Ash China

Greetings,

Ash heard two jokes in Iceland.

After Iceland caused a financial meltdown in 2008 Europeans wanted cash not ash.
Icelandic people don't want their ashes spread all over Europe.

Europeans, rather than accept accountability, escape the responsibility by blaming someone, somewhere, somehow for this beautiful majestic natural mess.

According to Mr. Bisignani of the International Air Transport Association, "This is a European embarrassment and it's a European mess. The decision that Europe has made is with no risk assessment, no consultation, no co-ordination, no leadership," he said.

"Europeans are still using a system based on a theoretical model which does not work... instead of using a system and taking decisions on facts and on risk assessment."

Ash currently holds 6.8 million travelers hostage around the world. It is the largest hostage situation in the history of mankind since Red China held 1.6 billion citizens hostage in the spring of 2010. 

Ash flew to China to verify this unpleasant fact. Ash rested inside 1.6 billion pairs of ears.

Easy to say and hard to do they say in China.
Speaking of China in Mandarin, you can get your ears cleaned there.
What! Really?

Yes. Now it happened at the empty Chinese opera one afternoon in Chengdu, you sit down in a wicker chair and give the girl in a blue uniform 10Y or slightly more than a buck. A group of Chinese men in wicker chairs drinking tea stare and laugh at you. Everyone stares at you in China because it is a zoo and you are an exotic humanoid species of endless speculation.

Look at the funny foreigner! He’s going to get his ears cleaned. Boy is he in for a surprise!

You sit back and close your eyes. She has all the tools; long steel wires, cotton swabs, some ointment, a microscopic spoon on a post and a pair of stainless steel tongs.

She probes into your right ear with the spoon and digs out hard brown wax. She flicks it on the ground where it becomes part of Ear Wax Mountain, a new wonder of the World. She swabs and cleans out your ear with a small cotton ball on a thin wire.

While this is buried in your ear she taps the tongs creating a vibrating frequency. She touches the steel rod in your ear and you hear the WHIRLING BUZZ BUZZ as 1,000 bees and cicadas invade your consciousness with a deafening crescendo.

She has opened your aural chambers big time taps the tongs again, and you receive the echo chamber canyon of sound, the WHIRLING BUZZ like sandpaper being rasped against old fibers of skin or yes, the fast centrifugal centrifuge of heartbeat reactors, roaring rivers inside a galaxy of weightless streams. BUZZ!

So she eases it out, massages your temples and your eyes are closed and you are dreaming you are in a Chinese opera playing the role of an old dramatic hero dying at his post after proclaiming his undying love for family and harmonious social order and stability in the country.

She attacks and cleans the other ear and the vibrations take you away.

BUZZ, BUZZ, BUZZ! Far away. She caresses your ears with something soft, massages your temples and scalp and when she finishes you no longer have a hearing problem. It’s all in the listening. You’ve been buzzed back to clarity.

Everything that goes in the ear comes out as language. It becomes a tool for emotion and expression.

Metta.

14 ministries

Greetings,

I work in the Chinese Propaganda Department. There are 14 ministries in the department.
Before the internet there was only one ministry, The Ministry of Truth. 

We, the drudges, have ministries all over the place and it's a huge financial and time consuming operation. Growth causes all of us, and I'm talking about millions, stress, anxiety and proverbial FEAR. 

I am authorized by Sir George Orwell to tell you about four ministries.

George is a good guy. He doesn't accept bribes, cash donations, cars, floral arrangements, luxury apartments on Hainan island with free golf membership and clean educational opportunities for his children at the finest schools money can buy so they will prosper and behave themselves in a harmonious society. 

It comes down to controlling information. Ignorance is strength. We've made some mistakes but we're improving our quality control.

The Ministry of Filters, for example, purifies and validates search engines, links and tags to verify their adherence to the Party line. The Party line is a secure communication system in a Mongolian yurt. It is covered with a thin veneer of high grade ultrasonic vibration-free saran wrap. This prevents exposure to Echelon communication satellite interception. Echelon is a big vacuum cleaner in the sky.

The Ministry of Soup controls emergency eye scans of all Chinese people to determine their thoughts. Thoughts are precious and the Chinese people only have a few centimeters. Thought control is part of our culture.

The Ministry of Culture and Currency is vast. Their responsibility is to provide and maintain a network of fake useless paper currency to create the illusion of value. The currency is embedded with sensors to monitor any and all verbal and non-verbal communication before, during and after any and all exchanges. It is very effective. 

A strong and important subdivision is The Ministry of Advertising. You can easily imagine how pervasive this subtle, subliminal and esoteric form of control is. It creates false needs, wants and desires among the sheep convincing them through thought control how insignificant and meaningless their worthless life is without more consumption behavior.

The ministry develops, maintains and reinforces, especially focusing on the poor lower classes how their lives will be enriched beyond belief if they struggle to raise their expectations. It's a circle game.

They used to walk. Then they wanted a Flying Pigeon bike. Then they wanted a radio. Then they wanted a refrigerator. Then they wanted a washing machine. Then they wanted  a 46-inch plasma television with remote control. Then they wanted a car, house, vacation, free medical care, cheap food, books and incense to worship the dead.

The ministry controls all the people by a large remote device. This device is embedded into every Chinese citizen's cerebral cortex at birth. It is very effective. 

Big Brother is watching. Thank you for your attention.

Metta.

Read more...
 

International Women's Day

Greetings,

To honor women this day, every day, everywhere, here are some cultural images.

Nature is what you are. Culture is what you can be.

Metta.

The Careful and Amorous Project

Greetings,

We met a guesthouse one morning. She started talking. "Amorous is my husband. He's sick. Something he ate."

Careful is 31. She was born in Xinjiang, China.

In 1991 while working for Ramada International Hotels in Beijing I traveled to Xinjiang to act in a movie about a hero who dies at his post. They needed a foreigner. My Swiss GM said, "Go for it." For ten days we filmed at the Chinese National Petroleum oil fields deep in the Tarim Basin. I wrote about this little adventure in my traveling novel, A Century Is Nothing.

She remembered the film and famous scientist. He developed a new drilling technique. He died at his isolated post surrounded by test tubes, mathematical scribbles, rusty oil drilling rigs and sand dunes. Then the Chinese Communist Party Propaganda Department had to approve film scripts depicting famous heroes. Especially dead scientific-political ones. He's in the Chinese national scientific hall of fame.

She's a freelance magazine editor in Shanghai. Amorous is an engineer from San Detour, California. He designs financial surf boards studying the effects of wave theory using electromagnetic pulse detectors. They met at a house party in Shanghai.

"When he came in I saw a deer," she said. She was the hunter and he was the prey. She is highly talkative. He is brilliant and taciturn. They dated for a year and married last year. First in her home town of Hubai province and then in Tomorrow Land. 

They got her residency card. They returned to China and quit their jobs. They hit life's highway.

Careful remembers everything, especially the long ago past.

"When I was a little girl growing up in Xinjiang, all I wanted was a book. I grew up with mountains and rivers. One day I saw a newspaper floating in the water. I dried it out and tried to read it. I couldn't. Then, when I went to school there was a girl - her father worked with my father as a public servant - and her family was well off. She had books. I didn't like her but I pretended to so I could see her books. That's how I started to read.

"It was a real struggle for me in Shanghai. I had no formal education, but I could write. I forged a C.V. and got on with an advertising company. Good money. I was looking for the perfect love. Then I met Amorous."

"I want a home," she said. "We'll need to make a decison by May," he said. "We either return to the states or find new jobs in China." 

"Look," she said, "I'm in my early 30's. I want to start a family. I need a child."

"First we need a home," he said. "Everything's in storage."

"Ok," she said. "After we're done traveling and doing this project, we'll decided where we want to live."

"Fine."

"It was my idea this project," she said. "Amorous agreed."

The project involves using various masks and props to create mysterious, surreal images around Asia. They plan their shooting schedule, Careful wears the costumes and Amorous makes the images in a raw format.

They won an Oscar this year for:

"Best Supporting Partner While Traveling For A Year in Southeast Asia While Working On A Crazy Yet Meaningful Artistic Project In Diverse Exotic Locations Using Bizarre Masks and Costumes."

Metta.

Careful in Lhasa, Tibet.

Careful in Cambodia.

Chinese kids Take the stairs

Greetings,

Yes, it's true, this passionate desire for pressure to pass exams in Chinese schools resulted in millions of children dying today in a stampede to escape their teachers after evening class. Stare at the stairs. 

-It was raining, said the authorities. Blame the rain.

-The rain had nothing to do with it, said a survivor, age 10. It was a death trap.

Chinese educational tools.

The provincial education party leader was fired. The principal of the school was fired. The parents of dead children can't do a thing because they are willing victims of the system. They have absolutely no power. How can the system fire parents? They have no idea how we run the institution. We brainwash the students and their parents.

-Mandatory study from 6:00 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. seven days a week, said the system.

-This is your DUTY as parents, said the system.

-As students, your DUTY is to pass the exams. 60 is heaven. 59 is hell. Learning is secondary. 

-We have developed safe and secure schools for your children, said the system. Look at our safety record. Look at the substandard construction materials and cost-cutting measures we have implemented to save money. Look at the bribery and corruption we've developed and nurtured to manipulate everyone from the bottom to to the top to create the finest, safest educational facilities in the entire world. We pay everyone off. 

-As you know from our long history the value of human life is worthless, said the system.

-Our rigid educational safety standards includes spotless bathrooms, expansive sports halls where students are required to sing silly patriotic songs about the motherland, dining halls where they eat the same mass produced rice and stringy green soggy vegetables day after day, dorm rooms where we pack 8-10 students into rat cages, an empty useless library and lots of slippery tiled stairs which, in the event of a fire, panic, epidemic, plague, tornado, hurricane, typhoon, and earthquakes - remember Sichuan and the shoddy buildings that killed 8,000 kids - become death traps. 

If you protest the death of your child because of our negligence we will:

1. evict you from your home
2. remove you from your plush paper pushing bureaucratic job
3. send you to a re-education labor camp on another planet
4. make you pay a fine
5. hunt you down

Your teacher loves you.

The school, to prevent disorder and broken social harmony by distraught parents grieving over the unfortunate and unforeseen death of their young children, will hold a one minute of silence memorial tomorrow at 10:00 a.m. in honor of our loyal and patriotic students who perished in the latest tragedy in their pursuit of good grades and academic excellence.

May their untimely death serve as a reminder to all of us to remain vigilant and steadfast in our common purpose of command and control procedures.

Thank you for your attention.

Metta.