h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Dear Ana, I will give your ask the thought it indubitably deserves.

It isn't rhetorical though is it; just checking, not wishing to be obdurate or to be obstinate. Your posts consistently show that you almost always have the answers before you pose the questions.

Speaking of which, how is it that you've ignored or is it that you've been so selective in what you have chosen to acknowledge?

Oh and about the spellings, this darn import language, one letter out of place one nuance misunderstood and you have totally different meanings.

Since the question was how you came to a certain conclusion, I could hardly know the answer before posing the question.

What is it you think I've ignored?

If you'll do me the kindness of re-examining your posts you will see why I assert that you already have a pretty definite idea/expectation if not a formed answer before you pose any query.

Almost always you let on what you _know that answer to be or even tell it, straight away.

Your wing is not rusty and your thoughts are well worth every farthing; and, most significantly, are Analiese - the gracious and consecrated to God?

Horseshit!!!

This post has been removed.

Dig the tune, but I wonder now if it will still happen. The window of opportunity is closing every day. France now openly defies us, and Germany will quitely fall in behind them. China and Russia both have oil contracts with the Ba'ath Govt that would be null and void if the U.S. installs a military governor after deposing Saddam. Turkey has got to be worried about it's own increasing restless Kurd population, especially if Iraq loses the ruthless dictator that has held the Kurds on the Iraqi side of the border in a death grip. Bush's handlers can undoubtedly see that even if the war goes, the only winners will be defense contractors who will once again fill the 24 hour news channels with millions of dollars of free publicity and advertising when their "smart" weapons are demonstrated repeatedly to show how bloodless mayhem can be. Nevermind all that footage was shot in the California desert last time.
Even Israel looks like it will be heading in a more moderate direction after the election, if you can define moderate as not immediatly intending to exterminate your neighbor, but instead negotiating his eventual extinction.
Top that with the unravelling of our stranglehold over the governments of South and Central America, and we have really got to get back to enforcing the Monroe Doctrine.
So I think Bush will drop below 50% approval in the polls by mid-February, and only a complete loss of composure could convince him to fight it out anyway, no matter how much it means to his father.

Amen Brother! I hope all that positive vibe will make it as you forsee it...

I don't feel so optimistic. I watched the news channel a hour this morning and the depression will probably last all day. It seems to me like bush was saying, through his mouth piece of course, that he knows better than we do what is best for us and he will make that decision. He's sure got balls is all I know, and maybe nobody will ever vote for him again, if anybody ever really did, but the damage will be done.

Hiya! Sad to note Paulie, as much as I want what Ssubnel posted to be, what you observe is the most likely scenario ... especially given that we live in a state of coup d'etat.

Coup d'etat? So true. But people would rather live in such a state than have a legitimate government it seems.

Incidently, it turns out that the Indian Land Claims Commission never issued a final report on the Western Shoshone claim before the agency was disbanded in 1978, therefore, contrary to certain court rulings, the claim has not been adjudicated, yet the BLM is acting as if it has. This is another example of how the government continues to operate in contradiction of its own laws.

Fortunately, some people are waking up. Several horse rescue organizations which were being coopted by the BLM to help steal the Dann's horse herd withdrew their support when they discovered that the agenda how little to do with the welfare of horses. This is but one example of how people can help remedy things by simply refusing to participate in illegal government activities. In time too the government agents themselves might rediscover their consciences.

What I wonder is, will we, _each of us, rediscover our consciences? I wish it will be so.

I don't think people would rather live in a state of illegitimacy. People are not basically bad perhaps it is the sad state of having lost touch with the whole.

Sincerely, I do not state this as a romantic notion but one that is of immediate concern and calls for urgent ceaseless action.

I think ?, you have to go back and reread your Engels/Marx. Until the middle class is effectively destroyed and we have really stopped the wheels of this economic wonder, it is very difficult to create radical change. The best we can do in the current state of affairs is win individual battles against the powers that be. The weight of all the nations of earth is begining to shift against the U.S. Bush sees the handwriting on the wall, and he is desperately trying to get the war machine in place before the American people see it too. Fox and CNN may try to hide the real story, but it is getting out. And I think Saddam is just a red herring anyway. The real goal was to bring back Nixon style government secrecy to aid in hiding the real agendas. Killing the unions (hello Dep. of Homeland Security), turning our National Reserves into a natural resource smorgasbord at bargain prices (hello Tongass timber industry), repealing Roe V. Wade, and eliminating the civil rights gains of the 1960's (blacks, women, gays, you're all in trouble). Top that off with the most liberal tax laws for the super-rich since the turn of the last century, and who needs a war. Bush is an orgy of greed that will take decades to undo. I forgot about the media consolidation, you probably missed the FCC public hearings regarding media consolidation, because no one covered them. And water privatization and deregulating... nevermind, I guess I made my point. The war and the destruction and destabilization is to great a risk with all the gains the Neo-Cons have made. I'm betting they call it off, and throw the oil companies a bone by opening up ANWAR and the coast of California or Florida, regardless of promises previously made regarding off-shore drilling. And if they get Chavez out of Venezuela, so much the better.

Oh, but they see it. They can almost touch it...allllllllll-mooooosssssst touch it...just one more little stretch and all...that...oil...ahhhh. You think they can let that go? That's like asking the blind to see. Maybe the thrust of global opposition will halt the effort, but this administration doesn't have much tolerance for outside opinion...or fact.

From your exposition it is to be assumed that you are well versed in the words and ideology of the Intenationale!

While I don't disagree with the hope you express as you sing to the choir, I fear it may be naive in failing to understand just how great is the scope of the ambitions of the rulers.

The striving class, how convenient that it is universally, expeditiously available to be reviled ... especially by parlour pinks.

Have you felt the cold in a tent of rags at night in the Himalayan heights after a meal of ground grass, have you huddled on the sands of a desert waiting out a storm, have you fought illness on a bare metal bed in the African jungle, have you witnessed the condition of a teenage mother in the upper Amazon who already has half a dozen children?

May I suggest a book: "The Constant Gardener" by le Carre?

BTW, you could probably rightly apply the epiteth of parlour pink to me too!

I think we don't hear or see or read more dissent because it is being actively muffled.

Today I read that the US is considering a 'limited' atomic war.

Shame on US ... especially, on those of us who do more than hit keys on a keyboard.

I just read that the US has "broad support" according to Mr. Powell. I suggest therefore that those "parlor pinks" among us direct their keyboards at him and the news organizations that report his baloney in a perhaps futile effort to educate. At least we tried.

Then I suggest that those who lurk join us not only with email but fax and snailmail and telegrams, with suitable return receipt requests, diligently copying to senators and representatives, local, and state officials. In sufficient numbers it might even become a news story all by itself.

Mr. Powell claims he can name at least a dozen countries off the top of his head who will support the US without a new UN resolution. Significantly, he didn't name them of course off the top of his head or the top of anything else. So maybe this is sounding more McCarthyish than we find comfortable?

Very well, while we're at it, let's include calls for articles of impeachment for this illegimate president. Since he presumes to go to war without a formal declaration, in defiance of the Constitution, in order to preempt an unsubstantiated threat, perhaps we can preempt his high crimes and misdemeanors before he formally commits them.

And while we are doing these things we can counsel our children not to join the military under any circumstances and our business associates not to participate in supplying the war machine.

We can contact the contractors directly, who usually have some civilian markets that tide them over between bankruptcies, that we would be more than happy to hasten their next backruptcy by witholding our consumption of their products.

Finally, but by no means the final possibility, only your imagination might dictate that, we could curtail our consumption of oil and petroleum products just little bit, but enough maybe to "send a message" of broad unsupport to the Seven Sisters that they may have crossed the line too far this time and they will simply have to find another way.

That may in fact mean we can all enjoy the experiences Kyaa cites in the Himilayan Highlands, the deserts and the Amazon Basin, if not the Great Basin, firsthand, but I think it will be better than what we're experiencing right now with this general malaise of impotence and the knowledge that by our inaction we participate in the perfidy, like good nazis.

hear! hear!

please do consider doing all of or any of the above mentioned suggestions.

Here's a url for an article written by one of the afflicted:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,881869,00.html

Professor Said's article is very insightful. It seems that he is calling on the Arab world to respond in much the same fashion as we have been calling on the Euroamerican world.

Yet as I peruse the pages of history in my studies a depressing duplication seems to emerge.

In the final years of the first century of the second millenium, a Europe shattered by terrorists from the north and consumed in internecine conflicts was called upon to assault the Saracens in another endless war that did not see it's last campaign until the adventures of Napolean, if then. Did the Crusades really end then? Why should I care?

Because it was the same Crusades, the same pattern of violence that assaulted the western hemisphere in 1492, the year Castile and Leon finally overwhelmed the last Moorish stronghold of consequence in Iberia, constructing the framework of the myth of the realm of Spain, a political fiction that is still being challenged in Navarre, Catalonia or Andalusia. But that Reconquista wasn't enough.

While Charles V attacked the Turks in North Africa, Cortez and Pizarro were assaulting the great indian empires of the Valley of Mexico, the Guatemalan Highlands, Honduras, and the Andes. Later, while courtiers of the court of Queen Elizabeth I were engaged in trade negotiations with the Sublime Porte of the Ottoman Empire, Walter Raleigh was attempting to colonize the barrier islands of the Mid-Atlantic coast of what he called Virginia, in honor of his queen.

A short time later, sympathizers of the fundamentalist rebels who were struggling to overthrow the royal house of the Stuarts planted their buckled boots on the mythical Plymouth Rock and began burning the villages of the great confederacies of the Wampanoags and Six Nations.

Did these assaults ever really end?

It seems like in the history of the so-called Western Civilization, the language changes and the "paradigm shifts" seem only to conceal the same greedy, vicious assaults on the rest of the world, over and over again, and often simultaneously in many parts of the globe. Not only is the "solution" or "settlement" long lived but far ranging, even alarmingly ubiquitous. How can this be?

How can one group of people, sharing the same cultural traditions of Greece, Rome, the Ancient Neareast and the indigenous European woods, oppress the entire world for so long and so repetitively? I fear this might sound overly critical of some people, and maybe it is, but if the question is never asked, how will we find learn the answer? So I'm asking.

The historical record is clear, right or wrong. What has been done over and over is being done again and people ask why no one resists? How can you resist, especially if, as some have suggested, you then become those who you loath? Is the answer really to unite in a common cause of universal brotherhood? Is it to forsake clan or tribal loyalties in order to overwhelm the leviathan? Maybe.

Or maybe it might be to reaffirm those loyalties that the leviathan itself has repudiated, repudiated in order to render its subjects helpless and dependent? Is this not how it has been able to amass the huge armies of conquest it has fielded for centuries to dominate whatever part of the earth it has coveted?

Or is the answer truly to organize another leviathan loyal to other universal principles than the Christian or Capitalist faiths? It seems to me that we have something like a computer template here, just fill in the blanks, whether the object be to complete the problem or its proposed solution. This is why I have my doubts.

If it were merely a matter of organizing according to the correct principles, the leviathan would have met its match long ago. The reason it hasn't, I think, is because, in such a context, the match merely becomes the new leviathan, the new oppressor, with even some of the same, old, familiar and ugly faces.

This is why I suggest that we try something both very old and, in the recent context, very different. This is why I suggest we reaffirm our tribal loyalties or make them anew if we need to. Keep our children, sisters, brothers, parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents close to us. Keep or reclaim our land, sovereignty or independence.

The leviathan flourishes when these things decline. It depends on collaborators first and last because the men who would direct it are merely men, like any others. They cannot oppress without allies and they cannot obtain allies unless they can break the family ties that have kept us more or less evenly distributed throughout our respective territories for millenia.

This is the reason for the oppression and persecution of indigenous people. They represent the last bastions of human independence in the struggle with the leviathan that seeks to concentrate the wealth of many into the households of a few.

It is therefore the template that is flawed I think. It promises the greatest good for the greatest number under whatever theology, ideology or cosmology you like, but what it always fails to mention is that the greatest number is Number One, and always someone, or some clique, will seek to become and succeed in becoming Number One, the winner or winners of the game. This, its apologists assure us, is simply the way things are, human nature or whatever.

This I think is nonsense. It's the way certain people want things to be and can manage to convince others to sacrifice their families and their sacred honor to achieve and that's all it is. As for human nature, we have thousands of years of empirical evidence for what human nature is.

Its what many of us have denied to enable the leviathan to gorge itself. It's family and all our relations in the animal and plant worlds. It's the earth and the sky that we share. It's what we are, not what some greedy bastards would like us to be. That's what human nature is.

So let them overwhelm us. That is not difficult. It only takes a sufficient number of fools willing to kill or maim for a few paltry and false promises.

Let them take the land. Our country is in our hearts too where they can neither touch it nor tax it. Let them take our languages. We'll invent new ones. Let them steal or slaughter our children. We'll raise more.

The leviathan is little different from any other terror of nature, but we know in our hearts there is really nothing to fear in the universe except what mere men would have us fear so they can get what they want.

So let them have their way.

Their organizations persist, it is true, for generations sometimes, but as long as free people draw breath, those organizations won't really endure. They'll simply be retreaded, repaired and recycled over and over until their sponsors finally realize what the Elders already knew ages ago. And if they don't realize these things, they will simply condemn themselves to an enduring hell of their own making as they already have.

Until they see these things for themselves, all we can really do is endure, if only for moments now and then, here and there, like our brothers and sisters among the other wild things.

So yes, I'm wild and proud of it. Feral human in the flesh. Look on my lives and tremble mighty Ramses. You can tame me maybe but you'll never domesticate me, lord of the domicile. Look on my beauty and despair. If only you really knew.

Analiese, you are quite the speechwriter, I am in awe.(no joke) The way I see it, we whites, caucasians, whatever you call us are not descended from Rome or Athens. We are the remains of the Huns, Goths, Celts, and Gauls. Brutally effective nomadic tribes that dominated the landscape during the contraction and fall of the more advanced Mediteranian(sp?) Empires. We picked up some of the wisdom of those ancients but usually converted them to our own brutal ends. Such as modern Christianity, which became the religion of warfare in the name of the Prince of Peace. And now we're on the march yet again, retreading the same old lines, but still the song remains the same.
The limited nuclear strike response actually is what brought North Koreas weapon technology out of the closet. They dimly remember a war against us, and after being named in the Axis of Evil, wanted to let us know they will not go quitely into the night. Powell is a fool, but I think he must soon realize if this war posturing fails, so does his dim chance of running for President as the first black man to hold the office. Bush cannot hold the cabinet together forever, with his father's old friends pushing for war and the new blood looking for a way out of it. I concur that the best answer is too berate your legislative representatives.
As far as seeing the world in all its bare splendor, I missed that. But I have seen the inside of a state prison, and I can tell you all about hell if you like. I know all about brutality and suffering. I know what people without hope really act like. And I know what it's like to be afraid to show a hint of fear. So you don't have to go far to learn about suffering, and what makes the sick and weak turn on themselves. But if I get a chance maybe I'll try.

If only Boabdil had had more heart ... a little more courage ... might the world be a different place?

Allow me to share a statement made by Gandhi, please. When asked what he thought of western civilization, the Mahatma, without a moment's hesitation, said, "it would be a good idea."

You've written eloquently and with passion Ana and have trusted the measureless unknown by offering what is deep in your heart. It is most generous and it is elegent.

Family, memory, shared belief, local action, agreed. Resist the leviathan not become a mirror of it, agreed. Live, think, act, survive ... in isolation, reconsider.

Beautiful, Ana? Perhaps, so. The compelling arrangements of thoughts attest it. Feral, Ana? Perhaps, not so. Consciousness and free will, hallmarks of being sublimely human.