way on board the ships, looting the holds, and dumping overboard a shit-ton of cargo. Stuff they personally had a use for and held dear. Motherfucking tea.

I’m drinking some right now. Mmmm.

It got the point across. The colonists were in open rebellion over the fact that they had no control over their lives — no representation in their own damned government. We don’t put up with that around here.

The second tea party — that one makes me laugh. It was set up by lay-about property owners that fluff themselves up in the morning thinking that their input into affairs is critical to making things run. Because they’ve got the high-fucking-score.

Apparently with great wealth comes great responsibility. They have to spend four or five hours a week on the phone to protect it. Maybe ten if people start to wake up. They have to shop for new congressthings to buy, hire a think tank to study market (i.e., “your”) behavior and draft toy legislation, hire lobbyists to stuff snippets of tax code wrapped in sheaths of hundred-dollar bills and scented with lobster grease into the pockets of legislators they haven’t tamed yet.

And when their favorite livestock — that’s congress, now rife with liberals and progressives and actual conservatives, as opposed to neoconservative imperialists and dominionists and “trickle-down” economists — started acting uppity, they staged a fake tea party, dressed up as the new kind of natives, “Joe Six-Pack” and “Joe Plumber”. And since it was a joke — a joke wearing your face, goddammit — they bought a “news” network and publicized it like it was a real thing. And people who were tickled by the sound bites and the whole staged imagery and enthusiasm came out of the woodwork, playing dress-up like lost Twilight fans at a sci-fi/fantasy convention.

But Jesus, people, it started with David and Charles Koch dressed up as you guys. And like parakeets confused by a shiny new mirror in the cage you bought it. FOX NEWS is as real as All My Fucking Children and serves the same goddamn purpose. WAKE UP, YOU FUCKING BUDGIES.

I’m only laughing about it because I’ve made a point not to buy any more bullets after I ran out that last time down at the range.

However. Six or seven miles from where I sit right now, I see another tea party brewing up. A real one. A thousand or more of their representatives — the out-of-work ones, supplemented by a few people who are already making a sacrifice for us by taking time off of work and away from their families and friends — are permanently camped out downtown. They’re angry that they — we — no longer have any representation in the governing processes. Because someone has changed all the rules so that everything is for sale, bought for with bribes and lobbyists, and someone, who is not us, has all the goddamn money.

Friends and neighbors, we no longer have any representation in our own government. We are permanently outvoted by towering stacks of cash that was the cash that we ourselves earned, but somehow, by order of the twisted laws that has now made such rape and pillage part of the system, legally resides in the wallets of people who simply want to own it, because that’s what they do — and that’s what makes them feel more powerful than us.

To drive the point home, The Supreme Court of the United States of America has declared that a massive campaign donation BRIBE is Free Speech, and the corporate sock-puppets of the ultrawealthy vampires are ACTUALLY PEOPLE, with RIGHTS THAT NEED PROTECTING, and among the specific rights that need protecting is THE RIGHT TO BUY YOUR GOVERNMENT OUT FROM UNDER YOU.

So here we are again, unrepresented in our own government, overworked and still broke, or unable even to find jobs, watching shit spiral out of hand. We have a cold winter coming up, and no stores laid up, and the people who are already fat on our blood and sweat won’t even feel it.

Let’s make them feel it, too. If it’s going to be a cold winter for us, then it’s going to be a long, dark, cold winter for everyone.

I hear a lot of talk about 1% and 99% and drawing stupid lines between us and them based on income and class and, please, let me explain this to you, that artificial bigotry is their last line of defense. It works in their favor. The last places the real criminals have left to hide is among a crowd of their wealthy neighbors who, if attacked, will have no choice but to defend them when they are needlessly forced to defend themselves and their resources. One percent of the US population is 3.5 million people, some of whom are actually philanthropists and people with principles. I wouldn’t go after them anymore than I would go after all Muslims, or Jews, or people with red hair.

The people who need to be separated from their power and influence are not some nameless group. THEY ARE PEOPLE WITH NAMES. They are not “corporations”. They are not “the wealthy”. They are certainly not Warren Buffett or George Soros. They are David Koch and Charles Koch — and about five hundred people like them, people who are identifiable, and, ultimately, accessible.

We will identify them. We will find them. And accuse them. And we will undo all their damage and take our nation back.

[*]

Oh, Rupert Murdoch, with your hands up the puppet-holes of those talking heads you employ, speaking on behalf of your Koch-Brothers-and-Company buddies….

We don’t hate Capitalism, or Freedom, or Corporations, or Banks. We hate the hundred thousand bastards who have run up executive compensation to 300x, 400x, 500x the pay of their average workers — SOMETHING THAT IS UNPRECEDENTED ANYWHERE ELSE ON EARTH. Other countries, even the ones with horrible economies, top out around 50x.

THEN we hate how you stealing bastards spend that money — the money that should have been spent on jobs and proper compensation for the workers that earned that money for you — to buy senators and representatives and justices and committee members — or, if you want to pinch more pennies, you buy line-items of legislation, or tax loopholes for yourselves or your companies, or portals in the tax codes to shuffle trillions of dollars into hidden offshore accounts. Or you buy media companies and newspapers and attractive talking heads with well-greased puppet-holes.

It’s not Capitalism that provides you the Freedom to strip mine the American Wallet with your Corporations and Banks. It’s your greed, pure and simple. And the greed of the powermad thugs you’ve bought, now holding office, with milk from your cash-swollen teats running down their own chubby little chins.

What does it take to cut you bastards out of the system? Do we replace your puppets in Washington? Do we cripple your banks? Do we pop you out of the corporations you’re hiding in? Or do we come for you personally?

Don’t blame the system. Don’t say you’re just following the rules. You’ve used jackhammers of lucre to change the rules until it is YOUR system, not ours. And we will break it if we have to in order to get it back.

Let’s see what gives first.

[*]

You’re going to pretend you don’t know what they want? Okay. I’ll humor you.

They want jobs. There aren’t enough, because small businesses can’t afford to stay in business, or hire them, or pay for healthcare or retirement plans or the other typical parts of a compensation package that it takes to maintain a standard of living suitable for living in a first-world country. They’ve done everything they were supposed to do to earn a decent living and now they want the rewards that make the work worthwhile.

Let’s break that down.

Because of the cost of healthcare and credit, small businesses can’t compete with corporate giants. Corporate giants can outsource labor overseas at a fraction of the price. And are happy to do so.

Because of the greed of Wall Street, because of outright fraud from trusted financial institutions, because of the insane avarice of the five hundred family dynasties that have captured half the wealth from the sweat of an entire nation by decades and decades of constant niggling and lobbying and legislation from pet powermad senators and representatives and justices and key committee members for whom they’ve bought positions of influence…. Because of this, the system we should count on for justice, for providing equal footing among children no matter who their parents are, is warped beyond repair, draining every last penny from the pockets of those who are the most defenseless into the bulging wallets of those that have thousands of times more than they need. Because of this, there is, finally, just not enough money to go around, and the people — the flesh-and-blood human beings whose sweat is the lubrication for all of this mighty machinery — are starting to falter, and starve, and lose all hope for any reward worth their work.

Because of this, it’s finally starting to hit the children of those who were rewarded for integrity and hard work. And retirees. And veterans.

Parents can’t afford to pay for worthwhile education for their children.

People can’t afford medical care or nursing care for their elderly parents.

Students can’t afford to pay back the loans they have to take out to get even a basic degree.

Students with degrees — and advanced degrees, which we’ve been preaching for ages is the key to success and a reasonable standard of living — can’t get jobs that would allow them to have a place to live AND food AND pay back their loans, and now there is no way to defer those payments or even seek the crippling relief of bankruptcy. Because you THOUGHT you were voting for “personal fiscal responsibility”, and what you ACTUALLY voted for was for the vampire banks to be able to suck the last drop of life out of your children.

The 40-hour work week — not a luxury, but a target for a good balance of work life and private life and social life and mental and physical health — is a joke. Some people can’t find one job, while others work themselves to death with one and a half, or two, or three — and still can’t afford healthcare or daycare or sick days, vacation days, or dropping spare coins into a savings plan. Or whatever joke a retirement plan would be. Everybody has something on the side to try to fill in the gaps and it’s not paying off. It just makes people literally sicker.

Look up the figures. Worker productivity: all-time high. Worker salaries: decreasing. Unemployment: sky-high. And STILL there is actual growth, but none of the proceeds make it to any American who isn’t a company officer. And if your share does increase, it’s at the expense of someone below you on the food chain.

“Work hard and you can get ahead,” is what we’ve been telling our kids since we pulled out of The Great Depression. But working hard doesn’t get you ahead anymore. It’s treading water at best. And maybe the reason you don’t hear the voices of all of those people behind you who have already fallen down the slope is because you’re concentrating so hard on not losing your footing while you watch your own feet slide backwards.

Trust me, though. You’re next. All it takes is an expensive, lingering death in the family. An illness that your own private death panel of an insurance company won’t cover. A car wreck. A fire. An altercation at work. A spurious lawsuit. A branch office closing. A corporate merger that eliminates YOUR job. Even bad weather. These are inevitabilities. You have already taken a number. You’re just waiting for your number to be called.

If you’re wondering why the media hasn’t been covering it, first, think of who owns them. The Free Press has all been bought up by corporations that are either owned by banks or owe money to them. Second, you really don’t want to hear about poverty, sickness, and starvation. You’ve been telling the press that for years. The media only reports on blood, sports, and celebrities because you have zero interest in anyone else’s pain or troubles. You have enough troubles of your own. You don’t want to hear it. You’ve ignored it. And now it’s in your own goddamn house and you still ignore it.

“How do we get out of this mess?” you ask. “Does anyone have a plan other than whining and chanting slogans and making broke-ass cities pay their cops overtime?”

Well, yes. There is a plan. And it’s a simple one.

1) Reinstate all the restrictions on banking and securities that have been removed since The Great Depression, seeing as those restrictions were put in place to prevent another one. You can see what’s happened with them gone.

2) Figure out why healthcare has gotten so damn expensive — in the USA alone of all the countries in the world — and fix that. I guarantee you that the insurance companies and drug manufacturers are at the bottom of it, so I suggest you start looking there.

3) Revoke any idea of the “personhood” and “rights” of a corporation. They don’t need freedom of speech — all of their constituent members already have that. They don’t need ANY rights — until they can also be held as responsible and accountable as an actual human being, who can be imprisoned and stripped of possessions and, in some cases, executed for the levels of villainy we’ve been seeing.

4) If a corporation makes money from US labor, resides on US land, uses US agricultural resources, manufactures products or improves materials to be later used in production in the US, provides services to US residents using US infrastructures of road and pipes and wires and satellites, excretes wastes into US environmental resources of land or air and water, then it should pay taxes to the US people for the use, upkeep, and repair of the commonwealth and its valuable infrastructure. NO EXCEPTIONS. Practices allowing shuffling of assets overseas to prevent paying owed taxes should be banned as fraudulent.

5) The tax burden on individuals should be rebalanced. People need a certain amount of spare cash to live and eat and have a roof. Above that, the more you make, the more you should be taxed. Let’s be serious: If you can afford a car, you can afford to buy a bike for someone less fortunate so he can get to work and back. If you can afford a yacht, then you can afford to buy a couple of buses for your city municipal transit system so a hundred people can get to work and back. Everyone should pay their taxes. NO EXCEPTIONS.

6) The government is NOT FOR SALE. Huge campaign donations from individuals and corporations are nothing but bribes. EVERYONE KNOWS THIS, yet the Supreme Court says this kind of bribery is a right of free speech for corporations. MY ENTIRE ASS. Everyone knows this is a crock. Every two years, every four years, every six years, our elected officials go trick-or-treating for enough dribblings from the corporations and the wealthy — basically begging for their bribes — to buy television spots and talk shit about one another. They do this campaigning INSTEAD OF DOING THEIR JOBS. Every two years, every four years, every six years, people are elected based on the shininess of their ads and the cleverness of their sound bites and the number of newspapers they could get pictures of their faces in and, amazingly enough, nobody knows what anyone stands for. Except they’d really like you to buy a $1000 plate of spaghetti to help fund it all. Seriously, figure out where to draw the line and arrest anyone who crosses it. Dissolve any corporation that crosses it.

7) Who are we at war with again and why? Playing supercop policeman to the world is an expensive hobby. If our friends out there want us to do this, then they can help finance it. If we’re going to do it, we should do it for good reasons — not so we can sloppily slide tax revenues into the back pockets of our friends who make weapons and bunkers and tanks and jet fighters and armored transports or sell us oil on the cheap. As a non-economic aside, anyone who takes part in these things, as soldiers or US contractors or foreigners in US employ, should be held to our criminal codes, our Constitution and Bill of Rights, and our rules of civilized society no matter whose soil they’re standing on, or whether they’re in international waters — or any other lame excuse for weaseling out of being a human being and acting like animals.

8) Stop encouraging people to profit from someone else’s misery. This is just a guideline to measure things by. This means looking at the effects of rulings and legislation and corporate practices to make sure the people who are hit hardest aren’t the ones already at the bottom end of the economic spectrum, the sick, the young, the elderly, the disabled, cultural minorities, etc. Every time something slips past this test, our humanity takes another knife to the neck. People die from being poor, disadvantaged, depressed. Unchecked greed literally kills people.

So this is what those people out there chanting want. Maybe they’re not eloquent enough to say it — or maybe they’re just too angry to be coherent. Or maybe this stuff is too complex for a kid with nothing under his or her belt but a watered-down public high school education to even understand without a good run-up. But they have no hope of ever being paid what they’re worth, of being rewarded on scale with their work, of ever getting out from under the crushing debt you encouraged them to take on, and they’re unhappy.

And they’re doing all this for you, because you’re next.

Join them from your chair — or keep waiting until you have no choice but to join them on the street. Your choice.

[*]

PS:

If you think these words speak for you, use them. I don’t care about credit or attribution or any of that stuff. Just say what needs saying. Put it out there. Link, rephrase, cut-and-paste — whatever you need, whatever works. And good luck.

[.]

Running out of money sucks for everybody. Take for example Michele Bachmann, whose recently-ex campaign manager Ed Rollins says her campaign is on the ropes, financially.

Well, that’s a bummer. As terrifying as Bachmann was as a nearly legitimate candidate, it sure was fun to sit around and make bets on what the next truly insane thing to come out of her mouth would be. And to make fun of her probably-gay anti-gay husband and his “pray the gay away” financial investment in science-free counseling.

She claims her campaign is alive and well, but we’ve known for a hundred years that the highest office in the land is bought with dollars, not votes, and that’s why we bother to keep an eye on whose campaigns stay well funded.

Bachmann isn’t the only one who is running out of money. The world’s entire economy, giant Ponzi scheme that it is, has been on the ropes since the first signs of instability in GWB’s first reign. That nasty hit we took in 2008 didn’t help either. The continuation of Reagan’s supply-side economic policies, touted by George H. W. Bush as “Voodoo Economics” doesn’t seem to be helping, since that really depends on there being an atmosphere of growth and investment, and, to be perfectly honest, the absence of a nationwide healthcare scam to fund.

Since science is off the table, and Voodoo Economics doesn’t seem to be working, allow me to suggest another form of magic entirely: NECROPANTS.

Necropants, or nábrók, are a sorcerous item of Scandinavian descent for gathering or generating money, but the instructions are simple. Here they are, borrowed from Museum of Icelandic Sorcery & Witchcraft:

“If you want to make your own necropants you have to get permission from a living man to use his skin after his dead.

“After he has been buried you must dig up his body and flay the skin of the corpse in one piece from the waist down. As soon as you step into the pants they will stick to your own skin. A coin must be stolen from a poor widow and placed in the scrotum along with the magical sign, nábrókarstafur, written on a piece of paper. Consequently the coin will draw money into the scrotum so it will never be empty, as long as the original coin is not removed. To ensure salvation the owner has to convince someone else to overtake the pants and step into each leg as soon as he gets out of it. The necropants will thus keep the money-gathering nature for generations.”

Fairly simple, yes? Stealing coins from poor widows seems a fairly straightforward process with a long-standing tradition in the US, and certainly one that’s in favor with the tax-the-poor/fund-the-rich processes already in place. As for finding male volunteers for waist-down skinning, there are hordes of gay homophobes in politics already who, due to their conflicted natures, really have no need for their nether half at all except for expelling waste, and that’s just simple plumbing.

Bachmann can test this for herself for her campaign before making it a matter of national fiscal policy, seeing as she has all the raw materials ready at hand.

“Ask yourself whether the dream of heaven and greatness should be waiting for us in our graves — or whether it should be ours here and now and on this earth.”

— Hugh Akston to Dagny Taggart in Galt’s Gulch, Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand

Who could ask for a better endorsement than that?

[*]

Every ten years, every year that the first digit on my age increments, I take an hour or two think of where I might be the next time it’s going to happen — to think of what I will be like, who will be close to me, where I will be living, what I will be doing to earn money, et cetera, in ten years’ time. At some point on the same day, I remember back to what I was doing ten years ago. Thanks to the Internet, this has gotten easier. Google is happy to index and serve my memories to me. It doesn’t lie to me nearly as well as I can lie to myself.

The engineers of the tragedies of September 11, 2001, intended for it to be a catastrophic breakpoint, a brutal crack in the timeline with a distinct “before” and “after”, with the results of “after” being a suitable and significant revenge against the decadent West for … I’m sorry. The message was a little garbled. Disrespect to Islam, maybe. Suppression of Arab culture, or maybe just prideful meddling. Moral and financial support of the dedicated enemies of Islam. One or more of the above. Perhaps it’s all for being perceived as some kind of linchpin or keystone that, once destroyed, would shake the status quo and give those on the bottom a chance to scramble higher.

In any case, let’s pretend the attacks were worthy of being that kind of milestone. Let’s give them their ten-year retrospective and a ten-year projection. For as long as I can stomach it.

I see what I wrote ten years ago on the topic within two hours of the attacks. I see the discussion that triggered that went on for the rest of the day and, unsurprisingly, for days afterward. And I see, with no amount of glee, that I nailed the prediction of what would happen — the directions, certainly, if not the scope. I am obviously smarter than the entirety of those who pretended there would be any kind of winner in this scenario.

Those who wanted war had no trouble whatsoever turning it into an excuse for war — and war with the targets of their choosing, not just the instigators. Criminals and thugs were elevated to The Enemy, and, in their own eyes, into Freedom Fighters. From there, anyone who profits from war on any side — logistical suppliers, manufacturers of munitions and matériel, researchers and scientists who design new methods for killing and containment — proceeded to rake in the dough. Also profiting were those wealthy enough on both sides, all sides, not to be impacted by the market crashes and rampant poverty, who could raise prices on their own countrymen who turned to them for relief, for the scarce essentials, and for protection. As predicted.

When people are afraid for any reason, they reevaluate who they think they can trust. “Us” gets smaller, and “them” expands enormously. And every decision gets made in the light of “us versus them” politics. Those who were smart enough to predict this — and already in secure positions of power — did everything they could to make sure they could take advantage of the impending situation. Western politics has never been more deliberately conservative or more polarized since the horrible times at the height of the Cold War. Whoever has any kind of advantage at all uses it to squeeze their enemies. As predicted.

Ordinary bigotry is tolerated if not encouraged. As long as those who are in charge are the right color, the right race, the right religion, the right orientation, the right gender, what harm could there be? What incentive could there be to interfere with that? Obviously, from the viewpoint of people who could help fix it, it’s not a priority. As predicted.

But all that could have happened from any catastrophe. An earthquake or a hurricane could have destroyed the same buildings, and, in the fear generated by the aftermath, we could have gone to war with those who could be painted as wanting to take advantage of us while we were weak.

Same exact results. Probably even the same people on both sides. Same number of innocents slaughtered, in the same way, for the same reasons or lack thereof. Same economic chaos. Same degradation of ethics on all sides. Same exact results.

This is what I have to say to al-Qaeda: It surely would have happened without you. Who are you again? An earthquake. A tsunami. A hurricane. A lucky one. An eventuality.

Same exact results. Same dearth of heroes. Same revelation of who the villains really are: anyone who would take a dollar from the victim of a tragedy — and perpetuate more tragedy to prepare more victims for wallet-harvesting. You know. While everyone is willing to accept it as the natural order.

Will that continue for another ten years? On one hand I’d say yes, because why screw with a strategy that seems to be working for those who have the power and immunity and remarkable lack of conscience to keep it going? But on the other hand, I’m a student of history. I remember what I’ve read of when and why the French invented the guillotine. When things get to be too far out of balance, at some point there is always the guillotine, and what comes after.

Will the criminals who destroyed a few key buildings try to take credit for the upcoming time of guillotines? To that I say: Whatever. We name our hurricanes too, and we also know that’s a joke.

So that’s ten years. Raise a glass to the fallen — or raise the blade. You decide which.

[*]

— appearing in Russian in the Sep 11 edition of The Printed Blog, Russian Edition

In my superhero identity of The Enabler (still undecided on the cape) I have trouble suppressing the desire to establish a menagerie — or perhaps something more open-planned, like a wildlife preserve — where the beautifully and wonderfully damaged can be collected and made safe from the consequences of their destructive, and ultimately self-destructive, actions or inactions and can live out their allotment of days embraced in the comfort or their respective diseases, yet available for friendship, companionship, and, should they consent, study by artists and scientists for the greater edification of society.

Just thought you should know.

[*]

How is it that people say it? Sometimes people are just different. Develop at a slower rate, maybe. Don’t make friends. Obsess over things of no interest to other people. Lose the thread of give and take in a conversation. Stare at a face in agony and answer with confusion. Lose all kinds of track of time when focused down to the laser point of concentration.

That’s one kind of different — common enough for thousands of years in the “odd duck” category, finally consolidated into Asperger’s Syndrome post World War II, doubtless to be reconfigured again, broken apart and recombined into classifications that might be slightly more useful in the next ten or fifteen years.

There are many other kinds of different. Differences that are only categorizable once the population gets high enough that there are enough people in the long, open-ended tails of the bell curve that unique cases are joined by similar fellows. Differences that were one-instance-in-a-hundred-years a thousand years ago, then one-a-generation for a while, and now, in the age of jet travel and the Internet, numerous enough that you can have conventions, or at least a quiet supper club in a populous city.

Differences that once were bred out, dissolved into the population in a thousand different recessive traits. Differences that, in an age of treasured diversity, may now actually be selected for.

Hallucinations, occasionally a source of fear, sometimes a source of trusted visions — accusations of witchcraft, promotion through the religious ranks… Let’s face it. Even at best, respect is tinged with fear as far as visions are concerned. And delusions are only tolerated when they can be disguised as faith. But now we preserve both. For the sake of art and fervor. Synaesthesia assuages our hunger for metaphor, for parable, for analysis via the logic of sympathetic magic.

Brilliance and genius are just as frequently treated as mental illness as they are worshiped, treasured, exploited. When we face someone who is brighter, a tiny corner of the tiny mind fears a predator. We are comfortable with leaders who are measurably slower than ourselves because they remain the responsible party, yet we hope to be able to manipulate them to our own ends, pulling strings attached to well-meaning hearts or predictable vices.

There’s a hint at the next stage.

There are a lot of illnesses, injuries, congenital malformations of body or mind, that would have been fatal any time before a hundred years ago. Before fifty years ago. Today, corrections can be found, or compensations. Or simply an empty niche. We are soft-hearted. We try to find a use for everybody.

The second hint. No reason to continue to be subtle if you don’t get it yet.

When a herd of antelope are challenged by a predator, they form a protective ring around their young — an aggregate beast with horns pointing outward and the soft underbelly of their future in the middle, useless in the moment, precious in the years to come. The aggregate beast with a hundred horns has no need of heroes — just like-minded conformists. They have a use for the mediocre.

The herd has a use for the anxious. When one can no longer take the strain of facing down the predator, she goes haring off and draws the predator away, often sacrificing herself so that the others may live. In the times of privation, the depressed have a use as well — they stop eating, stop consuming resources, and also lay down to feed the predators. It is not good for the individual to be anxious or depressed, but it is of value to the herd to have those that will expend themselves to keep the herd from having to run or fight, where many more could be injured or left behind to die.

More often than not, the herd has the use for the mentally ill when the individual decidedly has no use for the illness himself. Genius and brilliance are frequently far more useful to the group than they are to the individual who really has no needs beyond air and water and food and rest and sex. Individual problems rarely require genius for solutions.

Aberration, preserved, benefits the aggregate. Those who see the world differently, those with a tiny edge and a possibly larger drawback, are nowhere near superhuman. A small army of those with that spark of difference, who band together to armor any weaknesses, any soft spots needed for the future — that aggregate creature is superhuman. Is, incrementally, the next step forward in evolution.

Those freaks, mutants, sports, what have you, that band together with their own kinds multiply their weakness and strengths together. Those that seek heterogeneity, the “loners” that band together for mutual exploitation … those are the ones to watch out for. The first is a support group. The second is a pantheon.

_____

For homework, assigned reading: Theodore Sturgeon’s short novel More Than Human. For extra credit, try Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light. These works are forty, fifty years old. Consider them an analog to stories of that age that would discuss the capability of computers before computers actually came along and settled into their common uses and applications. Apply to them the corrections you know they need to be more accurate to the world as it has developed over the past half-century.

Show your work or no credit will be awarded.

[*]

I know we’ve all been fascinated with the recent rioting in Britain, where undisciplined near-apes have been flinging the flaming poo of their discontent through the storefronts of small businesses and making off with whatever they can carry for their troubles. This appears to be the only message they can compose that will attract the eye of the press, and, beyond that, of anyone who can address the underlying causes … of their near-apedom. Which, do not be deceived, is the ultimate root of the unrest. Meanwhile, elsewhere in the Western world, a similar, more subtle, yet more devastating riot continues unnoticed and unabated.

Yes, there’s a special circle of hell for those who use the blood from other people’s tragedies to lube the grindstones for sharpening their own axes. If it helps you visualize that for me, consider this an article from my old discontinued column for TheFootnote, Letters from Heck. As a once-upon-a-time tour guide, I’m well acquainted with those circles. Consider this yet another deliberate small-minded petty evil committed for the sole purpose of attracting a little extra attention that would otherwise just go reading webcomics.

The United States has its own invasive-species underclass of culturally impoverished, deliberately ignorant, irresponsible, empathically-challenged thugs. In fact, they have been rampaging for decades, living on the dole, setting fire to small businesses and ruining the neighborhoods where quiet, law-abiding citizenry try to take their ease, vandalizing and claiming territory, selling drugs and other unhealthy addictive panaceas for a hefty profit, and mugging ordinary people — until they die or are consumed by larger predators. And yes, they are a product of our nation’s own failure to address their needs, to see to their education and indoctrination, to see them as who and what they are — and to treat them as the insidious threat they can be if ignored and left to run rampant.

Friends and neighbors across the world, I’m referring to the underclass subculture of lovable hooded hoodlums we charmingly refer to as Corporate America.

Perpetual Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney says that corporations are people and have rights that need protecting. The Supreme Court says it agrees — and that the spending of money — huge amounts of money in excess of the money any single individual is ever likely to have — somehow counts as speech, and is to be protected under the First Amendment. The truth is that politicians have been cozy with Corporate America since the years of the original robber barons, zipped up in their anonymizing hoodies of corporate charters used to shield from liability the individuals responsible for, well, after all of that, “exploitation” is a weak word.

Thievery. Outright murder. Thuggery. Those are better words.

That’s fairly progressive thinking for politicians of any stripe, especially career conservatives, standing up for the rights of these new immigrants, this new species of invader, trying to protect a voice so it doesn’t go unheard.

Voice. I’ve run out of the cynicism necessary to let that metaphor continue unaddressed. Money isn’t speech. It’s muscle. Voice is speech. Words, writing, art, expression — these are the tools we use to convince and justify, to make points. Money can be used to convince and justify, but it shouldn’t. Muscle can also be used to convince and justify, but it shouldn’t.

There’s no essay I could write that would make a rational judge give me your house. But if I ponied up enough cash and applied it in the right places, that could actually happen. That has actually happened. If I had enough muscle — guns and threats and just enough anonymity to shield me from liability, I could do the exact same thing.

Money is faster. Friendlier to the recipients. More effective, even. Harder to trace. In near-infinite supply. And a huge weapon in the hands of our own thug underclass. It’s the next step up from bullets — especially combined with that shield from liability.

Okay, so corporations are people — artificial people built out of coded documents, each section and paragraph coding for abilities, restraints, interfaces with the outside world and other corporate machinery, suites of senses, feedback systems, decision matrices, and made artificially intelligent where necessary by plugging actual human brains into them in critical places. Whatever. I write science fiction. I read it. This is nowhere near a new concept: robots, golems, homunculi, Frankensteinian and Moreauvian technology, invocations and summonings, AI software… I simply take it as a given we’ve been making it work since the trading companies of the early Renaissance, when, not even remotely coincidentally, banking started taking off.

Whatever. Hurray. Give ’em a vote when they turn eighteen and make them pay their goddamn taxes. I’m the last person on earth that would ever get in the way of sharing the planet with a new life form, but I will not #^@&!%* bow.

I’ve built a few new life forms of my own in the various labs I’ve had access to, and trust me, it’s easier than you think. No big whoop. I know what I’m talking about.

I don’t mind the idea that we should judge corporations individually, on their own merits, before lumping them all together. I’m fine with that. There’s more variations between individuals than we have between humans. Taxonomically speaking, biologically speaking, they’re a whole new kingdom. But when we judge them, particularly when we judge them for crimes, there should be consequences. This shield from liability is the part that really needs to go.

If they want to be citizens, let them.

If they want the rights of children, then register guardians and hold them in loco parentis.

If they want rights as adults, then they get responsibilities to go with them. If they commit crimes, misdemeanors or felonies, then they get criminal prosecution and attendant civil liabilities. A trial. A jury. And, at sentencing, fines that are actually large enough to hurt. Suspension of charter for operating in the US is a perfect analog to prison. Dissolution and sale of assets is a perfect analog for the death penalty. And if that’s not enough, we can use RICO to go after every last member of the corporation, every last active, voting investor, to hold all of the participants in a crime jointly and severally liable.

No more shield from liability for those responsible for using corporations for thuggery, for smashing small businesses, for setting fires, for making back alley deals, for vandalizing society at large, for sneaking high-end sneakers and televisions out of windows when they think they can get away with it.

No more applying huge quantities of money or muscle where voice is the only influence that should be allowed.

No more hiding in hoods.

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So, the guy who writes this stuff… what’s he like? Here’s some nonfiction by way of explanation.

In March of 2003 I was working for the second-strangest place I’ve ever worked. I was brought in through the back door by a board member to take a position that would eventually have me running the small IT department of a family-owned business that– I don’t want to tell that story. At least not tonight. That would work better as the first couple of seasons of a TV series that would make The Office look boring and prosaic. This is a much shorter story, and not as funny.

The IT staff worked in a large room on the second floor of a two-storey warehousish building a bit north of Metro Atlanta, triangulated about halfway between the Bentley dealership and the Ferrari dealership. The secret project was to turn an all-overhead department into an application and digital content delivery development team and start generating profit. In the meanwhile, it looked an awful lot like a helpdesk.

This was a bother. People thought they could just walk into the office and interrupt us with any old damn question.

My coworkers, who had been on board for sneaking me in to lead the team from the beginning, griped about the nonstop interruptions nonstop, so I told them I would put a stop to it.

There was a whiteboard on the door where people could leave messages or notes or pleas for help if we were out or had simply locked ourselves in and refused to respond. Ostensibly. No one bothered to use it but the IT team, and we wasted a number of dry erase pens proving our cleverness in geekly matters. I wiped all of that stuff away.

I found our finest-point black marker and started to write in the upper left corner. It was a story about a guy who knew a guy who was having some kind of esoteric existential crisis involving fire and withdrawal-level cravings and cigarettes, and the story was not complete until it covered the small board in about fifteen lines of cramped text, in my best serial killer handwriting, ending, story deliberately inadequately resolved, all the way down in the bottom left corner.

I’m leaving the text out on purpose. Because it’s a mind eraser. Let me explain.

The human brain has scads of storage for long-term memory — how your first puppy smelled, the thing your great aunt named her car that everyone in the family wished she hadn’t, etc., ad damn near infinitum. But the section of the brain we use to store the things we’re doing right now — the temporary, short-term registers we clutter up with working data we really don’t know whether we want to store or not — that holds somewhere from five to seven things. For me, five is sometimes a stretch, but I’m clever. I cope.

If someone comes to  you with a problem, it almost never has to do with that color that your mom painted the living room walls when you were eight that made your parents have that big fight. And if it’s a technical problem — and you don’t know enough about technology to be able to fix it yourself — guess where you store the details when you try to go get help. You put it in your short-term stack.

You put it in your short-term stack and you schlep up the stairs keeping it all balanced on top of your head. You come to the door. You open the door, and catch out of the corner of your eye something you hope to hell isn’t a serial killer’s hastily written manifesto. You look. You note the shapes of the letters. You sort out at least two sets of bizarre proper names you’ve never seen before. One guy is saying something about the other guy, something about cigarettes, something about having trouble lighting them, something about nicotine and tinnitus, but– no it’s spelled wrong. Is it something else? And…

That was more than seven things. Your short-term stack is filled with this rapidly fading nonsense and you no longer have and idea why you bothered to trudge up the damn stairs. Three sets of slightly hostile glares are pointed in your direction. You let go of the doorknob and go back down the stairs.

If you’re slow, you repeat this process three or four times. You don’t remember the story because you can’t. It was just that much nonsense, and hooks onto nothing else you already have in your brain. By the time you make it back to your own office, because you’re desperately trying to remember what your problem was, you’ve forgotten the mind eraser exists.

And since you’re tired of trudging up and down the stairs to no particular purpose, you decide maybe to send an email, while your complicated technical problem’s details are right in front of you, and that’s awesome, because we can get to it when we feel like it without having to interrupt our work.

So who am I and what am I like? I’m the guy who whipped the concept of a mind eraser out of my ass, composed and penned it over a quick lunch, and had no compunction about employing it to make my life marginally easier.

I’m that guy.

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Here.

I see places like this and I think in terms of economic and ecological potential. I see a ritzy four-star underwater resort hotel in the middle of the lagoon, with the proceeds from $5000 weekend packages funding multiple square mile aquaculture experiments — reef-life and sea vegetables, farmed fish and krill and crustaceans, solar power, wind power, wave power experiments, experiments in biohabitats and encapsulated biomass management and self-sufficiency. I see applications from discoveries here making their way all over the globe and beyond, improving what it means to be human at all levels.

Sixty-five years ago tests of atomic weaponry were carried out in a location very like this — and the results of those tests changed the shape of the world forever downwind and downcurrent in the timestream. It’s high time for experiments of another nature to occur in places like these, possibly with even farther-ranging consequences, only this time with the goal of manufacturing an explosion of hope and potential for comfortable growth.

What I have right now is an idea. What I would like to do now is collect input and expert opinion. Later it will be time to construct a phased proposal and look for funding. But now is the time to be looking into things like this, while we still have a little slack in the resources that we can commit. When we’re fighting over the last drop of oil and scrap of arable land, it will be far too late.

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