Malignant Apathy

I'm not nearly as cool as the kid in this video. I'm relieved by that actually because the one thing I can't help noticing about this years-old video is that as LPC Eric unleashes pure virtuosity in a moment of spontaneous self expression, the oblivious horde strolls blithely past heedless of mastery. God it sucks to live in a world where talent is not only unappreciated, it's unnoticed.

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Bugs by any other name

SAN DIEGO – I’m one of a very few people I know who would get upset over a revelation that came to me yesterday. I don’t expect most people to care but I’m writing about it anyway. If you’re not at all interested in esoteric rants, see you tomorrow. Did you know (and I bet you didn’t) that what you used to call ‘insects’ are now more properly called ‘hexapods?’ I didn’t know that, but I do now. Hexapods. Shit you not.

All of the six-legged arthropods I was taught are insects are now lumped into the taxonomic subphylum Hexapoda. Hexapods are further divided into four sub-phyla, Insecta and three other groups with silly Greek names. I think one of them is called Pterodactyl or something. As upset as I was to learn that I was laboring under an old mental dogma, I was more troubled still by the fact that six-legged creatures hadn’t ought to be called “hexa” (six) “pod” (foot) in the first place on account of properly speaking they don’t gots foots. So imagine my dismay upon checking the lexicon to discover that in Greek, rather a precise language, ordinarily speaking, there is no distinction between ‘foot’ and ‘leg,’ both of which translate as πόδι.

With my worldview thus shattered vis-à-vis both entomology and etymology, I sank into a deep, blue funk and wondered how I’ve become an anachronism in my own time.

There’s more. Used to be there were four kinds of primates: us, apes (greater and lesser), monkeys (old world and new) and prosimians. Prosimians were so called because they weren’t truly simian yet, but were early primate forerunners of more recently evolved species. Prosimians included tarsiers, lemurs, lorises and a handful of other critters including the aye-aye (who has the coolest common name in the animal kingdom), mostly indigenous to Madagascar with a few on the African mainland and fewer in Asia. Their taxonomy reflected their similarity and the fact that they possessed more primitive features than do monkeys. Made sense to me.

Well that’s no longer the case. All extant so-called prosimians are now part of two suborders, Strepsirrhini and Haplorrhini. Modern science has determined that the two suborders’ relationship is paraphyletic and so people like me who use the term ‘prosimian’ are guaranteed to be scoffed at by naturalists in the know. That’s reason enough for me not to try to pick up chicks at a primatology convention. I’d still tap Jane Goodall, but I’m not bragging about it.

Did you know that Pluto is a planet again? Well it is, sort of. Pluto is now considered a dwarf planet, the second largest dwarf planet, in fact, right behind Eris, and the largest member of a population of bodies in the Solar System known as the Kuiper Belt. There are actually five dwarf planets; Pluto, Eris, Ceres, Haumea and Makemake (and I am not making that last one up). I guess it would be six if you count the Death Star. I was very, very comfortable knowing there were nine planets orbiting the sun. I don’t need fucking dwarf planets. How long will it be before they prefer to be called little people planets?

I don’t know where Eris is. It’s bigger than Pluto. It must have a zip code. I think it’s in Montana but I could be wrong. I have a friend who knows all about shit that doesn’t happen on earth – string theory, curved space, fucking nebulae and what-have you. I’ll ask him about Eris. He drinks like a fish so he might just make something up whether he actually knows anything about Eris or not. Plus he’s in his forties, like me, so he might just string me a load of crap:

“Oh Eris, yes, umm, Eris, you see, is a dwarf planet with the formal designation 136199 ERIS and it’s the ninth largest object known to orbit the sun directly. It has a mass 27 percent larger than Pluto and there’s a cocktail lounge in the capital city of Mylon where they make an unrivaled old fashioned. If you go there, tell Garzag the Barzoolian I said hi.”

God damned proto-monkeys with new classifications, midget planetoids, fucking bugs with fancy titles. Christ almighty. Could we maybe leave an already analyzed universe alone for a while? I want planets to be planets, insects to be insects, prosimians to be what they are, milk to be good for me and sex to be had horizontally. Of course that’s just me and I’m aging ungracefully. But whatever.

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Serena Williams would kick my ass

PALM BEACH GARDENS, FLA – "You shouldn’t hit girls." My father taught me that. A wise man, my father. He also taught me that where my older sister, Phyllis, was concerned I might have to make an exception. You see, I had a big sister who didn’t like me from the time I was born. There’s a family story about the time she was two and I was an infant and while I nursed she threw a phonebook at me and mother, knocking me off a teat and marking the first shot in a battle that would rage for decades to come.

The situation between my sister and me is better now. She lives a few thousand miles away and although she visits regularly, we no longer strike one another in anger. We haven’t come to blows since 1981, when I was 15 and went upside her like ugly on an ape before school one morning. While time mightn’t heal all wounds, it does fix the problem of being so little a girl can kick your ass any time she wants. Phyllis and I still bicker quite a bit, but in terms of actual brawling, there’s nothing going on.

Despite the détente between us, something obviously lingers in my psyche from my experience with Phyllis. It’s either that or else I have some kind of mother-hating issues stowed deeply in my subconscious. Or maybe it’s that I spent four years married to a reptile. I’m not sure. Whatever it is, I habitually surround myself with vituperating cunts. It’s a bad pattern I can’t seem to break. Whether it’s co-workers, or girlfriends, or sport pussy or whatever, I just end up immersed in a sea of horrible women. There are wonderful women in this world. I’ve seen many of them. My friends have told me about them. I know they exist.

But my own personal sphere is and always has been inhabited by the most venomous, carping, black-hearted harpies imaginable. It’s like waking up every day in the center of a Hieronymous Bosch painting. I’m not kidding. I’m surrounded by screeching demonettes, flesh-eating, winged serpents with toothed vaginas. Insatiable, life-drinking crones claw at me every waking moment and when I sleep I dream of ballistic titties firing milk shrapnel missiles in clusters all around me, trapping me in a mine field of gargantuan, subterranean, snarling twats that burst violently forth from the bloodied earth, belching out their fiendish contents, dousing me and the surrounding landscape in clotted gore.

All right. It’s not really that bad. But I was having fun. Forgive the hyperbole. I’ll discuss it in therapy. Anyway . . .

It puzzles me why my father would instruct me about the untouchability of women, given that so many of them, or at least so many I know, deserve and probably require a swift smack. I was wondering just yesterday, “Why oh why, Dad, mustn’t one hit girls?” Then I came upon something.

Because I spend far too much time alone (understandably enough) and because I’ve got a thing for sweaty women with fantastic bodies (and who doesn’t) and because I happen to believe that the internet exists for two reasons (fruitless job searches and masturbation), I was googling images of female athletes recently and I pulled up this frightening photo. That woman, my friends, could kick your ass. There are like maybe three guys in the world who could take Serena Williams: Ving Rhames, Danny Trejo and my World of Warcraft character. That’s pretty much it.

I’m sure glad Serena Williams isn’t my big sister. If she were, I’d probably still be taking an ass-whooping from a girl every day. As it is, I’m a free man. But I’m not looking to tangle with Serena any time soon, nor do I want to mix it up with her Amazonian sibling, Venus. Those two are too much for an ordinary man to handle in a fair fight. Of course, that said, I don’t believe in fighting fairly. If a Williams sustah stepped to me I’d have to cheat. I’d break a bottle, or pull a pool cue, or throw a chair at the big horse. Whatever. With access to makeshift weaons I might hold my own for a few minutes. Butt-naked, no foreign objects – that’s a different story. She’d beat me like a stepchild. Admitting that to myself was humbling.

I like self-reflection. It’s good for me. So I dwelt on the matter for a while. “I wonder,” said I to my lonely self, “what other women in this world could fuck me completely up.” I found quite a few.

For starters, there’s Denise Masino, although calling yourself a girl when you’ve got an Adam’s apple and a four-inch clitoris, that’s kind of playing fast and free with terms. And then there’s Lucia Rijker. Talk about beauty and the beast, she’s both. Dubbed by the press, “The Most Dangerous Woman in the World,” Rijker is undefeated as a professional fighter with a boxing record of 17-0 and a kickboxing record of 37-0, with 39 knockouts in her combined 54 fights. She’s a bad mamma jamma and just as fine as she could be.

And one can’t overlook Kyra Gracie. Born into the Gracie ultimate fighting empire and learned her science from uncles Ralph, Renzo and Ryan Gracie, bad dudes all. Ms. Gracie is the first woman to actively participate in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, in which she is holds a black belt and numerous titles. Obviously Kyra’s got other assets working for her. Yes indeed you’d love to nail her, but don’t pull her hair or call her names. She’ll fuck you utterly up.

Besides the women in the world who could actually kick your ass, there’s also the raft of broads who just seem like they could. I know Wendy O. Williams is pushing up daisies, but the mere thought of her in her prime can still scare a quart of blood out of a grown man. Tura Satana, star of screen classic Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, is now 69 and probably can’t really kick your ass, but I bet you wouldn’t want to test that hypothesis. And what about Grace Jones? Grace Jones is like hard drugs; you really, really, really wanna do her but you know she could destroy you.

That’s just a small sample of the deadly menagerie of women our world has to offer. There are far too many to list in a blog post. And anyway, this post isn’t about making a list anyway. It’s about one simple fact: there are chicks out there who would own you. I don’t care how tough you think you are; some broad somewhere could knock your snot loose.

And now, I think when it’s all said and done perhaps it’s that fact that underlies my father’s true wisdom. “You hadn’t oughtta hit girls, boy,” he’d say. “I know Dad,” I’d assure him. I always thought it was a gentle spot in him that made him instill so deeply in me the notion that a woman is a precious creature not to be fouled by man’s aggression. I still think that’s a part of it. Dad was a gentle man. But he was also a realistic man, and realistically speaking, if your son makes a habit of getting into it with girls, one day sooner or later he’s gonna get his ass kicked right in front of everybody. No man should want his son to live with the public stigma of getting owned by a woman. For that reason, if no other, you shouldn’t hit girls.

Especially not Serena Williams.

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Top Ten ass rape candidates

SAN DIEGO – A pal of mine got picked up on the run from the law a few days ago. He was facing some serious time so a little over a month ago he skipped town a few days before his court date, bouncing on a big bail ticket and leaving behind a mess. Not saying I wouldn’t have gone on the lam myself. I probably would have. But I like to think I’d have planned it better.

Anyhow, they overtook him down in Mexico. So now he’s fucked. Added to what he was looking at in the first place, he’s got international flight to avoid confinement and whatever else they want to hit him with. He’s 49 right now. If he ever gets out he’ll be a million. But he won’t ever get out. It’s a damn tragedy.

And adding to the tragedy is the fact that my friend is both old and not connected with any organized criminal enterprise, meaning that inside he’s too ugly to be a vendor and too poor to be a consumer. We’re talking about sex here, people. Yes it happens in custody. Happens all the time, as a matter of fact. And so my friend’s dilemma got me to pondering and I decided to come up with a list of the 10 men with whom an otherwise mostly straight man would be content to share a cell. Not to put too fine a point on it, what follows is a list of the men with whom I’d be happiest if I had to blast them in the love pucker.

So, without further ado . . .

Top ten men I’d bugger in prison

10. Johnny Weir – This one isn’t really fair. Prison shmison; I’d probably bone Johnny Weir at a Steelers Game. I mean seriously. Look at him. I’ve nailed uglier women, that’s for sure. And don’t make it like I’m gross. There are certain feminine signals that are universally attractive in our species and, arguably, throughout the mammalian class. Johnny Weir exhibits them in such abundance that pretty much the only thing a common man would have to do would be not reach around. That’s not hard. I’m not concerned with my partner’s pleasure in the first place.

9. Zac Efron – If this were a throat rape list, Efron would rank much higher. But it’s not. The problem with Zac Efron is that he’s a young hardbody and though virtually hairless, I wonder if his flesh would yield like a girl’s under a tight grip. I doubt it. Still, if I found myself doing hard time with Zac Efron as a cellmate, he’d find himself walking bow-legged. Zac Efron’s actually almost too pretty to be a guy in the first place, not unlike the young Rob Lowe, who, incidentally, would have made a fine cellmate in his day.

8. George Stephanopoulos – O.k. he’s getting on in years. Granted. But he’s also a) a midget and b) totally accustomed to being a bitch. Georgie’s still a pretty boy after all these years. In 2001 Stephanopoulos married Alexandra Wentworth who, one imagines, is a lucky fag hag. I doubt there’s much carnal action going on in that bedroom, but I’m sure the drapes are fabulous. I’m not totally proud to admit it, but in a custodial circumstance, I’d have to tap him.

7. Kato Kaelin – I confess this one’s a bit of a stretch. Like Kato Kaelin would ever commit any act of his own volition that could land him in prison. He might get talked into something bad by the tough guys on the block, but he’d be let go on the grounds of utter incompetence. And Kato is also getting a bit long in the tooth. Still, he’s aging well. Kind of like Kim Basinger’s elbow. I know it’s nasty. I’m sorry. If I were locked up I’d prefer it to be with Kim Basinger’s elbow. However, that won’t happen. So I’m just saying, if Kato Kaelin ends up in a cell in which I’m stuck for the duration, he’s chewing pillow.

6. Jaye Davidson – As with Johnny Weir, this one’s really not fair. I saw the Crying Game and even after the camera panned down to Davidson’s mangina I kept thinking, “So what? I’d fuck it.” There are some truly pretty people in the world and Jaye Davidson’s one of them. Ordinarily speaking I’d rather go up in something without hangers. But that’s ordinarily speaking. Not all times are ordinary times. There’s nothing ordinary about being confined and if I had to be confined I’d sure like it to be with something like Jaye Davidson.

5. Edward Furlong – The first time I saw Edward Furlong I thought it was K.D. Lang. Now before you point it out, yes I’m aware that he has let himself go recently. Rumor has it he now looks more like Rosie O’Donnell. But that’s not really a problem because locked in a cell with him, I’d take his tray anyway. I’d let him have the boiled greens. That’s about it. If he pleased me like he should, I’d give him a sandwich on Sundays. Furlong starred in Animal Factory as a teenage inmate who only avoided being pragged out in stir by befriending a tough-guy character played by Willem Dafoe. Dafoe’s character did not try to go up in the youngster and that made the film totally unbelievable.

4. Johnny Depp – Truth be told, I’d ass rape Johnny Depp just for being Johnny Depp. He’s a talented man, by all accounts an intelligent man, a nice man, a civic-minded, socially-conscious man, a charming man, an unassuming man, a decent man and an unnaturally handsome man. He’s also presently fucking Vanessa Paradis. God do I hate Johnny Depp. But hate him or not, if I had to room with him for five to seven years, I’d consider myself lucky. He might feel otherwise.

3. Jude Law – The problem with Jude Law is that he’s a big, strapping grown man and there’s no guarantee he’d just take a backdoor session without fighting back. So I’d have to have a shiv at the ready and forever after I’d be sleeping with one eye open. Despite all that, I’m fairly convinced I’d have to bugger Jude Law in prison. I wish that weren’t the case because I get the impression that I’d quite like Jude Law. I bet on the outside we’d make fine friends. I can overlook the fact that he’s English if he’ll forgive me being a crass, pompous, self-centered dick.

2. Enrique Iglesias – This fucker angers me even more than Johnny Depp. For the past six years Enrique Iglesias has been laying it to Anna Kournikova. I’d tap him just hoping some of her would rub off. I’m glad he had the mole removed. Cindy Crawford with a mole is hot. Some bitch of a celly, not. And despite his storied romance with Kournikova, I’m not all that convinced Iglesias doesn’t know his way around a pecker already. Of course, not all Latin pretty boys are secret bone smugglers . . . well, yeah they are.

1. Sigourney Weaver – For starters, Sigourney Weaver is so hot he has actually been cast in roles as a woman. What’s more, he has awesome structural elements. Striking cheekbones, a proud chin, wonderful shoulders. And look at those hipbones! Imagine holding onto those while you’re pile driving this dude. Sorry . . . that probably sounded gay. Obviously I’d rather tap a chick than Sigourney Weaver. But they don’t stick guys and dolls in prison together. If you go to the big house you’ve got yourself a long stint sans pussy posse and if I have to get stuck in an 8x12 room with a homey, I sure hope he looks like Sigourney Weaver. At six-foot-five, he’s a bit taller than I prefer for a grey bar slut, but you can’t have it all.

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Fuck the Dalai Lama

If you took half of all the things the West doesn’t understand about the East and packed them up tightly, you could just about squeeze the resulting mass of misinformation into the Grand Canyon. Brevity precludes me from touching on most of mistaken impressions that cloud Western opinions of Eastern society, but here are just a few notions of which I’ll happily disabuse you.

1) They’re not really sideways. That revelation disappointed me during a recent six-month sojourn in Changsha, China. Nevertheless, even conventionally oriented oriental gash is a pretty splendid thing.

2) Eastern societies are not “collective,” by contrast to “individualistic” Western societies. If you don’t believe me, try standing in line in Asia. For that matter, try finding a line in which to stand.

3) A fake Rolex is not just as good as a real one. But that wouldn’t stop me from buying a knock-off for twelve bucks in Hong Kong.

4) Most significantly, Tibet was not, NOT, some peaceful mountain Shangri-La prior to the Chinese occupation of 1959. The Dalai Lama is not a saint in exile. Chinese influence in Tibet does not stifle religious expression. Tibetan monks are not freedom fighters and the only legitimate government in Tibet exists through and because of China. The so-called government-in-exile is nothing more than one charlatan and his entourage of kowtowing sycophants eager to maintain the mythology that drives fatuous suburban tits to their doorstep to seek spiritual awakening and leave behind Western cash. It’s a fucking scam, people. He’s a snake oil salesman and his “country” has been part of China since the 13th Century.

So today CNN.com reported that South Africa has refused to grant the Dalai Lama a visa for an upcoming peace summit and it seems some bunch of people are ass-hurt over his being snubbed. Gasp! You mean someone who represents no country, holds no official position in any government anywhere, has never been elected to any office, never attended any academy, never managed any affair and never had a fucking job doesn’t get to go to a shindig for movers and shakers in the get-along-with-others industry? What a travesty. Both Archbishop Desmond Tutu and former South African president F. W. De Klerk announced they’d be sitting out in solidarity with their fellow Nobel laureate, His Shadiness, the Dalai Lama.

So there are three people evidently not going to a peace summit (whatever that is): a Bantu septuagenarian from the Transvaal, the last white holdout for apartheid, and a slant-eyed prick living large off chicanery in Dharamsala. I sure hope Charlize Theron doesn’t skip out as well. If so, the conference might have to give time, to, I don’t know, maybe influential people actually involved in meaningful fucking peace processes somewhere in the world?! God damn CNN reporting this shit like it’s news. And that’s really the issue.

Nobody needs to care where the Dalai Lama goes or doesn’t go. He’s a trifling, self-promoting stain on the world tapestry. He only matters because Western news outlets seem to think he does and those outlets apparently labor under their mistaken belief because they’re just aching to sustain some wild-eyed idea about an alpine utopia that never existed.

Here are the facts about Tibet. China’s Emperor Kublai Khan installed the first Grand Lama to govern other lamas as a bishop might govern parish priests. The Grand Lama in turn answered to the Emperor and that’s the way things were for Tibet for hundreds of years until another Chinese Emperor first sent an army to support the ambitions of a subsequent Grand Lama who took the title Dalai, meaning Ocean (in a landlocked country a thousand miles from salt water), and assumed for himself the role of ruler of all Tibet. Under the theocracy of the lamas, Tibet boasted such noble traditions as Manorial estates and serfdom, indentured servitude, child rape and slavery.

Until 1959, the Dalai Lama resided in a 1,000-room, 14-story palace overlooking the huddled masses of ignorant peasants that worked the immense lands of various landowners, mostly monasteries. The Drepung monastery, in fact, was once one of the largest landowners in the world with 185 manors, 25,000 serfs, 300 great pastures and 16,000 herdsmen. Secular leaders also made out pretty well, including the commander-in-chief of the Dalai Lama’s army who owned 4,000 square-kilometers of land and 3,500 serfs.

In Tibetan Interviews, Anna Louise Strong recounts her 1959 visit to Tibet during which she witnessed an exhibition of torture instruments used by Tibetan overlords. “There were handcuffs of all sizes, including small ones for children, and instruments for cutting off noses and ears, gouging out eyes, breaking off hands, and hamstringing legs. There were hot brands, whips, and special implements for disemboweling. The exhibition presented photographs and testimonies of victims who had been blinded or crippled or suffered amputations for thievery. There was the shepherd whose master owed him a reimbursement in yuan and wheat but refused to pay. So he took one of the master’s cows; for this he had his hands severed. Another herdsman, who opposed having his wife taken from him by his lord, had his hands broken off. There were pictures of Communist activists with noses and upper lips cut off, and a woman who was raped and then had her nose sliced away.” (www.michaelparenti.org)

And it all might have remained thus in Tibet, despite Mao Zedong’s conquest of the rest of mainland China, except that as with many an accustomed class of fat-cats, the Tibet elite couldn’t leave well enough alone. By the time the People's Army drove the Kuomintang from the mainland, powerful Tibetans had accepted Chinese suzerainty for centuries. In fact, when the current Dalai Lama was installed in Lhasa it was with a coterie of armed Chinese guards and a minister dispatched by General Chiang Kaishek. What concerned Tibetan landlords after Mao’s success in the late 1950s was that their new Chinese rulers were communists. Surely it was only a matter of time before they started extending their egalitarian values to Tibet itself.

And so during 1956-57, armed Tibetan gangs under the direction of powerful landowners began ambushing convoys of the Chinese PLA. Until that time Mao had left Tibet alone for nearly six years. In fact, it is an irony of history that his slowness to act on the Tibet issue stirred much criticism of Mao among Communist Party leaders even within his lifetime. Well, a dictator can only take so much. And after reaching first one agreement then another with the Dalai Lama, after the “ruler of all Tibet” proved either unwilling or incapable of abiding by them and after an assemblage of 7,000 wealthy Tibetans met in Lhasa to declare a “free and independent Nation of Tibet” (a ‘nation’ never once recognized as such by any other nation on earth) Mao eventually sent his army to Lhasa and beat the Tibetans like a pack of rented mules. The resistance, if it can be called that, lasted a matter of days.

The Dalai Lama fled in advance of the Chinese. On paper, at least, a condition of his sanctuary in India is that he not engage in political matters. I guess he signed that provision without reading it. He has been behind a campaign of propaganda and revisionist history ever since.

To be sure there have been Chinese excesses in Tibet over the years. During the Cultural Revolution of 1966-1976, it is evident that most Tibetans practiced their religion with caution. It is also true that during the Great Leap Forward, Tibetan farmers suffered from misguided policy, as did peasants throughout all of China. Today, though translated into Tibetan, most textbooks in use in Tibet’s schools focus almost exclusively on Chinese history and culture, a disservice to the nearly six million ethnic Tibetans in the country.

However, of all the putative harm brought in the Chinese wake, a few other changes came to Tibet in 1959, changes about which there can be no debate. The Chinese abolished slavery and the system of unpaid serf labor. They eliminated crushing taxes, implemented public work projects, and practically eliminated unemployment and beggary. They established secular schools, thereby breaking the educational monopoly of the monasteries, and they constructed running water and electrical systems in Lhasa.

“By 1961, Chinese occupation authorities expropriated the landed estates owned by lords and lamas. They distributed many thousands of acres to tenant farmers and landless peasants, reorganizing them into hundreds of communes. Herds once owned by nobility were turned over to collectives of poor shepherds. Improvements were made in the breeding of livestock, and new varieties of vegetables and new strains of wheat and barley were introduced, along with irrigation improvements, all of which reportedly led to an increase in agrarian production.” (Ibid)

Despite these facts, the Dalai Lama promulgates a myth, preying upon Western ignorance and romantic fancy, and the Western press time and time again buys that myth hook, line and sinker. And why wouldn’t we Westerners revel in that myth? We don’t know the first thing about the East, least of all about China, a country whose very emblem is a wall, a wall behind which a society hid for thousands of years, letting in nothing new and letting out nothing but mystery. Chinese metallurgy vastly predates European and yet the former still hasn’t invented the fork!

Chinese writing alone tells a story about the Chinese, not what they write, but how they write it. Several thousand years ago at several places on earth all at roughly the same time, people hit on the idea that using symbols to represent constituent sounds in words, rather than individual words themselves, was a much better idea than drawing stylized pictures of everything. As a result, we have alphabets. English has 26 letters. But while everyone else in the world with a written language came to that conclusion, the Chinese said, “No thanks. We’re good with what we’ve got,” and as a result, they still have literally hundreds of thousands of characters. It’s not very efficient, but then it’s Chinese.

That sort of uniquely Chinese closed-offishness is something that exacerbates Western misconceptions of who and what China is. We can’t understand the Chinese and Chinese custom does very little to help us understand them. We don’t fail to communicate just because our languages get in the way, we fail also because the most fundamental aspects of our cultures grew along divergent paths and under vastly different influences for thousands of years. Of everything foreign to the West, China certainly is the most foreign and as with other foreign things, since we don’t understand China, deep inside we fear it.

That’s a shame in this day and age. China represents many things in this world and the world of the near future, some of them frightening, others completely innocuous. Sadly, however, most of the West seems afraid of exactly the wrong things. We read often in the mainstream press of China’s possible militancy. That’s silly. The Chinese can build all the battleships they want. As long as they’re built to Chinese specifications, half of them will sink at the christening ceremony. We hear quite a bit as well about Chinese computing technology and its possible application to info-terrorism. Take it from me; my 13-year-old niece can outmaneuver any division of Chinese authorities on the internet. And worst, we hear trumped-up tales of Chinese misdoings in poor, little Tibet, flames fanned by the Dalai Lama in his ceaseless quest for living martyrdom. Fuck him. He’s a liar and a would-be despot.

What we need to be worried about vis-à-vis China are things like the unrelenting, toxic grey that chokes much of this earth’s largest land mass as a result of the more than two billion tons of coal burned every year in Chinese power plants, facilities that lack desulphurization systems. We might also worry about the long-term impact of a coming economic collapse in a country of nearly 1.4 billion people with more than 30 million jobs lost in the past year for migrant laborers alone. The trickle out of what Gordon Chang has called Beijing’s regime of “fakery” is alarming (The Coming Collapse of China). If the world’s fourth largest economy evaporates, well that could be scary.

Then too we might want to worry about this; throughout its history China has experienced a revolution approximately once every 50 years. It has been a little more than 60 years since the end of the Second World War when Mao’s forces engaged Chiang’s in China’s last revolution. The uprising in Tiananmen Square happened in 1989. That was 20 years ago and the government’s response to those student-led protests might have bought China some time. One could maintain credibly that the communist Party has held onto power largely because of reforms introduced following Tiananmen. While the Soviet model fell apart as hard-liners tried to clamp down, the Chinese government softened its stance, eased some restrictions and gave the common Chinese people the chance to go to shopping malls and buy shit they don’t need. Market reforms have allowed the Chinese to let off some steam without granting the people any real relief from centralized authority.

That’s an interesting history lesson. Totalitarianism and capitalism can go quite well together, as long as those in charge recognize something of fundamental importance: people entertained by the opportunity to consume will not demand a hand in their own governance. But the ruse won't last forever. On the ground in China you can feel the pent-up anger. There's something astir among the people and the government will ultimately, one way or another, lose control. They're due for a revolt, overdue in fact. One-fifth of the world's population in civil war - that's a scary prospect, particularly since China's neighbors include North Korea, Myanmar and a newly belligerent Russia.

So yes, there’s much to think about with regard to China and its position in the world today and down the road. But the one thing we hadn’t ought to think about for even a second is the Dalai fucking Lama. It is a disservice to a public who needs to know and foresee to be distracted by some Himalayan huckster purveying a fairy tale. Shame on CNN, shame on other networks of its ilk and shame on all of us who watched all seven agonizing years of Seven Years in Tibet and believed that anything so cockamamie could possibly be accurate. It’s a fable, a worn-out, useless fable that one could ignore, save for the fact that the Dalai Lama uses his supposed victimhood to draw attention away from something that truly should matter – a peace summit – and onto himself as though he had any ambition worth caring about.

I said it before and I’ll say it one last time; fuck the fucking Dalai fucking Lama.

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A tribute to female athletes

Since we haven't written anything today, we have decided to post a brief video of Slovenia's Alenka Bikar, former 100 and 200m hurdler, who we believe exemplifies the very finest in women's athletics.

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Stumblegate: California wakes up in Wyoming

WAMSUTTER, WYOMING – Residents of this small town in south-central Wyoming, 112 miles from bustling Granger, awoke this morning to the unfamiliar site and smell of tens of thousands of revelers unconscious and strewn about the rugged landscape. “It was eerie,” said Warren Zieglish, publisher of the weekly Wamsutter Bugle. “It was like the Dawn of the Dead or something. We here in Wamsutter have never seen so many people, much less so many passed out people.”

Throughout the early morning hours, reports cascaded into local sheriff’s offices all over Wyoming, countless reports all requesting assistance to deal with hordes of drowsing, drunken outsiders in sheds, barns, garages, some even on rooftops. First responders were at a loss.

“We’re just overwhelmed,” said one paramedic from Casper. “No amount of training can prepare you to deal with a crisis of this magnitude.”

By noon it was apparent that some 30 million yellow-eyed drunks, all with prodigious hangovers, had swelled the population of Wyoming, a state with an erstwhile population of just over 532,000. From his office in Cheyenne, Governor Dave Freudenthal ordered the immediate mobilization of all 43 Wyoming National Guardsmen to ease tension in the state. In a brief official statement the governor told Wyomingites, “We survived the winter. We’ll survive this.”

While Wyoming struggled to deal with the crisis, visitors to California, 1,100 miles away, noted that that state was inexplicably empty. Delta Airlines pilot Captain Jackson Entwhistle landed his Boeing 727 at Los Angeles International Airport with no assistance from the ground. Said Entwhistle, “LAX is a ghost town. There’s nobody there. I mean nobody. My crew and I divided up the stock from the bar in the international terminal.”

By early afternoon it was apparent that during the previous night California had tied one on and somehow made its way to Wyoming, leaving a swath of devastation in its path and inverting the ranks of the country’s most and least populous states. As the day wore on and Californians regained some semblance of sobriety, the after-effects of a hardcore binge began to kick in and the crisis escalated as only a few wayward Californians found themselves anywhere near a Jamba Juice.

“Oh my gawd,” said Jillery Bengston, a sophomore at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. “So like, I’m in this totally awful place with goats and, I don’t know, like gnus or something and I’ve got a screaming hangover and you’re telling me you people don’t have smoothies?! Dónde está el fucking bathroom?”

Across the western portion of the country relief teams were deployed to deal with the wreckage left behind in California’s staggering wake. Boise lay in ruins. Other cities were similarly devastated. President Obama declared at a Town Hall meeting in Boulder, Col., that “with hard work and faith in oratory,” the region would rebuild.

By early evening a few Californians had sobered up sufficiently to begin reconstructing the details of the mass exodus now known as Stumblegate.

According to Mel Gibson, “It all started on St. Patrick’s Day. A bunch of us met at Ürth Café on La Cienega for soy milk lattes. Then we headed over to St. Nick’s Pub on West Third. We were well into a two-day binge and all completely hammered and someone starting talking about how our homes aren’t worth shit anymore and a Jew said we ought to all pack up and head somewhere where we can ski and where what’s left of our money can still buy half a zip code. And then I kind of forget what happened next, but apparently we headed northeast.”

As often happens in the Golden State, blind drunk citizens followed Hollywood’s lead and the trek was underway.

Back in Wyoming, late last night city workers in Laramie hastily erected a tent village and makeshift sauna for the bear community of San Francisco’s Castro district who now reside, at least temporarily, in the town’s center. Although no nefarious activity had been reported as of press time, law enforcement officials expressed concern over potential future conflicts between long-time denizens of Laramie and the recently arrived, hairy man lovers who outnumber the mostly conservative townsfolk 12-to-one.

“What we’re facing,” said mayor Klaus Hanson, “is more than a cultural conflict. We’ve got ourselves a supply issue. Even if I had the manpower, which I don’t, there just aren’t enough tie straps in the whole state to lash this many big, fat homos to a fence.”

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