A while back I said that the little green men would be imminently showing up in Venezuela.
They have.
Today, reports say, Maduro had a plane on the tarmac ready to abdicate.
But he got a phone call from Puty, head of the little green men.
He said to stay.
I guess the rest of the little green men are going to leap to arms.
I am writing a novel about a guy a lot like me and five cats and a muskrat – the muskrat is a transitional soul, so he/she has various, other, non muskrat manifestations – and what I am going to paste here next is, you will probably think, odd in that kind of story, but I am either crazy or creative – and here is one of its chapters.
The seven of us in this chapter are, by the way, all controlled by what the human in the story – that seems to be me - is writing in one of the story’s time slices.
Here is that chapter:
“The train seemed to go off the track on 31 March 2017.
That was the night that CNN revealed that Ivanka and Jared were worth seven tenths of a billion dollars.
The father of that twosome – blood and in-law – had only that morning tweeted that the guy he had fired for lying to his – the father’s – vice president was really a good guy who needed immunity to testify about an investigation against him – the father/father-in-law – concerning whether he – the father/father-in-law - was guilty of treason; a guts call many said.
But out in the woods where the militias had their secret meetings and secret hideouts and camps and small but powerful armories the mood shifted.
Grand Wizard of the Ohio Militia of the North/Ku Klux Klan summed it up: “we have seen enough; it’s time to take our country back; donnie the dildo isn’t capable of doing it, so it’s up to us”.
He – the Grand Wizard – summed it with a video that he recorded with a Sony A7R II that he had stolen from one of the negro camera men that he had killed in the line of his – the wizard’s – duties as Grand Wizard.
Sometimes those duties were not only pleasant, they were profitable; so it had been with the acquisition of the Sony camera: that had allowed the Grand Wizard to make many useful videos.
The Jared/Ivanka video had been only the most recent of them; he decried profligacy, nepotism and Obamacare; he went on at length about the validity and god-dictated truth of white supremacy; he called out the father/father-in-law to smite the daughter and the son in law.
It was a brilliant performance.
It turned out to be the, by far, most effective the wizard’s various rants.
It also turned out to be magnificently historic.
But that is yet to be discussed.
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The Grand Wizard transferred the Jared/Ivanka video to a SanDisk SD chip and left the Sony file structure in place so he could bury the video deep down in that structure, making it less likely to be found by the agents-who-were- against-him.
He made as many copies as there were militias like his in the hills and dales of America in that briefly pre-apocalyptic period of the final days of the late great republic of north America.
And he sent them out to all of them.
He sent them out by Mexican immigrants who were tired of picking grapes and cutting lettuce.
Those Mexicans were illegal but essential to the Wizard’s mission; so they were protected in all 50 states where their mission as couriers was vital.
They were protected by the various militias that had various franchises across the landmass that had been known for a couple hundred years up to that point as the United States of America.
But that protection didn’t go unnoticed.
Pro donnie the dildo as all of them had been in the not too distant russian managed election, the faux president had always been distrustful of the ultimate loyalty of the militias.
And the NSA kept an eye on organizations like those militias.
And that had been good – donnie thought to himself – when the first of the Mexican couriers had been apprehended; “now I have proof of their disloyalty” he said to no one in particular.
But he got his best people on it.
Mainly he put Kelly Ann in charge of the military response.
He made her a five star general and told the branches of the military that their job was to crush the militias.
Kelly Ann went out and bought a white horse so she could lead the charge.
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As it turned out the first direct confrontation was in a small town on the highlands above the Columbia River in Central Oregon.
The Morgan Oregon Militia was one of the smallest in the, what was then called, the United States of America.
Morgan was on the plateau above the Columbia River and its adjacent Interstate, Interstate 80.
It was just off of State Highway 74.
Strung along highway 74 between its junction with Interstate 80 and Heppner were little towns in progressive stages of death: Cecil, Ione, Morgan and Lexington.
One of these, Morgan, had actually succeeded in dying.
But Morgan had a militia.
It wasn’t big but it was deadly.
Kids from the surrounding farms aspired to membership almost from birth.
They learned the various arts of gunmanship early and learned them well.
They started with single shot 22 caliber rifles, moved quickly to semi-automatic 22 caliber pistols and not long after, moved to big caliber guns with massive magazines.
It made everybody proud when one of the area’s kids turned a local cow who had become too old to milk and too tough to eat into a pile of hamburger-like plasma with a big magazine war weapon.
These conversions always occurred at a county fair.
Usually the mother of the kid in question had been a winner or contender in the strawberry jam competition.
It was at one of these fairs – it was a mini fair held to honor the imminent arrival of spring – when the whole militia thing jelled.
Nathan Hale – a 13 year old who had a precocious level of skill with a slightly modified version of an M14 – had just produced hamburger out of Bossie the cow.
She had bellowed and cried but the magazine had prevailed and she been reduced to a pile of boeuf tartare; and the crowd had gone wild.
But just at the point of maximum enjoyment a phenomenon of simultaneity occurred: from one end of Morgan’s one identifiably remaining street came a burst of Spanish and English: “I have a chip for the militia” being the only lingeringly identifiable words. At the other end of that ancient street came what looked like a skinny May West riding a large white horse.”
I hate trying to be safe.
I have posted to this blog numerous times about how I feel about “being safe”.
I think that being safe is tantamount to being dead.
The mental state of a safe being is similar to a deer in the headlights.
That is a state of existence I find to be really unattractive.
But being stupid is something the avoidance of which I DO endorse.
My understanding of the ongoing Boeing 737 debacle is that, to provide an apparently new plane quickly and economically to the airlines of the world, a plane that needed to be better, cheaper to fly and requiring no pilot training investment, Boeing did the obvious: they hung newer, bigger, more powerful and – I guess – more economical engines on a tried and true airframe, the 737, which has been in production since 1967 or thereabouts.
There being an enormous amount of sunk costs in that old an airframe, the Max 8 looked to be the cash cow of ever existing cash cows – probably exceeding the IBM Selectric typewriter.
The only problem with the idea has been that the 1967 airframe decked out with 2015 engines presented an anomalous silhouette to the slipstream.
All the implications of this remain unknown.
There have been only two data points so far.
Those data points are what we used to call fatal crashes.
But one additional data point that does seem to be documented is that when these new software-craft are in a steep climb and are using maximum engine throttle (we often refer to that condition as “takeoff”) the software puts the plane in a nose down attitude.
That, of course, if allowed to persist, would result in what the FAA has described as “risk of impact with terrain”.
It turns out that Boeing had realized at the outset that that was the problem of the old airframe with the new engines in the slipstream.
“No problem” said the Boeing slipstream factotums; “we will analyze the slipstream with sensors and feed that analysis to some software in real time and, voila, we will have a modern aircraft in the slipstream; there will be no ‘risk of impact with terrain’”.
Something about that didn’t work.
And I am really disinterested in being a part of the data gathering enterprise necessary to find out if you can really fly a software-assisted pretend airplane with any large scale likelihood of not doing what two of them have already done: going inexorably nose down and having “risk of impact with terrain”.
A few hundred test flights – multiple tens of thousands of passenger bearing flights being expected of any aircraft – don’t constitute any assurance that the software or the sensors really work right.
So I would have to call the Boeing 737 Max 8 (and 9) the pretend aircraft for the people who worry about being safe but don’t mind being stupid.
