Three students; one drunk, one who was reluctantly sober and one unfortunately cursed by love, have all asked me variations of this question within the last two weeks.
We’ll get there, but first, a survey of the conditions … free free to try this experiment on your own. Visit a pet supply store and ask them “May I buy some baby rats or mice to feed to my pet snake?” With some exceptions, you will likely be shown some feeder rodents with prices. Next time, ask the opposite question; “May I buy some baby snakes to feed to my pet rat?” Different response? Why?
At least in the business of pets, we seem to have a respect for snakes as apex predators of rodents, that we don’t have for the rodents. Rodents tend to get into our food stocks and our homes, so we hate them, we kill them with little hesitation, unless we happen to have a gerbil, hamster, rat or rabbit as a pet, those get a pass. And yet, even a field mouse cornered in the garage, is a terrified little mammal. We’ve all connected to them at some point to their remarkable fragility. Mice are not hard to kill compared to say, certain microbes, or even structures as small as a prion. But humans have shown our expertise at killing animals on the large end of our scale magnitudes … once we developed the age of industry, we found that we could kill things like whales, elephants, rhinos, and flightless birds without much difficulty. It’s still the small stuff that really eludes us … stuff like viruses, and staph, or of course, prions, those horrid little fuckers.
But mice, they push into an odd territory, don’t they?
They reproduce fast enough that with a source of food, they can become too numerous to ever exterminate, much like bacteria. But unlike bacteria, they are mammals, like us, and they can be readily genetically engineered to have immune systems that have been “humanized.” Kill a hundred? Breed two hundred more. Their relative fragility is a feature! They die easily? Well, we don’t want them to die TOO easily, but y’know, just easy enough to move some product through the Walgreens, CVS or Rite Aid. The biological research industry is a tough game. The people who do that work have to harden their hearts, and recognize that all the humanized mice that they have to test, are being tested to save the lives of humans. And I can only assume that most of them can handle it without wanting to blow their brains out. That’s where they set their moral compass, and they do a good job of working within those confines. But they also operate under the idea that “Nature is the worst terrorist.” That’s an idea that I reject, but I understand why some researchers say it. I feel that if they could do some nonlinear fluid mechanics and see just how much of a razor’s edge our lives rest, they would view Mother Nature as our greatest possibly ally against the forces of entropy, rather than call that gorgeous woman a “terrorist.” Yes, the idea bothers me because I believe it is borne of ignorance to just how lucky we are to even exist in the first place, let alone get to exist with the luxury of only being taken out by a virus, rather than by some kind of razor-jawed space monster.
And then there are those who oppose any and all kinds of genetic engineering. They will eat hybridized fruits and vegetables, but they won’t eat genetically modified organisms of any kind. They won’t eat animals or animal products because they don’t support the industrialization of animals. They argue that we have the means to produce vaccines without genetic engineering, that we have the means to produce foods and lifesaving technologies without genetic engineering, so we should simply do that. Some of these activists understand the dangers of manipulating carbon thread-like structures down below the 17 nanometer regime without control of chirality and stacking dislocations. While some of these activists don’t have this knowledge, and just take a “holistic” approach, some activists have both the knowledge to why genetic engineering is potentially dangerous, and also why the natural approach may be best. John B. Fagan is perhaps one of these activists as described by David Barboza in an over twenty-year-old New York Times article. The other extreme might be a farmer in India who sets fire to a field of genetically-engineered rice, because he wants to avoid the risk of those GMOs to contaminate his own all-natural, Vedic rice crop. That’s where they set their moral compass. Fagan willingly gave up some enormous research grants to stick by his principals. The Vedic farmer in India risked prison for doing violence against the GMO field. In both cases, they likely didn’t see the kinds of profits from their work that they would have seen if they had little problem with using humanized mice or GMOs in their business.
So where do you fit? Where do you set your moral compass? Maybe you don’t set it at all, let the wind takes you where it may? Sometimes we get lucky, and the wind blows us right into port without having ever touched the tiller … but most of the time, it’s the rocks.
This little analysis is just for you three, the rest of the readers have already left. So … stake a claim. Pick a position that lets you sleep at night. That’s all you have to do.
I don’t particularly like to feed a wriggling meal worm to a pet reptile, I feel the little thing terrified at its inevitable demise in the mouth of the pet gecko, but I don’t toss and turn in my bed trying to make peace with it. On the other hand, a mouse is sufficiently close to my own mammal point of view, that I unfortunately can’t block out their misery. I’m okay with conventional medicines and vaccines that test on mice, because for better or worse, that mouse has a job, same as me. But the second that mouse is born with an engineered, humanized genetic body, even though it looks the same as any other mouse, it seems to cross a line that I don’t want to cross. And that’s where I stake my limit. I can eat a genetically-engineered soy burger, even though I would prefer a non-GMO soy burger. I can take a vaccine that has been tested on mice, or chimpanzees. But humanized mice? Humanized primates? That would bump against that spot where I set my moral compass. Why? It doesn’t really matter, I have my reasons … they’re scientific and ethical and I don’t feel the need to share at the moment. But they are my ideals. I choose not to ridicule the values of others in this area, and I choose to not be ridiculed by them in return.
If you set your moral compass to a place where you don’t feel the need to judge others’ ethics, then you just might have found the sweet spot, a place where you can stretch out and breathe easy. I’m okay with a minority of people who support the industrial-scale production of mRNA vaccines using genetically-engineered humanized mice for the same reason I’m okay with a minority of people who are vegan and intensely centered around their ideals of protection of animals. And this reason is that we need both extremes, so that we can set our own moral compass on these issues, or at least while we wait for a COVID-19 vaccine that was not tested on humanized-mice. Yes, we understand that this non-GMO COVID vaccine will be more expensive, we understand that it will take longer to get, because it will need to be tested on humans to ensure safety of pregnancies and long-term impacts. But we’re willing to wait, and we’ll stay masked up as long as the law requires it of us. We support the safety and health of our human neighbors, and of our animal neighbors. That rodent may not be entitled to live if we decide that it needs to die, but it at least has the right to die with the genetic heritage with which it evolved. That’s the Rick Yukon official moral compass setting … altering that animals’ natural genetics so that it can be used as a cost-effective research tool in order to lower the costs of medicines which we may or may not need, is not different than many other forms of animal cruelty, except that the end-victim in these shenanigans will likely be our children and grandchildren.
This post is for public disclosure on our key holdings.
As longtime backers of the Space Force 7 organization have noted, we tend to run somewhat lean in the offices, and we tend to invest most of our revenue into research. However, in order to bridge our laboratory through difficult times, we do maintain holdings to provide liquid capital and thus cover operating costs when we have no other options open to us. Some of these holdings present a potential conflict of interest with our organization’s ongoing advocacy activities.
These holdings include 15 Cryptokitties, the least valuable of which is worth approximately $10 and the most valuable of which is worth approximately $88,000 during the height of the first Cryptokitties craze, but likely work considerably less at the moment. We disclose these NFT holdings due to our somewhat more contentious holdings of Our.Glass and Polydragon’s Fireball token. We support the work of all three organizations, however we make full and public disclosure to our investments in Our.Glass due to the public attention recently focused onto Our.Glass founder Trevon James. We strongly support the work of Mr. James and we stand by our investments in Our.Glass and the position of that system within the Bitconnect and Binance Networks.
The United States Securities and Exchange Commission has opened action against Mr. James and fellow developers.
Space Force 7 has produced two exploratory efforts into the model of the Our.Glass coin and compared the Our.Glass coin with similar products. We have initially concluded that Our.Glass is a stable and disruptive financial model that can potentially approach and contribute several opportunities in the U.S. Economy to expand investment in key components of three key industries. In noting these measurements, we also clearly note our open and notorious conflict of interest with our holdings in these digital assets. However the opportunity to fund disruptive research to improve the quality of the air, soil, water and lives is too significant for us to NOT invest in these assets. We have no ethical difficulty with earning lots of money and investing the liquidity into these afore-mentioned research projects.
We are confident that Mr. James and The U.S. Security Exchange Commission will come to an equitable arrangement to benefit both investors in the Our.Glass platform and also business people in brick-and-mortar businesses that rely on the Our.Glass platform. We note to the U.S. Security Exchange Commission, that the people who have invested in these brick-and-mortar businesses have done so in remarkably difficult times, following the loss of major sources of their income due to the COVID-19 quarantine. These business owners have requested less from the COVID relief programs than any other segment of the U.S. Standard Industrial Classification Index. These business owners largely and overwhelmingly decided to turn down the “free” money because they have seen the devastating effects of that these funds within their communities. They have since chosen to invest their often limited funds in the intellectual capital of their own community. Trevon James has spearheaded an effort to create a simple, crowd-sourced digital asset that can allow regular brick-and-mortar business owners to finance expansion of their businesses in a way that is fully compliant with their SBA, SBIR and financial requirements. The community earned this digital asset through their hard work against a country which stacked the deck against their own success for far too long. The U.S. SEC must be able to interpret the legal framework that guides their efforts in a way that helps to promote small business. Counsel to the SEC should endeavor to judge equally, corporate welfare at the very pinnacles of our economy, and working class investors in Black-owned financial models. If they are unable to apply the law in compliance with the purpose of these decisions then they will effectively chain closed the escapes from the smouldering ruins of the economy and force everyone to perish inside. Have no doubt SEC, Our.Glass, in our glass. If our community can’t survive in the digital space, we’ll survive on the streets. We’ve been doing that a lot longer than you have, and when you come to beg us for a scrap of food, we’ll remember what you did to Trevon, and we’ll hand you a nearly useless ten dollar bill, and you might be able to trade it for a single cigarette … if you’re lucky. And when you beg the former banker to sell you one of his loosies to you for a tenner, you remember what your second-cousin did to Eric Garner.
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Thank you, for reading these public statements. Here is a video that may help you to recalibrate …
Criminal negligence for four million COVID deaths if it turns out to be a lab leak? I doubt it. Everyone involved has probably already been offered immunity to prosecution, from Dr. Focaccia all the way down the doughy boy who sweeps the humanized-mouse carcasses out of the test cages.
Four million deaths, it’s going to be essentially impossible to claim it was anything other than an accident. I’m sure there are going to be some smarty pants who claim that Big Pharma and thus the genetic research community was not incentivized to keep these human-chimera gain-of-function experiments locked down, because they knew that if they got out and led to a few million deaths, that would be the critical mass for them to finally bypass FDA compliance on getting mRNA drugs onto the market. And not just bypassing the FDA compliance, but also getting people to forget about how much they hate GMOs. There is a clip from Futurama, how Leila was highly concerned about the effects of genetic engineering from MomCorp, until she found out that it could cure her incurable disease, then she says “Okay, I’m in.” As the cured Leila and Fry walk away in happiness, the city is then revealed to have been taken over by MomCorp’s GMO beans, which encase the city like radioactive Kudzu.
Years ago, if you asked just about any Lefty for their opinions on GMOs, at least half or more would have told you how it needs to be controlled for fear of an unexpected disaster. But now, anti-GMOers are being compared to Anti-Vaxxers by those who control the flow of disinformation. It’s a convenient enough trick, or at worst, that those who are concerned about GMOs are essentially old Fuddy Duddys who can’t get with the program. Tell them to “get over it, you old altacocker,” or “we don’t do things your way anymore, you Christian Scientist Ahmish baboon.” Whatever has the right tone to make it sound like concerns about GMOs are “so pre-COVID.” And that works reasonably well. Most people are sufficiently ignorant that actual science might as well be science-fiction. And I’m no better really, back when I lived in Glasgow I used to run numbers for some bookie family there, I saw something that changed my mind of genetic engineering. Before that point, it didn’t concern me much. Here’s what happened … the patriarch of the family, he gets me in his cigar shop, I figured he’s trying to get a bead on my head for his gambling business. They’re legal there, as far as I know, a good 90% of their business was licensed. But these old numbers families, they all want to have at least a little bit of illegal action … not enough do more than buy a few horses, but enough to keep it interesting. Most of those old bookies, they’ll hold action on anything they can. They’re holding action right now on the efforts to get this British export royal family to take off in the USA, how long it’s going to last before those royals move to Canada or maybe France, or even just buy a house on Madonna’s block in Crustyfordshire. Smart money says that most the Yanks are just don’t have the stomach for royalty, nepotism is something that seems to rub American’s fur the wrong way, they’re a nation of Cowboys and Arabs. That’s where the American Royalty is, it’s in whatever they can sell that goes down smooth and rugged. And a bunch of royals can’t kick ass, even when one marries a Black woman, he’s still going to be some pasty-assed candy-sucking cherry boy. And that will move product in Europe a good bit of the time, Asia, it’ll move product in Canada, Australia and country infected with even a bit of Commonwealth, but that doesn’t make the Yanks’ pussies wet … more Marlboro Man, less Marlborough Gentleman. The end result is that royalty is dying out BECAUSE it’s royalty. Now, you have a fine-ass Cherokee or Sioux Nation Princess, America is down with that. But not Brits, they’re too … what’s the word? Punk-ass motherfuckers? Yeah. There isn’t a British Royal on the planet that would be able to pick up a Cherokee Queen in the High Country Lounge, she would laugh their candy-ass onto the pavement. The British Royals are about as sexy as a bag of enriched wheat flour.
So this guy was running action on the British Royals that denounced the Royal Family, and they’re franchising their broken-ass Enriched Wheat Flour show in America. The smart money has them lasting another five years in L.A. doing reality shows, and then they’ll move down the street from Madonna. We already have a family with no actual skills and they’re pulling coin as the Armenian Royalty.
He pulls me into his cigar store, he hands me a half-decent Cuban, the kind where you break the glass. I’m careful, I look on the floor for any chunks of glass, but it breaks clean, I pull out the Cuban, smells good, I trim the ends, which is the way I like it, always has been, and I happen to know for a fact that he only bought the cigar store a few years ago with bookie money. But he does it the fancy way, the way people do it if they didn’t smoke their first cigar when they were fourteen or so. And this guy, he’s putting on a show for me. Yeah, his dad was a bookie, his granddad was a bookie, he knew the business, but he sees the numbers I’m running, and they’re just consistent, so he asks me, twirling that damned cigar like an idiot, “are you a mathematician?”
I tell him “Nah mate, I’m a physicist. And the only reason my games are running even is because I roll the line with logarithms instead of over-and-under.” I tell him “Mate, it ain’t rocket science.” I figured he was going give my games a little more exposure, and then the old bastard starts turning that fucking cigar, he’s hemming and hawing, trying to slow it down. It annoyed me, it was like he was trying to channel his inner Frank Rosenthal. I remember he had a work by George Wylie in the corner of his office, I assumed it was authentic, but with some of these guys, you never know. I figured, okay, this Glasgow after all, everyone fucking knows George Wylie here, there is no way he puts up a fake Wylie.
He finally tells me what’s up. Some nephew of his is working on his Ph.D. in applied physics, he’s into robotic arms for disabled veterans or something, he’s across the pond at Columbia, this punk kid has already failed his qualifier once, then he failed it a second time, but he supposedly showed enough forward progress that they give him one more shot … I’m not sure if they even know this kid is Scottish, I found out when I met him that he speaks posh, they might have assumed he was from Kent or maybe some financial family in London … but definitely not the nephew of some bookie with a cigar store just fish distance from the Clyde.
And that’s how I got back to the USA after Scotland. He didn’t need my numbers too much, but he needed me to get his nephew past his qualifier. He has no idea that it’s essentially impossible to cheat on them if the qualifier committee keeps their damn yaps shut to their students, which a lot of them don’t. I cut a deal with the old guy … one way ticket to JFK, four weeks salary regardless, if he passes the qualifier, I get twelve more weeks salary, if he fails, I pay him back one week’s salary. He agrees to that, next thing I realize, I wake up drunk inside the plane, halfway over the Atlantic, I had finished most of a bottle of Oban from the Duty Free in the airport, I mixed it with at least a dozen bottles of Irn Bru from the airport shop. I wake up on this plane, middle seat center aisle, best way to keep from getting woken up when you pass out on Oban and Irn Bru, because you don’t have anyone asking you to get up so they can take a shit, or ask you raise or lower your window shade. And you’re going to say I’m a damned liar, but it was true, all around me, second time, it was another woman’s sports team of some kind … lots of tattoos, I figured Roller Derby again, but this time I just kept my mouth shut, I had smuggled just enough cocaine onto that flight to get me to Kennedy, I didn’t need to share it with a Roller Derby team again like that flight from L.A.. I make it to Manhattan, I head up to NASA GISS, say hi to some friends, the Scottish kid meets me in the Seinfeld diner on the ground floor of the NASA GISS building. Nice kid, speaks posh, but he’s really into his idea of helping veterans who get their limbs blown off by IEDs. The kid was genuinely a good kid. But this kid, dumb as a box of rocks. There is no way he passes the qualifier fairly, and there is no way this kid is dirty enough to bug his advisor for “preparation advice” like most of the other candidates. I get a bead on this, we have six weeks until his qualifier, so it’s four weeks paid, two weeks unpaid, I decide right then to gamble that the extra two weeks will win me the twelve weeks and that I can get him to pass. But it’s not easy, this kid tells me he has to go to class and work in the lab. I tell the little fuck that he’s going to the Plaza Hotel with me, where his uncle got us a single room with two beds until the qualifier test. The Plaza is pretty nice, but he didn’t get the room service on barter, just the room itself, for six weeks. I didn’t need room service, I could live on those street chicken kebab sandwiches they have up near Central Park. (It’s why those asshole television chefs have such a tough time figuring out New York City, they can’t wrap their heads around the reality that the best food in the city comes out of those food carts.) He tells me we have to go to his apartment to get his books and he has to at least leave his lab notebook up at the lab so his research partners can get his data if they need it. My friend at GISS makes a few calls for me, they get me a colloquia for one of the nonplanar research groups, honorarium is $260, which was the most they could go without running it past the department chair and the colloquia committee, but it gets me a day-badge to get in the door. I figured I could get some intelligence about the test by what cartoons the professors tape to their doors … lots of Far Sides, it’s going to have minimal approximation techniques, mostly straight-up Jackson, Pathria, and Landau. Anything with Star Trek, it’s going to be more analytical problems. Pin-ups of fractals, no way to guess. I get there and poke around, lots of Far Side panels, we’re good, I can train him in the regular topics in six weeks. And then there’s the point of this whole story, thanks for waiting for it.
I go with the kid to his lab, turns out the principal investigator is in the ante-room, he running some density functional analysis on an Amazon mainframe. I get to talking with this guy, I have a little more coke from Scotland, so I offer him a bump, he and I both do a decent-sized bump. Now this guy is on a roll, I figured I might have hit pay-dirt, maybe he’s on the qualifier committee, I get some intel from this guy … cool guy by the way, he explained what he’s doing. The kid is in the back pulling data for his notebook. I catch a glimpse of him, he might not have the bones for theory, but he’ll make a good lab man. This associate professor, he asks me if I smoke, I ask him “cigarettes or weed?” He says “I have both.” We head down a back stairway, walk around the block,turns out he doesn’t have any weed, he has one of the vape pens. I’m not a fan, but whatever it takes, I noticed that a lot of the associate professors use the vapes now because they don’t want to smell like sativa flower for their students. And this is where shit gets weird, it’s the point of this whole story. That vape works fast, I’m high as fuck, we do another bump, and we’re walking back, he asks me, “you know why I picked prions? It’s the smallest organism I can model with the Amazon mainframes, and then I can build them with the STM we have the in the lab.”
At this point, I realized that there is no possible way this box of nutcakes is on the qualifier exam committee … he’s fucking around with prions in a physics lab, no biological containment that I could see. So I ask this guy how he gets research clearance to fuck around with prions. He gets paranoid fast, I could see it. You know that moment when you feel like everyone you talk to is a cop, and it’s best just to spill your guts? This guy is right there, he’s balls-on-the-table spilling the beans. Turns out he doesn’t get prions in at all, he’s pulling carbon nanofibers from a sol-gel coating method. No big deal, but then he drags individual fibers into the scanning tunneling microscope that he mostly built out of surplus from a pharma company. And then he uses the STM to push around the surface molecules and builds these things he calls “pseudo prions.” No functionalization as a prion, he keeps the new structure sufficiently far from the prions that they’re still just nanofibers. But he’ll functionalize one protein group on one size, and then he’ll do the flip side on another. There is no possible way that either of the half-proteins could do what a prion does, that’s his safety interface. But he joins the measured proximity sensing in the computer model and sure enough, he has a prion with the right chirality to damage natural proteins. It’s straight up Frankenstein shit, but nobody expects that out of physics lab. Then he starts to calm down a bit, I lie and tell him that I’m out of coke. He takes me into the lab, tells the Scottish kid to hit the turf, but I tell him that I plan on helping the kid prepare for his qualifier as a favor to his uncle. He looks a little nervous with the kid hanging around so I tell the kid to get his a copy of Cohen-Tennoudji, which I remember I saw in the office he shared with the Chinese, Russian and Indian candidates. I wanted to get rid of the kid, at this point, I’m actually kind of losing my cookies over this research. This guy built protein structures out of nanofibers. It was a big deal.
So he fires up the STM, he has some samples he had already functionalized. First, I guess just for safety, he cut a channel in the fiber between the bottom half that was already functionalized and the blank top half, and then he modulates the tip voltage and current to start shuffling around the molecules on the surface of the fiber. I watch this go down in real time. This fucker literally builds the top half of a prion in his lab. He has these surface molecules popping around like he’s building something out of those magnet balls, just boom, boom, boom, he built an organism with a kind of intelligence built into the surface Coulomb potential … there wasn’t really an intelligence, but in the computer, it could snap proteins at will, just fucking break holes in healthy proteins because of the chirality.
That was the moment that changed me. I learned to fear genetic engineering on that day because I knew there was no way that there was a cell biologist on the planet who could do what that guy did with that STM. That guy knew Kittel’s Solid State like it was the owner’s manual of an Austin Healey. I doubt it one our of five thousand physicists could do what that guy had done. But a cell biologist? No fucking way. They don’t even have the cryogenics to make most of that work, they’re mostly physicians anyway, none of them do poverty, and it’s unlikely they could figure out what that guy had done. If he could do that with an STM, what could a fluke genetically-modified DNA do if the chirality and surface energy found an inflection point? Kill the host, leave them impotent?
But it worked. COVID killed four million people, the lefties got scared, and like magic, suddenly a good 50% of them had lined up to get injected with the stuff. Same people who wouldn’t eat a GMO a couple years earlier, now they’re telling their neighbor that they have an ethical obligation to get the injection for fear of infecting someone.
Yeah, the smarty pants will claim that the Big Pharma wasn’t incentivized to keep the SARS-CoV-2 virus from leaking out of the lab, because it was the only way they could get mRNA into needles. But realistically? No way this turns into anything other than a four million lives accident. The USA and China will dig up some pocket change to pay reparations to the dead, changes in policy will come, there will be scientific review committees to supervise these physicians who have no clue how to safely conduct research on that scale.
So four million lives? That’s a rounding error for the pharma researcher. They had to have expected something like this would happen with a lab leak.
But what if those functionalized mRNAs happen to develop a fucked up chirality the way those nanofibers developed dangerous chirality and surface tension in that lab? Do you remember the last time we had anything like that? Yeah it was Thalidomide.
And that, friend is a whole different kettle of fish.
If these genetically-modified vaccines end up producing misshaped babies, or sterile twenty-somethings? That’s no rounding error. Thalidomide with the reversed chirality didn’t butcher rat babies at first either, because the DNA was sufficiently different. Now they feel confident enough that the mRNA vaccines won’t lead to birth defects, because they were tested on humanized mice. But these humanized mice, they were humanized in the immune response, but were they also humanized in the reproductive response? Sure! And if you believe that the reproductive response can be humanized in mice, then the Albert Bridge is for sale, and I’m the guy to sell it to you, I take Polydragon only, thank you.
The human reproductive response can’t be humanized in mice. But in about eight months, the first batch of the babies born to mRNA immunized mothers will begin. There is no question that some of them will be malformed, because some of them are malformed even without the mRNA vaccine. But if a statistically significant number of them are born malformed, that’s not the kind of human catastrophe that even Pharma can manage, because at that point, an entire generation of ticking timebombs will curse the heaven and earth that they can’t enjoy their pregnancy for fear of being “Thalido-Ma-RiNAted.” The kids will call it “marinaded in GMOs.” They’ll hug their malformed babies, and then they’ll go to war with the industry. We can pay reparations for dead people, but nobody has yet found a reliable way to pay reparations for mangled people.
Both the Los Angeles surf contingent and the Texas cowboy contingent have known this for some time, but I’m only now beginning to clue in on this … Mexico is — in many ways — better suited for future economic stability than the USA. Canada population growth rate is currently about 0.9, they would normally be in a bad spot, but they control about one quarter of the world’s freshwater, and a smiling and willing victim with the USA to dump all their toxic waste. (We call Canadian toxic waste a “jobs opportunity.”) Waste from oil, gas, geothermal, agriculture, whatever you got Canada, just tend us a Telex and we’ll give you the best prices in the region for dumping the stuff you don’t want to contaminate your pristine and beautiful land.
So I think Canada will be okay, but the USA, we spend our money as fast as we make it, it’s the American way, and a lack of Mexican and Central Americans will leave us in a bit of a pickle. We can try to entice Africans to move here, maybe some South Americans, but there is a lot of cultural complexity to doing this. Mexico works well with the USA because so much of the USA is historically Mexico, they were here before we were. And they have a culture that is as ancient and in many ways less molested than China’s culture. They know what they’re doing.
The thing about population inversion, it happens fast and we can’t say “we’ll deal with that shit later.” We have to get ahead of it now. So these are our two obvious options …
Do a Logan’s Run type scenario where Baby Boomers and Millennials (there aren’t enough of us Gen-Xers to bother) get on a floating carousel and then float toward the top of the arena, where a laser beam zaps them into a Utopia where they will never need to leave their homes, and everything comes delivered to them by the Afterlife Amazon. If necessary, we can replicate this process genetically somehow, maybe with some weird human-chimera genetic engineering that can only be cured by yet more human-chimera genetic engineering.
Replace the USA-Mexico border with a strategic and defensible line of picnic tables and food kiosks on our side of the border, from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific. Simultaneously, Mexico can build a similarly-spaced line of strategic and defensible food kiosks and picnice tables on their side of the border. Once both are in place, we would then be able to remove the antiquated border wall, and replace it with the only so-far proven undefeatable warrior juggernaut, which has protected the region since the days of Tenochtitlan, also known as The Unstoppable Five; Fish Tacos, Ceviche, Carne Asada, Ricos and Frijoles, and a secondary tribute to the Rio Grande, the New River of Cantaritos, delivered by little clay pots of deliciousness to each of those occupied tables.
I prefer the second option. We really can’t risk plugging up the Amazon Afterlife with too many Boomers and their Progeny, given that Amazon already nearly owns our U.S. Postal Service.
So with the second option, that would open up a world of opportunities for United Impoverished States of America. Once we’re on the border, we can use it as a kind of jobs hub … shmooze a bit over the fish tacos, see if anyone in Mexico City has any day gigs for an out-of-work hedge fund manager, or a project management specialist. Once we can get some Americans into Mexico, they’ll be able to send us a few pesos now and then, and we’ll be cool. We don’t need that much to survive in the USA, we can mostly live off of the Burger King Dollar Menu and just limit our defense spending to just a few trillion bucks a year.
Clark and I sat in the back booth of the High Country Lounge, I drank tequilla, he drank some kind of craft beer. There is a road crew in the bar, and that little gal that the owner hired to clean up and sing. She never sings, she seems to hate it. She draws cartoons on the back of the paper coasters. Clark is an asshole, but we’re longtime friends, I tend not to notice it. He comes off as something like the Ted Knight character from Caddyshack, deciding who has value, and who doesn’t. He’s a snob. He moved up here back about twenty years ago when he made a few hundred grand in a dot-com before the bubble broke. Now he’s a nurse. He looks at the road crew, and says “look at that mouth breather with the Amped Energy t-shirt, I hope he drowns in the shallow end of the gene pool.”
Clark is a bigot. But he doesn’t see himself as a bigot, since he only hates working class Caucasians, not Black people.
The reality here is that Clark makes his living and pays his bills off of mouth breathers like that, they tend to end up in the hospital in which he works, there are a lot of dangerous jobs at this altitude, including jobs that a person would assume wouldn’t be all that dangerous. Clark had some aspirations to become a surgeon, he thought of himself as sufficiently driven and intelligent to do it. One day he chopped off the end of his index finger while relieving the spring tension on a cocked-up reel mower with the three horse Briggs and Stratton. It gave him a good excuse to quite the pre-med program, he couldn’t hack it anyway, and he looked like an idiot in there with all those kids.
I said “Clark, you’re a bigot.” He laughs, the idea doesn’t even penetrate his skull. He sees himself as a progressive and the idea of hating rednecks gives him a kind of holy progressive aura, he sees it as a character feature.
Clark smells like Clark and anyone who shits on Americans (and even Aussies) who don’t look like you, or dress like you, or vote like you. Do you or Clark know how to run a high tension line to clean out the splices? I don’t know how to run a high tension line to clean out the splices. So therefore, my life relies on those rednecks who do, when I hit the power switch in my bedroom and tell the raccoons to climb back out the same window they just climbed in. My life relies on that redneck whom you hate, that redneck on whom Clark shits and declares that “we’re fucked” because the guy didn’t give him back the ass-kissing look of adoration, “oh thank you wise and kind healthcare provider, for granting me and my wife the ability to continue our lives in a living state, rather than as a corpse in a bag.”
The electricity that comes out of that switch and heads into that light so that I can keep from tripping over all the lingerie scattered about from whatever adventure I had found myself the night prior, that electricity is in part due to the redneck whom you hate. And maybe I don’t agree with him on his political theorems, and maybe I choose not to end my sentences in prepositions as often as he chooses, but I find a a way to find some common ground with people, and the first step in doing that is not hating the breath that comes out of his mouth.
Clark doesn’t see any problem with his hatred, because he sees it as a way to give credibility to his aura of progressivism. Clark justifies his bigotry in a way that I find remarkable, I’m incapable of believing my own lies for as long as he does. I can last maybe a few weeks, he manages to last the larger part of his life.
Maybe someday, Clark will find a way to rebuild his own transmission, or operate a backhoe to clear out a trench to run a new drain from his house. Maybe someday he will know how to operate a CNC machine, or a turret lathe. And when he learns all the things he needs to do to create a functional, vibrant economy, then he can go ahead and hate all the rednecks. But until that day, he’s a prisoner of his own deficiencies. And in reality, that redneck can survive a whole bit better than Clark if the shit hits the fan and our economy plummets down the same well into which they threw the Jews, Armenians, Chechnyans, Sufis and All Black Fans. Because that redneck can keep a truck running, can rig up water filtration, can fix a roof, can deal psychedelic mushrooms for a few weeks to keep food on the table, can keep his wife sober, keep his daughter in nursing school, and keep his son out of prison. These people that Clark hates will end up saving our collectives asses someday soon … and on that day, we will no longer hate the rednecks. But then the day after we will hate them as usual, because we’re powerless, ineffectual and weak, and the rednecks remind us of that in a way that we don’t want to be reminded.
Clark will likely never understand that the mouth breathing voter who keeps the sanitation plant running, saves just as many lives as he does, because a lot of healthcare providers think of themselves as gods who hold the ability to grant life, and when they fuck up, it’s just part of the job. Almost none of those quarter million Americans and two thousand Aussies who die every year due to hospital error will have the words “hospital fuckup” stamped on their death certificate. It will stay something with words like “cardiac” and “respiratory” and “complications” and so forth, because dead people can accept the blame for their death a lot easier than healthcare workers who see themselves as infallible instruments of divine protection. How could Clark ever see himself as a normal human when he is legally protected from fucking up and killing someone?
But you will get this, I hope … this is an American shitfight. You have no idea what’s really involved here because as much as I like to joke otherwise, vast chunks of the rest of the planet solved their class problem a long time ago. That’s part of the reason they hate tall poppies and sit in the front seat of the taxi and influence Yanks to get in the front seat of the taxi after they live in Oz for a few years, and call each other “mate.” They do those things because they partly solved their class problems. Yeah, there are still a few random Pommy fucks who give Aussies a bad name, but you lot know how to laugh and kick the fucking tin, bitch. We haven’t solved that problem here yet. Our economy relies on an unspoken hatred of the “underclasses.”
Our economy relies a pronounced and undeniable polarization of people. Back in the day, we hated the British. That worked well enough for us to get away from them and build the most powerful country on the face of the planet. And then we hated the Indians. We killed as many as we could, but then we found out they were actually a whole lot tougher than any of us imagined they would be, and a whole lot more ruthless and intelligent than we could possibly be, so we found a way to make peace with them. So then we saw all these slaves that we kidnapped from Africa, and we were like “what good slaves, we need to find someone new to hate.” So we hated Mexicans, Chinese and even Australians for a bit, but then before we knew it, the slaves were no longer slaves. They were an underclass that threatened our ability to build the kind of wealth, power and future that we wanted to build. All of a sudden, our vision for a Caucasian utopia evaporated when we realized that our women wanted to fuck the Black dudes, and that these Africans were stronger, smarter and more cunning than we could ever be, with out pasty European weakness. So we then decided to hate the Black men and rape the Black women. And it was a glorious love-affair with hatred. We hated the slaves and the children of slaves and the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of slaves as long as we could, and it brought us wealth, that hatred. For a few years, we even found that we could beat the Nazis by taking a page from their book and rounding up the Japanese Americans and putting them into concentration camps … we hated them really well for a while. But after the war was over we said to ourselves “So where were we? Ah yes, torturing Black people. Black people, please come here, we’re going to accuse you of crimes that you didn’t commit and turn you back into slaves, and we’re going to accuse you of murders you didn’t commit and execute you, just in case those Azteks were onto something with sacrificing their virgins to the volcano gods and we need to sacrifice George Stinny to the electric chair, then perhaps the economy gods will take mercy on us and bring us wealth, power and the utopian future that we want to build.”
Yeah, that’s right, we executed a fourteen year old boy by putting him into an electric chair that was too big to kill him without an unimaginable amount of pain to the boy. And sure, it turns out he had nothing to do with the murder, but it wasn’t really about justice, it was about the gosh-durn volcano gods, and hey it must have worked, killing that boy, because no volcanoes erupted that year, and we pretty much had World War Two beat.
We hated the descendants of the slaves for a good while longer, and it made us wealthy and happy, and we didn’t feel too bad, because we were polite in our hatred, we talked about “giving them a chance for success” and “giving them a decent education” and “giving them a chance at a future.” But ultimately, we didn’t want to live next to them, and if we considered ourselves to be a better class of person than our fellow human, then we didn’t want to come in contact with their body fluids, we didn’t want to inhale their smell, because as Orwell wrote about this unique brand of comforting hatred; “the lower classes smell.”
We didn’t really have the luxury of an actual lower class in the USA, being a nation of mongrels, so it was simple enough to hate the descendants of slaves. And that brought us straight in the 1960s, and we killed as many as we could, but then we found out they were actually a whole lot tougher than any of us imagined they would be, and a whole lot more ruthless and intelligent than we could possibly be, so we spent a few decades getting used to their body fluids, and most of us found a way to make peace with them.
But the elites needed to replace their hatred with something new, and by that time they finally figured out how the British manage to maintain their snobbery for the lower classes and those who “drop their aitches.” That’s when polite society found they could hate the rednecks. And not all rednecks, because there are just as many Black rednecks, Mexican rednecks, Jewish rednecks, Asian rednecks, Native rednecks, and Mormon rednecks. But in this case, they found that restricting their hatred of rednecks to a specific kind of redneck. It worked, it’s the new socially-acceptable hatred. And Clark wants to see his fellow human “drown in the shallow end of the gene pool” because he is a bigot … a bigot who listens to Public Radio, who donates to the limit of his tax deduction to his favorite causes, and yes, even a bigot who allows a robot to drive his car, but a bigot nonetheless.
But genetic work is a different animal. When we get the data from Wuhan, we’ll know. It’s traceable. We have genetic signatures that might as well be as accurate a a satellite roadmap of what exactly went down. And in that case, we’ll know.
Now, that cop that accidentally grabbed the gun instead of the Taser. His career is over, it probably should be, he killed someone. But what about someone that kills 3.5 million people out of a perfectly honest mistake? Should they lose their job?
What about when someone willingly falsifies documents that lead to deaths? Lose their job? Go to prison?
In this case, for the last year, the Planet Earth was operating under the assumption that COVID-19 was something that Mother Nature made. And in this era, with good medical treatment, Mother Nature isn’t really a wanton murderer. A few thousand people here, maybe a hundred thousand people from a Tsunami? But to kill en masse, like COVID-19 does, it takes things like bad sanitation that causes diarrhea or cholera. Human made shit, literally. Malaria from improper dainages, diabetes from too much sugar, air pollution … human made shit, figuratively.
The point here, the salient point is that we were an affected band of asswagons. We’re now in this position which terrifies us kind of people who change the station from our ironic listening of the Christian station to NPR, lest the parking lot attendant not realize that we were listening to the Christian station ironically. All of a sudden, we band of nitwits are going to have to start to examine the “truths” we think you know, piecemeal, like scientists … at least good scientists. And like judges, juries, voters, and engineers that have to do forensic research on a bridge that falls into a river, or forensic work on a lab release genetically-modified, synthetic protein cleavage site, human-chimera, tested on a mouse with humanized mother fucking genes, coronavirus.
Appointed Federal Officers and awarded grant recipients were being paid by our tax dollars. Federal officers signed off on this research, checks were paid. And all through that long line of Americans, nobody was able to poke their head above the insanty, and say, “hey, is this right?”
But you know who did poke his head up? President Obama. And now it seems, President Biden. As far as I can tell, the voice of ration and respect for the miracles of Mother Nature is fighting back against these monstrosities, that seek to gain a function over a hypothetical release from Mother Nature, and instead create something that Mother Nature couldn’t dream in her worse nightmare fueled by half a bottle of red wine, two bumps of coke off her lovely manicured fingernail with the brown nail polish, just like the Policeman’s muse in Bonfire of the Vanities. And also a white wine spritzer, four cigarettes that we shared in the ally behind Bill’s High Country Lounge. A shot of the same tequila that I had, and some kind of antidpressant that her doctor prescribed so she wouldn’t have to wake up in agony each morning because of the child she accidentally killed when she fucked up on that surgery that she had done 23 times previously without a hitch. She’s one of those surgeons that internalizes her failures because she never learned how to lie to herself. And those are the ingredients that fueled her nightmare of some crazy genetically-engineered coronavirus that was optimized with a synthetic protein cleavage that even now is killing people in India.
So what do we do? Do we toss these recipients and officers in jail? It wouldn’t help. We don’t put rich people in prison in the USA because they are not guilty of the crime of being poor. Do we put them in front of Congress? Yup. Do we bring them a coffee and a danish, and thank them for attending? Hell fucking no. We do that for poor people and Black people and poor Black people because we know full well that they are going to be sucked into our legal justice system for a few years. But the people who did this? They know that they might lose their job, but they know they’re not going to see any prison time. They know they’re not going to see the inside of a courtroom filled with poor people and psychopaths and addicts. So no, they don’t get a coffee and a danish, they have to buy that themselves in the lobby of Forrestal before they descend into the the Kafkan wonder of that building, and then answer some questions along the line of “what the actual fuck, man?” Injecting humanized genes into mice to test these engineered virions? Making Human-Chimera genes just in case Mother Nature decides to attack us?
Part of the reason we did that research in China was a trust-building move with the Chinese research community, but part of it was also because China has a deep bench in cell biology. But I can only imagine what the Chinese felt when they saw what we were doing with those genes. I mean, yeah, they’re not Native Americans who believe in the sanctity of the natural structure from the Great Spirit, and the human obligation to safeguard Mother Nature from our fellow humans who don’t respect her as we do. But they’re still Chinese. They’re an ancient culture. Nearly as ancient as us. There is no way that Mao surgically removed the Chinese respect for nature. There has to be a good bit left, behind all that air pollutiona and rare earth mining effluent. These Americans tell them to splice this to that, and that to this, and make the gene do this so that it will enter that better than this. Like a game of genetic Minecraft … like the wet dream of a some demented fifth grader who has never had to worry if someone loved him.
The reality is that we need someone to refocus the NIH. This isn’t it. Deep apologies Fauci, but even if they find that bat that boned that pangolin tomorrow, shit is still fucked up. This isn’t medicine. It’s not humanitarianism. It’s not even really research, because it kills too many of the researchers. It’s a sign of an NIH that may have lost its direction a bit. We got so desperate to find the next big thing that we forgot to look at the pile of dogshit in the center of the room … diabetes, asthma, depression, suicide, lungs that collapse under the weight of 4,000 parts per million particulate in the regime above the Kelvin barrier that currently kills some five million people a year. If NIH sees the need to spend tax dollars on mice that have been granted humanized DNA, then they can go play their weird ass Frankenstein games after children stop dying of lungs clogged with infection, soot and vape. After they figure out a way to work with the EPA and both DOEs, DOI, FHA, HUD, and the rest, to put those salaries to the public good, in ways that assume every American has equal value, and that value is equal to every person in the world, even the child of a hotel worker in Haiti. If we have the money to build robotic flying attack planes, then we have the money to apply equity to all lives on the planet.
It’s time to take away the toys. They fucked up, they killed 3.5 milllion people, and the way things are going in India, and may soon go in the Southern Hemisphere, we might hit a 4 million. We have other tools to fight these diseases, we don’t need to use genetically-modied vectors. We have nutrition. We have sanitation, we have water chlorination, and we have feedback mechanisms in our hospitals. We don’t need gain of function because there is nothing on the horizon that is worse than what we have staring us in the face. Every years, some 11 million people die around the world due to nothing more complicated than our refusal to create equity with their lives and invest in their futures with clean air, clean water and clean soils.
But gain of function was supposed to be the thing that prevented rich people from dying. Cause we sure as fuck didn’t care about poor people dying. Gain of function was to protect the lives of the well-to-do people and then look what happened? An equal-opportunity virus. Rich, poor, it didn’t give a shit. So now, the rich people will have to accept that their lives are demonstrably worth the same as their employees, and their employees’ children in Guatemala. It took 3.5 million lives for us to learn this lesson. If we would have protected the lives of the poor as much as we protected the lives our family out in the Hamptons, maybe Aunt Tilly would still be on this side of the grass.
But none of that matters too much right now sisters and bothers. Because Mannana? Mannana Sol …
You should come to the USA for a week or two to observe. You might understand it then Perhaps you can’t see it in Oz because you’re too close to the culture there.
Here’s the thing man … in the USA, it’s rare that someone will get into the front seat of a taxi or even a Lyft. We just don’t do it because we have residue from our British classism that we were unable to purge.
Australians get into the front seat of a taxi (or I assume a rideshare, but those were’t invented when I lived there,) they get into the front seat of the taxi for the same reason you say “hey mate, got a light?” Because Australia may not have solved its residual British classism, but Australians knew that it exists. Yes, there are some Pommy Aussies that are trying to bring back classism, but the average workaday bob-a-job Aussie harbors a kind of hereditary hatred for it. Unlike the USA, Australia was apparently far enough away from England that it couldn’t be used as a strong trading partner, the ship voyages were too long and too treacherous. So it became a dumping ground, and “farm team” of America. The British knew full well that the future of shipping was on the horizon with stronger, faster and even steam-driven ships, they built a lot of these technologies after all, and Britain was the global leader in Western-style precision engineering and ship-building. The Germans and the Swiss controlled the guidance of these ships, but Europe seemed to converge on this idea that Britain would control the heavy lifting of the new global economy. And Australia had a future, but it’s future wasn’t then.
Yes, the English shit on everyone, they shit on the Scots, the Welsh, the Irish, Australians, the Canadians, but they had an odd kind of grudging respect for the Yanks, and in typical gentlemanly fashion, once we had our grand punch-up, we were friends again. The Treaty of Paris was in 1783, so that’s about seven from start to finish … seems like greased lightning compared to our current wars that seem to drag on for two decades like like our War against Afghanistan. They tidied that up, the USA made out like a bandit, France, Spain and Britain divvied up what was left, and the USA demonstrated what happens when you put a bunch of religious fanatics in charge of a national economy. They’re going to expand, they’re going to isolate and secure trade chains, they’ll patent revenue sources … basically, a bunch of religious fanatics with guns who are in charge of a global economy are going to do pretty much what they did in the church … they’ll privatize their gains and socialize their losses. So it wasn’t long after the Treaty of Paris that the religious fanatics with guns controlled the center swath of North America. And Britain seemed to see a rising star in their new Client-State Scam so they let us grab some of that loot, and let the USA take charge of revenue direction down through Canada (which remained Canada because they kicked the shit out of us and burned down our White House) and up from Mexico, of which we bought, stole and captured down to the Rio Grande, but we could go no further, and that part remained Mexico, because they kicked the shit out of us and then introduced us to the wonders of smoking their own special blend of hemp, and drinking their own special blend of distilled agave nectar.
So we said “Canada, Mexico, you two are okay with us. Britain and Spain gave us permission to take advantage of your economies … What’s that Mexico? You told Spain to go fuck themselves? … Uh, Canada, remember how a few moments ago we told you that Britain and and Spain gave us permission to fuck you in the ass? Well, it turns out Mexico is out of this one, so it looks like this menage-a-trois just became a manage-a-une, plus one. We’re going to overwhelm your economy wherever Britain tells us we can, since y’all are too polite to tell the Queen to go fuck herself, like they just did in Mexico. Whatever The Queen doesn’t steal from you, we’re going to steal from you, and whatever is left over, you can have that part. We have a funny feeling that in a couple hundred years when the global economy for water becomes critical, that you will become an economic superpower due to all the freshwater you have up there, but what the fuck do we know about all that? We don’t know about disinfection, the radio hasn’t been invented yet, and we still think it’s morally responsible to enslave Africans, hell we don’t even have left and right shoes yet, I mean, would you take advice about virtual water exportation from a timeline of humans who don’t have left and right shoes? Oh Canada … Oh Canada … we were speaking to you Canada, it seems you drifted off into some reverie where you were dreaming about winning a Stanley Cup, which of course you know isn’t going to happen this year with the Avs standing on head and burning up the ice, right. Pay attention Canada!”
So that whole thing happened with Canada, but Australia was like “ooy, wha’ about us, ya cunts?”
And Britain said “oh yeah, didn’t we send a bunch of Cunts down to Oz? I guess we forgot about them. Okay, we’ll just have to manage that one the old fashioned way … we’ll send down a bunch of lower-upper-middle-class managers from the trading floor at Herrods, and we’ll give them the authority to kill anyone who gives them stress and we’ll tell them something like “Now see here, Good Man! I don’t want to hear any of that rot about you missing England. You have a job to do in Australia, and you’re just a lower-upper-middle class manager from Bolton, which means you will likely never amount to anything more than a warm plate of beans for breakfast. Buck up man, take your family to Australia, and when you get down there, you will get to live like Eric Blair did when he moved to Burma, as an upper-middle-class manager from your country of God and King. You’ll have the proper help down there, with servants who will allow you to feel like a member of the actual British public. Doesn’t that sound pleasant man? Now excuse me, I have a letter from our colonies in Australia … what’s that, harumph, it seems that our colonists went and killed most of the natives, you unfortunately won’t have that proper help we promised you. You’ll have to pay some of the prisoners and their children to cook, clean and drive for you, as Tesla has still not delivered those robot cars they’ve promised us. But it will be lovely, you’ll enjoy your new life in a beautiful paradise that has everything that England has, including some extra things that you’re going to love, like deadly venomous spiders, snakes and crocodiles, also a bunch of bats for which we theorize carry some odd diseases that will jump over to humans all of a sudden in a couple hundred years because Eddie Liu is going to eat it in a wet market. Excuse me good man, I digress … You’ll love Australia, you’ll probably die down there, but you’re doing it for The Queen and her kittens.”
Unlike in the USA, there just wasn’t a lot of opportunity to enslave humans that gentlemen and gentlewomen could feel like proper members of a proper society that can only feel that way while destroying their lives and futures of our fellow human beings. So the takeaway here is that the USA could continue a cut-rate version of British stuffy-pants snobbery, and Australia couldn’t. Australia had no choice but to do away with classism because classism was incompatible with the life down there. Much the same thing happened in the USA when people moved out West. Suddenly it was a lawless territory and any slaves that the Easterners brought West would either escape or outright rebel. So it was like legal weed is now, but with Africans deciding that they could fight back, and a life sufficiently difficult that money meant less than ability.
Or course even now, some Pommie influence has crept back into Oz, and there are people who cling to their snobbery, who treasure their snobbishness. Orwell described it better than I can, in Road to Wigan Pier;
A shabby genteel family is in much the same position as a family of ‘poor whites’ living in a street where everyone else is a Negro. In such circumstances you have got to cling to your gentility because it is the only thing you have; and meanwhile you are hated for your stuck-up-ness and for the accent and manners which stamp you as one of the boss class.
But we had a lot more of it in the USA than Australia ever had, and our rapidly expanding economy after WWII launched a generation of well-healed, essentially spoiled-rotten Baby Boomers who have from their birth to this point, received most everything they have ever desired, because it was their birthright from the Post WWII American Way. At this point, the USA has one of the greatest concentration of classist snobs that the Planet has ever seen, and in fact, might ever see. History will remember the planet for these touchstones; the Aztecs threw virgins into volcanoes and the jaws of drug cartels, the Ancient Romans threw those with a streak of independence to the lions, and the Americans threw those of hungry bellies and empty pockets to the snapping jaws of The Great American Snob.
So here’s the deal man … you want to know why. The why is because The Great American Snob, they — WE — can’t enslave Africans anymore. The government told us we can’t do that anymore. But we have an unexplainable need to think of ourselves as better than someone in our lives. It’s in our DNA, though it isn’t clear yet if this will remain after the genetically-engineered COVID vaccine gets in there and fucks some shit up. But as for now, it’s in our DNA, this need we have to feel superior to someone, anyone, as long as it’s a human. And it can’t be an African, because they taught us in Baby Boomer school that it’s wrong to not only enslave Africans, but we also aren’t allowed to make them feel as miserable as we feel. And we aren’t allowed to hate anyone in the whole world of pain, like Arabs, or Latinos or Asians. We can’t hate homosexuals anymore, and we’re still allowed to hate Jews, as long as we call them “Israelis,” but we aren’t allowed to hate people who are only too happy to kick the shit out of us. We’re the new British after all, still under Her Majesty’s grace, but she seems to like us Yanks better than you English anyway. We pull in a lot more holla’ dolla’ bills for her than you lot.
We can’t even hate fat people anymore, unless the fat person is a man, and the person doing the hating is a woman, then it’s still allowed. But we obviously need someone to hate. So we’ll hate rednecks, they’re still fair game, because they have to work for a living and we’re not going to need them soon anyway, that now that Elon Musk has finally found a way for us to move around town without needing those rednecks to keep our cars running. We’ll supposedly still need them to drive all the trucks, but as long as they drive at night and don’t force my robot car to slow down, then they can do their thing. Ah, I just can’t say how wonderful it is to be alive and woke and progressive and be able to hate rednecks, be able to wish them death by drowning in the shallow end of the gene pool. It’s such a pleasure to be able to hate people who have to get dirt under their fingernails. It completes me as a person. My friend, you know us … atheism is just another way of saying that we don’t need to worship gods because we now know that we can worship ourselves. And people who have religion tend to read People Magazine, which is kind of weird, right? I mean, yeah, we’ll look at the cover to get an idea of what we need to look up on our Instagram and make fun of whatever basic celebrity is hawking her broken down shit. But we have henna on our feet, we can say that “boys lie” and girls go to Mars and boys get stupider, because we still have a hierarchy of hate, thank goodness. And Jews … excuse me, Israelis, rednecks, men and dads have a remarkably stellar rank on the Hierarchy of Hate. We can hate them with impunity, blame all kinds of shit on them, and they’re usually too stupid to even see what we did.
Do we care if a religion provides the death sentence for atheists and homosexuals and feminists and union activists and poets? Of course not, it’s not like were were going to live there, we just wanted to identify with their poor, sad plight for a while, which lets us vampire their sadness to use in our own lives where anti-depressants and staggering quantities of inherited wealth in Baby Boomer Nation has made actual sorrow something that we forgot how to do.
We are ready with our weapons. We are ready with out rockets. We are ready to blow up buses. We are ready to carry out suicide missions.
All of you 7 million Cats abroad, enough of the warming up, You have Dogs everywhere! We must attack every Dog on planet Earth We must slaughter and kill them, with The Great Spirit’s help.
Oh Great Spirit, destroy the Dogs and their supporters. Oh Great Spirit, destroy the Dogcatlanders and their supporters. Oh Great Spirit, count them one by one, and kill them all, without leaving a single one.
Catopia is from the Sea to the River! And we shall never, never, never recognize Dogland.
People of Catdogland, you cut off the heads of the Dogs with knives. But from us here in Catopia, they will never get anything but guns, fire, They will never get anything but martyrdom. They will never get anything but death and killing.
If ever there was an argument for death being a portal to a new plane of existence, Shock G might have it down. He died a few days ago, 57 years old. He was a co-inventor of contemporary hip hop. There are lots of actual bios of Shock, this isn’t one of them. And honestly, my brain is giving me a little stress in remembering all these details. I was going to write that I loved Shock, but we all loved him, what’s the point of stating the obvious when we’re all sitting around a puddle of spilled beer, and we’re in pain. Shock was just one of those guys that couldn’t die, because he was too smart, too sensitive, too hilarious, too gifted. But then we said that about Pac too, so what do we know?
I have to take off the veil for a minute … this is Rick Yukon, coming to you from a hotel on the back of the Walheem. I’m not sure that I’ve stopped drinking since I heard the news, it hit me like that time Stumpy Lefkowitz conked me on the noggin with a billiard stick. My head sounded like a coconut, that sound, I can still hear it. I had no idea that Shock had died, I read about it somewhere on social media, I can still hear the sound in my head … like a coconut, how could I have been so stupid? Not to give him a call from the old days? Not to appreciate him being alive back when he was alive. My head is hollow, I should have been a better person.
But we all say that, what’s the point of bringing up the obvious?
Shock G knew music as only a kind of trained musician could know music, he flexed, he competed, and when he couldn’t find competition, he invented competition. He put Humpty, Peanut and Buttafly on the stage because he couldn’t find enough people to prime the pump, to turn hip hop into more than music, but into something like a sporting event, where artists could compete and get their feedback directly. I’m going to say that Shock invented that. I don’t know if it’s true, but if it isn’t true, then I don’t know of anyone else who went to so much trouble to develop his own competition. And then Shock met Pac, and then Shock’s world changed. I don’t remember much from those days, I guess I drank a bit too much back then, and I was on the outskirts of the scene, I handled some of their technical issues. I had no idea what I was looking at back then. Shock’s work payed the bills, and that was enough. I remember the dawn of Pac over Shock’s life, I guess Shock was a bit in denial at first, that someone could be so good as Pac, that a mere human could cast a shadow over all of poetry. But it wasn’t long before Greg recognized what was happening in front of him, Hip Hop suddenly had its Albert Einstein. And then Greg was smart enough and talented enough to just stand back and let Pac do what Pac did. He produced, he played keys, but at that point, he no longer really needed Humpty or the Professor, he had found a competition that was so far beyond anything he could manage that it seemed his new life mission was to do whatever he could do for Pac, and we owe Shock for that.
Would there have been a Pac without Shock? Maybe not. What kind of complete, emotionally-resonant human does it take to not only admit that there is someone so far beyond his own abilities, but also help him up? The rest of us, we know what we do, we knock down true talent, we’re threatened by it. But Greg saw what was in front of his face, and he seemed to accept that to stand in Pac’s way would have been a crime against humanity. And here we are in 2021, Black Lives Matter, a cop was just pronounced guilty for killing someone. But Pac where there. And Pac was there because Shock was there. And Shock was there because Humpty and Peanut kept him there, and they were all there because Greg had a gift of nature. He had something in him so purely unselfish that it was like the curve of a puppy’s tail, or a beam of sunlight that pokes through the fog. Greg was there because Nature willed him to be there.
Yeah, I’m doing what I promised I wouldn’t do. I’m defining Shock in terms of Pac. They’re separate people. But they weren’t, they were as intertwined as two people could be. None of us even knew Pac. We know the guy who rained paychecks, we knew the fountainhead of that poetry, but he wouldn’t let any of us through the barricades. He seemed to open up to the women in his life, and he opened up to Greg. How do we mourn the force behind The Force of Nature? We can’t, because Pac is gone, but Shock will live forever. We learned from him how not to be selfish, how to smile when it hurts, and how to help the people you love.
