Personally, I do not care about sex and violence in my entertainment fodder, unless it is really functional to the story.
I wouldn't censor anything - as long as racy elements do not become an excuse to pull back on the writing efforts., everything is fine.
When they become such an excuse, "Crap is Crap is Crap" - there is no need to have an office of censorship. I rather watch "The Hogfather" than "Striptease" because the first is a nice small TV movie with a good story from one of my favoured authors, and the second is just a crappy exploitative piece of nothing.
I accept the fact that kids are often attracted by crap, so a restriction to their access to shifty material may be reasonable - it doesn't take away that some kids would probably be better off looking at well done porn than they are with a lot of TV supposedly made for them (better a "happy porn", possibly from a woman director, than "1000 ways to die", if you ask me).
But that's it... once something is "VM-18" (or whatever its name where you live), no more censoring actions should be needed.
The whole British"Video Nasties" idiocy and, currently, the UK law criminalizing possession of violent pornography are travesties, ass-pulling and demagoguery well representing that country's ruling classes obsession to keep "the plebs" under control.
If something is crap, and one has problems watching it, he should just avoid it on his own.
For example, "1000 ways to die" whole premise irks me, so I have never watched more than a couple of minutes by accident, while surfing the TV.
But I have never thought that it, and any other show following a similar premise, should be banned (among other reasons, because I do not know enough to be really sure about that show's very own merits - it could even not be the absolute crap that I think it is).
Yet, if we look, we see that the world is full of censors, small men deciding on their own what others can watch and read, usually on the base of conservative agendas that are little more than pandering to old folks' prejudices.
We shouldn't accept it.
When somebody asks us to endorse this or that censoring initiative, we should flatly say "no".
Adults do not really need someone hiding crap from them, and any suggestion that they do should be welcomed with extreme suspicion..
Because, we know what is the crap that first gets hidden (wikilieaks was surely among the first sites censored for "child pornography" in Australia, when the country enabled its anti-paedo filtering system) and what those laws are really used for, in the end (harassment of anybody that the authorities do not like, usually).
Tuesday, 31 January 2017
Monday, 23 January 2017
The Nu Slide and Anthropology
The discovery that our species is an outshoot of the so-called "Cro-Magnon Expansion" has prompted many creationists to shout that "Darwin was Wrong".
In reality, given the fact that the expansion was a very small episode in a succession of similar events, and left no direct proof on planet, the question that arises is "why no incongruences were spotted before".
It is a powerful interrogative, and the answer to this may be every bit as incompatible with the creation myth as the view of the evolutive process of our species that was accepted by science, before the flood of new data available on the galactic net forced its revision.
In reality, the classical view of humans as the last offspring of a long but quite linear evolutive process had already been abandoned by most anthropologist way before the "Beautiful Alien" image was ever decoded, to be replaced by a more realistic vision of a ramified tree of inter-related species, many of whom really diverged from our evolutive line to disappear and one - the Neanderthals - folded back into our line, as proved by the presence of Neanderthal genes in the European pool.
This itself had been an unhappy realization, for many Europeans, and thus had been a much contested one - as the 2% of the genetic variability proper to the continent ascending to the Neanderthals being the only notable difference between its inhabitants and the rest of the planet, many saw it as a proof of the continent's ancestors lack of moral fibre, having indulged in ante-litteram miscegenation,.
In reality, it is now believed that the Neanderthals were simply descendants of a previous expansive wave of humans, that had reached our planets about 200000 years ago. It is extremely probable that they were the descendants of a research vessel from the so-called Mesoican Culture, that stranded on our planet and chose a France region to settle because, at the time, the most comfortable. Unfortunately, the Mesoican had a tendency to underestimate radiation effects in their ships designs, and to keep crews at a bare minimum. The combination of genetic instability ad reduced variability in the initial population may account for the Neanderthals greater-than-usual deviation from the humanities average.
It is now believed that, for a combination of factors that kept it an interesting planet, our Earth has been touched by many waves of galactic drifters - the "Cro-Magnon" being just the last ones - that kept succeeding on the tempo of what is now suspected to be a cyclical variation in the entanglement rate between our space and the first-band hyperspace.
The so-called "Nu-slide" would thus be not an isolated fact - about every 100000 years the entanglement aspect changes, with trivial effects on most biological and physical processes, but powerful ones on FTL travel and on some very subtle details of how human intelligence works.
Not only can the change enable or disable cheap FTL travel, it is virtually proven that some of the inner mechanics of the human mind are contiguous to that same space-hyperspace interface, which was also used - again, implicitly, and without a conscious design choice on the part f our ancestors - by the Cro-Magnon Artificial Minds to boost their capabilities way beyond the limits of their 3D hardware.
When the connection is more favourable, part of the human mind takes residence in the hyperspace, boosting creativity and sheer, brute intelligence.
Telepathy becomes more common, and almost everybody naturally contributes to the whole species baggage of ideas, concepts and solutions - contributes to, and gains from.
Humans becomes more creative, and much more effective in their pursue of solutions to problems. More ideas flow and are developed faster and better.
In these phases, not only the access to hyperspace - and FTL - is simpler, but the humanities and their Artificial Minds are more powerful, so an age of galactic travel ensue... and someone reaches our Earth.
When the access becomes more difficult - like in the last transition - the disappearance of FTL travel is NOT its most dramatic effect, nor is it the sudden incapacity of Artificial Minds to function correctly. Both occurrences would be terrible on their own, but what makes them nearly insurmountable is the fact that the human mind, too, loses most of its abilities, as well as its direct access to most of the culture created up to that moment.
Without hyperspace, there is no more telepathy, nor galaxy-wide concept sharing, and every human is left with just the tiny shards that it can retain in its conscious mind. Unless the planet has a very numerous and enormously varied population and economy, this usually means that only a tiny and very insufficient fraction of the original culture is maintained, with effects that can be easily imagined.
About 90% of the human settlements that were stranded by the last Nu slide went extinct in one or two generations, and virtually every one of the remaining regressed to Palaeolithic levels of technology, the exceptions being enumerable on the fingers of one hand.
Hellish as it may look to the modern reader, ancient Earth was not, in facts, the worse offender when it comes to exterminate human groups stranded on its surface. It is now postulated that what kept Earth an interesting planet was the very possibility of observing variants of humanity, descended from past humans and sometimes hybridized with local species who themselves derived from even more ancient drifters - like the Neanderthal.
In other words, up until the current cycle and its reversion to a more common path of technological development and genocide of the human variants competing for space , for about two million years Earth has been an anthropologist heaven.
Unfortunately, given the aggressivity with which our branch of modern humans has adsorbed or exterminated its cousins, and the corrosiveness of globalization against tribal cultures, we can assume this to be a glory of the past.
Currently,our Earth is a run-of-the-mill human settlement, with a set of cultures that is constantly being reduced to a planetary, single one, though differences will always persist - the geographic nature of an area does have some effects on the "mood" of its inhabitants and their art, values, and beliefs.
Even if a new "change" re-established the favourable situation present at the end of the Cro-Magnon expansion, with the reappearance of cheap system-to-system shuttle services, it is unlikely that our world would get much attention, as there are no more Australopitechus or Neanderthals to motivate interstellar study expeditions, and the planet otherwise lacks any interest whatsoever as far as industrial resources go (it is estimated that the Anipos robot mining operations in the asteroids belts surpassed Earth mining outoput by a factor four, during the build-up leading to the war - that was the product of a whopping one thousand initial machines, commanded by just a hundred technicians, and moderate self-replication).
This will probably show up in the next few million years as a discontinuity in the fossil documentation.
If this cycle will end, and the current galactic civilization network will crumble too soon (in the past, the effect on human intelligence have led to galaxy-wide collapses even before widespread FTL and pan-systemic travel had managed to unify the human sphere), there will be a visible missing link between our current, Cro-Magnon derived phenotype and the one from the next colonization wave.
Currently, no such an egregious void can be found, because Earth has always been host to humans derived from a series of precedent waves, as well as visitors from the then-current one, that intermingled in the aftermaths of each "slide" episode.
This produced intermediate individuals or, even, new species, which is the reason why our extra-world origin had to be discarded until recent years - the documentation did not support what seemed an illogic ad-hoc explanation.
More relevantly, the influx of alien mutations has a great importance in the use of genetic drift to characterize human rests antiquity.
In fact, the parameters used for that operation must be thoroughly revised, as they currently tend to overstate the antiquity of most human rests.
Unfortunately, studies on how to correct these biases are in their infancy, and no clear answer can be given, beyond what can be found in surviving data from the "great centres"
that managed to whether the last slide (like the Anipos "Supreme Computer Farm").
This information would have us believe, for example, that Homo Erectus (called "The Mono-Tonal Men", for their limited vocal range ) was still inhabiting the planet, at the time of Homo Neanderthal, more than half a million years after its supposed extinction.
Its reliability, of course, is anybody's guess (adult Anipos may be pretentiously serious, but adolescent Anipos are every bit as mischievous as those of any other human species, and not above the kind of elaborated practical joke that would be adding spurious material to an ancient database) but opens the possibility for an extensive, and intriguing, re-write of our species history.
It is a good time to be an anthropologist.
Our field has never been more open to new discoveries, and seldom the importance of them has ever been so felt, inside and outside the scientific community.
It is of these days the news that the North American Evangelical Churches association has asked the Kansas Board of education to discard both creationism and the "Panspermic Theory" from their textbook, after it was revealed that most of the Genesys is likely a plagiarism from a set of 30.000 years old erotic novels for young adults (something the late FTL-era Chro-Magnons were apparently fond).
In the words of Rev. Cynthia Loudberg,
"Darwinism is pure science - it leaves the believer free to believe an ineffable God be the prime mover of the universe, hiding his hand for the sake of allowing free faith. With these revelations, the Genesys becomes the proof that we are the product of a bunch of horny teenager straying out of adult supervision at the wrong moment. God operates in mysterious ways, but I don't think it would use so embarrassing ones."
In reality, given the fact that the expansion was a very small episode in a succession of similar events, and left no direct proof on planet, the question that arises is "why no incongruences were spotted before".
It is a powerful interrogative, and the answer to this may be every bit as incompatible with the creation myth as the view of the evolutive process of our species that was accepted by science, before the flood of new data available on the galactic net forced its revision.
In reality, the classical view of humans as the last offspring of a long but quite linear evolutive process had already been abandoned by most anthropologist way before the "Beautiful Alien" image was ever decoded, to be replaced by a more realistic vision of a ramified tree of inter-related species, many of whom really diverged from our evolutive line to disappear and one - the Neanderthals - folded back into our line, as proved by the presence of Neanderthal genes in the European pool.
This itself had been an unhappy realization, for many Europeans, and thus had been a much contested one - as the 2% of the genetic variability proper to the continent ascending to the Neanderthals being the only notable difference between its inhabitants and the rest of the planet, many saw it as a proof of the continent's ancestors lack of moral fibre, having indulged in ante-litteram miscegenation,.
In reality, it is now believed that the Neanderthals were simply descendants of a previous expansive wave of humans, that had reached our planets about 200000 years ago. It is extremely probable that they were the descendants of a research vessel from the so-called Mesoican Culture, that stranded on our planet and chose a France region to settle because, at the time, the most comfortable. Unfortunately, the Mesoican had a tendency to underestimate radiation effects in their ships designs, and to keep crews at a bare minimum. The combination of genetic instability ad reduced variability in the initial population may account for the Neanderthals greater-than-usual deviation from the humanities average.
It is now believed that, for a combination of factors that kept it an interesting planet, our Earth has been touched by many waves of galactic drifters - the "Cro-Magnon" being just the last ones - that kept succeeding on the tempo of what is now suspected to be a cyclical variation in the entanglement rate between our space and the first-band hyperspace.
The so-called "Nu-slide" would thus be not an isolated fact - about every 100000 years the entanglement aspect changes, with trivial effects on most biological and physical processes, but powerful ones on FTL travel and on some very subtle details of how human intelligence works.
Not only can the change enable or disable cheap FTL travel, it is virtually proven that some of the inner mechanics of the human mind are contiguous to that same space-hyperspace interface, which was also used - again, implicitly, and without a conscious design choice on the part f our ancestors - by the Cro-Magnon Artificial Minds to boost their capabilities way beyond the limits of their 3D hardware.
When the connection is more favourable, part of the human mind takes residence in the hyperspace, boosting creativity and sheer, brute intelligence.
Telepathy becomes more common, and almost everybody naturally contributes to the whole species baggage of ideas, concepts and solutions - contributes to, and gains from.
Humans becomes more creative, and much more effective in their pursue of solutions to problems. More ideas flow and are developed faster and better.
In these phases, not only the access to hyperspace - and FTL - is simpler, but the humanities and their Artificial Minds are more powerful, so an age of galactic travel ensue... and someone reaches our Earth.
When the access becomes more difficult - like in the last transition - the disappearance of FTL travel is NOT its most dramatic effect, nor is it the sudden incapacity of Artificial Minds to function correctly. Both occurrences would be terrible on their own, but what makes them nearly insurmountable is the fact that the human mind, too, loses most of its abilities, as well as its direct access to most of the culture created up to that moment.
Without hyperspace, there is no more telepathy, nor galaxy-wide concept sharing, and every human is left with just the tiny shards that it can retain in its conscious mind. Unless the planet has a very numerous and enormously varied population and economy, this usually means that only a tiny and very insufficient fraction of the original culture is maintained, with effects that can be easily imagined.
About 90% of the human settlements that were stranded by the last Nu slide went extinct in one or two generations, and virtually every one of the remaining regressed to Palaeolithic levels of technology, the exceptions being enumerable on the fingers of one hand.
Hellish as it may look to the modern reader, ancient Earth was not, in facts, the worse offender when it comes to exterminate human groups stranded on its surface. It is now postulated that what kept Earth an interesting planet was the very possibility of observing variants of humanity, descended from past humans and sometimes hybridized with local species who themselves derived from even more ancient drifters - like the Neanderthal.
In other words, up until the current cycle and its reversion to a more common path of technological development and genocide of the human variants competing for space , for about two million years Earth has been an anthropologist heaven.
Unfortunately, given the aggressivity with which our branch of modern humans has adsorbed or exterminated its cousins, and the corrosiveness of globalization against tribal cultures, we can assume this to be a glory of the past.
Currently,our Earth is a run-of-the-mill human settlement, with a set of cultures that is constantly being reduced to a planetary, single one, though differences will always persist - the geographic nature of an area does have some effects on the "mood" of its inhabitants and their art, values, and beliefs.
Even if a new "change" re-established the favourable situation present at the end of the Cro-Magnon expansion, with the reappearance of cheap system-to-system shuttle services, it is unlikely that our world would get much attention, as there are no more Australopitechus or Neanderthals to motivate interstellar study expeditions, and the planet otherwise lacks any interest whatsoever as far as industrial resources go (it is estimated that the Anipos robot mining operations in the asteroids belts surpassed Earth mining outoput by a factor four, during the build-up leading to the war - that was the product of a whopping one thousand initial machines, commanded by just a hundred technicians, and moderate self-replication).
This will probably show up in the next few million years as a discontinuity in the fossil documentation.
If this cycle will end, and the current galactic civilization network will crumble too soon (in the past, the effect on human intelligence have led to galaxy-wide collapses even before widespread FTL and pan-systemic travel had managed to unify the human sphere), there will be a visible missing link between our current, Cro-Magnon derived phenotype and the one from the next colonization wave.
Currently, no such an egregious void can be found, because Earth has always been host to humans derived from a series of precedent waves, as well as visitors from the then-current one, that intermingled in the aftermaths of each "slide" episode.
This produced intermediate individuals or, even, new species, which is the reason why our extra-world origin had to be discarded until recent years - the documentation did not support what seemed an illogic ad-hoc explanation.
More relevantly, the influx of alien mutations has a great importance in the use of genetic drift to characterize human rests antiquity.
In fact, the parameters used for that operation must be thoroughly revised, as they currently tend to overstate the antiquity of most human rests.
Unfortunately, studies on how to correct these biases are in their infancy, and no clear answer can be given, beyond what can be found in surviving data from the "great centres"
that managed to whether the last slide (like the Anipos "Supreme Computer Farm").
This information would have us believe, for example, that Homo Erectus (called "The Mono-Tonal Men", for their limited vocal range ) was still inhabiting the planet, at the time of Homo Neanderthal, more than half a million years after its supposed extinction.
Its reliability, of course, is anybody's guess (adult Anipos may be pretentiously serious, but adolescent Anipos are every bit as mischievous as those of any other human species, and not above the kind of elaborated practical joke that would be adding spurious material to an ancient database) but opens the possibility for an extensive, and intriguing, re-write of our species history.
It is a good time to be an anthropologist.
Our field has never been more open to new discoveries, and seldom the importance of them has ever been so felt, inside and outside the scientific community.
It is of these days the news that the North American Evangelical Churches association has asked the Kansas Board of education to discard both creationism and the "Panspermic Theory" from their textbook, after it was revealed that most of the Genesys is likely a plagiarism from a set of 30.000 years old erotic novels for young adults (something the late FTL-era Chro-Magnons were apparently fond).
In the words of Rev. Cynthia Loudberg,
"Darwinism is pure science - it leaves the believer free to believe an ineffable God be the prime mover of the universe, hiding his hand for the sake of allowing free faith. With these revelations, the Genesys becomes the proof that we are the product of a bunch of horny teenager straying out of adult supervision at the wrong moment. God operates in mysterious ways, but I don't think it would use so embarrassing ones."
Wednesday, 18 January 2017
WTF?
 |
"If she says that doing this gives her an orgasm, I would be inclined to believe it, for once." |
Today was the day of my monthly visit with my psychological support provider.
"Why monthly", you say, "when my shrink wants to see my sorry ass every damn week?"
Well, when it started, it was once every two weeks, then every three, now it is once a month, hopefully it will become once every two months.
It is Public Health Service, babe - they allot time on how dangerous one is, to himself or others, not on how much money they can squeeze out of his pocket.
So my mild depression clearly takes a back-seat on the goat-shepherd that dreams to shag his own daughter(s), and the guys that attempted suicide.
So, I was there, commenting "nothing new, really", and the discourse went back to my SM allegiance.
Because the lady - she is a she of about my age, which is better, because my issues mainly stem from my less than spectacular relationship with womankind and a he younger than me, like my previous therapist, worked nothing on that respect - has always been puzzled by it.
After all, I am really a god-damn anarchist at heart, so I kind of laugh my ass off at many of the classic D/s tropes, and I do not really like the ideas of inflicting pain on anyone just for the sake of it, which isn't exactly Sadistic. My "the important is that she gets off from it" is quite uncharacteristic of the category, to say.
What it boils really down to is that I can't really, really, really trust women with normal sex.
You know the drill... everyone has met - or is, or has been - a woman who could not get there with her companion, yet faked orgasms for his sake.
Maybe it was done to not disparage his efforts, out of politeness, sympathy, desire to maintain an otherwise satisfying relationship, pity etc.
Maybe it was for pure and simply evil manipulation purposes, boredom, control mania.
The reasons why a woman may decide to pretend that she enjoys intercourse with someone, while she really just tolerates it, are as numerous as are the reasons to do any other little thing in life.
Like many of those, also, not all of them are nefarious - "He is a sweet man and I do not want to make him feel bad" doesn't exactly sound much evil-mastermind-y.
Unfortunately, both my parents spent my childhood teaching me that women were manipulative whores.
Yes, both dad - whose entire life philosophy was "women are whores, and friends enter your house, shag your wife and then bled you dry, cheating you out of money and job opportunities before disappearing" - and mommy - who went along with a more sober "all [other] women are whores that you have to stay away from, as much as possible" .
Needless to say (really?), it is not exactly so.
Rationally, I know it - as well as I know that, when it comes at manipulative bitches, my mother is second to none, stealthy as she is with her whole "victim-hood" act.
But when it comes to guts feelings?
When it comes to that, I can't really help but think that every woman that has an orgasm through "normal" sex - more important, normal sex... with me! - is really just faking it. Worse, that she is faking it for some nefarious - logically impossible to ascertain, but try to prove a privative like, say, the non-existence of the invisible pink unicorn - hidden purpose.
It does not really help the fact that some women do so - the 20-something model marrying the 60-something millionaire is an usual suspect of this - or that virtually every woman has faked the damn thing, some time.
It doesn't help at all that the perspective of ending up with yet another manipulative bitch - my mother put to shame even the most money-obsessed professional prostitute that I met in my life - as a significant one scares the pants out of me.
So, women and normal sex... I can't trust them, not even the proverbial "as much as I throw them".
When I look at the kind of masochism that I usually draw, I see a pay-off and risks matrix that is quite different - faking orgasm is still possible, but no gain available at my level would justify the risks involved.
More so, not when there are tons of much more interesting men available, waiting and eager to be duped in the far less risky, "vanilla" game.
So, I read the whole SM game as truer than the "vanilla" ass-pull.
I know, I know... I am fragged.
Saturday, 14 January 2017
President Trump
I cannot believe it.
For years, all the American au-pairs that my brother hosted - so that his kids could speak the Imperial Vernacular almost like a native - have lambasted us with the over-dependence of Italian politics from Silvio Berlusconi.
What can I say... they were, and still are, right.
Now, the same sociological strata of the population that was the base of Berlusconi's triumph, the white plebeian - in its USA incarnation - has expressed Donald Trump as 45th President of the USA, after its UK incarnation has expressed the infamous Brexit and before the French and Italian incarnations ( (LePen, Bepper Grillo, La Lega Nord)) will proceed to greet the world with a Frexit and an Itaxit.
Let me get this out of the way: Trump is a man that makes Silvio Berlusconi - someone that I tend to think to as "The evil dwarf" - look like a giant of a man.
Before going all outraged, consider the biography of the two.
S.B. was the son of the director of a bank filial that managed, through every dirty trick in the economical book and solid working relationships both with Mafia and the so-called Socialist Party of Bettino Craxi, to accumulate some seven billion dollars in his own life, and took a virtually absolute control over the Italian media (apart the - possibly - CIA-tied "La Repubblica").
He has a far more chequered record in fields in which his groups had to face competition without any serious political backing, like malls and insurances, where he didn't really shine but, compared with other Italian politicians of the past he is indeed someone that made something of his life before entering politics (this last career was started precisely to protect his economic interests, when he lose his political patron Bettino Craxi, as well as to save himself from a small host of pending trials, among other things for corrupting a judge).
Donald Trump is the son of a multimillion-dollars real estate entrepreneur that has a made a name for himself as... what, exactly? Ah, He continued with his father enterprise, and amassed... 3,7 billions?
Yes, he states that he is worth some ten billions, but professional accountants have put this in doubt, as his net income is really in the 150 million dollars range, which would mean that he would earn more by selling everything and buy out treasury bonds. So, either he is a spectacularly poor entrepreneur (in Real Estate in the US... ) or his net worth is a lot less then ten billions, possibly even less than those 3.7 .
So, the "Evil Dwarf" Silvio managed to go from playing a piano on leisure ships to 6.9 billions.
"Larger than life" Donald went from some hundred millions to 3.7 billions.
Trump has become richer, but when he shapes his story as a success, as being a great entrepreneur... yes, he is better than me, but in this era of rampaging billionaires, he is a very forgettable one.
For all his defects, S.B. is not famous for being overly racist or really any kind of extremist, and even the womanising ways that led to his fall may really be just the product of a soft spot.
For all his wealth and power, S.B. took refuge in re-enacting his younger days, when he was a penny-less pianist that had dalliances with ladies on the cruiser ships - which is pathetic, it opened up his figure to blackmail from virtually everybody and was - thus - incompatible with being the chief of a modern state, but as far as human flaws go, it is not the worst I know of.
But he never grabbed a woman by her cunt and, as far as we know, he behaved in a relatively sensible way with his "bunga-bunga" guests.
To be honest, if confronted with some of his predecessors as chief of the Italian government, S.B. looks like a decent human being.
Had anybody been in the position to damage his power the way the "Rubacuori" affair damaged Berlusconi, good old Giulio Andreotti would have had half of the involved disappear, one way or the other.
When I read a cracked.com article about the similitude between Trump's first days as President Elect and Adolf Hitler, I find it a bit preposterous.
Trump is likely even less of a capable figure than Sivio Berlusconi was (a man whose main claim to comedy was ruling a country that is existentially resisting to any attempt at actual governance).
Then, I remember... in 1933, Adolf Hitler looked every bit like a pathetic Austrian wannabe-painter aping the older, much more capable Benito Mussolini, an ex-journalist that was also the founder of a famous newspaper and had been a public figure from well before WWI...
Not so preposterous, maybe - damn.
For years, all the American au-pairs that my brother hosted - so that his kids could speak the Imperial Vernacular almost like a native - have lambasted us with the over-dependence of Italian politics from Silvio Berlusconi.
What can I say... they were, and still are, right.
Now, the same sociological strata of the population that was the base of Berlusconi's triumph, the white plebeian - in its USA incarnation - has expressed Donald Trump as 45th President of the USA, after its UK incarnation has expressed the infamous Brexit and before the French and Italian incarnations ( (LePen, Bepper Grillo, La Lega Nord)) will proceed to greet the world with a Frexit and an Itaxit.
Let me get this out of the way: Trump is a man that makes Silvio Berlusconi - someone that I tend to think to as "The evil dwarf" - look like a giant of a man.
Before going all outraged, consider the biography of the two.
S.B. was the son of the director of a bank filial that managed, through every dirty trick in the economical book and solid working relationships both with Mafia and the so-called Socialist Party of Bettino Craxi, to accumulate some seven billion dollars in his own life, and took a virtually absolute control over the Italian media (apart the - possibly - CIA-tied "La Repubblica").
He has a far more chequered record in fields in which his groups had to face competition without any serious political backing, like malls and insurances, where he didn't really shine but, compared with other Italian politicians of the past he is indeed someone that made something of his life before entering politics (this last career was started precisely to protect his economic interests, when he lose his political patron Bettino Craxi, as well as to save himself from a small host of pending trials, among other things for corrupting a judge).
Donald Trump is the son of a multimillion-dollars real estate entrepreneur that has a made a name for himself as... what, exactly? Ah, He continued with his father enterprise, and amassed... 3,7 billions?
Yes, he states that he is worth some ten billions, but professional accountants have put this in doubt, as his net income is really in the 150 million dollars range, which would mean that he would earn more by selling everything and buy out treasury bonds. So, either he is a spectacularly poor entrepreneur (in Real Estate in the US... ) or his net worth is a lot less then ten billions, possibly even less than those 3.7 .
So, the "Evil Dwarf" Silvio managed to go from playing a piano on leisure ships to 6.9 billions.
"Larger than life" Donald went from some hundred millions to 3.7 billions.
Trump has become richer, but when he shapes his story as a success, as being a great entrepreneur... yes, he is better than me, but in this era of rampaging billionaires, he is a very forgettable one.
For all his defects, S.B. is not famous for being overly racist or really any kind of extremist, and even the womanising ways that led to his fall may really be just the product of a soft spot.
For all his wealth and power, S.B. took refuge in re-enacting his younger days, when he was a penny-less pianist that had dalliances with ladies on the cruiser ships - which is pathetic, it opened up his figure to blackmail from virtually everybody and was - thus - incompatible with being the chief of a modern state, but as far as human flaws go, it is not the worst I know of.
But he never grabbed a woman by her cunt and, as far as we know, he behaved in a relatively sensible way with his "bunga-bunga" guests.
To be honest, if confronted with some of his predecessors as chief of the Italian government, S.B. looks like a decent human being.
Had anybody been in the position to damage his power the way the "Rubacuori" affair damaged Berlusconi, good old Giulio Andreotti would have had half of the involved disappear, one way or the other.
When I read a cracked.com article about the similitude between Trump's first days as President Elect and Adolf Hitler, I find it a bit preposterous.
Trump is likely even less of a capable figure than Sivio Berlusconi was (a man whose main claim to comedy was ruling a country that is existentially resisting to any attempt at actual governance).
Then, I remember... in 1933, Adolf Hitler looked every bit like a pathetic Austrian wannabe-painter aping the older, much more capable Benito Mussolini, an ex-journalist that was also the founder of a famous newspaper and had been a public figure from well before WWI...
Not so preposterous, maybe - damn.
Thursday, 12 January 2017
Random FAQ Entry
- "Why your blog is so full of fantasy tales?"
Do you have any idea how void, lonely and wasted is my life?
Do you really want to read about that?
Come on, let's be serious... to know that life sucks, yours is more than enough.
Thursday, 5 January 2017
I am crazy
To substantiate the assertion, here above is pictured an example of my second preferred car (among the ones that I have driven extensively).
Behold, yeh fickle westerner, the mighty UAZ 469B.
If you look in youtube, you may find Jeremy Clarkson ditching it as the most horrible car in the world.
As I commented there, that mainly says us that Clarkson is a bit of a pussy driver.
1600+ kg (say, 3600 lbs) of 4x4 without servo steering? Just a bit stiff in parking, that's all.
The Ford Transit didn't have it either, when I used to overcharge it while working as a mason (ah, no more drifting on the ice with a full charge of sand... youth fades away and does not come back, indeed).
I managed to steer that, and this car proved no major challenge (though, I might have slightly sprained my left shoulder once, steering the UAZ with one hand while parking).
It had drum brakes that oxidized differently, so much so that, after a week of parking rest, if one forgot to clear them (by driving & braking for a couple of hundred meters, applying a modicum of brakes with the left foot and full throttle with the right) chances were that at the first hard brake it would steer itself sideways (mine, toward the left).
Brakes were virtually inexistent, at any speed above 70 km/h (realistically, its max safe speed... for a certain definition of safety).
The clutch spring was so stressed that disengaging it felt like serious workout - it was to be expected from a 65 hp Russian petrol being replaced by a 103hp VM turbodiesel... Alfa Romeo used double disc clutches, for its Type 116 sedans with that same engine and the Giulietta Turbodelta, but Martorelli didn't bother to use such a refined approach and simply tightened the screws of the clutch thrust plate.
Its used a no-synchronizers gearbox, that obliged to learn double-clutching (with that clutch) on a turbo-diesel. That, too, was a nice detail.
Its ride was so tall that one could see over the roofs of Mistubishi Pajeros and their ilk (even being just my 5'8").
It rode on four leaf springs and two live axles... sweetly so.
In 2x4 mode (mandatory on tarmac), it fishtailed on wet road, even simply negotiating a rotatory intersection at 30 km/h (20 mph).
It had no seat belts, no crumple zones nor any other sissy occidental things like airbags.
You have an accident, you die, simple as that - I found it refreshing.
What makes me crazy, was that I liked to take this Death Machine, and going at 110km/h on the highway (flat out, with the engine near over-rev... not that there was any way to know it, as it had no tachometer).
Which is 10 km/h below the local speed limit, and about 40 km/h above its sensible max speed (debatable... my family thought that its max sensible speed was - parked).
On the other hand, if one used it for what it was really designed - slinging around in middle level off-road, with its 4x4 engaged and a set of good grip tires - it was a very competent machine...
I still miss it.
Because, tiring as it was, harsh as it was, it was so much fun that I always went flat out with that thing (sometimes, flat out meant at 50 km/h... 10 more than what would have been sensible).
With it, going slightly below speed limits usually meant speeding like a raving crazy.
Alas, now I am reduced to much more humble drives, things that I cannot drive nowhere near as fast as to communicate any emotion whatsoever (I have the 2 litre version of something, whose 6 litres engined examples were still considered extremely stable, ourgh)...
But, it is probable true that I am still here also because the UAZ is not around any more.
Oh, swell, we must as well all die for some reason, no? Some day, I'll buy another one...
MUAHAHAHAHAHAHA...
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| When things get rough, you need reducing gears, not trip computers. |
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