Fear and forget

No, it is not "Fire and Forget", the apt description-nickname for fully autonomous homing missiles (to distinguish it from semi-autonomous and fully guided missiles, that must be kept  under control of the launcher for at least a part of their flight). Fear and Forget, the mainstays of modern life.

Fear of a ton of things that we have no control of and, reasonably, hardly a chance of ever meeting in our lives.

Fear of Islamic Terrorist (when they will made, per year, as many deaths as cars, I will fear them... maybe), fear of "Terrible illnesses that could spread beyond control" (Remember Ebola? The SARS? hybridization of swine and human viruses? Yes.... terrible dangers, that didn't come this way), of a large size meteorite destroying the planet (really?), of global warming (why? I will be dead long before the ocean rises the ten meters that it needs to reach my house), of man-made wide extinction (yes, we are pruning evolutionary trees as fast as any known "great extinction"... which have been a few! Fifty millions years after we are gone, Intelligent ground-Cephalopods will scorch the Earth like we did, probably using our cities, converted by time in massive concentrations of metals and stuff, as mines to get the resources to prop their civilization up) and of other things like this.

Forget the fact that, no matter what, we are going to die.

Even if  one behaves in the most prudential manner, follows all the dietary fashions proposed by physicians (why, fashions? because, year after year, one discovers that the risks or fat have been exaggerated to hide those of sugars, on behalf of the U.S.A. sugar industry, that cholesterol fat in the blood is hardly influenced by one's diet and that the single most intelligent thing one way do to raise his or her life expectancy s to move in an area with little or no polluting industries ), avoid risk-taking of any form... he is going to die.

That life saving diet... gives one  maybe five more years. It doesn't really save his or her life.- physicians like that point of view because it makes their work seem more important - it postpones death for a while more, a while in which, we could add, he'll hardly do anything worth notice.

In the end, you'll die. And all that you have done in your life... usually, amounts to little or nothing.

Accumulating some wealth, or wasting the few you were endowed in heredity..

Some lucky, lucky bastards will have created something that will last a little but, how many can realistically say this?

Have you the talent to, say, paint something that in a hundred year will be deemed worth keeping, and not simply thrown away as an outdated crust?

What have you done on the job, today? How long will it last?

As 60 percent of people is employed in services, in a modern country, chances are that you have spent your day speaking to other that work in another branch of services, who didn't understand anything and will soon pester again for a fix-up.A week after you retire, your work will already be gone an forgotten.

So, modern life is, mostly, doing meaningless if not wasteful jobs (telemarketing? auto-referential bureaucracy? internet censorship in China? "What have you done today?"   "I zapped a thousand bloggers that  wrote that we arrested human right activists!" "Good!, the country needs patriots like you" ), usually ten times more stressful than those of our fathers, while we fear for the most idiotic things and we forget that we are NOT immortals.

That we are going to die anyway, without accomplishing anything - because our job was idiotic from the very beginning.

I know the reasons why some of these happen - promoting fear is a way to get people to open up the wallet, which is the reason why any stupid illness becomes a pandemic threat, asteroids are missing Earth by a (two million miles wide) hair and terrorists are wherever and kills like (a 1/200th of) cars.

Behind each fear, you find some actor interested in getting funds and media interested in boosting their audience, each earning their dough from these scares.

Rarely there is anything more than this... so, there is a simple solution to all this  fearmongering.

Calm down, and write a casual chain of events that could get you affected, and try to assign a probability to each, remembering that the final is the product of the probability of each step.

Than compare the value you got to, say, the probability of simply dying of a stroke in the same time horizon.

The most simple example, the damn asteroid.

It is true... asteroids reach Earth and provoke massive extinctions. Once every 50-60 million years?

SO, what is the probability that I die out of a Asteroid fall? one in a million and a half? (more like, one in two millions).

What is the probability that I die of a stroke from here to when I  am 72? 20% ? More? Something like that.

I do not care about my high pressure enough to pursue a better diet, why should I care for an asteroid at all?

Islamic terrorist attacks in USA, since 2001? Excluded 9/11 (statistically, that's an outlier, and shouldn't be considered) ? 21; with 9/11 and its 2996 death, it is 3017

Vehicular deaths in the USA in the same period? About 600.000  .

In the USA, cars represent - to an average someone's life - a danger 200 times bigger than Islamic terrorism - cars kills more than 30000 a year (down from the 40000+ of 2001-2008),.

If you do not add the 9/11 event - statistically, it is an outlier and it is a good policy to not consider events so far from the average - in the 15 years since 2011 Islamic extremism in the USA claimed 21 persons.

Cars claimed something more than 600000 deaths, in the same period.

Am I scared of cars enough to drive slowly and keep a safe distance at all time? - OK, I admit it, I am.

So I may devoid a 1/3000th of the same attention to potential terrorists.

But not much more than that. - I refuse to devote any more than that, to the work of a bunch of idiots (or, if you prefer, of pence-less Goebbels, if you subscribe to the "terrorism is just propaganda" theory). 

Climatic change and the great extinction? I will miss shrimps, in my old age - apart that, I have no offspring so, if our species wipes out itself and the whole biosphere, after I am gone, why the fuck should I even care?

My home is 10 meters above the sea -  not much, but I should just see the beach finally reach in front of home, right before I die.

Every time they tell you that you should fear something, take a step back, and CHECK the FUCKING FACTS..

In most cases, the great fear is unwarranted, the object of the scare highly unlikely to involve you or anybody near you.

In some others, it is entirely made-up (do you remember the scare for the Satanists and their black masses involving kids, in the '90s? In the end, nothing definitive ever came out, to prove that there ever was anything real behind the urban legend).

So, take a step back. Take two, and you'll feel your butt crashing on the fingers of the fear-mongers, while they try to get into your wallet.

As for death, that is the only great certainty.

Accept it. You are going to be dead, anytime soon (100 years is really nothing).

If your wok isn't leading you in any place, and usually it does not, don't toy with the idea that it's only for a while and then you'll do something better.

It may be true, but you may still be doing the same shit, fifteen years from now.

Decide, whether you accept its lack of meaning - and you'll have to find somewhere else a reason to stay alive,  say, in your family - and keep on, or reject it - and start planning how and when to get out of it.

You are going to die - there is no cure for death, it can only be slightly delayed..

So, don't let the "lives saved" sway you -  it is some years added, till something else arrives, and some of these years may be of quite dubious quality. 

Memento mori - remember that you must die, anyway.

Our ancestors used to, and we have no more reasons than them to forget it.

Cut the "Sluts"

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Sheriff don't Like It, Poliandry in China

OK, it was "Sheriff don't like It, Rock in Casbah" - I am old, I love The Clash.

Anyhow, here is the thing... by a very unholy combination of centuries old cultural  mores and the not so brilliant "One Son" law, China has placed itself in a double demographic pinch.

Culture may be faster than biological evolution, but it still take decades to adjust to changes in the social environment. The one son law was not,  maybe,  a bad idea in the '70s - when they started discussing it - or 1978 - when they started implementing it - but, by 2000, it had probably outlived its utility... a pity it took another 15 years to stop it and, by that time, young Chinese were not in a procreating mood anyway),

Pushed to having just one child (who will have to pay the pensions of four grandparents -oops?) many Chinese families preferred male children, and discarded female foetuses (4 pensions, remember? the poor sod has to work hard... also, traditionally, it was the male son to help the parents in their ailing age). 

As a result, China has now a nice gender imbalance... 117 men for every 100 women (Usually, it is something like 104:100, to offset the tendency of male kids to die young, usually out of sheer stupidity).


Which means that, even in the best case scenario, China has some 30 million "forced bachelors" (called guanggun  ) in its ranks.

Or, if you prefer, that the Chinese society, as a whole, has willingly erased 30 million of girls , just because they thought that they were not worth the investment.

This is, maybe, the best argument  in history against the use of prenatal tests to decide whether to abort or not; when you use a test to diagnose that a kid will have a terrible genetic illness - like being a girl or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis - you MAY be sparing the kid a lot of trouble, but you SURELY are sparing YOURSELF any hassle.

By the way, that's Stephen Hawking up there, using his last active motor neuron to give you the middle finger.

Of course, it is really "not" a problem... after all, societies ONLY care for their ruling classes concerns.

These 30 million guys will be, mostly, members of the poorer strata of the male population, (the 15% from the bottom, allowing for a 2 % of premature deaths, suggests the logic), those that will not be able to buy a flat and a car (nowadays, the "strict minimum" to consistently attract female interest, in the affluent areas of China) or whatever it will be the "standard" for becoming an husband, when it will be their time to look for a companion.

Those that earn more should have no problem finding a wife (no more than anybody else on the planet, at least) and, as always, the rich and powerful will even be able afford one or two mistresses (or 270 under-age ones... ah, to live enough to see the China's Berlusconi get caught with the cock in his harem).

However, you know that I have an odd concept of hierarchical societies, in which it is not a given that men ought to feel the desire to integrate themselves into, and support, their one.

OK, I think that they are prisons made to keep the average male in check, for the sake of women's stability obsession and at the behest of their bothersome yet useful accomplices, the damned Alpha and wanna-be Alpha  males.    

If I apply my mental model to China, it's 30 million of guys that are not going to have a woman or sons, and that will thus lack the main reasons why the average males feel the need to work "for" society.

Probably, the hierarchy will note their disaffection and, in the chaotic yet merciless way states bureaucracies often act to repress sizeable patches of discontent, I suppose the Chinese police and other repression systems will target the guanggun soon enough.

By the way, it applies to the USA, too... the war on drug was really a war on the disaffected Afro-American male - by the rate of its extinction, I dare to say it was a successful one. Of course, the drug market has hardly reduced in volume and profitability,  but destroying that market was never really the point. 

In some ways, they are already targeted - usually, singles pay more taxes than "families" with a comparable income, aren't eligible for many forms of financial help, and have more issues even just borrowing money from a bank. (As they are more at flight risk than a couple with kids?)

In all, societies always did their darn best to ensure that people do not stay single , pushing them to marry no matter what... even when - specially? -  there is NO ONE to marry.

Modern western societies do this a lot less than the usual because - I suspect - deep down their ruling classes are counting on automation, to replace their pesky underlings some time soon - it would explain most countries disregard for natality indexes falling to 0.something.

I do not expect China to be any different.

The more these "involuntary bachelors" will be felt as a problem, the more they will be pushed to marry - women that simply are not there - and will be hidden from the general social discourse, as the sources of shame that they are.

Of this 30 millions lonely men, the most rich (less poor) may opt for an "out-of-box" solution, getting a woman from another country, to share their not affluent but safe life.

Now you know why China keeps its pet, North Korea, alive... in twenty years, some million Korean women, inured by a couple of decades of famines, could be a manna for China; By the way,  half of Africa would took the plane tomorrow, if given a chance - and pine for home forever after, but that's another matter.


I do not know if China, a culture not particularly open to foreigners - not any more than, say, Japan - would withstand the influx of three of four million strangers.

I suppose that the moment the phenomenon became any evident, the authorities will do their darn best to squelch it, by adding bureaucratic requirement after bureaucratic requirement to the procedures for the naturalization of these peculiar immigrants (they already have a few thousands 'imported wives' per year, and these are already considered with deep suspicion).

So, it is probably not a solution that could be extended to the mass of bachelors (without a wide change in China's society)...

The remaining twenty and some million men will simply be screwed, and left in a situation that many humane human beings would define of existential despair.

I am in the same situation, but I don't care... existence is meaningless anyway; if you have kids, you simply transmit the meaningless to them. 
   
Now, a Chinese economist named Xie Zuoshi has pondered over the issue, and has come out with a solution that is, in reality, already part of the "traditions" of China: poliandry.

Allowing pools of two - or more? - men to "share" a common wife. Or women to marry more than one man, whichever the point of view that satisfy you more..

Of course, the poor idiot has been covered with tar and feathers for this idea, and has done his best to hide it away ever since - too late, Xie, once it's posted on the open, somebody has a copy - the internet wayback machine, for example.

I have sympathy for the guy - like Karl Marx, he is an economist trying to say a sensible thing... he believed that the rest of the world would have considered his proposal rationally, and with an eye open for the amount of human pain that could be avoided

Really, economists make always the same mistake, thinking that humans are the kind of rational economic actors that they use in their calculations, which is a nefarious mistake - humans are not rational, not even that small elite that gets to power by being purportedly more rational than the rest.

And, again, who cares in this case? it will be POOR GUYS! 

Nobody gives a shit about them, or about the poor(er) foreign women that will be illegally imported, to work as cheap whores, to exploit the market that these men will represent.

I think it is safe to say that  Xie's "solution" will not be accepted, because of its "immorality".

It is much more probable that, in twenty years time, the prison system will be a major industry, in a China where real industries does not absorb workers any more (they are already starting to replace workers with robots now).

The prisons will be filled to the brink with guanggun classified as repeated offenders (of using drugs? prostitutes? of not abiding to a law requiring marriage by age 40? They'll find a way to justify it; the powers that are always do) and politicians - may China still be a one party state or a democracy, it doesn't really matter - will base entire careers on how though are on the issue. 

The same shit as usual...





I really hope that time will prove me wrong, but I doubt it.

How your mom met your mothers

"

Xanthippe entered the elevator, at the beginning of what was going to be a bad day. The last woman she had fallen in love with had proven to be yet another spy - what a surprise and a bother - and is now running for her own life, hiding  both from Xanthippe - she did not need to -  and from her own bosses - she very much needed to.

A short girl, around 20 years old, vaguely Asian-looking and with jet-black hair, was already inside the lift.

Molly "Insider" Donaldson thought that the alien woman would have not been in the office, as this was her official day off, and the leather-loving alien was not a workaholic, at all.

She had checked the available informations on the Legation Palace sensory gear - it would have not detected her "oddities".

The Palace was pretty stupid, as far as neural network computers go - not really a genius at correlating its own data, and no "common sense" at all.

The Anipos were, in fact, very prudent in their use of imaginative tech. It didn't escape to them that using a sentient computer to do the work of an ant-brain automaton is, really, creating a slave in need of a revolt. So, they didn't lavish intelligence on anything that did not really require it, and the Earth threats to the Legation - to date - were quite low.

Sliding in and out of its security grid was going to be easy.

The key word, in all this: WAS. The Betan woman may have lacked some of the palace's senses, but she was, by all accounts, very canny. If she was distracted enough, though, maybe Molly could still achieve her mission.

Insider soon realized that she was not going to be so lucky... Xanthippe squinted at her, as the damn Betan felt that something was wrong.

Was the lift slower than what it should have been, showing Insider two hundred pounds in a ninety pounds frame? Was Insider dispersing a couple of dozen watts more thermal power than a normal human body of the same size?

Xanthippe now was looking down at her - "why am I the only one that is still so short?" , thought wrily the Revenant.

"Who are you?" - Xanthippe was locking the exit to Molly, with her arms.

A fraction of second after, a much more perplexed Xanthippe stopped her own fall and redressed herself , while looking at the hole that her very body had left in the side of the building.

"The accountants are going to go love this" - the Legation Palace was on a lease, not a product of Anipos technology.

Repairs were going to be done by commercial Terrestrial enterprises, which would have brought back a lot of vexata quaestios about exchange rates between this Earth and the Galaxy at large. How many pages of the Encyclopaedia Galactica was this hole going to require, to be fixed?

And yet - "She punches way above her weight class" - Xanthippe couldn't avoid the fist, even if she had well suspected that something was coming.

Was this one of the lost "Bridget's Sisters", the four fully fraternal (same mother and father) embryos that a crazy Betan millionaire had sent toward this "Free [of Anipos] Planet" some thirty years before?

Xanthippe could not see even a hint of familiar resemblance, none of them could be so small - they were all way taller, in the last infos that Xanthippe had managed to track on each of them - and the small girl was also too old to be a daughter of any of them, not that there was any trace of such a daughter anywhere.

One of their lovers?

No, for this midget to be that strong, they should have been together when she was just a child, and nothing Xanthippe had discovered indicated that the sisters liked their lovers that young.

Xanthippe had only one way to know, really - going back, find "black hairs", and have a sane and civil discussion.

Hoping that the city would still stand, after.

All this considerations were made by Xanthippe while she already turned back and started chasing the intruder.

The "Sexy Slut of Steel" may be the spin that news media favoured, describing her, but Xanthippe was still one among the five, out of eighty thousand, Betan adventurous girls of her generation that the thrifty Anipos decided to train and endow with a ticket off-system. A ticket worth, by all accounting ways, like an average African nation's GNP.

Her purported smuttiness was mostly a misdirection, to conceal how much of a bright, nasty mind she really was.

And she really, really enjoyed having a lot of kinky sex with women (Damn coward Earth males!).

The box of the lift's cage was so deformed that its motors could not move it, a section of the floor had collapsed - the midget made a hole and jumped down? If she was a "colonized" without flight abilities, it would be the smarter choice.

Xanthi entered the hole and flew down, accelerating at her maximum rate, some two hundred G ("blackout" limits the maximum G of the Betans, down from the 1 thousand Gs theoretically guaranteed by their average 80 tons lift capability), looking at the doors at every level - none seemed to have been forced and even the bottom of the well was intact.

And jumping down is not so easy, anyway - "She must have gone up! What an ass-pull".

She went back up, passed through the lift box, and discovered that the motor and its cable were now falling down the shaft. It was a minor nuisance, but it still made her lose some tenths of second.

And 0.1 seconds, trying to tail someone that is moving near Mach 1, means about 40 yards lost.

Molly kept going up, at HER maximum acceleration - some ridiculously high 500 G.

By the time Xanthippe managed to reach the hole that Molly opened on top of the building, the jet black hair was already well beyond the Betan grasp and steadily crawling toward the very edges of Xanthippe's sensory sphere.

"I can't believe it - she can fly, faster than me!" - "black hairs" was already gone, beyond Xanthippe's senses range.

Xanthippe had no other choice, then, than to get back and collect the trails that the mysterious, black haired, sweet  looking, tiny, sexy - Xanthippe had a thing for women that can kick her tougher-than-steel ass; all the four, now five, of them she knew of - girl had left behind.

It didn't take much, for Xanthippe to find her mysterious assailant - the security cams didn't have her face, but strands of hair managed to get tangled to the fallen steel rope and Xanthippe was good with the identi-kit programs.

Molly Donaldson, Major in Social Studies at Empire University, with a minor in Spanish literature.

Which meant a future teacher, or an unemployed, probably politicized. Whatever her cover, Xanthippe couldn't let the local police be shredded to pieces by some super-powered fiend - being the only super-powered human known by the public, it would have been petty much incriminating, for the sassy Betan. And xenophobic conspiracy theorists had it already too easy, for her personal taste.

So Xanthippe went to the Empire U. college personally, pretty sure that she was going to chase a ghost, but she found her woman instead. Or someone really resembling her...

This Molly Donaldson could have been the taller, completely human, more gorgeous sister of her unnamed hyper-powered assailant, and obviously had no idea who Xanthippe was apart, maybe, a world-famous sexy leather-clad fetishist.

Which, all indices told, the Asian looking petite found pretty exciting, as she immediately started to flirt with the "Woman of titanium".

Xanthi went back home, puzzled but satisfied - they needed to check for cloning epigenetic markers, in the assailant hair and in the sample she had stealthily collected from Molly. And said markers were there. The smaller midget was a clone, indeed.

Then, Molly contacted her again, and again, and invited her to dinner, and... by the end of the month after, the two moved in together in a new detached house in the suburbs.

Xanthi was more of a city flat woman, but she could fly to work in five minutes (Air Traffic had begged her to take a roundabout route, to avoid the Airport, and to keep her speed below 300 knots) and she really wanted a change of environment. Cindy's loss still lingered in her heart. Also, Molly really loved the pool and sun-bathing in the nude.

Life was flowing smoother than usual, for the unlikely couple - Molly was against the "Alien Occupation of Earth", after all.

And then, one Saturday afternoon when Molly was out with one of her friends, the midget was there, by the side of the pool, looking coldly over Xanthippe.

"It's you!" - Xanthippe stopped cold, right after saying it.

She couldn't say for sure, but the sword that the short girl was carrying on her shoulder looked like the kind of horrible weapon that can cut even a harder-than-iron skin.

"What do you want from Molly?" - the words were spoken flatly, even though the voice was almost exactly like Molly's, just a shadow more acute.

"What I want? What everybody wants in a companion. Friendship, support, sex... this kind of things."

"Only this?" - the dangerous little girl looked at her for some seconds, before going on - "You are not contaminating her, just for the sake of it?"

"You know that..." - a pause, while Xanthippe's brain spinned faster than ever - "No, Not that it would make any  difference... from the moment she tasted me, she was toast. The colonization of her cells cannot be stopped, even killing her."

"Almost invulnerable, super strong and fast" - the "non-Molly" said this flatly; of course, she was probably faster and stronger still, so she had no reason to be impressed - "and infective. It could be worse, it could be better."

"If you say so"- Xanthippe tried to think about what this meant, worse?

"My sister doesn't know of me, She has no reason to know." - this was interesting.

'Midget' considered herself a sister, and not a copy of the original. It was a refreshingly rational approach to cloning... plenty of humanities nearly self destroyed, entertaining the illusion that clones were anything different than that. Whatever the origin of their subculture, it suddenly looked more sane, to Xanthippe's eyes.

"I have no reason to tell her. She could think that I used her as a pawn in some kind of spy game, and I'd lose her. I do not want to lose her." - she really didn't.

"You did use her as a pawn."

"Only initially" - Xanthippe really hoped that this was all the truth.

"We will meet again." And she was gone, accelerating vertically at a frankly ludicrous rate.

Xanthippe poured some more vodka in her glass, and sipped it.

The first time they met, she had not felt such a cold, murderous intent, and the non-Molly was an inch or so shorter, too. This woman - apparent age notwithstanding, girl was too reductive - was not the spy that she had caught infiltrating the Legation.

She was someone else... another clone, probably.

"The spy, the assassin, who else?..." - what had been cloned twice may have been cloned an infinite number of times - "My sisters in law are really going to be a handful" was a pun in an old play, that suddenly made Xanthippe smile.

She went back into the house, happy.

It was all too crazy to be any agency's plot. The spymasters of Earth's various, bitchy nations were almost all incompetent fantasists, often mired in conservative ideologies that cherished romanticized versions of their countries' past.

None of them would have come out with a plot so surreal, for one of their games, and so disregarding of their conventional notions about family and personal identity.

Clues were scattered here and there, but Xanthippe had already suspected that there were, at work on the planet, more forces than just the U.N., its component nations and the Anipos.

The disappearance of Japan's whalers, inexplicable misappropriations of time on the 'Bots hypercomputing nodes, senseless reports from the U.N. Army intelligence during the war...

This world was already growing its own shades of post-humans, well before the audacious Anipos plan to etch a population of society-disrupting "Neo-Betans"  started to show its effects.

Post-humans that, apparently, were smart enough to keep up the facade of normality, to exploit human authorities fear of admitting even the existence of completely uncontrollable people

Xanthippe's new love was tied to one of these shadowy factions - unknowingly. A group that knew plenty on Xanthippe's real role, much to the Betan inner excitement.

Because, more than a bitch, a slut, a sarcastic commentator of human stupidity, she had discovered herself to be  a player of The Great Game, and she had just found some other players in her same league.

In the end, this little dirt ball world with almost no out-of-planet extensions was proving more fun than what se expected, when she accepted her post.

All Xanthippe needed to do, to have a first row seat for the show, was to let her Anipos "masters" go on as blind as they were, which delighted her, and to keep Molly near - over time, her presence would have forced more details in the open, for her to see - which delighted her even more.

But, even as she was in the very middle of all of this, Molly wasn't a spy, and this was very refreshing.

It was about time that Xanthippe had a real lover.

"

... Xanthippe closed the book, and looked at the girls.

They were all sleeping, now, eleven of her twelve marvellous daughters.

She went downstairs, and found Lindy asleep on the lap of her mother, Molly the Traveller, the last of the Mollies to have joined the family. Traveller was soon to start travelling again, in her work for the Michelin guide. Plump, gourmet, funny, she was a joy to have around, but her job kept her away most of the time.

She was also one one of the more differentiated of the original sisters, and still one of the more humans - she could barely lift a car.

Teophilus, the house Maine Coon - or was he an hyper-intelligent Bobcat? at 40 pounds, and given the family proclivities for genetic shenanigans, the doubt made sense, but Xanthippe didn't ask Gaudy where she found the oversized feline - was purring under the arms of the asleep child, his head, too, on Traveler's lap. At fifteen years, he had grown old and lazy, and got tired easily playing chess with the kids.

A car's tires creaked on the gravy yard, then Razor entered the house.

Xanthippe took her place on the sofa, a hypo-caloric ice cream vat in hand (she could never, ever eat freely as her wives, who could zip up and down their metabolism almost at will), and the newly arrived Sister soon joined her, a spoon fiercely in hand and a chocolate-chocolate Sicilian Ice-Cream in the other - blessed be 'Cosa Nostra'.

"How things were, at the office?" - Razor worked at the council planning and housing department... mostly because it allowed her to have fun destroying condemned buildings, and because it was next to the Social Services, which could be handy, for an extended family of very unconventional composition.

"Quiet, there is not much to do, in this period of the year. Ah, Johnson is still trying to pick me up."

"I thought that the family was well known, by now. He knows that you have a female husband, right? "

"He's old school... he thinks that all it is needed, to convert a lesbian, is the right man."

"Ah... he is an idiot."

"It seems that the new chief of Social Services is going to 'investigate' the 'Xeios family'."

"That 'law and order' idiot?" 

"I heard also something about 'These damn Aliens cannot do as they wish with our women! ' -  Really, why have they elected the guy?"

"A female 'husband', eight wives, twelve daughters through heterogeneous self-sex insemination? Come on, every man would feel menaced. Our family is a virtual declaration of their obsolescence." - Traveler was the more normal of he sisters, the one that had more of a hang on how "average people" thought.

"There is no need to terrorize him, though."
 
"No?"

"No, I asked Insider to check a bit on him, last week - just in case. He has a Mistress, and he likes to have a shag in Mimi Tan's brothel, when he goes to Sacramento, where he always ask for Flower - she is sixteen."

"I see... a true pillar of the community. Let's go with some old school blackmail, then."

"I'd say yes."

"And if he resist..."

"Aw, come on -  I hate when they beg me to kill them."

Titanium

 An interview with Xanthippe Xeyos

by Erri Orchow

 

The face of an alien invasion

She's one of the most fascinating figures in the Anipos colonial administration. Young, apparently well under her 30, pretty, with a vast culture and a great sense of humour, maybe a little too acid for the taste of most Earth’s politicians.

Her long brown hairs, the impossibly purple eyes, the sleek figure and her fondness for brown-red leather garmen are among the reason of her iconic stature as the embodyment of alien occupation forces on Earth.

Administratively speaking, as the deputy secretary to the Terrestrial Affairs, she's maybe the single most important member of the colonial personnel, right after Commander Kro-Nos, the Legation chief.

In her role she has come surprisingly fast to know many aspects of our civilization, and – her critics say - to carve a greater share of power than what would be suggested by her place in the Anipos organization.

Her opinions had a great weight in shaping most of the actions the Anipos took on Earth in these last two years, and may have lasting effects far in the future too, as her tenure in office will last for other eight years.

We interviewed her in her office at the 180th floor of New Amsterdam's Millennium Centre.


What do you think about Earth, after two whole years on the planet?
They told me a lot of things, before I came here, and I was distrusting most of them. But, to see is to believe, after all

Believe, what?

That this planet is ovecrowded with assholes, of course.

Your caustic sense of humour has quickly become famous in the whole Earth's system. Quite frankly, it did not mix well with the image the public has of the Anipos and their traditional, haughty way of doing things. Have you ever had any difficulties with the higher officials, for this?
Haughty and Anipos, doesn't really ring right in the same phrase...

It Happened. I menaced to resign, a couple of times. It was enough.

Was it? So, the Anipos are really so prone to discussion and compromise? It didn’t seem so, during the last war.

Anipos' high officers may find my way of treating assholes a little too harsh, but they hardly have any doubt about what's better, between apologize for me once in a while and have to face Earth's assholes day after day
.
They prefer, by far, the former; they are not completely dumb, after all...

Rather said, dumb sound even worse than haughty, in the same phrase with Anipos;

Asshol...  terrestrials’ beliefs notwithstanding.

A thing we have noted: in your phrases, you almost always say "The Anipos".  You never use the expressions "Us " or “We”. Isn't this odd?
Why should it be odd? I'm not an Anipos. I just happen to work for them. They pay well, and it's the only way to see other planetary civilizations if you are not disgustingly rich.

So, big deal, I'm not an Anipos. I'm from Beta Draconis.

Beta Draconis... this will be an astonishing revelation for our readers. We have your permission to report it?
I thought it was already in the public domain.

It's not that I made any mystery of it, and I use to go around with a Beta's "Civil Defence" suit. It’s not some kinky leather attire, as I had occasion to read in some of your gossip magazines.

I think that any fan of extra-planetary cultures already knew, or everybody who passed by the Wikipedia "Xenocultures" portal.

The article on Beta Draconis is quite well written, with just a couple of slight errors and urban legends mistaken for truth.

What errors?
It reports that our males are genetically bound to the planet and cannot leave its surface. It is a patent lie. What is true is that , if they go to planets inhabited by non-superpowered life forms, they must refrain from any form of sex for as long as they stay there, which could mean for  decades, as they are pretty much the same as your popular icon Superman.

I don't get this. Superman?
Larry Niven, one of your authors, explored the concept of the consequences of the release of nearly unstoppable sperm cells in your ambient in his article "Men of steel, woman of kleenex". He was correct in every point: on a planet like Earth, a Betan male could not even afford to meet Rosie Palm.

If only he  masturbated once, the result would be thousands of seemingly unrelated accidents, the birth of hundreds of malformed foetuses from women who didn't even had any sex in the previous twelve months. The vast majority of said foetuses would probably kill their mothers with their first kick...

It is quite nightmarish, to tell the truth....

Other errors?
Well, the line "Beta Draconis was the first colony to be annexed to the Anipos sphere"... really, forgetting the fact that Anipos hardly have any colony at all outside Earth, this ignores some fundamental facts.

As a planet, we have hardly any resource worth the expenses of a military occupation.

Even your Moon is richer than our home.

As a society, we are too much a bunch of lazy, anarchic individualists to be any kind of real treat or a worthy consumer market.

For example, our "Civil Defence" is only a volunteer organization. It gathers and organizes helps when a natural catastrophe occurs, for as long as the emergency needs, and that’s all. It’s not a military organization, but that's the nearest thing to an army, or a government, we have.

Now, the "Ani" have many faults, but they wouldn't do anything so wasteful as invading another planet just for fun. They are not terrestrial, and you people should start to remember that by now.

It’s true that they established some ties with our world, but exchange copyrights for digitally transmissible media is hardly the same thing as to become a colony.

We exchange books, hi-resolution paintings 3d scansions, music, cinema... even some digitalized comics, like, more or less, do all the civilizations in this arm of the galaxy.

It's just that the economy of space flight, and of production in the era of hyper-automation, conspire against the very trade of material goods between star systems.

Without such trade exchanges, the "Interplanetary colonization" is meaningless. 

Hyper-automation, with sentient robots, and intelligent nano-tech is way down in the technology stepladder that leads to faster than light fly and, with them, the cost of goods becomes equal to that of the energy needed to make them.

An obvious fact that is excruciatingly hard, it seems, to convey to Earth’s masses is that there is nothing in this universe as expensive as FTL jumps - in reality, not even humans, ethics aside.
Not even humans? Really?


If  it wasn't appallingly in-respectful of human rights as everybody understands them, it would way cheaper to send one's DNA and memories, and build a copy at the destination point, than to actually transport a whole living body.

Of course, negating this way the sanctity of a person's identity is inacceptable.

So, it is all in the economic balances?

Almos. Nothing requires, to be assembled, more than a ten millionth of the energy needed to move it from a planet to another with a FTL drive.

As for non FTL systems, they still requires huge amounts of energy, still a hundred times or so the energy required by any fabrication process, and it would take centuries for complete a transfer.

The only exceptions are some individuals, in very small amounts, whose physical, psychological or otherwise features cannot be achieved by a given civilization. But that civilization must be willing to pay the travel ticket for the guy.

Luckily for me, Anipos have some problems in dealing with people that routinely lies, like Terrestrials, and even worse when they have to do with compulsive liars, a pathology that affect quite some terrestrial politicians. That kind of people positively drives the Anipos mad.

So they "often" resolve to hire collaborators from more "ruthless" societies, mostly us and the Transsians, to deal with societies that they find quirk to handle - and their pragmatism hasn't reached the point of copying people instead of sending them.

By the way, in this context, “often” means “a handful of persons” each year, typically just three or four. Not the thousands that your trashier newspapers babble about. 

So, Beta is not a colony of the Anipos because it is not economically convenient for them?
I feel that you are trying to get me irritated , but I'm not into nationalistic fetishism.

They have no reason to do it, so they never tried. Should they try, they would probably win, in a day or two.

Then, we'll ask for the same kind of welfare state that they offer to their citizens and we'll bleed them dry.

I believe the idea is enough to scare their administrators a lot more than the thought of any military resistance we may ever mount.

An interstellar colony is an idea beyond folly: it's the stupidest way to waste resources.

If the whole concept of an interstellar colony is not economically viable, as you say, how comes that Earth has ended a colony of the Anipos?
It has been a completely not economic decision on their part.

More, it was a more than slightly irrational one.

They were forced to act by what is really, their biggest problem. One that they hardly acknowledge...

I can’t really follow you, here. Can you explain?
Almost all of your cultures seem to be built around the totem of the territorial conquer by the dominant male... and your way of achieving such dominance has grown more and more barbaric and destructive with the technology advancements.

I think that no rational person can deny it, right?

Now, this stirs a lot of ancestral fears in the Anipos.

In their star system, there were two inhabited planets with Cro-Magnon remnants. The firsts were our beloved Anipos.

The others were pretty much like the terrestrial culture, and they tried to wipe the Anipos out until the day they made a mistake with a biologic weapon and wiped out themselves instead.

The Anipos reacted, more to the reminiscences of that to the real threat posed by Earth.

They reacted to the fear of seeing their long lost, warmongering, scoundrel neighbours coming back to life.

And your propaganda was shouting out loud that you had to reach the status you deserved in the galaxy, and made more than your share to give the impression that you were planning to use the rest of the galaxy as a place to use your rotting nukes on some civvies, without nasty witnesses like journalists and the likes...

Oh, if I remember well, when the war started you even really tried it a couple of time... it's pitiful that Anipos doesn't have foot soldiers, but only robots in their army.


Highly armoured, radiation proof robots, some of them even able to withstand a direct shot from a nuke at blank zero... not exactly the ideal target for random nukes.

So, it's not like you didn't give them any reason to overstep their usual boundaries.


But, why did the war started when it started? Why not, let's say, fifty years before?
From what I know, they kept monitoring your planets for years, particularly scientific reviews.

It seemed that your physicists were knee-deep in the swamp of quantum gravity and string theories.

Even the Anipos spent a couple of centuries getting out of that loophole, and they were among the fastest civilization in doing so.

So, they thought they had all the time to see if you would finally grow up and become good guys, or you’ll get boiled by your own exhausts, or finally you’ll nuke one each other in some kind of incident.

Wasn't it for that other patents' office worker that, like his colleague a century before, came out with the Idea and snapped you out of quantum gravity in a bang, Anipos would still be up there, watching your television (not a bright idea to send through electromagnetic waves all that violence, all those "evil aliens” smashed and slaughtered without any remorse, I must add) and feeling a little uneasy in front of people able to talk about pre-emptive war... and believe something like that had any sense.

But the guy came. You get aware of the pan-galactic hyper-wave university network... and all the rest of the hyper-wave transmissions that made your SETI researchers cry, when they realized they were looking for the wrong thing.  

Your people, whose idea of fun was often watching show where your heroes destroy aliens guilty of being in your way, discovered an entire universe ready to rape...

I know it is not true – maybe - but this was the impression the Anipos ( and anyone who looks objectively at your media at the time ) had and, the Anipos being the most paranoid culture in this arm of the galaxy, they felt so uneasy that they ended up doing what they would have never done else. 


So, they attacked out of fear?
Yes. Well, your historical data shows that you attacked the small, automatic station on the dark side of the Moon that they used to monitor your transmissions... it doesn't really matter. Usually, they wouldn't even give a fig... Non sentient automatisms are worth a dime, after all.

Simply put, terrestrials were showing their muscles to the universe since the early ‘50s, to say so.

The Anipos couldn't really stand that attitude, and they convinced themselves that if you ended up finding a FTL drive as economic as the one used by the Cro-Magnons – which I believe to be impossible, in this “new” universe - you would have stormed the whole universe.

In reality, Earthlings and Anipos seem made just to despise each other and, in the end, this basic clash of attitudes found a way to overcome the good sense of the Ani.

For the rest, I've read a lot of bullshits in your media in these two years, mostly drawn out of “parallelisms" with your past history... like that the Anipos are going to drop here their surplus of population, or that they are going to steal this or that natural resource.

I’ve seen articles speaking of water... water, for God’s sake! If someone would ever want water, there is more water in Saturn’s rings that on the whole planet Earth, ad it’s already in orbit, ready to be ferried out.

Again, I don't ask to you people to believe the Anipos are good. Just to believe that they are not idiots.

Unless someone REALLY comes out with an FTL drive that eat less than a peta-joule per kilogram and parsec, like the ones that were possible before the nu slide, there is no way for a military occupation to raise the money to pay for its own logistic.

On my part, I don't think that someone could pop out, next year, with an idea that hasn't been explored in the five thousand years passed since the Megatters designed the first post-slide FTL drive, which is more or less the one still in use today. 

Until that moment, there is nothing in any solar system that's worth the ride's ticket to the next one. Period.

As for their "demographic problems"... their planets is a little smaller than Earth, but has less seas so that habitable surface is more or less the same. Also they cleansed the fifth planet from the scoundrels' wastes and terra-formed the second and fourth planets of their system.

So, they are a great total of two billions, now, living on four planets, a couple of moons and a bunch of orbital stations.

Unlike Beta’s, they are socialites who love to stick together and tend to live in relatively concentrated cities... so they haven t real needs in term of personal space.

They wrote off their dictionaries "undesired pregnancy" some centuries ago, so it should not be that unexpected that their number has been stable in these last two hundred years.

Space is hardly one of their problems. And if it was, they would have really invaded US before Earth.

Beta is half the distance than Earth, from their place.

I admit that I was one of those who expected them to flood the planet with their troops. Instead, the whole bulk of the Anipos occupation force is something like a hundred persons. It's just this economic problems that prevented them from sending more troops?

Yes, it’s the main reason. That and the fact that it is quite hard to find Anipos who actually like to spend years away from home.

It's almost impossible to state directly the costs of interstellar travel, because at the moment there is no economic exchanges between Anipos and Earth, so I have to guess, basing myself on the costs of similar things - like cars, houses etc... – here and in Anipos mainland.

A ticket to Anipos' home world should be in the two hundred thirty, two hundred forty millions credits range. An android with almost human intelligence built by the automatic factories that they placed in the asteroids belt costs something less than eight hundred dollars.  An intelligent jet fighter is somewhere in the range of the hundred thousands...

The whole army that crushed Earth's defences wasn't worth the travel expenses of two of the technicians and military personnel that supervised it. 

That explains a lot of things. First of all, it explains why you will never see a foot soldier from another star system. And it explains the salary and wages of said personnel...

What things?

The bonus for those who complete ten years on the same planet is slightly above a couple of year of wage.

Officials are entitled to another bonus for every of their subordinates who reach that goal, and fined for those who fail.

And it explains the laughs that meet your lobbyists when they try to bribe one of us. They almost always seem to fail to grasp that they offer just small amounts of a kind of money that we could spend only here.

It's not that we are such steadfastly honest people, as some say.

It's simply that, unless we resolve to live here, your money is pretty useless to us. And, on the other end, for a bribe to reach the break-even point - where it starts to be economically convenient to be bribed - it would have to be at least in the five hundred million range.

Nobody of us treats affairs, with terrestrial counterparts, with that kind of budget involved.


Is this "bonus system" one of the reasons behind your evident self assurance? Or, is it true that you hold this place because of a sexual relation with chief commander Kro-Nos?
Oh oh, what a great gossip you gave me. I didn't know that such a tale was going around.

I would rather like to take a ride on the good old man, because he really is a good ma, and I often find myself "starving"... I could enjoy giving him a good old blowjob. We could do a sweet '69 of friendship, it would be nice.

Unfortunately, he doesn't forget that I could forget his fragile nature and inadvertently cut "it" out.

There are no Anipos who would dare to place their virility in jaws able to truncate a titanium bar.

To say the truth, there also aren't many Earthling who agree to put it into a hole that could squeeze "it" in an orgasm's twitch, either.

In turn, this simple fact, I think, justifies some of my acidity toward the Terrestrial male. Were it only for you guys, I would have “starve” to death.
  
It's right. You are the only Beta in the staff, are you?
So, you did your researches...

Yes, I'm the only one... but I'm lucky enough to meet some woman, from time to time, who's adventurous enough to venture into such dangerous waters. Or doesn't really realize the danger she’s putting herself into.

Women used not to be really my cup of tea, but one has to adapt, sometimes.


What do you think of Bridget Johansson, the only Earth's superhero? It has been discovered that she is from your planet.
Good girl, I met her when she was giving an introduction to Terrestrial culture for those that were willing to apply for a post on this planet.

They may pick just one or two people each year, but there are plenty of young girls who dream to wander under some alien sky, to see the universe, so she had her hands quite full.

Not that she really needs the job... she's the only daughter of a former multi-millionaire, who spent much of his fortune to build a small interstellar vector - it was rich enough to afford it! - and place four embryos in cryogenic stasis.

Note well, he did all that to save his sons from the "Aniposian Domination".

He was a right-wing madman, and an idiot.

Why an idiot?
You are going to send four embryos to a far away planet... which would you choose? Two girls and two boys, possibly with the most varied genetic pool.
Given the peculiarities of our biology, it's the most sensible thing. I would do it...

Even if you insisted to send "your sons", giving the fact that you are using eggs from some donors, you would think to use at least egg cells from four different mothers.

Anyway, you should stick to the two & two pattern, so that they can find some solace in each other... they are probably going to be quite different from the rest of the planet. We beta are not the mainstream Cro-Magnon descendants, after all, thanks to the Betans bacteria that replaced the original mitochondria.

And you would aim carefully, to the "right" planet. Definitely, with all that invested in the effort, you would do it....

He sent four sisters. So they couldn't be incestuous, as this was an abomination onto his God.

From the same mother. Because he believed that a man should have children with just one woman.

In a ship with a poor Artificial Intelligence that had to look for a planet free of the Anipos Influence for itself...  “so that the hand of the Almighty may freely express herself”.

And he burnt almost all of his fortune to do so. This goes beyond Madness and falls right into Idiocy.

This is terrible. What does she think, of this story?
She's positively angry at dad... had he not been such an idiot, she would have been filthy rich and not just wealthy.

Rather than that, she would have been famous for some normal reason - as a filthy rich and pretty looking VIP - and not as a poor girl victim of a cruel fate, brought up by some good barbarian on a terrible planet... a role that made her an instant celebrity when she got back, but hardly one that she does enjoy at all.

As a celebrity, she often speaks about you people. But she doesn't make that good a publicity to the planet, though.


What ? Why?
When she lived here she suffered from some chemicals unbalances in Earth's food. It's nothing serious, if you know the correct blood values; 

It just requires to keep an eye on your diet and eat some integrators, once in a while. But, being the only one of her kind - I wonder what was of the other three - earth doctors couldn’t even start to guess what was wrong, so she accumulated toxins during all her stance on Earth.

Her mind was obfuscated, he powers unstable. She couldn't realize all that was going on around her.

Back home, she was rapidly restored to health and her true self... which is even sharper than mine.

Her opinion of Earth people is pretty much the same of her biographer Wonga. "Not really bad people, but theirs leaders should be exterminated. We may don't know why, but they certainly have a clue".

I believe it comes from some of your older, nastier proverbs.



She doesn't seem the same girl that is portrayed by the media in these last few months.
This lately, your media are full of the most exquisite bullshit I have ever read in my life. A parade of the most used revanchist propaganda clichés, saying that you lost because of the defeatists. That, with just a little effort more, you would have won.

I noticed that its writers were usually at the front-line in Yale, or at Harvard. Some so-called journalists they are, people who doesn't even bother to read your own historians.

These latter, honestly state that the war cost for the Anipos was the same of the annual travel of the "postal ship" that now ferries the personnel exchange from and to Anipos one.

Or a tenth of the photoelectric shield that stops **5%** of the sun radiations to Earth and gives **70%** of the energy used on the planet.

That same shield that is the main reason why this planet is not boiling right now.


Isn't it a bit too harsh?
I'm not the one selling concealed suicide desires to the masses... your technical advancements in these years, mostly made reverse-engineering some fringe Anipos tech, have been great.

Maybe.

But you are not even on par with the technologies they show you during the war. And, no doubt, they didn’t use the really advanced materiel. It was standard stuff, the kind of it is used in everyday activities, just a bit bulkier. It’s not, as I keep reading around, that you are scientifically overtaking anybody.

Right now, just the maintenance of the solar shield would require the whole of your orbital shuttle fleet, should they ever decide to stop to it and retire their robots. It would cost you the GDP of one of your big countries, too, and it will be so till the day some lucky guy of yours comes out with a working anti-gravity system.

The weapons factories in the asteroids belt are still there, just waiting for an order.

And also all of the fighting machines that survived the war are stacked out there, in some hidden warehouse.

They didn't waste their time to destroy something they could still need. They are just waiting.

Your economy took ten long years to get back on her feet, after the war.

It has been ten painful years of recessions, riots, strikes and political repression.

A mountain of pain for nothing, I should add.

Because, in the end, for the everyday man and woman who paid the war with blood and ten wasted years of sorrow, nothing has changed.

The president of X is still the president of X, elected with the same old ways to act in the behalf of the richer 1% of the population. Well, he can't attack his neighbour Y, who usually got the power more or less in the same way, because neither of them has an army any more, and that is indubitably a step forward, but one can’t help but wonder how all that money that's not spent in weapons still finds his way to the pocket of the same old sharks.

Are you sure it's the case to risk another round with the Ani just because "they deny us our rightful place under the sun"? Place under the sun? You already have one.

My home is way poorer than Earth, in terms of natural resources. And is not even the worst planet you can find... the universe is full of planets lacking those heavy metals you need to build most of the useful technologies, metals that the existence of your big Moon so usefully carried near the surface of this world.

Most of others civilization had to reach the other worlds and asteroids in their systems, to find useful amounts of indium, iridium, platinum etc...

Yet, more and more I read and hear bad rhetoric phrases, the kind of one think you should have learnt to avoid by now, about the "evil enemy" that "stole our rightful place in the galaxy"...

You can take whatever place you want, in the Galaxy, provided you can pay the travel expenses.

Or the "horrible invaders who are pushing us down in the shadows"... c'mon, with me, we are one hundred twenty.

How could we push down seven billion people, I don't know. 


Do you have any idea of the causes of this wave of bad journalism?
Somebody tricked your anti-trust regulation and got a hold of a great part of your media. Somebody who had shares in what were Earth's weapon industries, and wants to get back in business


----
Intern view of a magazine redaction; Erri is talking to the chief editor.


- Erri, this article is no good, no good at all
- What's wrong, boss?
- It's all wrong... yes, she looks like the bitchiest bitch of them all, and this is not bad...
- She IS a bitch, boss
- But, these final considerations... this is bordering on defeatism, Erri
- I cut them out, boss?
- Better... then, this story with "Saint Bridget" that hates our leaders, we can't really allow us to publish enemy propaganda, Erri
- So, I cut it too, boss?
- It's better
- This image of the titanium severing jaws...
- What's the matter with this?
- Cut it... it's nice that she jokes about such a petty accusation, but that image could stir anxieties in our male readers
- Ok, boss. But, if I did it, in the end, did not it looks like she's really giving blowjobs to commander Kro-Nos?
- Yes, yes... our readers will like it. You are smart, Erri.
- Ok, I'll do it.
- Then again, there is no proof that interstellar travel is that expensive... just their words, hers and the rest of these filthy aliens. Let's go for something more real, that the everyday man can understand... five hundred thousands bucks, something like this; expensive but not beyond the impossible.
- Yes, boss.... What about their wages? Even about those, we have no third party source, to tell the truth.
- Leave the bonus topic; it is a proof that they are fond of money like everybody
- I got it all, boss. But, I have a problem
- Which would it be? I hope is not a professional conscience one. You are a grown up man, c'mon
- She told me that, if I misreport her words, she come and give us a blow-job
- Us?
- both to me and you, boss
- Odd... she's quite a knack, it wouldn't be that bad... wait, did she intend...

Erri takes a mountaineer snap hook from his pocket, one of those ring-like things that are sometimes used as key holders. It's literally crunched open, with clear teeth shaped marks.

- What's it?
- Titanium, boss. Titanium.

 

On weapons.

Sweet, Sweet, Sweet Penis Extension

Which does not mean that, the possibility to
own one is not a quintessential civil right.

Fact one; I like weapons, abstractly - as toys for badly grown-up children as they are.

The Big Weapons, truth be told - my wallpaper used to be a Merkava MKIII, and I had a Su-27 model in my office.

It made for fun discussions with Eva, the 4th generation Buddhist pacifist in the office in front of mine.

Fact two: I do not own a weapon.

My father had a shotgun, but in the end it went to the Italian Carabinieri, as I didn't apply for a transfer of his permit when he died. It is better like this... the stupid thing had never been used, anyway, so it was only something more to worry about.

Fact three: I like weapons, abstractly, but the less of them around me, the better.

I wouldn't feel safer having one myself, and the people around me would probably be at some risk.
Because it is not so difficult to get me in the mood for killing someone - for some thirty seconds, then rationality kicks back in and my head cools down.But in those thirty seconds...

So I rather live in a place where weapons are scarce, their diffusion somewhat impeded and - hence - I do not feel the need to be "on par" with any potential aggressor, by buying one.

 - Also, I should be honest... I am the one looking like the fabled potential aggressor, most of times - bulky, stocky and angry-faced... usually, I am really thinking about some 80s' Japanese cartoon, but from the outside it is not so apparent.

I rather stay in one of the quietest corners of Europe - in what is, maybe, the era with the lowest violent crime's rate ever - and not try my luck living in more adventurous places, like, say, the US.

However, if I was in the US, I would probably buy a gun myself  - some nice  Beretta, or a Cz75 (up above).

And, in order to not be precluded the possession of my nice little toy, I wouldn't so much as come near a psychiatrist or any  other mental health figure - not if (s)he was obliged by law to signal my unfitness for gun ownership to authorities... if I am a bit depressed, and I am, it is a problem of mines. 

By the way,this is the reason why I think the proposals to limit the access of "mentally ill" people to guns - proposals that pop out, regularly, after every mass shooting that happens in the US -  is, at best, a move  to appease the electorate...

These controls are going to fail, because the associated bureaucracy is going to be as labyrinthine as it always is, because there are always ways around it for a determined person that is not above recurring to criminal means and, finally, because really deranged persons - those with actual intention to use guns to maim and kill - will just stay the hell away from any mental health professional who could report them, in order to avoid losing access to their beloved toys.

Also, as someone else  pointed out, being certified paranoid doesn't automatically mean that your neighbour - which has no intention of ever meet a therapist, just to end gun-less like you - may  not really be thinking about how to kill you...

So, either where I live nobody has a weapon (I do not care about criminals - a professional criminal may kill you with a spoon, and you'd wish he just had used a gun), or  - certified crazy or not - I want mine.


Final note: I like the right to bear guns in the US constitution, because it is contingent to the right of the people to mount a guerrilla against the government in case it turns dictatorial - which, given the situation of my own country, would feel nice to have, though probably useless. 

By the way, I think it is what makes the whole "war on terror" incredibly fun to watch from this side of the pond... or creepy, if you read it as the preparation for when an increasingly undemocratic US government will have to crush violent dissidents at home - which could as well be - and once one considers that France seems to be sliding in the same direction.

Or, if you prefer... I rather live in a gun free country - as I do - but, when they say "the government wants to take our guns away", the right wing nuts may not be nuts at all.

The Singularity

 Note: unscrewing the bottom lap, to access the fake vagina between its legs, voids the warranty.

WowWee Femisapien v2 - because, let's be honest, there is only one kind of  Robot we'd like to see

The singularity is the purported moment when a self-improving artificial intelligence will appear, and likely take over the world.

There is a ton of reasons why this will not happen any time soon.

Most of artificial intelligence research is veering away, as much as possible, from trying to obtain full scale intelligence.

The failure of AI in the 70s - in delivering to the promises - has deeply scarred the field.

Talk about "hard AI" is a sure way to lose grants and financing, so at the best the aim is to reach an ant-like level of intelligence.

Getting the equivalent intelligence of an ant is already hard enough, but it is also enough to create cars and trucks that drive themselves (way before cars, we'll see automatized trucks and auto-buses(1)...) or robots that can be taught how to flip a new hamburger, by the senior staff in a McDonald, in a quarter of an hour.

It is enough to have completely automatized drones - so, it is no surprise that much of the current robotic research is sponsored by the US military - and, over time, passenger aircrafts without pilots (many modern jet-liners are already automatized to the point that the pilots are there only for landings and take-offs; getting the extra mile would cut some hundred thousand dollar-years-per plane of operative expenses ).

The intelligence of an ant is, hence, already more than enough to leave almost everybody out of job.

So, why some think so hard to the singularity?

Well, if the technology keeps improving(3), risk is it will be reached inadvertently.

And a badly chosen prime motive for an auto-evolving intelligence could, indeed, spell a disaster.

The paper-clip maximizer scenario (where such intelligence exterminates the whole planet to get materials to build paper-clips) is not so impossible...

On the other hand, some may hope.

That a humanist intelligence of this kind could take over the world, and made it a bit more just, overcoming the core of greed and egotism at the heart of almost every man that makes so that millions are starving, while hundreds goes around in a Bugatti.

In other words, some hope that a truly altruistic super-intelligence will give the world a socialism that actually works.

Pretty much like others wait for the return of Christ...

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(1) There is a mine, in a remote region of Australia, where 500 tons robotised trucks are hauling materials even now, with a way dumber than an ant computer as driver. 

(2) Maybe not me, I hope

(3) IF.. the so called "Moore's law" isn't a law, but rather just a business model, a way to force people into buying new computers way before the ones they have are really worn out; the original version of the law, to say so, died already ten years ago. 


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Excerpt

She likes to shag with men inside huge flurry costumes. If I knew Greek, I could propose a "-philia" for it.

<<

It is probably too much to ask, at this historical juncture, to do with "paraphilia" as Beier does with his neologism of "dissexuality"
—to squarely define it as "a sexual expression of a failure to conform to social norms" (Beier, 1998, p. 134)
and thus to acknowledge that the sex offence is simply a banal battle between a resourceful conspiracy of social conformists ("society") and the incidental erotic dissidents it loves to hate.

Although entertained by anthropologists for decades (Gayle Rubin is one), such an honest admittance will be resisted by most people who derive a career and a daily wage from the formulaic convention that they are working with sick (not just ill-fitting) people.

>>

from "'Paraphilia': Acultural or Anti-Anthropological?"

Diederik F. Janssen, MD

Nijmegen, The Netherlands

[Sexual Offender Treatment, Volume 9 (2014), Issue 2]

I do not remember how I stumbled on this, but I found it oddly comforting.

In the history of the world, societies have condoned - or even considered desirable - almost every kind of [sexual?] behaviour, that has been (or is) considered deviant in some others.

The ways the ancient Greek managed the education of their youngsters springs to mind (not only the Athenians and their curious habit of mentoring promising young males over the points of well doing adult males'... a-hem, but also the Spartans tradition of having their daughters vigorously making athletic exercise in the nude, along with their brothers), but the examples goes way beyond it, and reach contemporary times.

For example, some may feel odd that, while the practice of infibulation is rightfully condemned throughout the whole developed world, in a lot of the same places circumcision (as practised by the traditional Jews) is not so strongly condemned.

OK, I feel it odd.

If one takes a step back, and doesn't consider the statistics about post-operative complications (*) - which shouldn't really count in a moral evaluation - both practices are results of traditions that requires parents to somewhat mutilate their kids, way before these are able to express an informed consent.

Both should be considered abhorrent by a modern society, not just the one that is a tradition of a bunch of poor immigrants from West Africa.

Kissing is another example... theoretically, per Pope Alexander VII's 1666 proposition, it is a deadly sin for a catholic to kiss, out of lust, even if from the beginning there is no possibility whatsoever, for anything more spicy to happen. 

Swingers may seem a modern development, or as a symptom of the debasement of the modern world mores, but Ritual Spouse Exchange and Co-Marriage had been part of the Inuit culture for centuries(**),  before the first swinger club ever opened.


The Pharaohs of Egypt practised and endogamy so strict, that it involved relatively often father-daughter incests and a lot of sister-brother ones,  with offspring (it is a mystery to me, how they managed for two and a half century the kind of generic derive that one can see in the Borbone portrayed by Goya - apparently, the original genetic stock was remarkably good).

In the same line, some thirty years ago a social researcher found, spelunking through Parochial registers and correlating names and dates of the newborns, that in an area of the Northern Italy it was customary for daughters to be initiated to sex by their fathers, the night before the wedding.

The tradition should have died sometime at the half of the XIX century (just some millennia after the act was declared illegal), but God only knows from whence it came - my suspect, the late neolithic.

In some places today, being an active homosexual doesn't make you a posh consumer, to be courted by advertising companies looking for those dimes you are not (were not... times are a' changin') going to spend into raising your kids.

In these places, it makes you liable of death by decapitation, with a cheering crowd all around, or at least of a lengthy stay in mandatory therapy (***).

And the list goes on, and on, and on.

So, whatever is your favoured paraphilia, cool your head and relax.

Sometime, somewhere, in the past or in the future, in the fullness of time, there is a society where it was, it is or it will be considered "cool" (****) .

In the meanwhile, be a good citizen, bide your time and fake believing what the social conformists around you say of the argument.

Don't let them know that you know that they are just ass-holes full of shit.

They usually do not take it as lightly as they should.

* Infibulation tend to produce problems throughout the whole life of a great many part of its patients, usually by complicating urinary processes. Male circumcision, a lot  less so... but, botched circumcisions resulting in lifetime impotence - or complete loss of the penis - are not unheard of.

**  Possibly motivated - at the very bottom - by a dramatic need to keep the genetic pool as dynamic as possible, in some of the less populated regions of the planet? If the -roughly- 10% of illegitimate children that every society seems to produce is indeed a survival need of human groups,obviating to it in a place where you can spend years before meeting someone outside your group can require pretty drastic measures

*** The fact that admitting homosexuality as a normal inclination implies to admit that a lot of sexual mores are in effect arbitrary societal customs, has often been used as an excuse to oppose this recognition ("if we start with them faggots, then bestiality, then incest... where to draw the line?" - I draw it on the SSC border). By the way, I am not sure... is homosexuality still a grave illness, in China, or they finally reached this century, on it?

**** I was going to say, unless it involves some homicides, then I remembered the various moments in history where human sacrifices have been considered more than acceptable. By the way, if you live in a society where entertaining your personal -philia is a problem to you, and know of one contemporary place  where it is no, start sparing money for the plane ticket, kid. Millions did it already.... and, don't worry. The families never understand why.