The Inferno

Pretty sweet, wot?

I hate what America has become

Date: 2009-10-28, 9:58PM PDT

There are so many reasons that frankly, it’s hard to pick a place to start:

First of all…..when 28% of you brain dead fucking morons give a blithering IDIOT like Sarah Palin positive approval ratings and think she ought to run for president in 2012, it really makes me sick to know I am lumbered with that many mouth-breathing Cro-Magnons I unfortunately have to consider as my fellow countrymen….trust me…..I don’t. You motherfuckers are beyond help.

And before you go thinking this is a “liberal” based rant…..that brings me to one more item on an ever-lengthening list.

This “Liberal” versus “Conservative” paradigm that so many of you simple dunces buy into…..as BOTH parties sell you out to the multinational corporations, banks and special interests that actually run Washington D.C.)…..you do this STUPID dance every day, blithely detatched from the reality that YOU YOURSELF are helping to DIVIDE AND CONQUER the nation, as you myopically beat your little Hannity/Olberman drum of FUTILE self -righteous indignation. PATHETIC.

THIS is a nation of PUSSIES AND FUCKING COWARDS. If this nation had any BALLS WHATSOEVER, there would be a trail of DEAD MEN SWINGING FROM THE ENDS OF ROPES leading from AIG, thru WALL STREET, the not-so “Federal” reserve, the 9/11 commission, and right through every other set-up con-job you people just buy into like a bunch of CATTLE BEING LED TO SLAUGHTER.

It’s not that Americans don’t give a fuck…..every misled, misdirected group that goes out and crusades for the “Grand Cause” they think is responsible for the decimation of this ONCE great nation proves that…..the problem IS that the problem ISN’T illegal aliens (i.e. Minutemen) or Democrats in Washington (i.e. Teabaggers) or conservative policies (i.e. Code Pink)…….the problem is …… AMERICANS THEMSELVES.

AMERICANS have sat on THEIR ASSES while Washington and the Pentagon have BANKRUPTED THE TREASURY and sent our sons and daughters into MEAT GRINDERS in Iraq and Afghanistan for WMD’s and connections to 9/11 that did NOT EXIST and even AFTER the overwhelming evidence that the intel was “swept all up” (doctored, falsified, unreliable) you STUPID SHEEP keep buying into the BRAIN DEAD notion that somehow, these wars are for the FREEDOM of America.

You’re an IDIOT. They’re wars for EMPIRE.

Your son’s and daughter’s BLOOD is being used as OIL to grease an evil, out of control WAR MACHINE….Your money and financial security is being DEVOURED by Wall St. and the Federal Reserve, with collusion from YOUR ELECTED REPRESENTATIVES, and your standard of living is slowly eroding into a two-class system as the middle class is being FORCED INTO EXTINCTION……

……and you do NOTHING to stop ANY of it.

You ignorant FOOLS who send shotgun Emails to all your friends warning of “death panels” and other such HEALTH INSURANCE INDUSTRY PROPAGANDA, yes, you friggin’ GOMERS actually think the Health Insurance Industry has your best interests in mind, and it’s “dat mean ol’ gubmint” that wants to penalize you by providing your family health care that isn’t profit-based.

MEDICARE only got passed because it effectively REMOVED the highest-risk group to the insurance providers (the elderly) from the ‘pool’ of prospective insurees, thereby minimizing their financial exposure. It’s completely lost on most people that catastrophic illness is the main reason for personal bankruptcy….and that 75% of those who had to file HAD health insurance.

And this is the ’status quo’ many of you are defending. You are BEYOND dense.

America has lost it’s HONOR, as well as it’s collective senses. I don’t wish upon America any malice or catastrophe…..trust me, this is happening with assistance and collusion from the top down, not from some Arab in a cave. I just want to leave peacefully and live in a place that doesn’t have leaders that hope for a “catastrophic and catalyzing event” to promote a war agenda that takes pride in kicking the shit out of unarmed peasants living in the dirt….then blames them for retaliating. Can’t wait to see this dysfunctional madhouse in my rear view mirror.

When you abide by a system of government that you FULLY EXPECT will side AGAINST YOU and WITH corporate lobbyists (MANY of whom represent interests that are not even from the USA) who BRIBE THEM WITH BALES OF CASH….and are working 24/7 to maximize their profits and minimize their potential competition in the marketplace…..all at the expense of you and your family….and don’t lift a FINGER to do ANYTHING TO CHANGE IT……you fucking DESERVE WHAT’S COMING. What might that be…..?

Think Germany and the treaty of Versailles…..when a wheelbarrow full of Deutschmarks is what it took to buy a MEAL.

WHEN the dollar collapses…..not IF, WHEN…..THAT’S when you’ll really begin to see the true definition of FASCISM. The unity of government and corporations to economically and militarily control it’s people. History WILL repeat itself….but if you’re like so many of the morons in the USA who think they’re so smart but don’t know SHIT…..it will all be NEW TO YOU. Good luck…..you’ll need it.

This is the most ARROGANT nation in EXISTANCE, second only to ISRAEL….and since ALL of our politicians are falling over backwards to kiss Israel’s ASS on a daily basis, fully knowing that exposing any inconvenient TRUTH about them equals political SUICIDE….that and the mass media in America that feeds it’s daily ration of BULLSHIT is controlled by individuals biased towards them as well….ANYONE who thinks they know what is going on because they read TIME magazine and watch CNN, FOX news OR MSNBC…..you are DELUSIONAL.

One nation under God….? What a JOKE.

MONEY is God here pal….even people who are reading this who hate the words I typed KNOW this is true. What does it say in your bible about the love of money? The root of all evil, no?

How DARE this nation question human rights abuses of other nations after Abu Ghraib and countless other bombing and torture campaigns, where it was stated it is passable to crush the testicles of young boys in front of their fathers to extract information.

How DARE this nation deign to be the world’s nuclear police when WE are the only nation to ever USE NUKES.

MOST of you actually consider Palestinians as TERRORISTS, when it is THEY who have been occupied, imprisoned behind 25 foot high concrete walls and denied basic human decency by APARTHEID ISRAEL. Those of you who get your info from American media REMAIN IGNORANT OF THE TRUTH.

You’re probably wondering if I’m some Arab, or other person hostile to “America’s Freedoms” lol…. Yeah, you’re really free here…….

Free to go BANKRUPT if you get sick, even if you HAVE HEALTH INSURANCE.

Free to vote on DIEBOLD voting machines that can flip elections and leave no paper trail.

Free to watch your life savings DWINDLE AND EVAPORATE into the pockets of the ROBBER BARONS you PATRONIZE.

Free to watch your JOB get shipped to CHINA….and then you fucking FOOLS buy the goods PRODUCED FORM THOSE JOBS at Wal Mart, further REWARDING AND ENCOURAGING businesses to CONTINUE this pattern. I have never bought a fucking THING from Wal-Mart, and if you have…..you are a simple, stupid FUCKSTICK.

You’re free to be video monitored, photographed by the millisecond at traffic light traps, electronically surveiled, searched with no warrant, shaken down and partially disrobed at airports, free to be told how much shampoo you are allowed to carry in your luggage, free to buy processed foods that give you cancer, genetically altered vegetables that contain neat things like INSECT DNA, free to pay more than ANY OTHER COUNTRY ON THE PLANET for pharmeceuticals, free to be the pharmaceutical company’s guinea pig for drugs that have potentially catastrophic side effects, free to have PUBLIC POLICY DICTATED TO YOU by government ‘officials’ that have dual citizenship with ISRAEL, free to have ANY MEANINGFUL TRUTH WITHHELD FROM YOU by the mass media……

…..and free to be one of the ONE OUT OF EVERY HUNDRED AMERICANS living in PRISON.

Land of the free, home of the brave??

More like land of the SHEEP and home of the SLAVE.

Today I learned that there are snipers atop buildings in the downtown core, in case any “terrorists” attack or there isn’t enough cheering when $country wins $medal. Click to enlarge the pics.

Anybody know what kind of sniper rifle that is?

EDIT – The comments have taught me that the two guns aren’t “sniper” rifles. In my ignorance of all things firearms-related, I assumed they were so. Thanks, Reddit.

Should have let them all drown, Alan. Down to the bottom of Davy Jones’ locker where the fish could pick them clean for millennia. And by extension, let them starve. In the hundreds of thousands. The things you could have exacted for a modicum of respect.

This is interesting. I’d never heard of this before, but it warrants some analysis.

Look at where we sit. more individualistic AND more secular-rational than the good ol’ US. Japan and Sweden are at the top, who would have thought? I wonder how old this is, it shows Eastern and Western Germany. It also misspells Czech as “Chech”. Look how close Poland is to India, it’s not too hard to believe, I guess. How is Turkey more traditional than India or Poland? Kemal must be turning over in his grave.

Also, Uruguay’s secular enough to belong to “Catholic Europe”. I guess they broke out of Latin America after all. Let me know your thoughts.

One of the most fascinating topics is linguistics and I consider myself an armchair linguist. Several forms of consonant shift exist, and can be seen throughout the varied family of Indo-European languages, which are spoken by a majority of humans today. Let me illustrate with some examples:

b/v alternation

Seen in words like probe/prove. Even in names like Elizabeth/Elizaveta and so on. Also heard in other people’s diction. For example, whenever an accented Spanish-speaking person says “Vancouver”, most Canadians will undoubtedly hear it as “Bancouver”. This is because the sounds we make that are responsible for ‘b’ and ‘v’ are very similar, and only the slightest movement of the lips differentiates between ‘b’ and ‘v’.

t/d

t and d are both dentals, i.e., they are sounds made with your teeth. Don’t ask a toothless person to utter them, because without teeth they sound like ‘pf’. As words with t and d migrate, they alternate to give us lots of words. This is visible even within a single language, as people hear and mishear and transcribe slightly different variations of the same word. Consider Willingdon/Willington.

d/th

This applies to the soft d seen in many European languages, but which is missing in English. The closest an English-speaker can come to making this sound is the  ‘th’ sound in ‘thee’ or ‘there’. Which is why it’s no surprise that these consonants undergo an orthographic transformation to end up as th. Witness deist/theist or danke/thank.

f/v

This one is huge. One massive culprit is German, where the v is pronounced as f, which is not shocking, since v and f result from almost the same anatomical movements. Textbook example: vier/four.

b/p

Similarly, b and p are both labials, i.e., they are both sounds produced with the lips.  Over time, as words migrate between languages, the b’s and p’s alternate and give us variants. Token example: bop/pop.

v/w

This gives most non-native speakers more grief than it’s worth. Some people simply can’t pronounce the v, and pronounce everything as if it’s a w. An example of this being present not due an inability of the speakers is German, where their sounds are swapped. In any case, w is a fairly recent letter and as such, deserves little respect.

j/y/i

This can be seen in the hordes of Norwegians who pronounce Java as Yava, and the tons of languages where j is pronounced as y. Well, j itself is the newest addition to the English language and simply supplants i. An example: major/mayor. This one needs no further examples.

k/g

This applies to the hard g, not the soft g. Best example: gnos/know. Again, this is because both sounds are velars, produced by the roof of the mouth.

m/n

Both sounds being nasal in nature, it is easy to mix them up, especially since most people don’t articulate well these days. Witness the confusion when you meet someone who either talks too fast or mumbles with incoherent diction. In fact, I bet it’s sounds like these that gave rise to the whole Alpha, Bravo, Charlie code, to prevent any confusion. This one is a bit more involved and involves a rule called ‘assimilation’, where a consonant is changed to become more like the surrounding one. Consider the word ‘imbibe’. it comes about from in + bibere, which means ‘to drink’ in Latin. Since we have an n + b, the n is assimilated and becomes an m. The same holds for impossible, imbue and so on. This is a complex topic and one I’ll discuss later.

r/d

This can be seen in some Slavic tongues, where the name Mary becomes Madia, for example. A very thick, rhotacizing effect can change an r into a d, if sufficiently ‘hard’ enough.

These can also be daisy-chained, giving us quite the sequence of alternations. Consider p->b->v->f. Thus, where we had a word with p, we end up with one that now starts with f. Best example: pater/father. The link is more convoluted, probably looking more like pater-> pader-> vader-> fader-> father.

There are many many more which I haven’t covered. After all, this was just the primer. Since the primary vehicle of consonant shift up until now has been spoken or written speech, with spoken speech being the overwhelming majority, it is now time to consider the new kid on the block: typed speech.

Written speech was limited in the damage it could cause, since it was usually proofread and corrected by legions of editors, only too happy to wield the red pen like the sword of Tamerlane. Alas, typed speech on the internet suffers no such restrictions. Let us ignore non-English, non-standard keyboard layouts for now. Since the majority of English communication on the internet occurs via the humble 104- key keyboard, we can focus on this particular specimen.

Here are a list of common mistakes people have made when writing me emails or in instant messaging. I’ve described them in terms of the same notation above.

b/v

m/n

k/l

g/h

w/e

r/t

s/d

c/v

u/i

c/x

We notice right away that b/v and m/n already exist. Typing mistakes can only make them stronger. We can also discard the ones with vowel/consonant pairings, since on being read aloud, it is likely that they will be dismissed as being improbable. This leads us to discard w/e.

We’re left with k/l. at this point, we have to decide if such jumps are possible. k is a hard velar sound, while l is a soft liquid sound. Try saying a word with k in it after substituting l for k. Let us consider cake -> cale -> lale. Or kiss -> liss. How about kilometre -> lilometre? That just sounds silly, as does lale. But kiss -> liss might work. It seems that a soft word like liss, composed of a liquid sound like l and sibilants like s might actually do a better job, onomatopoeically speaking. So perhaps we need to amend the rules. k- > l, iff l precedes sibilants? How about the other way around, l-> k? Liter -> kiter or lion – > kion. Seems doubtful, but you have to understand it’s very hard for us to do this. Most of us are too far entrenched in English to think of these as anything beyond laughable. But to someone who is unaware that lion sounds right since it derives from leo and so on, why, kion for a big yellow cat might make perfect sense.

G -> h could succeed on a very slender stem of probability, but even I must admit it’s unlikely. Many words have a ‘gh’ combination in them, and simply deleting one or the other might still leave the meaning unchanged. The biggest obstacle here is the fact that h is an aspirant, a sound made by breathing out air, something g is most definitely not.

R -> t probably has the biggest chance of succeeding. Since r/d occurs already, and so does d/t, we can easily get r-> d.

C -> v also has a moderately good chance of succeeding, simply because they’re so similar. The labial v might be a little hard to overcome, however.

U -> i is probable as well, since throughout history vowels have been shuffled around. We’re focusing on consonant shift here, so we’ll leave this advanced topic for later.

Finally c -> x awaits. We need to remember that the letter x is simply shorthand for ‘ks’ or ‘cs’, with a hard ‘c’ of course. Words that are spelled ax can just as easily be spelled acs or aks. However, does this mean that c -> x is probable? Consider ax -> ac, or mix -> mic. All that’s missing is the final s, which could be forgiven, if and only if the non-s word wasn’t an already-extant word. Ac would work for this reason, but mic wouldn’t. How about the other way around? Spic -> spix or nick -> nix? The addition of the s leaves the original word’s meaning almost unaltered, except for imposing a plural definition. This is something that might be coped with, especially given the current decline of plural usage ubiquitous today.

One must remember that I’m an armchair linguist and this is merely my hobby, but it should be exceedingly interesting to see which of these, if any ever come to pass. After all, languages are living things and only imbeciles seek to control them. The most we can do is marvel at their beauty and see which way their inky wonders flow.

This is a truly horrific excerpt from Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra. You can find it on Page 864.

On Diwali night, young Bhavani was picked up by the police in the village of Rekhan. Bhavani was deep in a drunken sleep in the house of a woman, a widow, when the police found him. And so handsome Bhavani disappeared into the grinding jaws of justice, and Natwar Kahar was left raging. The police had obviously received a tip-off, a very specific one. Natwar Kahar examined his suspects, all the villagers, and he finally settled on Bhavani’s woman. She was the only one who knew that Bhavani would come to her bed that Diwali night, that he had a weakness for good rum. She had sent her two children to her mother’s house, and that on Diwali night. So Natwar Kahar had her seized and brought up to his camp. He asked for her name – which was Ramdulari – and then he asked her for a confession. Ramdulari protested, she was innocent, she would never do such a thing, and especially she would never betray Bhavani. She was a tall woman, Ramdulari, not beautiful but with a long, lush body and a fast walk. Her husband had died of kalazar during a flood some eight years ago. She had raised her two boys, and maintained the house and survived. When she spoke to Natwar Kahar, she had her head covered but she looked very directly at him and did not beg, or tremble, or look afraid. Natwar Kahar insisted on a confession, and she shook her head, and spoke back at him impatiently, saying that Bhavani was dear to her, as much as he was to Natwar Kahar.

So Natwar Kahar convened a people’s court that very same evening. Ramdulari was tried, the evidence was examined and she was convicted. She again refused the chance of confession and self-criticism. The sentence was, of course, death, as it always was for betrayal. But Natwar Kahar wanted to make an example of Ramdulari. Instead of proceeding with the customary beheading, he cut her a little at a time. The next morning, he called the squad together, and in front of them he cut off all her toes and fingers. He did it with a small knife which was kept about the camp for stripping poles and saplings. She screamed, and bled, and Natwar Kahar laughed and had the camp doctor attend to her. ‘Keep her alive,’ Natwar Kahar said. The doctor was not really a doctor. He had once been a compounder, and he had never encountered multiple amputations. But he had some experience with bullet wounds and cuts, and Ramdulari survived. She was given food regularly, and it became something of a camp amusement to watch her try to eat with the pads of her hands, and bend double to lick up grains of rice from the dirt.

Aadil saw Ramdulari three weeks after her trial. He hadn’t believed the story when he had first heard it, about Natwar Kahar’s punishment of the informing whore. He thought it was good propaganda, effective in preventing the Bhavani Singh situation from occurring again. Even when Aadil came to Natwar Kahar’s camp, to pick up a delivery of cash, he did not think to mention the woman. He thought she was dead and the matter closed. He had finished putting the plastic-wrapped stacks of notes in his jhola when Natwar Kahar asked, with a grin, ‘Do you want to see Ramdulari?’

Aadil didn’t know whose name that was, and Natwar Kahar explained with a proprietary pride. Aadil followed him, the bag heavy over his shoulder. The stench from the pit pressed at Aadil’s face, but Natwar Kahar walked on, unconcerned. They stood, overlapping the sloping hole. At the bottom, in the moist yellow and brown mess, there was a large moving object. Aadil couldn’t make out what it was. It was neither human nor animal, nothing that he had ever seen before. It moved in sideways jerks and spasms, something like the little crabs that popped up from the sand on the river’s edge. Then Aadil’s head swam softly and lifted, and the sun shifted its arc, and he saw that below him was a woman, but strangely attenuated. She was not complete.

‘We cut her at knees and elbow four days ago,’ Natwar Kahar said, chopping at his arm with the edge of his hand. ‘I thought for sure she was gone. There was too much blood. But the bitch won’t die.’

Ramdulari was looking at Aadil. He felt himself swaying, unable to look away. Her eyes were enormous and dark and remote, and he could read nothing in them, not pain or sorrow. The dark hair wrapped around her face and her lips drew back. She was saying something. But what? He was sure she was speaking. He couldn’t hear her, not past the roaring that came from inside his body, everywhere, his arms and legs and stomach, like the flapping of a thousand wings. Natwar Kahar was saying something. What?

‘If we put food and water on the other side, over there, she crawls. It takes hours, but she gets there. She just won’t die.’

Hearing Natwar Kahar’s voice, hoarse and low, broke Aadil’s trance. He was able to look away. Natwar Kahar was watching Ramdulari, and he was almost admiring, almost respectful. He was rubbing his chin. Aadil heard the scrape of his fingers over his white stubble. Natwar Kahar said, ‘She’s as strong as a horse.’

Aadil reeled away. He found the support of a tree and vomited at its roots. He finished, and Natwar Kahar was waiting for him, one arm folded across his chest, the other smoothing out his moustache.

I know it`s yet another book excerpt, but with school out of the way, I`ve been catching up on my reading. The book is full of other tragedies and mind-numbing brutalities. I picked it up because of its Slumdog-Millionaire-esque qualities, being the biopic of a gangster slumlord from Bombay and so on. This book is excellent and infinitely more gripping than the Slumdog movie. It`s a bit hefty, but that`s good, since there`s more to enjoy.

Not only is the build-up immense, the punchline is as anticlimactic as the Obama presidency.

Having grown too old to ring the bell in the cathedral tower, Quasimodo, the hunchback of Notre Dame, ran an ad in the local newspaper for a replacement.

An armless man appeared at Quasimodo’s door, and the old ring-master asked him, “Are you here for the job of bell ringer?”

“Yes, I am”

“But how can you ring the bell when you have no arms?”

“That’s easy. I may lack arms, but I possess an extremely tough skull. I simply run at the bell and strike it with my forehead. The tone produced is absolutely exquisite.”

“All right,” conceded Quasimodo and hired the fellow.

The man ascended the spiral staircase, climbed into the bell tower, ran to the bell, and struck it with his forehead, indeed making a lovely clang. Alas, though, the bell swung back pendularly, smashed into the poor chap, and knocked him out of the tower. He splatted on the cobblestoned far below.

When the police arrived at the scene, an officer asked, “Mr. Quasimodo, do you know this man?”

“Yes, I do,” answered Quasi. “He was an employee of mine.”

“For our records, please give us his name.”

Quasimodo furrowed his brow. “I don’t know his name, but his face rings a bell.”

Shortly thereafter, Quasimodo placed a second ad in the paper asking for new bell-ringing applicants. A second gentleman appeared who looked exactly like the first, including the state of armlessness.

Quasimodo asked the new man, “Are you here for the position of bell ringer?”

“Yes, I am,” replied the second man.

“Then I have two questions for you. First, am I wrong or do you look exactly like another fellow who was recently in my employ and who came to a tragic end?”

“That man was my older brother,” replied the applicant. “Indeed, many people have remarked that I look just like him.”

“You look so much like him,” Quasimodo went on, “that you too lack arms. How do you propose to ring the bell?”

“Easy. Like my brother, I too have an exceeedingly tough forehead, which I use to ring the bell, but I am more agile than my brother, and I have learned to get out of the way of the bell’s backswing.”

“Fine,”sighed Quasimodo with relief. “You may start immediately.”

The second gentleman mounted the spiral staircase, climbed up to the tower, and ran headlong into the bell, producing as exquisite a tone as had his brother. As the bell swayed back toward him, he deftly stepped aside and avoided getting clobbered bythe return swing.

Alas, though, three nights later, the new bell ringer got stinking drunk. He staggered up the spiral staircase, lurched toward the bell, and struck it with his forehead. As he stood there swaying, the bell swung back and knocked him out of the tower and onto the cobblestones below.

Again the police arrived. “Do you know this man, Mr. Quasimodo?”

“Yes, he too was an employee of mine, ” answered the hunchback.

“May we have his name, please?”

“I don’t know his name either, but he’s a dead ringer for his brother”

This pun is good, but it demands too much perseverance. A pun’s fleeting beauty lies in its ephemeral understanding, the tacit knowledge that it is a wordplay that needs no deeper insight or thorough investigation. A two-part pun like this deserves little mercy, if any. Only the most avid logolepts would find this pun enjoyable. This joke is from The Miracle of Language, by Richard Lederer. Read it, stranger.

Today I’ll talk about subscriptions. Not to magazines or anything so banal, but subscribing to the bigger things in life.

So, what is a subscription? A subscription is the amount of emotional investment in a system, belief or otherwise. I suppose the word “belief” is redundant, since there can be no emotional investment unless you agree or disagree vehemently. Consider the case of sports. A subscriber to sports, any sport, is emotionally invested in their sport.  They know many things about their sport that the average layman doesn’t know, and presumably are well-versed in the sport itself. A firsthand knowledge of the system is not required, as seen in the millions of people who follow sports with breathtaking fanaticism but don’t play them.

How can we measure the intensity of such a subscription? It’s not an easy task. A good indicator is the age at which someone was exposed to the system. Any system which can impress someone has a much higher chance of making a subscriber out of them, and you’re always more impressionable when younger. Religion makes spectacular use of this. Witness the Jesuit saying “Give me the child until he is 7, and I will show you the man”.

The amount of friction generated between two people is a direct result of their subscriptions. Perhaps the easiest way to avoid friction and get along with every body is to simply be subscription-free, thereby making you well lubricated for any form of social discourse. This may not be tenable in all contexts, since people usually have subscriptions to their welfare, their kids’ welfare and so on. Apart from the bottom layer of Maslow’s hierarchy, why would anybody commit to anything on an intellectual level? It almost seems as if the minute you subscribe to something, you shear off numerous alternative possibilities that might have been worth exploring.

But is believing in nothing really freedom? Surely one must have some principles to live by. Hoary old apes will tell you about morals and ethics and other watchwords, things you simply must subscribe to, in order to function in society and so on. I’m tempted to say that believing in nothing is possibly the greatest form of freedom you can achieve in the world we live in. Concerned about anti-abortion or pro-life arguments? Not if you don’t care either way. How about religion? The same applies if you breezily ignore them all. What about politics then? Surely, your political views impact your way of life. Not if you skirt that entire can of worms by a mile. Who’s in power and who will be in power has scarcely ever mattered to the average Joe, who is too busy getting skewered by whoever’s in power to even care.

How about holidays like Christmas or the Chinese New Year? Again, a liberating dose of apathy will help you AND your chequebook while others rush to give each other gifts destined for landfills. Plus, you can get so much more done when not surrounded by sycophantic supplicants of whatever man-made festivity is upon you. What about sports? Worried or excited about the Olympics? The World Cup? Some tennis tournament or other ball-and-stick sport? Well, now you don’t have to be if you simply don’t care.

How about things like TV shows or books or movies, where people over-analyze and pore over fictional characters and harangue each other to death over the imagined characteristics of people created by people they’ve never met? How hard do you laugh at people who know too much trivia about a particular TV show you considered stupid and beneath contempt? Exactly. Not worth subscribing to, right? Right.

But, if you cut out music, movies, sports, books, religion, politics and holidays, what are you left with? Some might argue that that makes for a drab existence. I beg to differ. You’re free to sample any of those, just not to subscribe to any of them. The difference is that you’re not burdened with unnecessary obligations to stay updated on anything that you’re not subscribed to. Picture a hockey fan fretting over the trade of one player to some team or another, since that is how those free-wheeling mercenaries operate. Now picture me, who’s blissfully unaware of anything to do with hockey or hockey players or anything as involved as hockey trades. Ignorance truly is bliss.

But what if you really, really like something? Let’s say you really love books by Waugh. Is it not natural to pore over his every word, to analyze the merits and undercurrents of his life’s work? Surely a genius like Waugh deserves a little bit of your time. I’d have to argue that he deserves only as much time as he warrants out of the pantheon of great writers. Perhaps a little less than Dostoevsky or Kipling, but certainly more than someone like Stephen King. But to someone not subscribed to books, these names mean zilch.

So, how does one cultivate a sophisticated, empty veneer through which no subscriptions get through? The answer is simple: cynicism. A cynic knows that there is only one possible outcome to a situation, the worst. He differs from the pessimist in that he can spot the fatal pitfall in the situation and laugh about it, while the pessimist doesn’t exactly chuckle when things go wrong.

Back to subscriptions. This graph shows the proclivity of the average person for the average subscription, based on their age. The average person starts off eager to subscribe, and then it fades with age. This is only natural, you can’t teach an old dog new tricks and all that rot. A person who’s more gullible than average might be more willing to subscribe to other things as they age as well, the trick is not to be so open-minded that your brains fall out.

Keep in mind that these are just my initial musings and ramblings on a topic which I’ve been pondering for some time now. Expect the theory to get more polished and refined as time goes by and I come up with a better system for it.

You know it’s a prison state when….

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Ye gods, what a terrific slab o’ wax!

The new Nile album was released on Nov 3rd and I got it on Nov 6th. After spinning it nonstop from then until now, I feel I’m qualified to write a review.

The album starts with Kafir!, which is Arabic for “Nonbeliever” or “Infidel” or some other quaint concept. An excellent intro riff, with some standard Middle-Eastern sounding chants, juxtaposed with Nile’s typical brutality. The refrain of “There is No God but God” is taken from the Koran and is probably meant to symbolize the Islamic takeover of Egypt. However, this happened thousands of years after the Pharaohs, so the conection is tenuous at best. Either way, the song is a crusher, if historically inaccurate.

Hittite Dung Incantation and Utterances of the Crawling Dead have sinuous main riffs that get your foot tapping. At blistering speeds of 400 mph, the rhythm section weaves like a wounded tiger in the long grass. Great stuff.

The title track is pretty strong, with a fairly typical Nile-esque refrain.

4th Arra of Dagon wins points for the Lovecraftian reference. The ending, starting 5:29 is simple but very effective, easily the catchiest part on the whole album. Where does Karl come up with these riffs?

Permitting…. is the speediest song on an album with no slow parts. Some very fine technical brutal death metal, for you novitiates. A marked contrast to Yezd…., which is all slow drums and meant to be some sort of funeral drum dirge. Melancholy and making full use of those chants again, stuff like this is Nile’s trademark.

Kem Khefa Kheshef is solid, merrilly drilling its way into your brain as it winds its way to completion. Kollias is a monster! The Eye of Ra is another blistering track, none of that soft stuff on this track.

Iskander D’hul Karnon is a very strong finish to a monstrous album. “Alexander in Karnak”? I don’t know, maybe no one does. We have the little hammer off at the end of a riff, followed by a slower part that slowly speeds up and gives us an excellent end to a bodacious album. If the long slide reminds you of Annihilation of the Wicked, well, that’s a good thing, right?

4.5 stars out of 5