Doug's Darkworld

Who knows. Since the eighties I’ve often said “What will happen when the last dollar in America gets deposited in an offshore account in the Caribbean?” Well, we’re there in effect if not quite literally. They didn’t put those dollars in offshore accounts, they put them in derivatives. The result is the same, the money is gone. The economy is like a frozen computer, control-alt-delete didn’t work, so now the only thing left to do is to restart it. And it’s gonna take ten to twenty years to reboot. You have been warned.

Moving right along, I’ve been taking a break from blogging, the world has gotten too depressing.  Not to mention the flu, an injured ankle, and  a sick cat.  Sigh. I’m back now, with a zillion half written posts swirling around in my head. Rather than focus on one I’m going to cover a few bases here and see what inspires. Obviously I will be writing more about the economy’s free fall, but enough of that for now.

I won’t be writing about Obama for awhile. I’ll wait until he’s been in office and actually doing his job (I hope) before I revisit the topic. And frankly politics doesn’t interest me all that much, it’s all pretty much the same. People I wouldn’t shake hands with lying to get what they want. In the same vein, Bush as a blog topic is pretty much passé. Maybe one more post on his legacy when the time is ripe.

I’m working up a nice post on psychopaths, always a favourite topic for me. One percent of the male population and 20-40% of prison inmates are psychopaths. You’d think this would get more attention, a war on psychopaths would do a lot more to protect us than the war on drugs or the war on terror. Such is life. The Eskimos knew what to do with kunlangetas (their word for psychopaths,) when no one was looking someone would push them off an ice floe. Prisons are a luxury of settled people I guess.

A great new post on the War on Terror is coming up. Yes, a Congressional committee claims that a terror attack will kill millions of people in the next year or two. I’m a little skeptical. I think they’ve been tossing around such huge numbers recently that they’ve lost all perspective. Or maybe fear-mongering has become institutionalized in America. I recommend this article on how the politics of fear has Americans cowering every time something goes bump in the night.

The Mumbai attack deserves another look. I hate to say it, but the conspiracy people might have a point. Actually I don’t hate to say it. Occasionally extremists are right, so it’s always a good idea to listen to what they’re saying. My favourite extremist theory is the one about  how the USA got double-crossed by sneaky aliens in the fifties, and the government has to keep it secret now because they basically gave the aliens permission to abduct huge numbers of Americans and conduct bizarre nocturnal experiments on them. That will be fun to write about.

More dedicated history posts are in the works. Caesar’s failed invasions of England, he tried twice and was forced to withdraw both times. All sorts of lessons and observations to be made there, like everything else in history the parallels to the present are almost overwhelming. Then there’s Caesar’s Battle of Alesia, one of the greatest battles in history, and almost completely forgotten today. Of course most Americans today are barely literate, a post is in the works about that. It then follows that their knowledge of history ranges from ignorance to categorically misinformed. Of course one can study history all their lives and still be ignorant, a lot of stuff has happened in the last 7,000 years or so. And even before we had writing a lot was going on. A  temple complex built by stone age people has been discovered in Turkey, turns out cave paintings weren’t the only thing cavemen and cavewomen were up to.

And as always, I’m still working on posts about how to cook with mutant chickens and other post apocalyptic scenarios. Though I suppose I should now be working on posts on how to live on $3 a day in a post Bush economy. Thrillsville. As always, suggestions about new posts are welcome.

Have a great weekend everyone.

(The above illustration is claimed as Fair Use under US copyright law. It is not being used for profit, is central to illustrating the post, is a low resolution copy of the original, and its use here in no way interferes with the copyright holder’s commercial use of the image. Credit and copyright: Deesillustration.com. As they say, it’s not the fall that kills you, it’s that sudden stop at the bottom.)