Curveball

Media's running stories about falsified intelligence after 9/11 leading British and American politicians to believe Sad Man had WMD. We know he didn't.

The pretense of believing faulty intelligence led to the invasion of Iraq. Politicians and media pushed it down gullible throats ten years ago. Choke choke.

Cost? $1.7 trillion so far. Estimates of $6 trillion over 40 years. 

190,000 dead Iraqis, aid workers, security forces, journalists and insurgents. Millions displaced.

4,500 dead US soldiers.

Curveball, Wikipedia

An excerpt from A Century is Nothing, Subject to Change (2007, 2012).

Curveball came in for short relief. “I know where it is.”

“Where what is?” asked Bumsfeld.

“All the Iraqi mobile labs full of toxins and nerve agents.”

“For an alcoholic spy and fabricator you have a lot of nerve,” screamed the Tenant (CIA). He used to be Lew but now he was just a plain Jane Tenant from a housing project. He was on a speaking tour making big bucks when it happened after his slam dunk fell well short of the net.

“Look,” said Curveball. “I gave German intelligence the high hard stuff. But they don’t understand the American pastime. They said I was past my prime. They co-opted me with women and booze. A hell of a lethal combination, let me tell you. They grilled me over a hot flame. I became a double agent. I was beside myself.”

“Yeah, sure,” said Bumsfeld, “a classic case of split personality, bi-polar disorder and your mother wears combat boots. Anyway, then we distort flimsy evidence from a worthless intel source saying the dictator is an immediate and direct threat to our national security. He’ll attack us in forty-five minutes.”

“But,” said Resident President, waving his one-way tickets to Argentina, “that won’t give me time to finish reading the story about goats to the elementary kids.”

“No butts sir,” said his spokesperson. “You’ll just have to skip a few pages.”

“Isn’t this strategy too vague and deceptive?” asked a garbage collector.

“Vague and deceptive shit happens all the time,” said the man cracking his cool whip. “What planet are you from, amigo? We have the national media eating out of our filthy hands with all this flag waving patriotic bullshit. So, we con the world with these fictitious stories about the dictator being a threat to us with his weapons of mass distraction and start a war to remove him from power.”

“Brilliant,” said a very rich civilian military contractor from Texas. “What then?”

“It’s easy. We know the dictator’s been bluffing all along to maintain his power base. Just ask Curveball here when he sobers up. He’s never had weapons of mass destruction except for the munitions and sarin gas we gave him to support his eight-year war with Iran and commit genocide against the Kurds, but the world doesn’t know that unpleasant fact. His military will collapse like a house of cards. We send in, what, maybe 150,000 military forces, - mostly young, poorly trained national guard units from America’s middle and lower class mind you - take some losses sure, but that’s the price of doing business right, while we establish a quasi-official coalition government with us in total control of everything.”

“What about the local people?” asked a relief worker.

“Screw them I say. We’ve liberated them from a dictator for God’s sake. They should be eternally grateful to us and get down on their knees in desert sand thanking us.”

A public relations flack had an idea.

“For propaganda purposes we’ll let them form a provisional government so they’ll be distracted and think they have real input in how their country is going to be run. It’s like we’ve controlled Kuwait with our remote for years. They increase oil production when we tell them and they shut up when we hit the off button.”

“When do we get the contracts?” asked an oil man from Texas washing his bloody hands.

“All in good time. Rebuilding the oil industry will be tied into larger deals. We’ll start you off with easy contract stuff first: mail delivery, detention camps, prisons, roads, schools, building hospitals, and supplying food to the troops. That will keep your people busy for what, 5-20 years, easy.”

“Sounds great,” said the contractor. “This is going to make a lot of my friends very rich.”

“Hey,” said Hally Burden, “war is good business. Politics is business and business is politics.”

Ministry of tourism

Welcome to The Ministry of Tourism in Kampot.

It's near The Ministry of Fear and The Ministry of Truth.

You can't miss it.

It's next to The Genocide Museum. S-21. 

2,000,000 skulls are waiting for you.

They are delighted to have company in their silent vigil. 

Colonial French buildings will delight your memory of commercial conquest.

It's all a facade. 

Kampot is a sleepy little southern river town.

It is famous for pepper. Pass the sneeze please.

Quack-quack.

Hold hands. Relationships are precious. Life is short.

Let's have a look-see.

Chinese Appliance Factory #8

Good afternoon students. My name is Mr. ON.

It rhymes with song gong, long gone.

         It is 17:10 p.m. If it was 18:01 p.m., I would say good evening, however it is still afternoon. It is late in life. Class meets twice a week for two hours. Show up on time, do your assignments and stay awake. Nothing more. Nothing less. Simple English is good.

         We are gathered here today in the glorious Chinese Communist Party Peoples’ Appliance Factory #8 to begin our simple English lessons. Your supervisor informs me you are here by choice and chance. You have the choice. This is your chance. Am I clear? Do you understand me? Choice and chance. 

         Now. I know. Most of you have been working in the factory since dawn. It is the end of another long mind numbing grueling tedious day down on the killing floor. English has brought us together. You face unique and amazing challenges to acquire a foreign language. To use said target language with meaning. To maybe baby become fluent. It will require your undivided attention, focus and electrical energy.

         You will practice speaking, reading, listening and writing. These are the four basic skills.

Output: Writing and speaking are active.

Input: Reading and listening are passive.

Learning is a never-ending process. Many of you will die before it’s complete.

        Learning occurs in the context of task-based activities. In other words you learn by doing. You do and you understand, as we say, said, did, done.

         We will cover, in exhaustive detail, four important appliances and their English A/C-D/C lets see connections. They are: washing machines, air conditioners, vacuum cleaners and microwave ovens.

         These machines are now essential in everyone’s life. You know this because it is your job to put them together. It’s like English. Putting words together makes a phrase. A short, simple sentence. Some have meaning and some are gibberish. Many words are composites of useless idiomatic semantic syntax that is not the same as income tax however both are expensive.

         Write this down.

         English in. English out.

         Open your head, heart and mouth. Eat English.

         Please open your creative notebook. Using a simple writing tool like a pen or #2, get the lead out fast pencil I want you to consider the following questions. Answer them using basic English.

         How did I get here? ______ 

         Why am I here? _____

         Am I a machine? _______

         Am I a tool of the factory? _______

         What is my motivation to learn English? (Secret answer - MONEY)

         No money, no honey.

Here’s the equation. No English = no job. No job = no money. No money = no food = starvation.

         Your supervisor has instructed me to motivate you. She expects me to motivate you to arrive on time, complete the assigned tasks, and pass the exams. Her management style ordered me to use fear as a form of discipline with you.

We are all well aware how the power and threat of fear motivates humans in our society. If I fail to motivate and pass you I will be executed. Survival is my fear-based motivation. You WILL pass because my little short life depends on it.

         Fear is a funny word.

Fear of starvation. Fear of poverty. Fear of losing face. Fear of failure. Fear of humiliation or shame. Fear of not meeting family expectations. Fear of speaking in public.

         Fear of  ______  (free choice).

         Thank you for your short attention span. Next lesson we will discuss parts and functions of a washing machine cycle with elocution about a Turkish woman using sharp word shears down on her killing floor.

old cherokee

An old Cherokee chief took his grandchildren into the forest and sat them down and said to them, “A fight is going on inside me. This is a terrible fight and it is a fight between two wolves. One wolf is the wolf of fear, anger, arrogance, and greed. The other wolf is the wolf of courage, kindness, humility, and love.”

The children were very quiet and listening to their grandfather with both their ears as he then said to them, “This same fight between the two wolves that is going on inside of me is also going on inside of you, and inside of every person.”

They thought about it for a minute, and then one child asked the chief, “Grandfather, which wolf will win the fight?”

He said quietly, “The one you feed.”

calligraphy Brooms

Down dream street in Turkish reality

an unprecedented wave of egalitarian support featuring millions of sad, serene women facing callously arranged marriages filled with empty hopes and vague promises of love and happiness enlisted to become engaged to strangers on transcendental borders. This wave of support resembled an open handed gesturing in the eternal present as a mother reluctantly gifted her daughter a long fare well wave watching her disappear into life’s teeming stream.

         “Be well my love,” she sang. “You will always be in our hearts.”

         Her daughter joined a world tribe of singing, sighing women. They lived their dream, making sacrifices with clear intention, motivation, determination and focus. The entourage of waving, singing women danced through valleys, climbed jagged Eastern Mountains named Regret and entered a no-name village where males pounded war drums and hammered plowshares into word swords.

         Marginalized poor angry males killed each other over pita bread, olives, fresh tomatoes, kebabs, women and geographical dust while studying imaginary maps.

         “The map is not the territory,” said Visualization, a cartographer.

         “Where is this place?” asked a woman leader in a strange village on a strange planet in a strange solar system in a strange universe.

         “It is far away,” said a gravedigger with vast earth moving experience. “It is a dysfunctional place where bronze statues of fallen soldiers, warriors, politicians and testosterone fueled fools rust and congratulate each other on their mutual stupidity.”

         Wind whispered to women, “Go home, return to your children, your families and friends. Live in peace.”

         Women listened with heart-mind.

         “It’s tough living in dystopia where women are beautiful and sad,” said Visualization. “Millions don’t know whether they are coming or going, going, long gone. They’ve fashioned well-defined living death masks from loss and hopelessness and confusion and uncertain doubts selling tears wrapped in silence. Millions of us wait for an arranged marriage.”

         Potential husbands gathered to draw lots. They drew with ink and pastels and charcoal. The charcoal came from a deep black shameless unconscious well of tears where women, tired of waiting, sang, “Give me a child, give me someone to love and protect and carry forever and cherish and spoil with benign neglect. Give me your future. We don’t really truly honestly care about adverbial love, it’s all arranged. Everything has already happened. We just need to experience it. Love is a blind whore. It’s an impossible love. It’s a matter of practicality. Marriage first love later.”

         “Here,” said a marriage broker, “accept this man, this stranger into your heart. Just give him a child. Get to the verb.”

         “We breed, work and get slaughtered,” said one woman. Daughters wrapped these constricting words around their hearts in love’s tangled jungle.

         You never see women taxi drivers in Turkey. It’s a male ego thing with bright speeding tire spinning toys on wheels. It’s a Toy’s For Tots live game show. In cafes idle retired or chronically employed guys sit around all day from opening to closing playing backgammon. They slide little wooden pieces carved from youth’s forgotten toys. Young macho guys spin shiny yellow taxi wheels playing arranged symphonies in the horn section. They are the next generation of backgammon players.

         Women know better. They express their feelings. They live longer.

         Courageous women stood up to parents. “I respect your traditional ideas about arranged marriages, however, to be really honest heavy deep and real with you, it’s old fashioned conservative thinking. This is 2013 not 1987. I am a member of a new freethinking generation. I am not willing to be a victim, a willing victim of your narrow-minded attitudes. I will choose my friends, lovers and companions, based on my needs. I know why the caged bird sings.”

         Before leaving Ankara I shared a Chinese calligraphy painting poem with students. It was an old Qing dynasty poem, a gift from primary students in a rural Sichuan village school. A visual simplicity symbolized the transient nature of life lessons.

         Bright beautiful children in their radiant universe wearing red Young Chinese Communist Pioneer scarves around well-scrubbed necks sitting upright at colorful plastic desks raised hands when I asked questions yelling, “Let me try! Let me try!”

         Only young brave students had the courage, the absence of fear to say this. Older students at middle schools and university were aged and silenced through tyranny and oppressive parental and educational brainwashed ideological practice. Shame. They’d lost their curiosity and enthusiasm. Only primary kids had the courage, the inherent inner freedom to say, “Let me try, let me try!”

         Their beautiful black pictographic calligraphy ink read, “One day a man climbed into the mountains and reached a hut. He met some children.”

         “Where is the teacher?” he asked them.

         “They pointed up the mountain covered by clouds. ‘He is not here, he’s gone into the mountains to look for herbs.’”

         Chinese characters were creased where latitudes and longitudes met linguistic horizons.