Ghosts of George Kennan

Vaya con Dios-- a pachi making up his mind

To the extent that the Korean War was a precursor to the somewhat over-simplified policy of "the domino effect," it still seems preferable that Truman would have allowed MacArthur his aggression during the dubious ignition of the original conflict; it would have had a less devastating global impact. The US military can wage any battle it puts its mind to, until the political reality of occupying foreign territory sinks in. With the possible exception of our charming war with Mexico in 1850, we don't know what to do when we win, except when it comes to Europe. The republican heir of imperialism threw its wealth back at its parent, and NATO is an anomaly in a majority populace of doves, understandably so. In this account, I am mostly either outraged that I pissed my life away in the city of my birth because of an attachment I would have never been able to maintain anyway, (discounting all the abuses my illustrious state has offered up), illegal, specious, or full of longing I cannot fulfill, but I am not attempting to be facetious this morning, and realize that throughout the course of its civilized formation, the majority of Asians suffered horribly, under their own fanaticism, or our own mercantile avarice, and North Korea has long had the stench of an outhouse attached to it. The secret footage smuggled out of Pyongyang illustrates some of the bleakest conditions of human existence outside of concentration camps, and I've seen a good diet of bleak footage. Yemen is positively lively next to the average starving North Korean female, and thus, no citizen in the North deserves a return to the desolation after the cease fire was signed in 53.

This said, it seems Kim is pushing an envelope, one in which the question isn't defeating him, but rather turns into, can Xi Jinping be cowed into submission, or do we risk a third world war with a New York real estate celebrity entrepreneur at the helm? Major economies would be disrupted, and the very thought of NATO occupying the border of the world's most populous nuclear power? 


The despotic personality cult of the upper peninsula has plagued three previous administrations. The longer this drags on, the more lethal the impending consequences. The only reasonable solution the dowager can contrive: induce the Chinese military to defang the puppet state over which it has suzerainty, however tumultuous that muscle is, at present. I've written this before. I'll write it again: I voted for Donald Trump, reluctantly. If there was ever an election to sit out, in decent libertarian felicity, it was 2016, and though I could route my diction otherwise, as I am posting this with some gravity, a mild alarm-- on election day, I made a choice, without being blind. I am fully aware conservatives have problems: but I can never return to the progressive sensibility of a triumphant egalitarian field, and so, my minority vote said "fuck you," despite the small fortune I have cost the welfare state, I am a pauper, broken by activists as much as any residual austerity, and Trump's impropriety has amused me, but we do not need to reignite the ghosts of opposition to Vietnam, which was a travesty on the heels of Truman's escapades.

The Vulva of Russia

"I think the results speak for themselves," a grieving father

I had a terrible headache Wednesday morning, my sister messaging me later, before the American dinner hour, that she wanted to give me money. Fuck that. Between our aunt and our father, the debits for the fact that I paid my younger siblings mortgage from the bowels of my nigger habitat twelve years ago have been paid. She has four children. Two have had significant conditions. I told her to let it go. The headache was a trade off in concession to my age: I had been running the air conditioner, to which my Mediterranean constitution rebels, believing a stroke was imminent. I shut off the machine, and the cranial tension eased.
 While Otto's comatose body riled the fourth estate, I evaluated Oscar Isaac's death scene as reasonably effective in Ex Machina, though my immediate objection resides as it always does in empirical observation. We attribute anthropomorphic characteristics to artificial intelligence, perhaps for dramatic anxiety, but this is Deep Blue against Kasporov, processors, circuits, pulses. Conditionally, its future self awareness may not contain a minimal personality, so why is Google hurling along? Why do we desire machines to survive our eventual extinction? I was merely revising an old piece, stopped myself, logged on for archaeological data, made an FB page and appointed my baby half brother administrator, just hitting his forties. I may have adapted to Twitter's utility, but social media is dangerous, and I hate it. I really do.

Whispers in The Dark

Thus many a weighty discussion ensued while weeding the garden, paring a turnip, or serving tea.--Kakuzo Okakura, The Book of Tea

No one actually dies of congestive heart failure, certainly not Stanwyck, who survived her Bitter Tea lead by nine years. Lust for life is broken by marginalization as we lose relevance, and pathology experts may scoff, but disease is mainly an issue of status and stress. Take the pressure for territory away, stigma, and all that. This points to why the monastic lifestyle lends itself to longevity, why we're all hot for cosmopolitan tyrants, despite protestation to the contrary. Eurasian matings were tolerated slightly better than African Caucasian sex, where they occurred in the last century, due to the fact that, with the appropriate grooming, it was difficult to tell the difference. David Carradine certainly had no problem submerging European individualism to Asian methodology, leaving him hot literally in the throes of death, the fusion which gave him prominence ultimately catching him up.

Frank Capra is absolutely shameless in how he utilizes the Chinese civil war to create this lust charged romance, but who wouldn't be aroused by it must be dead alive. Spastic knew Stanwyck had a hot to trot career, but rarely viewed the sizzle of her controversial rise. Damn, how what we leave to the imagination opens so many possibilities, even in the yearnings of post menopausal dryness. The juicy plasticity of menstruation is actually missed after all, the bloating, the inconvenience of diarrhea, trade off right back for this level of taunt seduction which blames Christianity for Mao, but more than that, the kinetic lure between Western and Eastern cousins. Though we now have the technology to meddle in it, and the evolutionary advance is, at times, infinitesimal, the liberal to progressive spectrum starts howling bricks if anyone dares assert that Nubians, who led to Semitic peoples, Asians, and Europeans, advance the original African model. Not by very much, but if evolutionary science is driven by adaptation, well, if nature is allowed to take its course, Africans and Native American Indians will eventually breed out of the human population. Intelligence being conditioned by geology and environment, Asians and whites adapted smarter, which is why we will never move past the damnation of liberal paternalism. Humanity allows pity and empathy en masse to virtually ensure global catastrophe. The ruthlessness Asther mimics prior to Mah li's seditious activity sealing his fate isn't far off from Eastwood's nuanced arrowhead in the same direction: Euthanasia is the better part of valor, especially when decline passes its plot. The exotic sex along for the ride is compensation of our ancestors watchful spirit. This doesn't mean the CPC won't kill us all if it isn't careful, dancing on the bleached bones of Danish silent film relics.

Exploring the Option

Mmm. Part of Act's problem is the fact that weapons manufacture is a money making industry, however astute the analysts are in assessing potential conflict. Certainly the Russian Federation can reignite the Cold War, but as the ruthlessness of the IS group illustrates, the technical ease of mobility, excepting the invalid class, threatens all state models, none of which are as secure as they seem, not even Canada, with its territorial expanse equivalent to the US, which points to how science fiction writers like Daniel Keys Moran may not be so far off the mark.

His Last Dancer franchise, for those not in the know, was about forced global hegemony under the UN, clones, and cyborg AI's gradually taking over. Unwittingly, spastic purchased the last novel in the series, and know only that the United States was the last sovereign territory to fall, defeated by French forces, (oddly enough). A little too melodramatic for my taste, and I could not enter into all the concluding story lines, but for a wildly vacillating future dystopia, Moran's dismal voice was a lens over my own. For all we know, France may indeed be the first to advocate the death of territorial sovereignty. If the third world war is an advent, however, I am not sold on Putin's paranoia or Xi Jinping's muscle flexing being the primary trigger to put an end to the global leadership of the US. Libya might have a domino effect on Egypt, Erdogan may push to expand Turkey's regional dominance, as it may be under a nationalist Muslim banner, but is neither Sunni nor Shi'ite, moving my pieces on the board with the same fallacy toward predictable scripts, but one thing is certain: State governance is being outstripped by meta data, which presents its own vulnerability.

Strike The Dragon

It's a crusade the WWF refers to in the hardened terms of war.--the Warren and Baker expose of an ethical dilemma long predicted here by the spastic dowager

We often put up with the wooden acting of Jet Li, prevalent even in his Chinese biopics, for the improbable calisthenics of his martial arts training. No one human being, whether Lee or Li, can truly prevail against such a fusillade of forces arrayed against against him, but the fantastical exploits so carefully choreographed, offer the human imagination a transcendent appeasement. Kiss of the Dragon (2001) 14 years young, is actually not a bad mesh of sub-genres. Martial arts meets softened variation of the French thriller as an exported imitation of the American formula. Virtuous and focused Asian cop goes up against diabolical French enforcer of corruption, and Bridget Fonda offers the mew of tarnished American innocence offered the requisite redemption via application of Oriental virtue, the Hollywood seal of approval for why Chinamerica is, after all, a beneficial mirage for both Asia and the northern hemisphere. Chris Nahon may also have unwittingly or deliberately directed what is essentially a revenge fantasy for the Yangtze Agreement to which the European powers gave consensus in the first year of the 20th century in the aftermath of a naval power's rather unpopular victory in the Opium Wars. What does Karyo's character do? Kills an Asian dealer for self-preservation? What did the British armada achieve in gaining access to China's coastal region? Profits. The entire plot of this film contravenes the reality of Mao's cultural revolution, while Xi, who is Maoist 2.0, with Google's acquiescence, is going to solve the problem of poverty as a moral failing, which senior fellow Niall Ferguson says cannot be solved, through the implied process of extermination. For my part, I'll side with neo-imperialism, however irrelevant our actions appear to be anymore. What a bummer.

Shen Chuan Flexes

Despise China. Admire Japan. Perhaps simply a cold war mindset? A little more penetration would indicate a preference for Japanese adaptation of the western model over Mao's disastrous application of Marxism which the contemporary party has not truly repaired-- which is not to convey western democratic principles work for all of Asia. Democracy and personal liberty fail in large populations, which are governed primarily these days by statutory enforcement that Constitutional principles check or support as a last resort, but Japan, that ferociously zealous island of samurai, found the right balance after Truman nuked them. I argued vehemently with my foreign policy professor about the decision. It was wrong to radiate Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If we had allowed Japan to control Korea and to take the Chinese coastal region, today's Caucasian entrepreneurs wouldn't be pissing their pants every time the Chinese military rattles its sword about Pacific hegemony-- and this points to my disillusion with our national politicians. All of them. We could easily put Xi Jinping in his place, especially as conflict tends to ignite western economies in stagnation, but nary a peep from anyone, and why is that? Money to be made on a billion and a quarter, disposable citizens in the very eyes of the party officials who control them, boxed in stark flats like my own, walled off by an intranet to propagandize the security of those in control. I can afford my contempt, as I am nothing, teetering on the brink of homeless because I want to be left alone, but remain under no illusions. Certainly not about ideology. Atul Gawande, if he really listens to himself, sounds like a libertarian, perhaps mincingly, in his promotional interviews for Being Mortal.

There was an interesting news item on Wednesday about a young female chimpanzee who had a difficult birth and wound up with cerebral palsy. She is younger, more endearing than Knuckles, and being rehabilitated out of moral guilt. It would be better to euthanize the primate. She is already imprinting on her therapists, having been rejected by her mother-- and this is the truth about me. Dropping pretenses. Empathy sometimes produces worse outcomes than extermination, and I pity the full arc of life this baby girl will lead as an adult ape. Disability law doesn't filter down the five percent difference between us, our relatives. 

Taiwanese Mushrooms

Interesting, is it not? Chiang Kai-shek casts a long shadow, buried so deeply that he is finessed into the violence of the culinary arts, but Taiwanese and mainland China's social norms aren't all that different. The island may be more fluid, speculatively less corrupt than the lying hatchet men in Beijing, but it boils down to the same thing: Homogeneity and repression under male dominion for the greater good, and though it is an entirely different subject, it may be why Japanese pornography is so outlandish, riddled with abuse of prescription drugs: Western promiscuity and permissiveness is an indigestible element, so Asians go at it when it comes to sexual stimulus. If Europeans vanished tomorrow no one would notice. China and Japan and the Vietnamese would pick up where they left off, easily able to absorb millions more in atrocities, and we can root for the Emperor from the owner's box at the right hand of heaven.

Eat Drink Man Woman was viewed intimately a very long time ago, illutrative of the fact that Ang Lee is a loving optimist who finds good karma possible for all. Seeing it again wasn't needed, but did remind a terrorist that aesthetic excellence is redeemable, worth striving for, and can even halt the decline of sensory deprivation from grief. Like Tampopo, it gives misanthropic energies a place to rest, even if no armistice was ever signed after the Communist takeover. The Republic of Taiwan should exist. It does not because the United States simply doesn't want the fight, as it slowly declines into not being able to wage a serious conflict with the PRC, and the Politburo plays a clever waiting game.

If China becomes the dominant global power toward mid-century, then it becomes a game of Waterworld, and Jinpings's successors will resort to tea worker exports, a last resort, collectivism defeated against a dead ecosystem.

Reduced to earning a dollar on assignment like a blood letting

Why do I not submit one of those wonderful tickets to Clarity Media and tell them with sweetly drooling daggers to kiss my bloody spastic ass? Why? Because I'll never be a fucking syndicated columnist even worthy of an ISIL/ISIS beheading, because I am not sure I can apply to be a part time or full time editor journalist writer without getting fired if I cannot make a deadline due to an incontinence or COPD attack, my stool invariably ruining rayon, cotton, or other synthetic knits. The low income Protestant corporate office who encompasses the building owners I have lived under is a big business, and the Philadelphia Housing Authority is an embedded syndicate. I might as well be Chen Guangcheng attempting to evade secret police beatings even as I snicker at Xi Jinping giving speeches to Brazilian politicians about historical Chinese tea workers in South America. 

China. The new old global aspirant. Yes, whether or not the new 2016 President of the US finds a way to reverse our new found anxiety about both, our domestic and foreign competency, the United States will eventually begin to dovetail, if we haven't already, but China's muscle is no panacea -- or does Google's immorality rate an equivalency marker with third world state models? Fear of forcing your own eviction might be a wonderful way to insert a huge block of granite into a life long love of writing which ultimately, the majority of us fail to transmute into gold, but getting stymied over puff pieces of trivial pursuit? Ah.

To my regular viewers: I do not know what Presby is going to do to me. They have done enough over the years: Peggy asking me to case manage tenants while I worked for Matrix, typical Greater Delaware Valley collusion. Debra Schwab barging in over my deplorable conditions in the studio, granted, at the time I urinated and smoked my way into destructive tenant classification. Frank thought of the urinal. Less accurate stream aim with a clitoris, but it mitigates the loss of control. I never thought of the urinal, so give my bastard ex pig of a fiance some credit. After all the nursing aides on the Medicaid Waiver, after blowing thousands of dollars of my own money, after even the costs of Presby's renovations, this stark, sterile studio with its cheap dry wall, cheap non glossy white paint, stained drop ceilings in the bathroom from the crippled gang banger above me who is a fucking bombastic drunk with no teeth, it is pretty much in the same condition its been in since after my first three years of residency.

The lethal conjunction of poverty and disability is about more than mere lack of money. It is about the erosion of esteem, devaluation, an inability to take pride in habitation, in interior design, your own appearance. After so many years without employment, with a collegiate debt going to crush you unless you re-institutionalize yourself, you begin to stop caring.