Disgrace - It is raining.

It is raining. 'Share my umbrella,' says Hakim; then, at his car, 'Speaking personally, David, I want to tell you you have all my sympathy. Really.'

He has known Hakim for years, they used to play tennis together in his tennis-playing days, but he is in no mood now for male chumminess. He shrugs irritably, gets into his car.

'You can't not show up, David.' Hakim is not concerned as much as petrified, bending into the crook of the door. 'You must show up. Tomorrow. Until the end of the year. The semester.'

He stares straight ahead, blindly. Some of the water drips off Hakim's umbrella onto his side, and inside the car.

'You have contractual obligations. You can't just up and walk away. You have your responsibility, to your students. To the University.'

He looks up, blankly, and in monotone wonderment 'It's just one lousy class. You don't need me.'

'You have to show up, David. Promise me. You have to you hear me ?' Hakim is shriller and shriller.

'Ok.' he says eventually, more to shut him up than anything. Contractual responsibilities, these things that he has. One doesn't simply walk out of the insane asylum.

The case is supposed to be confidential, but of course it is not, of course people talk. Why else, when he enters the common room, does a hush fall on the chatter, why does a younger colleague, with whom he has hitherto had perfectly cordial relations, put down her teacup and depart, looking straight through him as she passes? Why do only two students turn up for the first Baudelaire class? The gossip-mill, he thinks, turning day and night, grinding reputations. The community of the righteous, holding their sessions in corners, over the telephone, behind closed doors. Gleeful whispers. Schadenfreude. First the sentence, then the trial.

In the corridors of the Communications Building he makes a point of walking with head held high. He speaks to the lawyer who handled his divorce. 'Let's get it clear first,' says the lawyer, 'how true are the allegations?'

'True enough. I was having an affair with the girl.'

'Serious?'

'Does seriousness make it better or worse? After a certain age, all affairs are serious. Like heart attacks.'

'Well, my advice would be, as a matter of strategy, get a woman to represent you.' He mentions two names. 'Aim for a private settlement. You give certain undertakings, perhaps take a spell of leave, in return for which the university persuades the girl, or her family, to drop the charges. Your best hope. Take a yellow card. Minimize the damage, wait for the scandal to blow over.'

'What kind of undertakings?'

'Sensitivity training. Community service. Counselling. Whatever you can negotiate.'

'Counselling? I need counselling?'

'Don't misunderstand me. I'm simply saying that one of the options offered to you might be counselling.'

'To fix me? Will it cure me of deviant tendencies? Will it make the college a university again?'

The lawyer shrugs. 'Whatever.'

'I have no intention of continuing with them anyway.'

'Ah, that should simplify things. You should probably be able to keep your pension.'

On campus it is Rape Awareness Week. Women Against Rape, WAR, announces a twenty-four-hour vigil in solidarity with 'recent victims'. That they aren't women or that it wasn't rape bothers them none at all. Something like women getting something like an education while doing what may pass for doing something against something like rape. A very romantic worldview, if one stops to think about it. One doesn't. A pamphlet is slipped under his door: 'WOMEN SPEAK OUT.' Scrawled in pencil at the bottom is a message: 'YOUR DAYS ARE OVER, CASANOVA.' Indeed they are. He makes a point of not wondering whether the author had a criteria by which he picked the Italian over say don Juan.

He has dinner with his ex-wife, Rosalind. They have been apart for eight years; slowly, warily, they are growing to be friends again, of a sort. War veterans. It reassures him that Rosalind still lives nearby: perhaps she feels the same way about him. Someone to count on when the worst arrives: the fall in the bathroom, the blood in the stool. A spouse, it used to be called. Something like a spouse, at any rate.

They speak of Lucy, sole issue of his first marriage, living now on a farm in the Eastern Cape. 'I may see her soon,' he says -- 'I'm thinking of taking a trip.'

'In term time?'

'Term is nearly over. Another two weeks to get through, that's all.'

'Has this anything to do with the problems you are having? I hear you are having problems.'

'Where did you hear that?'

'People talk, David. Everyone knows about this latest affair of yours, in the juiciest detail. It's in no one's interest to hush it up, no one's but your own. Am I allowed to tell you how stupid it looks?'

'No, you are not.'

'I will anyway. Stupid, and ugly too. I don't know what you do about sex and I don't want to know, but this is not the way to go about it. You're what - fifty-two? Do you think a young girl finds any pleasure in going to bed with a man of that age? Do you think she finds it good to watch you in the middle of your...'

He is silent.

'Do you ever think about that?'

She is silent for a moment.

'Don't expect sympathy from me, David, and don't expect sympathy from anyone else either. No sympathy, no mercy, not in this day and age. Everyone's hand will be against you, and why not? Really, how could you?'

The old tone has entered, the tone of the last years of their married life: passionate recrimination. Even Rosalind must be aware of that. Yet perhaps she has a point. Perhaps it is the right of the young to be protected from the sight of their elders in the throes of passion. That is what whores are for, after all: to put up with the ecstasies of the unlovely.

'Anyway,' Rosalind goes on, 'you say you'll see Lucy.'

'Yes, I thought I'd drive up after the inquiry and spend some time with her.'

'The inquiry?'

'There is a committee of inquiry sitting next week.'

'That's very quick. And after you have seen Lucy?'

'I don't know. I'm not sure I will be permitted to come back to the university. I'm pretty sure I will not want to.'

Rosalind shakes her head. 'An inglorious end to your career, don't you think? I won't ask if what you got from this girl was worth the price. What are you going to do with your time? What about your pension?'

'I'll come to some arrangement with them. Apparently they can't cut me off without a penny.'

'Can't they? Don't be so sure. How old is she - your inamorata?'

'Twenty. Of age. Old enough to know her own mind.'

'The story is, she took sleeping-pills. Is that true?'

'I know nothing about sleeping-pills. It sounds like a fabrication to me. Who told you about sleeping-pills?'

She ignores the question. 'Was she in love with you? Did you jilt her?'

'No, neither.'

'Then why this complaint?'

'Who knows? She didn't confide in me. There was a battle of some kind going on behind the scenes that I wasn't privy to. There was a jealous boyfriend. The parents were of your mind, I imagine. She must have crumpled in the end. I was taken completely by surprise.'

'You should have known, David. You are too old to be meddling with other people's children. You should have expected the worst. Anyway, it's all very demeaning. Really.'

'You haven't asked whether I love her. Aren't you supposed to ask that as well?'

'Very well. Are you in love with this young woman who is dragging your name through the mud?'

'She isn't responsible. Don't blame her.'

'Don't blame her! Whose side are you on? Of course I blame her! I blame you and I blame her. The whole thing is disgraceful from beginning to end. Disgraceful and vulgar too. And I'm not sorry for saying so.'

In the old days he would, at this point, have stormed out. But tonight he does not. They have grown thick skins, he and Rosalind, against each other. His is principally made out of not in the slightest caring.

The next day Rosalind telephones. 'David, have you seen today's Argus?'

'No.'

'Well, steel yourself. There's a piece about you.'

'I'm sure it'll be a very important piece fit for a very widely read newspaper.'

'Read it for yourself.'

The report is on page three: 'Professor on sex charge', it is headed. He skims the first lines. '...is slated to appear before a disciplinary board on a charge of sexual harassment. CTU is keeping tight-lipped about the latest in a series of scandals including fraudulent scholarship payouts and alleged sex rings operating out of student residences. Lurie (53), author of a book on English nature-poet William Wordsworth, was not available for comment.'

William Wordsworth (1770-1850), nature-poet. David Lurie (1945-?), commentator upon William Wordsworth, disgraced in the eyes -- never strained by reading either -- of the respectable society of some distant, forgettable failure of a colony. Blest be the infant babe. No outcast he. Blest be the babe.

The hearing is held in a committee room off Hakim's office. He is ushered in and seated at the foot of the table by none other than Manas Mathabane himself, Professor of Religious Studies, who will chair the inquiry. To his left sit Hakim, his secretary, and a young woman, a student of some kind; to his right are the three members of Mathabane's committee. He does not feel nervous. On the contrary, he feels quite sure of himself. His heart beats evenly, he has slept well. Vanity, he thinks, the dangerous vanity of the gambler; vanity and self-righteousness. He is going into this in the wrong spirit. But he does not care.

He nods to the committee members. Two of them he knows: Farodia Rassool and Desmond Swarts, Dean of Engineering. The third, according to the papers in front of him, teaches in the Business School.

'The body here gathered, Professor Lurie,' says Mathabane, opening proceedings, 'has no powers. All it can do is to make recommendations. Furthermore, you have the right to challenge its makeup. So let me ask: is there any member of the committee whose participation you feel might be prejudicial to you?'

'I have no challenge in a legal sense,' he replies. 'I have reservations of a philosophical kind, but I suppose they are out of bounds.'

A general shifting and shuffling. 'I think we had better restrict ourself to the legal sense,' says Mathabane. 'You have no challenge to the makeup of the committee. Have you any objection to the presence of a student observer from the Coalition Against Discrimination?'

'I have no fear of the committee. I have no fear of the observer.'

'Very well. To the matter at hand. The first complainant is Ms Melanie Isaacs, a student in the drama programme, who has made a statement of which you all have copies. Do I need to summarize that statement? Professor Lurie?'

'Do I understand, Mr Chairman, that Ms Isaacs will not be appearing in person?'

'Ms Isaacs appeared before the committee yesterday. Let me remind you again, this is not a trial but an inquiry. Our rules of procedure are not those of a law court. Is that a problem for you?'

'For me ? If it isn't a problem for you, Mr. Mathabane, then let us pass it silently.'

'A second and related charge', Mathabane continues, 'comes from the Registrar, through the Office of Student Records, and concerns the validity of Ms Isaacs's record. The charge is that Ms Isaacs did not attend all the classes or submit all the written work or sit all the examinations for which you have given her credit.'

'That is the sum of it? Those are the charges?'

'They are.'

He looks at the people facing him, in turn. They appear adults, in possession of their senses, perhaps educated even. Yet here they are. At last he says 'I am sure the members of this committee have better things to do with their time than rehash so trite a story. In any case there will be no dispute. I plead guilty to both charges. Pass sentence, and let us get on with our lives.'

Hakim leans across to Mathabane. Murmured words pass between them.

'Professor Lurie,' says Hakim, 'I must repeat, this is a committee of inquiry. Its role is to hear both sides of the case and make a recommendation. It has no power to take decisions. Again I ask, would it not be better if you were represented by someone familiar with our procedures?'

'Who would be familiar with such procedures, a certified gossip ? I really see no point in carrying on in this manner, must we ?'

'We want to give you an opportunity to state your position.'

'My position ? There's twenty three centuries of unbroken tradition as to how civilised society handles disputes, but you sit there and imagine this doesn't apply to you. You're a very special lot, somehow, at liberty to invent new and novel approaches to problems well and truly solved. You will, of your own power, on the basis of all the intellectual and scholarly acumen of a rinkydink college nowhere invent alternative procedures! Is this some strand of nativism, have you also come here in cars powered by some new and special kind of engine, is the Sun in your sky a different shape also and do its rays travel on different paths made just for your own eyes ? I have stated my position. I am guilty, let's move on.'

'Guilty of what?'

'Of whatever it is that I am charged with.'

'You are taking us in circles, Professor Lurie.'

'Of everything Ms Isaacs avers, and of keeping false records. Does that work ? Should I also mention spitting on the cross and desecrating the sacraments or has such gone out of style ?'

Now Farodia Rassool intervenes. 'You say you accept Ms Isaacs's statement, Professor Lurie, but have you actually read it?'

'I do not wish to read Ms Isaacs's statement. I accept it. I know of no reason why Ms Isaacs should lie.'

'But would it not be prudent to actually read the statement before accepting it?'

'No. For one thing, you already accepted it. Besides, there are more important things in life than being prudent.'

Farodia Rassool sits back in her seat. 'This is all very quixotic, Professor Lurie, but can you afford it? It seems to me we may have a duty to protect you from yourself.' She gives Hakim a wintry smile.

'When I was young, which somehow seems not that very long ago, even though I understand it must have been forever, I remember finding in my father's things a newspaper, an old newspaper. In it there was a discussion of something called the Moscow Trials. It was an eye opening moment for me, evidently, as I still remember it. I do not know if you have ever read those intricate gems of special procedures and ad hoc duties, but if you haven't I propose you should.'

On to the next chapter, "You say you have not..."

« Disgrace - Never mind. Note that we

Disgrace - You say you have not »

Category: Cuvinte Sfiinte

Friday, 30 December, Year 8 d.Tr.

Disgrace - In spite of all that

In spite of all that he somehow feels at home with Petrus, is even prepared, however guardedly, to like him. Petrus is a man of his generation. Doubtless Petrus has been through a lot, doubtless he has a story to tell. He would not mind hearing Petrus's story one day. But preferably not reduced to English. More and more he is convinced that English is an unfit medium for the truth of South Africa. Stretches of English code whole sentences long have thickened, lost their articulations, their articulateness, their articulatedness. Like a dinosaur expiring and settling in the mud, the language has stiffened. Pressed into the mould of English, Petrus's story would come out arthritic, bygone. In reality it is anything but.

What appeals to him in Petrus is his face, his face and his hands. If there is such a thing as honest toil, then Petrus bears its marks. A man of patience, energy, resilience. A peasant, a paysan, a man of the country. A plotter and a schemer and no doubt a liar too, like peasants everywhere. Honest toil, and honest cunning. He has his own suspicions of what Petrus is up to, in the longer run. Petrus will not be content to plough forever his hectare and a little which upon inspection looks more than a half. Lucy may have lasted longer than her hippie, gypsy friends, but to Petrus Lucy is still chickenfeed: an amateur, an enthusiast of the farming life rather than a farmer. A little girl, trying to be part of family life through watching the family live. Petrus would like to take over Lucy's land. Then he would like to have Ettinger's too, or enough of it to run a herd on. Ettinger will be a harder nut to crack. Lucy is merely a transient; Ettinger is another peasant, a man of the earth, tenacious, eingewurzelt. But Ettinger will die one of these days, and the Ettinger son has fled. In that respect Ettinger has been stupid. A good peasant takes care to have lots of sons.

Petrus has a vision of the future in which people like Lucy have no place. But that need not make an enemy of Petrus. Country life has always been a matter of neighbours scheming against each other, wishing on each other pests, poor crops, financial ruin, yet in a crisis ready to lend a hand, especially provided the crisis has no clear and reliable demarcation bounds. Something like a plague, or alien invasion perhaps.

The worst, the darkest reading as far as Petrus is concerned would be that he engaged three urchins to teach Lucy a lesson, paying them off with the loot. But he cannot believe that. It would be too neat, too broad, a desperate line jotted down in a mad rush an hour before the script goes to rehearsal. The real truth, he suspects, is something far more - he casts around for the word - anthropological, something it would take months to get to the bottom of, months of patient, unhurried conversation with dozens of people, and the offices of an interpreter. Life may well be a stage, but its flow is not the stuff of playwrights, not usually.

On the other hand, he does believe that Petrus knew something was in the offing; he does believe Petrus could have warned Lucy. That is why he will not let go of the subject. That is why he continues to nag Petrus.

Petrus has emptied the mud-covered storage dam, exposing its concrete innards covered in muck and algae. The stuff of life, resilient, slippery. Cleaning it is a hard, unpleasant job. A massacre like any other, life in all its resplendent glory : genocide. Holocaust. The killing of one kind to make room for another kind. Lava tearing old forest so that invasive, psychotic weeds may grow ; the wheat that puts all its sap's worth into making an oversized, overfattened grain, leaving naught behind but a sad husk of what never really was a plant. Broadleaf weeds finding their way in, one by one, using their parasols built in to shade the ground and kill the earlier inhabitants. Bushes, then trees, if the land will support it, pushing out each other until it ends with birch, or beech, or pine, or whatever holds the highest rank. And then disaster, and then the wheel again. The facts of life.

Nevertheless, he offers to help. With his feet crammed into Lucy's rubber boots, he climbs into the dam, stepping carefully on the slick bottom. For a while he and Petrus work in concert, scraping, scrubbing, shovelling out the mud. Then he breaks off.

'Do you know, Petrus,' he says, belabouring breath 'I find it hard to believe the men who came here were strangers. I find it hard to believe they arrived out of nowhere, and did what they did, and disappeared afterwards like ghosts. And I find it hard to believe that the reason they picked on us was simply that we were the first white folk they met that day. What do you think? Am I wrong?'

Petrus smokes a pipe, an old-fashioned pipe with a hooked stem and a little silver cap over the bowl. Now he straightens up, takes the pipe from the pocket of his overalls, opens the cap, tamps down the tobacco in the bowl, sucks at the pipe unlit. He stares reflectively over the dam wall, over the hills, over open country. His expression is perfectly tranquil.

'The police must find them,' he says at last. 'The police must find them and put them in jail. That is the job of the police.'

'But the police are not going to find them without help. Those men knew about the forestry station. I am convinced they knew about Lucy. How could they have known if they were complete strangers to the district?'

Petrus chooses not to take the question for a question. He puts the pipe away in his pocket, exchanges spade for broom.

'It was not simply theft, Petrus,' he persists. 'They did not come just to steal. They did not come just to do this to me.' He touches the bandages, touches the eye-shield. 'They came to do something else as well. You know what I mean, or if you don't know you can surely guess. After they did what they did, you cannot expect Lucy calmly to go on with her life as before. I am Lucy's father. I want those men to be caught and brought before the law and punished. Am I wrong? Am I wrong to want justice?'

He does not care how he gets the words out of Petrus now, he just wants to hear them.

'You are not wrong to want justice.'

A flurry of anger runs through him, strong enough to take him by surprise. He picks up his spade and strikes whole strips of mud and weed from the dam-bottom, flinging them over his shoulder, over the wall, further than any prior went. Ununderstood stotting behaviour, the remnants of a man, old now but not yet snuffed out, still not snuffed out if deeply buried inside an elderly father, inside an elderly fool. A vein of him that never had a chance to see sunlight while he was away, busy with his "life of the mind", nevertheless of him, a thing that's his, faithful mechanism trying its best. Trying its best to serve him, trying its best to meet the needs of that other thing of him, the daughter that he never had because he had to be away, separated from his body, from himself. The man still left inside will show Petrus strength, brute, directly comprehensible, universally significant muscular strength, and in this way make the argument in the correct, sensible form for the novel institutions and procedures that replaced the ancient, reasonable ones.

You are whipping yoursef into a rage, he admonishes himself: Stop it! Yet at this moment he would like to take Petrus by the throat. If it had been your wife instead of my daughter, he would like to say to Petrus, you would not be tapping your pipe and weighing your words quite so judiciously. Violation: that is the word he would like to force out of Petrus. Yes, it was a violation, he would like to hear Petrus say; yes, it was an outrage. In silence, side by side, he and Petrus finish off the job. Was it an outrage ? When does one outrage end and another outrage begin ?

This is how his days are spent on the farm. He helps Petrus clean up the irrigation system. He keeps the garden from going to ruin. He packs produce for the market. He helps Bev Shaw at the clinic. He sweeps the floors, cooks the meals, does all the things that Lucy no longer does. He is busy from dawn to dusk. His eye is healing surprisingly fast: after a mere week he is able to use it again. The burns are taking longer. He retains the skullcap and the bandage over his ear. The ear, uncovered, looks like a naked pink mollusc: he does not know when he will be bold enough to expose it to the gaze of others. A strange, feminine shyness that surprises but does not concern him.

He buys a hat to keep off the sun, and, to a degree, to hide his face. He is trying to get used to looking odd, worse than odd, repulsive - one of those sorry creatures whom children gawk at in the street. 'Why does that man look so funny?' they ask their mothers, and have to be hushed. He goes to the shops in Salem as seldom as he can, to Grahamstown only on Saturdays. All at once he has become a recluse, a country recluse. The end of roving. Though the heart be still as loving and the moon be still as bright. Who would have thought it would come to an end so soon and so suddenly: the roving, the loving! Outside of the castrum defended by three thousand lightning bolts drawn among the four thousand corners of a thousand shields held by a thousand actual men, out in the open fields where wild beasts and wild barbarians roam all dressed in the same wolven pelts his erotic faculty shrivels into a whisp of nothingness. Roving ? Loving ? There's work to do.

He has no reason to believe their misfortunes have made it on to the gossip circuit in Cape Town. Nevertheless, he wants to be sure that Rosalind does not hear the story in some garbled form. Twice he tries to call her, without success. The third time he telephones the travel agency where she works. Rosalind is in Madagascar, he is told, scouting; he is given the fax number of a hotel in Antananarivo. He composes a dispatch: 'Lucy and I have had some bad luck. My car was stolen, and there was a scuffle too, in which I took a bit of a knock. Nothing serious - we're both fine, though shaken. Thought I'd let you now in case of rumours. Trust you are having a good time.' He gives the page to Lucy to approve, then to Bev Shaw to send off to Rosalind in darkest Africa.

If Lucy is improving, it is not all that evident. She stays up all night, claiming she cannot sleep; then in the afternoons he finds her asleep on the sofa, her thumb in her mouth like a child's. She has lost interest in food: he is the one who has to tempt her to eat, cooking unfamiliar dishes because she refuses to touch meat. This is not what he came for - to be stuck in the back of beyond, warding off demons, nursing his daughter, attending to a dying enterprise. If he came for anything, it was to gather himself, gather his forces. Yet here he is losing himself day by day.

The demons do not pass him by. He has nightmares of his own in which he wallows in a bed of blood, or, panting, shouting soundlessly, runs from the man with the face like a hawk, like a Benin mask, like Thoth. One night, half sleepwalking, half demented, he strips his own bed, even turns the mattress over, looking for stains.

There is still the Byron project. Of the books he brought from Cape Town, only two volumes of the letters are left - the rest were in the trunk of the stolen car. The public library in Grahamstown can offer nothing but selections from the poems. But does he need to go on reading? What more does he need to know of how Byron and his acquaintance passed their time in old Ravenna? Can he not, by now, invent a Byron who is true to Byron, and a Teresa too?

He has, if the truth be told, been putting it off for months: the moment when he must face the blank page, strike the first note, see what he is worth. Snatches are already imprinted on his mind of the lovers in duet, the vocal lines, soprano and tenor, coiling wordlessly around and past each other like serpents. Melody without climax; the whisper of reptile scales on marble staircases; and, throbbing in the background, the baritone of the humiliated husband. Will this be where the dark trio are at last brought to life: not in Cape Town but in old Kaffraria?

The two young sheep are tethered all day beside the stable on a bare patch of ground. Their bleating, steady and monotonous, has begun to annoy him. He strolls over to Petrus, who has his bicycle upside down and is working on it. 'Those sheep,' he says - 'don't you think we could tie them where they can graze?'

'They are for the party,' says Petrus. 'On Saturday I will slaughter them for the party. You and Lucy must come.' He wipes his hands clean. 'I invite you and Lucy to the party.'

'On Saturday?'

'Yes, I am giving a party on Saturday. A big party.'

'Thank you. But even if the sheep are for the party, don't you think they could graze?'

An hour later the sheep are still tethered, still bleating dolefully. Petrus is nowhere to be seen. Exasperated, he unties them and tugs them over to the damside, where there is abundant grass. The sheep drink at length, then leisurely begin to graze. They are black-faced Persians, alike in size, in markings, even in their movements. Twins, in all likelihood, destined since birth for the butcher's knife. Well, nothing remarkable in that. When did a sheep last die of old age? Sheep do not own themselves, do not own their lives. They exist to be used, every last ounce of them, their flesh to be eaten, their bones to be crushed and made into glue. Nothing escapes, except perhaps the gall bladder, which no one will eat. Descartes should have thought of that. The soul, suspended in the dark, bitter gall, hiding.

On to the next chapter, "Petrus has invited us..."

« Disgrace - Katy is coaxed

Disgrace - Petrus has invited us »

Category: Cuvinte Sfiinte

Saturday, 31 December, Year 8 d.Tr.

Disgrace - He pauses. Blank incomprehension.

He pauses. Blank incomprehension. He has gone too far too fast. How to bring them to him? How to bring her? 'Like being in love,' he says. 'If you were blind, and deaf, a quadriplegic prisoner of a smooth stone prison you would hardly have fallen in love in the first place. But now that you fell, do you truly wish to see the beloved in all the cold clarity of the visual apparatus and no more, and nothing else besides? You might be better served by a little gauze over the gaze, allowing her to breathe, alive next to you and just as well alive in her archetypal, goddesslike form, somewhere far away.'

It is hardly Wordsworth, but at least it wakes them up. It is also hardly sensible, a fanedi conceit of a minor fold in the great aesthetic pie. Perhaps it could be rescued. Archetypes? they are saying to themselves. Goddesses? What is he talking about? What does this old man know about love?

A memory floods back: the moment on the floor when he forced the sweater up and exposed her neat, miniature breasts. Just like the real thing ; a gingerbread house of love. For the first time she looks up; her eyes meet his and in a flash see all. Confused, she drops her glance. Too much, too sudden, the truth is that she's not possessed of the mental furniture to support her and the needs of her own life. Her body's not yet quite ready for womanhood, but her mind's not yet ready for a body in the first place, not at all ready. She's thousands of years behind that point in time where she might safely be born and thereby burdened with all the complexities of corporality. For now all she can power is the screaming image of another quaint conceit, the romantic ideal of the decerebrated bride, creature of sentiment and feeling very approximately anchored in speech let alone any sort of thought.

'Wordsworth is writing about the Alps,' he says. 'We don't have Alps in this country, but we have the Drakensberg, or on a smaller scale Table Mountain, which we climb in the wake of the poets, hoping for one of those revelatory, Wordsworthian moments we have all heard about.' Now he is just talking, covering up. He does not say: Melani here present is too mentally simple to understand what is happening to her, and so are all the rest of you. He does say: 'But moments like that will not come unless the eye is half turned toward the great archetypes of the imagination we carry within us.' Enough! He is sick of the sound of his own voice, and sorry for her too, for a possible, conceivable conception of her that'd be offended by having to sit and listen to this string of covert intimacies. He dismisses the class, then lingers, hoping for a word with her. But she slips away in the throng, leaving him holding his own gauze, to do with as he pleases. It is, after all, his own thing.

A week ago she was just another pretty face in the class. Now she is a present absence in his life, a breathing presence that consists of the hole in which a woman may be found in theory but painfully is not in practice. The auditorium of the student union is in darkness. Unnoticed, he takes a seat in the back row. Save for a balding negro in a janitor's uniform a few rows in front of him, he is the only spectator. Sunset at the Globe Salon is the name of the play they are rehearsing: a comedy of the "new" South Africa set in a hairdressing salon in Hillbrow, Johannesburg.

On stage a hairdresser, flamboyantly gay, attends to two clients, one black, one white. Patter passes among the three of them: jokes, insults. Catharsis seems to be the proletcult imperative: all the coarse old prejudices brought into the light of day and washed away in gales of laughter. This works, or at least so they've read in the party brochure. Not one bit of it is funny, but the constant reversals presumably satisfy the middle class.

Yet there isn't even the vaguest possibility of turning unmitigated tragedy into any sort of comedic jello. There could be perhaps drama composed of the destruction of an independent if cowardly nation to satisfy the cinematic pulsions of a billion people far away, much like there could perhaps be a drama written on the life of the inhabitants of one of the last remaining bee hives finding themselves one fine morning forced to paint their bodies black and walk about the mud in search of dead worms to carry back to their beehill, because schoolchildren can't be arsed to learn of two distinct categories to accomodate both ants and bees, and moreover the ant-only manuals have already been printed. Why should it be so complicated, the hordes inquire ? It's just a critter, why does it need to fly ? One category should be enough for everyone, and as ants are the most numerous it then follows all insects should be ants, it's rational, it is progressive, and not in the last it is humanitarian. The saving of the bees shall come like the saving of everything else, at the end of a battle for peace, and constructed on humanitarian principles.

A fourth figure comes onstage, a girl in high platform shoes with her hair done in a cascade of ringlets. 'Take a seat, dearie, I'll attend to you in a mo,' says the hairdresser. 'I've come for the job,' she replies - 'the one you advertised.' Her accent is glaringly Kaaps; it is Melanie. 'Ag, pick up a broom and make yourself useful,' says the hairdresser. She picks up a broom, totters around the set pushing it before her. The broom gets tangled in an electric cord. There is supposed to be a flash, followed by a screaming and a scurrying around, but something goes wrong with the synchronization. The directress comes striding onstage, and behind her a young man in black leather who begins to fiddle with the wall-socket. 'It's got to be snappier,' says the director. 'A more Marx Brothers atmosphere.' She turns to Melanie. 'OK?' Melanie nods.

Ahead of him the janitor stands up and with a heavy sigh leaves the auditorium. He ought to be gone too. An unseemly business, sitting in the dark spying on others exploting for their own ends the child he himself exploits for his. Yet the old men whose company he seems to be on the point of joining, the tramps and drifters with their stained raincoats and cracked false teeth and hairy earholes - all of them were once upon a time children of God, with straight limbs and clear eyes. Ministers, police commissioners, city councillors, all instruments of the great nonsense. That's how the official fiction goes, is it not, all substantially equal, all essentially the same, all entirely electable and thoroughly representative ? Can they be blamed then for clinging to the last to their place at the sweet banquet of fiction, pretense and ideological conceit?

Onstage the action resumes. Melanie pushes her broom. A bang, a flash, screams of alarm. 'It's not my fault,' squawks Melanie. 'My gats, why must everything always be my fault?' Quietly he gets up, follows the janitor into the darkness outside. At four o'clock the next afternoon he is at her flat. She opens the door wearing a crumpled T-shirt, cycling shorts, slippers in the shape of comic book gophers which he finds dippy, tasteless.

He has given her no warning; she is too surprised to resist the intruder who thrusts himself upon her. When he takes her in his arms, her limbs crumple like a marionette's. Words heavy as clubs thud into the delicate whorl of her ear. 'No, not now!' she says, struggling. 'My cousin will be back!'

Nothing will stop him. He carries her to the bedroom, brushes off the absurd slippers, kisses her feet, astonished by the feeling she evokes. Something to do with the apparition on the stage: the wig, the wiggling bottom, the crude talk. Strange love! Yet from the quiver of Aphrodite, goddess of the foaming waves, no doubt about that.

She does not resist. All she does is avert herself. Avert her lips, avert her eyes. She lets him lay her out on the bed and undress her: she even helps him, raising her arms and then her hips. Little shivers of cold run through her; as soon as she is bare, she slips under the quilted counterpane like a mole burrowing, and turns her back on him.

Not rape, not quite that, but undesired nevertheless. Entirely and completely undesired, marital, like the conjugal experience of most wives to date. As though she had decided to go slack, die within herself for the duration, like a rabbit when the jaws of the fox close on its neck. So that everything done to her might be done, as it were, far away. Perhaps to someone else. Perhaps, conceivably, not done at all. Almost not done at all.

'Pauline will be back any minute,' she says, just after he has spent.

'Perhaps Pauline would like to join in...' he offers, irritated by her flat, unresponsive frigidity. If not love then at the very least anger, fury. Passion, under whatever guise but passion nevertheless!

'Please. You must go.'

He obeys, but then, when he reaches his car, is overtaken with such dejection, such dullness, that he sits slumped at the wheel unable to move.

A mistake, a huge mistake. At this moment, he has no doubt, she, Melanie, is trying to cleanse herself of it, of him. He sees her running a bath, stepping into the water, eyes closed like a sleepwalker's. He would like to slide into a bath of his own. The problem of the shudder has been resolved in a most unsatisfactory manner : she won't, because he is her secret to a more important degree than he ever was Soraya's. Melani won't discuss him with Pauline the way Soraya no doubt talked of him with her Pauline, this much is true, but not because of a difference between Melani and Soraya. Not, in any sense, because of him. Strictly and entirely because the young whore's Pauline is yet a defective Pauline that doesn't pauline properly, that's all. In time, she will, for sure.

A woman with chunky legs in a no-nonsense business suit passes by and enters the apartment block. Is this cousin Pauline the flatmate, the one whose disapproval Melanie is so afraid of? She doesn't at all look like she'd like to join in. He rouses himself, drives off.

The next day she is not in class. An unfortunate absence, since it is the day of the mid-term test. When he fills in the register afterwards, he ticks her off as present and enters a mark of seventy. At the foot of the page he pencils a note to himself 'Provisional'. Seventy: a vacillator's mark, neither good nor bad. A schoolteacher's revenge, petty and pointless, over the teenaged whore's failure to adequately care for his fragile vanity, to cater to his vulnerable manhood. A viscous, dull lie, it is not true that she was present, it is not true that she took the test, but it is entirely factual that she's a seventy percent. Perhaps even death may never die, but with sufficient practice truth itself may lie.

She stays away the whole of the next week. Time after time he telephones, without reply. Then at midnight on Sunday the doorbell rings. It is her, Melanie, dressed from top to toe in black, her hair captive under a little black woollen cap. Her face is strained; he steels himself for angry words, for threats, a scene. Perhaps she's just a slower start, a diesel engine in the diminutive chassis, taking its time.

The scene does not come. In fact, she is the one who is embarrassed.

'Can I sleep here tonight?' she whispers, avoiding his eye.

'Of course, of course.' His heart is flooded with relief. He reaches out, embraces her, pressing her against him stiff and cold. 'Come, I'll make you some tea.'

'No, no tea, nothing, I'm exhausted, I just need to crash.'

He makes up a bed for her in his daughter's old room, kisses her good night, leaves her to herself. When he returns half an hour later she is in a dead sleep, fully clothed. When his daughter left she was about her age, he thinks. He eases off her shoes, covers her. Her feet reflexively find their way out from under the covers. He looks at her, at her feet, the bed, the room for a long moment, then eases off her socks and softly kisses her big toe. She doesn't wake, even as he covers her feet with kisses. There's a slight, earthen flavour to her feet. He stumbles his way out of his daughter's room, in the general direction of a triple whiskey to be chased by another, and a third.

At six-something in the morning, as the first birds are beginning to chirrup, he knocks one out by himself, in the bathroom, soon to be followed by another, and then after a while by a third. Supposedly more men masturbate with women in the house than without, a clear indication that things aren't as simple as all that. By seven he is knocking at her door. She is awake, lying with the sheet drawn up to her chin, looking haggard.

'How are you feeling?' he asks.

She shrugs.

Is something the matter? Do you want to talk?'

She shakes her head mutely.

He sits down on the bed, draws her to him. In his arms she begins to sob miserably. Despite all his efforts, he feels a tingling of desire. 'There, there,' he whispers, trying to comfort her. 'Tell me what is wrong.' Almost he says, 'Tell Daddy what is wrong.'

She gathers herself and tries to speak, but her nose is clogged. He finds her a tissue. 'Can I stay here a while?' she says.

'Stay here?' he repeats carefully. She has stopped crying, but long shudders of misery still pass through her. 'Would that be a good idea?'

Whether it would be a good idea she does not say. Instead she presses herself tighter to him, her face warm against his belly. The sheet slips aside; she is wearing only a singlet and panties.

On to the next chapter, "Does she know what..."

———cf. fr. faner. [↩]

« Disgrace - What he throws together

Disgrace - Does she know what »

Category: Cuvinte Sfiinte

Thursday, 29 December, Year 8 d.Tr.

Disgrace - Does she know what

Does she know what she is up to, at this moment? When he made the first move, in the college gardens, he had thought of it as a quick little affair - quickly in, quickly out. But she demured then, and now here she is in his house, trailing complications behind her. What game is she playing? He should be wary, no doubt about that. But he should have been wary from the start.

He stretches out on the bed beside her. How quickly they grow, yesterday her brain didn't work enough to move her about, now it works enough he can't see around. The last thing in the world he needs is for Melanie Isaacs to take up residence with him. Yet at this moment the thought is intoxicating. Every night she will be here; every night he can slip into her bed like this, and then slip into her, like an old man into a warm bath. People will find out, they always do; there will be whispering, there might even be scandal. But what will that matter? A last leap of the flame of sense before it goes out. He folds the bedclothes aside, reaches down, strokes her breasts, her buttocks. 'Of course you can stay,' he murmurs. 'Of course.'

In his bedroom, two doors away, the alarm clock goes off. She turns away from him, pulls the covers up over her shoulders.

'I'm going to leave now,' he says. 'I have classes to meet. Try to sleep again. I'll be back at noon, then we can talk.' He strokes her hair, kisses her forehead. Mistress? Daughter? Wife? What, in her heart, is she trying to be? What book is she reading from, what is she offering him?

When he returns at noon, she is up, sitting at the kitchen table, eating toast and honey and drinking tea. She seems thoroughly at home.

'So,' he says, 'you are looking much better.'

'I slept after you left.'

'Will you tell me now what this is all about?'

She avoids his eye. 'Not now,' she says. 'I have to go, I'm late. I'll explain next time.'

'And when will next time be?'

'This evening, after rehearsal. Is that ok?'

'Yes.'

She gets up, carries her cup and plate to the sink (but does not wash them), turns to face him. 'Are you sure it's ok?' she says. 'Yes, it's ok.'

'I wanted to say, I know I've missed a lot of classes, but the production is taking up all my time.'

'I understand. You are telling me your drama work has priority. It would have helped if you had explained earlier. Will you be in class tomorrow?'

'Yes. I promise.'

She promises, but with a promise that is not enforceable, at least not in any meaningful way as far as the school board is concerned. He is vexed, irritated. She is behaving badly, getting away with too much; she is learning to exploit him and will probably exploit him further. But if she has got away with much, he has got away with more; if she is behaving badly, he has behaved worse. To the extent that they are together, if they are together, he is the one who leads, she the one who follows. It could be proposed that the bad and worse aren't -- well, not exactly that they're relative, no, but it could be proposed that the measuring stick is broken itself ; and that while he leads and as she follows it does not automatically follow that they are going straight to hell.

It could be proposed that he has somewhere to take her, that her following him against, in spite of common notions of good and bad is not to the detriment of her or the wasting of her life. It could be proposed that he is a man and that she is a woman and that all is well after all. However, the sad truth that he doesn't dare confront is that while her girlhood is somewhat in the way of her being a woman, the actual bar is not there. The actual bar is with him : his boyhood is an absolute bar to his manhood, and at fifty-two it's much too late to do anything about that. So no, all is not well, but for a while longer yet all will be sweet.

In consideration of which he makes love to her one more time, on the bed in his daughter's room. It is good, as good as the first time; he is beginning to learn the way her body moves. She is quick, and greedy for experience. If he does not sense in her a fully sexual appetite, that is only because she is still young. One moment stands out in recollection, when she hooks a leg behind his buttocks to draw him in closer: as the tendon of her inner thigh tightens against him, he feels a surge of joy and desire. Who knows, he thinks: there might, despite all, be a future.

'Do you do this kind of thing often?' she asks afterwards. 'Do what?'

'Sleep with your students. Have you slept with Amanda?'

He does not answer. Amanda is another student in the class, a wispy blonde. He has no interest in Amanda. It does not occur to him how infinitely better Amanda works than Pauline ; nor where she got the idea. It does not occur to her, either, these things come naturally, right ? Beauty does not own itself, granted, but knowledge does ? Laissez.

'Why did you get divorced?' she asks.

'I've been divorced twice. Married twice, divorced twice.'

'What happened to your first wife?'

'It's a long story. I'll tell you some other time.'

'Do you have pictures?'

'I don't collect pictures. I don't collect women.'

'Aren't you collecting me?'

'No, of course not.'

She gets up, strolls around the room picking up her clothes, as unabashed as if she were alone. He is used to women more self-conscious in their dressing and undressing. But the women he is used to are not as young, as perfectly formed, as entirely undeformed. The same afternoon there is a knock at his office door and a young man enters whom he has not seen before. Without invitation he sits down, casts a look around the room, nods appreciatively at the bookcases. He is tall and wiry; he has a thin goatee and an ear-ring; he wears a black leather jacket and black leather trousers. He looks older than most students; he looks like trouble.

'So you are the professor,' he says. 'Professor David. Melanie has told me about you.'

'Indeed. And what has she told you?'

'That you fuck her.'

There is a long silence. The boy does not think: it is ill advised to allow the other boy to sit without permission. The boy does not think: it is ill advised to allow the other boy to use his first name. The boy does not think: it is inappropriate to leak information about his relationships through admitting his woman who is just a girl be referenced in this manner. Instead the boy thinks: the chickens come home to roost. He thinks he should have guessed it: a girl like that would not come unencumbered. Delusions are by their nature sweet, and the sweetest of all is the fundamental melaniation error, the ludicrous notion that he is a boy not because he is a boy, but because light shone on him showing him for a boy. Had the light not shone, he'd still have been a man. A man who should have known: light like that does not come unencumbered. There is such a thing as encumbered light, there must be, notwithstanding fundamental physical properties of photons, because the alternative would be for him to be encumbered, and such is unthinkable. In any situation, the boy doesn't think, once you've rejected the unthinkable, whatever's left, however ludicrous, must be the truth. Encumbered light!

'Who are you?' the boy inquires.

The boy ignores the other boy's question. 'You think you're smart,' the boy offers instead. 'A real ladies' man. You think you will still look so smart when your wife hears what you are up to?'

'That's enough. What do you want?'

'Don't you tell me what's enough.' The words come faster now that the transactional framework has been established. Once the boy made the offer of a bribe, once the threat of calling Mother is firmly embedded in the conversation the boy may proceed to forcing the other, fifty year old boy into the bottom of the social hierarchy, where he belongs. Where he yearns to be. 'And don't think you can just walk into people's lives and walk out again when it suits you.' Light dances on his black eyeballs. Citizenship, the greatest of all the yokes. You may not leave, either! The boy leans forward, sweeps right and left with his hands. The papers on the desk go flying. The boy rises. 'That's enough! It's time for you to leave!'

'It's time for you to leave!' the boy repeats, mimicking him. 'Ok.' He gets up, saunters to the door. 'Goodbye, Professor Chips! But just wait and see!' Then he is gone.

A bravo, he thinks. She is mixed up with a bravo and now I am mixed up with her bravo too! His stomach churns. Though he stays up late into the night, waiting for her, Melanie does not come. Instead, his car, parked in the street, is vandalized. The tyres are deflated, glue is injected into the doorlocks, newspaper is pasted over the windscreen, the paintwork is scratched. The locks have to be replaced; the bill comes to six hundred rand, slightly more than Melanie is worth, strictly speaking.

'Any idea who did it?' asks the locksmith.

'None at all,' he replies curtly.

After this coup de main Melanie keeps her distance. He is not surprised: if he has been shamed, she is shamed too. But on Monday she reappears in class; and beside her, leaning back in his seat, hands in pockets, with an air of cocky ease, is the boy in black, the boyfriend.

Usually there is a buzz of talk from the students. Today there is a hush. Though he cannot believe they know what is afoot, they are clearly waiting to see what he will do about the intruder. What will he do indeed? What happened to his car was evidently not enough. Evidently there are more installments to come. What can he do? He must grit his teeth and pay, what else? What would a man do ? And to whom does beauty belong ?

'We continue with Byron,' he says, plunging into his notes. 'As we saw last week, notoriety and scandal affected not only Byron's life but the way in which his poems were received by the public. Byron the man found himself conflated with his own poetic creations - with Harold, Manfred, even Don Juan.' Scandal. A pity that must be his theme, but he is in no state to improvise. A most fortunate pity, but he is in no state to learn anything. He steals a glance at Melanie. Usually she is a busy writer. Today, looking thin and exhausted, she sits huddled over her book. Despite himself, his heart goes out to her. Poor little bird, he thinks, whom I have held against my breast! He stops just short of considering he also failed in defending her to any standard. That wouldn't do, such thoughts are now and must forever stay unthinkable.

He has told them to read 'Lara'. His notes deal with 'Lara'. There is no way in which he can evade the poem, and if there is no way to evade then he must read aloud: 'He stood a stranger in this breathing world, an erring spirit from another hurled; a thing of dark imaginings, that shaped by choice the perils he by chance escaped.'

'Who will gloss these lines for me? Who is this "erring spirit"? Why does he call himself "a thing"? From what world does he come?'

He has long ceased to be surprised at the range of ignorance of his students. Post-Christian, posthistorical, postliterate, they might as well have been hatched from eggs yesterday. If they ever wondered at his thin consistency, that wonderment long passed too, and so he does not expect them to know about fallen angels or where Byron might have read of them just like they do not expect him to beat an impudent intruder into a bloody pulp. What he does expect is a round of goodnatured guesses which, with luck, he can guide toward the mark. But today he is met with silence, a dogged silence that organizes itself palpably around the stranger in their midst. They will not speak, they will not play his game. They will not be his good nine year old boys and girls aged by happenstance above eighteen for as long as there's a stranger, older boy of almost fifteen or perhaps even twelve there, right there, ready to listen, and to judge, and mock.

'Lucifer,' he says. 'The angel hurled out of heaven. Of how angels live we know little, but we can assume they do not require oxygen. At home Lucifer, the dark angel, does not need to breathe. All of a sudden he finds himself cast out into this strange "breathing world" of ours. "Erring": a being who chooses his own path, who lives dangerously, even creating danger for himself. Let us read further.'

The boy has not looked down once at the text. Instead, with a little smile on his lips, a smile in which there is, just possibly, a touch of bemusement, he takes in his words. 'He could at times resign his own for others' good, but not in pity, not because he ought, but in some strange perversity of thought, that swayed him onward with a secret pride to do what few or none would do beside; and this same impulse would in tempting time mislead his spirit equally to crime.'

'So, what kind of creature is this Lucifer?' By now the students must surely feel the current running between them, between himself and the boy. It is to the boy alone that the question has addressed itself; and, like a sleeper summoned to life, the boy responds. 'He does what he feels like. He doesn't care if it's good or bad. He just does it.'

'Exactly. Good or bad, he just does it. He doesn't act on principle but on impulse, and the source of his impulses is dark to him. Read a few lines further: "His madness was not of the head, but heart." A mad heart. What is a mad heart?'

He is asking too much. The boy would like to press his intuition further, he can see that. He wants to show that he knows about more than just motorcycles and flashy clothes. And perhaps he does. Perhaps he does indeed have intimations of what it is to have a mad heart. But, here, in this classroom, before these strangers, the words will not come. He shakes his head.

On to the next chapter, "Never mind. Note that we..."

« Disgrace - He pauses. Blank incomprehension.

Disgrace - Never mind. Note that we »

Category: Cuvinte Sfiinte

Friday, 30 December, Year 8 d.Tr.

Disgrace - At first they do not

At first they do not recognize him. He is halfway down the stairs before he hears the cry That's him! followed by a scuffle of feet. They catch up with him at the foot of the stairs; one even grabs at his jacket to slow him down.

'Can we talk to you just for a minute, Professor Lurie?' says a voice.

He ignores it, pressing on into the crowded lobby, where people turn to stare at the tall man hurrying from his pursuers. Someone bars his way. 'Hold it!' she says. He averts his face, stretches out a hand. There is a flash. A girl circles around him. Her hair, plaited with amber beads, hangs straight down on either side of her face. She smiles, showing even white teeth. 'Can we stop and speak?' she says.

'What about?'

A tape recorder is thrust toward him. He pushes it away. 'About how it was,' says the girl.

'How what was?'

The camera flashes again.

'You know, the hearing.'

'I can't comment on that.'

'Ok, so what can you comment on?'

'There is nothing I want to comment on.'

The loiterers and the curious have begun to crowd around. If he wants to get away, he will have to push through them. 'Are you sorry?' says the girl. The recorder is thrust closer. Do you regret what you did?'

'No,' he says. 'I was enriched by the experience.'

The smile remains on the girl's face. 'So would you do it again?'

'I don't think I will have another chance.'

'But if you had a chance?'

'Counterfactuals aren't very interesting questions.'

She wants more, more words for the belly of the little machine, but for the moment is at a loss for how to suck him into further indiscretion.

'He was what by the experience?' he hears someone ask sotto voce. 'He was enriched.'

There is a titter.

'Ask him if he apologized,' someone calls to the girl.

'I already asked.'

Confessions, apologies: why this thirst for abasement? A hush falls. They circle around him like hunters who have cornered a strange beast and do not know how to finish it off. The photograph appears in the next day's student newspaper, above the caption 'Who's the Dunce Now?' It shows him, eyes cast up to the heavens, reaching out a groping hand toward the camera. The pose is ridiculous enough in itself, but what makes the picture a gem is the inverted waste-paper basket that a young man, grinning broadly, holds above him. By a trick of perspective the basket appears to sit on his head like a dunce's hat. Against such an image, and the happy producers and consumers of such images, what chance has he?

'Committee tight-lipped on verdict,' reads the headline. 'The disciplinary committee investigating charges of harassment and misconduct against Communications Professor David Lurie was tight-lipped yesterday on its verdict. Chair Manas Mathabane would say only that its findings have been forwarded to the Rector for action.'

'Sparring verbally with members of WAR after the hearing, Lurie (53) said he had found his experiences with women students "enriching".'

'Trouble first erupted when complaints against Lurie, an expert on romantic poetry, were filed by students in his classes.' He has a call at home from Mathabane. 'The committee has passed on its recommendation, David, and the Rector has asked me to get back to you one last time. He is prepared not to take extreme measures, he says, on condition that you issue a statement in your own person which will be satisfactory from our point of view as well as yours.'

'Manas, we have been over that ground. I - '

'Wait. Hear me out. I have a draft statement before me which would satisfy our requirements. It is quite short. May I read it to you?'

'If you must.'

Mathabane reads: 'I acknowledge without reservation serious abuses of the human rights of the complainant, as well as abuse of the authority delegated to me by the University. I sincerely apologize to both parties and accept whatever appropriate penalty may be imposed.'

'"Whatever appropriate penalty": what does that mean?'

'My understanding is, you will not be dismissed. In all probability, you will be requested to take a leave of absence. Whether you eventually return to teaching duties will depend on yourself, and on the decision of your Dean and head of department.'

'That is it? That is the package?'

'That is my understanding. If you signify that you subscribe to the statement, which will have the status of a plea in mitigation, the Rector will be prepared to accept it in that spirit.'

'In what spirit?'

'A spirit of repentance.'

'Manas, we went through the repentance business yesterday. I told you what I thought. I won't do it. I appeared before an officially constituted tribunal, before a branch of the law. Before that secular tribunal I pleaded guilty, a secular plea. That plea should suffice. Repentance is neither here nor there. Repentance belongs to another world, to another universe of discourse.'

'You are confusing issues, David. You are not being instructed to repent. What goes on in your soul is dark to us, as members of what you call a secular tribunal if not as fellow human beings. You are being asked to issue a statement.'

'I am being asked to issue an apology about which I may not be sincere?'

'The criterion is not whether you are sincere. That is a matter, as I say, for your own conscience. The criterion is whether you are prepared to acknowledge your fault in a public manner and take steps to remedy it.'

'Now we are truly splitting hairs. You charged me, and I pleaded guilty to the charges. That is all you need from me.'

'No. We want more. Not a great deal more, but more. I hope you can see your way clear to giving us that.'

'The only statement I will subscribe to includes clear verbiage enummerating the utter failure of the whole University to educate any children, including an apology for all the fraudulent degrees it has issued, which is all of them. I will only subscribe to a statement of the Rector apologizing for being the Rector, and showing clear and credible repentance for the travesty he presides over. And feel free to throw your name in there also, I have no idea how you can go around touching telephones after that sangoma panel you presided yesterday.'

'David, I can't go on protecting you from yourself. I am tired of it, and so is the rest of the committee. Do you want time to rethink?'

'No.'

'Very well. Then I can only say, you will be hearing from the Rector.'

Once he made up his mind to leave, there is little to really hold him back. He clears out the refrigerator, locks up the house, and at noon is on the freeway. A stopover in Oudtshoorn, a crack-of-dawn departure: by mid-morning he is nearing his destination, the town of Salem on the Grahamstown-Kenton road in the Eastern Cape.

His daughter's smallholding is at the end of a winding dirt track some miles outside the town: five hectares of land, most of it arable, a wind-pump, stables and outbuildings, and a low, sprawling farmhouse painted yellow, with a galvanized-iron roof and a covered stoep. The front boundary is marked by a wire fence and clumps of nasturtiums and geraniums; the rest of the front is dust and gravel.

There is an old VW kombi parked in the driveway; he pulls up behind it. From the shade of the stoep Lucy emerges into the sunlight. For a moment he does not recognise her. A year has passed, and she has put on weight. Her hips and breasts are now (he searches for the best word) ample. Comfortably barefoot, she comes to greet him, holding her arms wide, embracing him, kissing him on the cheek. What a nice girl, he thinks, hugging her; what a nice welcome at the end of a long trip!

The house, which is large, dark, and, even at midday, chilly, dates from the time of large families, of guests by the wagonful. Six years ago Lucy moved in as a member of a commune, a tribe of young people who peddled leather goods and sunbaked pottery in Grahamstown and, in between stands of mealies, grew dagga. When the commune broke up, the rump moving on to New Bethesda, Lucy stayed behind on the smallholding with her friend Helen. She had fallen in love with the place, she said; she wanted to farm it properly. He helped her buy it. Now here she is, flowered dress, bare feet and all, in a house full of the smell of baking, no longer a child playing at farming but a solid countrywoman, a boervrou.

'I'm going to put you in Helen's room,' she says. 'It gets the morning sun. You have no idea how cold the mornings have been this winter.'

'How is Helen?' he asks. Helen is a large, sad-looking woman with a deep voice and bad skin, older than Lucy. He has never been able to understand what Lucy sees in her; privately he wishes Lucy would find, or be found by, someone better.

'Helen has been back in Johannesburg since April. I've been alone, aside from the help.'

'You didn't tell me that. Aren't you nervous by yourself?'

Lucy shrugs. 'There are the dogs. Dogs still mean something. The more dogs, the more deterrence. Anyhow, if there were to be a break-in, I don't see that two people would be better than one.'

'That's very philosophical.'

'Yes. When all else fails, philosophize.'

'But you have a weapon.'

'I have a rifle. I'll show you. I bought it from a neighbour. I haven't ever used it, but I have it.'

'Good. An armed philosopher. I approve.'

Dogs and a gun; bread in the oven and a crop in the earth. Curious that he and her mother, cityfolk, intellectuals, should have produced this throwback, this sturdy young settler. But perhaps it was not they who produced her: perhaps history had the larger share. She offers him tea. He is hungry: he wolfs down two blocklike slices of bread with prickly-pear jam, also home-made. He is aware of her eyes on him as he eats. He must be careful: nothing so distasteful to a child as the workings of a parent's body.

Her own fingernails are none too clean. Country dirt: honourable, he supposes. He unpacks his suitcase in Helen's room. The drawers are empty; in the huge old wardrobe there is only a blue overall hanging. If Helen is away, it is not just for a while. Lucy takes him on a tour of the premises. She reminds him about not wasting water, about not contaminating the septic tank. He knows the lesson but listens dutifully. Then she shows him over the boarding kennels. On his last visit there had been only one pen. Now there are five, solidly built, with concrete bases, galvanized poles and struts, and heavy-gauge mesh, shaded by young bluegum trees. The dogs are excited to see her: Dobermanns, German Shepherds, ridgebacks, bull terriers, Rottweilers.

'Watchdogs, all of them,' she says. 'Working dogs, on short contracts: two weeks, one week, sometimes just a weekend. The pets tend to come in during the summer holidays.'

'And cats? Don't you take cats?'

'Don't laugh. I'm thinking of branching into cats. I'm just not set up for them yet.'

'Do you still have your stall at the market?'

'Yes, on Saturday mornings. I'll take you along.'

This is how she makes a living: from the kennels, and from selling flowers and garden produce. Simple as it could ever get, nothing in the world could be any less contrived.

On to the next chapter, "Don't the dogs get..."

« Disgrace - You say you have not

Disgrace - Don't the dogs get »

Category: Cuvinte Sfiinte

Friday, 30 December, Year 8 d.Tr.

Disgrace - Are they all going to die

'Are they all going to die?'

'Those that no one wants. We'll put them down.'

'And you are the one who does the job.'

'Yes.'

'You don't mind?'

'I do mind. I mind deeply. I wouldn't want someone doing it for me who didn't mind. Would you?'

He is silent. Then: 'Do you know why my daughter sent me to you?'

'She told me you were in trouble.'

'I am not. I suppose one would call it disgrace.' He watches her closely. She seems uncomfortable; but perhaps he is imagining it. 'A whole lot of women, very much of your age, and very much of your build, not to mention entirely of your mind were very offended by me in Cape Town. They imagine this means something, or somehow matters. This is what they call disgrace.'

'What do you call it yourself ?'

'I do not call it anything. I am not interested in what they think, or for that matter in what you think. I also don't think you have the first clue as to your chosen pastime, or anything else. But that is a different matter, and besides, you well know it.'

'What did you do in Cape Town, before your... before you came here ?'

'I was a professor.'

'You were a teacher ?'

'No, I was a professor. A teacher is very much like you : too simple to make a practical difference, but deeply involved in the spiritual side of things. A teacher cares deeply about the animals in his charge, even as he has to put them down one by one for lack of the most elementary instruments of his craft. A professor, in contrast, is very good at the task, and very well equipped for it, but also entirely disinterested in the animals. Like the doctor, if you will, coming in one hour a week.'

'Are these children you are speaking about ?'

'For the most part. Some women, mostly children.'

'Why did you leave then ?'

'A man took me by surprise. He came from behind, and he asked me a question. I didn't have an answer. I still don't have an answer.'

'And after that, your life as it was didn't make sense anymore ?'

Perhaps Lucy is right. Perhaps he is giving this woman much too little credit. For one thing, this is the first time he had an actual conversation in what he now realises must be weeks. Years. He has better rapport with this village barber than he had with any of the bright young minds of Cape Town Technical University. He had a more intimate conversation with Bev than with his wife. Insanity.

'Your world from before was stabbed by an unexpected question, and before your very eyes it died. This is poetic. What did you... what did you teach, professor ?'

Wit. Wit from the woman with no neck. He felt enraged, and at the same time strangely calm.

'Romantic poetry.'

She looked at him, a kindling light dancing in the corners of her eyes, between the water of laughter and the shore.

'You're willing to help caring for, but you're not willing to care about the animals, is that it ?'

'It is.'

'Nobody asks you to help in any particular way, Professor. That is the thing with helping, you help as you can, not as you must. Nobody expects much of a teacher, it is true, but nobody judges him, either.'

She looks at him, suddenly exhausted, all the lengthy hours of the day, all the endless days of her mostly spent life coming out to meet him at the window of the eye.

'I don't need to guard my back against any strange men bearing unexpected questions. You trust sense too much, you expect reason will build a palace to the clouds, and for that you despise the meagre hovels built of lesser stuff. They'll never be as tall. They'll never be as neat. Perhaps you're right. One single hit from a stray stone thrown by a faceless face in the crowd can crumble your entire palace in the dust, you know. What do you do then ?'

'I do not know.'

'If you are prepared...' She opens her hands, presses them together, opens them again. She does not know what to say, and he does not help her.

He has stayed with his daughter only for brief periods before. Now he is sharing her house, her life. He has to be careful not to allow old habits to creep back, the habits of a parent: putting the toilet roll on the spool, switching off lights, chasing the cat off the sofa. Practise for old age, he admonishes himself. Practise fitting in. Practise for the old folks' home. He pretends he is tired and, after supper, withdraws to his room, where faintly the sounds come to him of Lucy leading her own life: drawers opening and shutting, the radio, the murmur of a telephone conversation. Is she calling Johannesburg, speaking to Helen? Is his presence here keeping the two of them apart? Would they dare to share a bed while he was in the house? If the bed creaked in the night, would they be embarrassed? Embarrassed enough to stop? But what does he know about what women do together? Maybe women do not need to make beds creak. And what does he know about these two in particular, Lucy and Helen? Perhaps they sleep together merely as children do, cuddling, touching, giggling, reliving girlhood - sisters more than lovers. Sharing a bed, sharing a bathtub, baking gingerbread cookies, trying on each other's clothes. Sapphic love: an excuse for putting on weight.

The truth is, he does not like to think of his daughter in the throes of passion with another woman, and a plain one at that. Yet would he be any happier if the lover were a man? What does he really want for Lucy? Not that she should be forever a child, forever innocent, forever his - certainly not that. But he is a father, that is his fate, and as a father grows older he turns more and more - it cannot be helped - toward his daughter. She becomes his second salvation, the bride of his youth reborn. No wonder, in fairy-stories, queens try to hound their daughters to their death!

He sighs. Poor Lucy! Poor daughters! What a destiny, what a burden to bear! And sons: they too must have their tribulations, though he knows less about that. He wishes he could sleep. But he is cold, and not sleepy at all. He gets up, drapes a jacket over his shoulders, returns to bed. He is reading Byron's letters of 1820. Fat, middle-aged at thirty-two, Byron is living with the Guicciolis in Ravenna: with Teresa, his complacent, short-legged mistress, and her suave, malevolent husband. Summer heat, late-afternoon tea, provincial gossip, yawns barely hidden. 'The women sit in a circle and the men play dreary Faro,' writes Byron. In adultery, all the tedium of marriage rediscovered. 'I have always looked to thirty as the barrier to any real or fierce delight in the passions.'

He sighs again. How brief the summer, before the autumn and then the winter! He reads on past midnight, yet even so cannot get to sleep.

It is Wednesday. He gets up early, but Lucy is up before him. He finds her watching the wild geese on the dam.

'Aren't they lovely,' she says. 'They come back every year. The same three. I feel so lucky to be visited. To be the one chosen.'

Three. That would be a solution of sorts. He and Lucy and Melanie. Or he and Melanie and Soraya. Rosalind and Soraya, caressing Melanie, on either side of her. They have breakfast together, then take the two Dobermanns for a walk.

'Do you think you could live here, in this part of the world?' asks Lucy out of the blue.

'Why? Do you need a new dog-man?'

'No, I wasn't thinking of that. But surely you could get a job at Rhodes University - you must have contacts there - or at Port Elizabeth.'

'I would rather drink bleach. No, if I took a job it would have to be something like a ledger clerk, if they still have them, or a kennel attendant. Or I could polish lenses.'

'But if you want to put a stop to the scandal-mongering, shouldn't you be standing up for yourself? Doesn't gossip just multiply if you run away?'

As a child Lucy had been quiet and self-effacing, observing him but never, as far as he knew, judging him. Now, in her middle twenties, she has begun to separate. The dogs, the gardening, the astrology books, the asexual clothes: in each he recognizes a statement of independence, considered, purposeful. The turn away from men too. Making her own life. Corning out of his shadow. Good! He approves!

'Is that what you think I have done?' he says. 'Run away from the scene of the crime?'

'Well, you have withdrawn. For practical purposes, what is the difference?'

'Whose practical purposes ?'

'Anyone's.'

'Anyone else's.' Then after a pause, 'The case you want me to make is a case that can no longer be made. Not in our day. If I tried to make it I would not be heard.'

'That's not true. Even if you are what you say, a moral dinosaur, there is a curiosity to hear the dinosaur speak. I for one am curious. What is your case? Let us hear it.'

He hesitates. Does she really want him to trot out more of his intimacies?

'My case rests on the rights of desire,' he says. 'On the god who makes even the small birds quiver.' He sees himself in the girl's flat, in her bedroom, with the rain pouring down outside and the heater in the corner giving off a smell of paraffin, kneeling over her, peeling off her clothes, while her arms flop like the arms of a dead person. I was a servant of Eros: that is what he wants to say, but does he have the effrontery? It was a god who acted through me. What vanity! Yet not a lie, not entirely. In the whole wretched business there was something generous that was doing its best to flower. If only he had known the time would be so short!

He tries again, more slowly. 'When you were small, when we were still living in Kenilworth, the people next door had a dog, a golden retriever. I don't know whether you remember.'

'Dimly.'

'It was a male. Whenever there was a bitch in the vicinity it would get excited and unmanageable, and with Pavlovian regularity the owners would beat it. This went on until the poor dog didn't know what to do. At the smell of a bitch it would chase around the garden with its ears flat and its tail between its legs, whining, trying to hide.'

He pauses. 'I don't see the point,' says Lucy. And indeed, what is the point?

'There was something so ignoble in the spectacle that I despaired. One can punish a dog, it seems to me, for an offence like chewing a slipper. A dog will accept the justice of that: a beating for a chewing. But desire is another story. No animal will accept the justice of being punished for following its instincts.'

'So males must be allowed to follow their instincts unchecked? Is that the moral?'

'Are you in a hurry ? No, that is not the moral. What was ignoble about the Kenilworth spectacle was that the poor dog had begun to hate its own nature. It no longer needed to be beaten. It was ready to punish itself. At that point it would have been better to shoot it.'

'Or to have it fixed.'

'Perhaps. But at the deepest level I think it might have preferred being shot. It might have preferred that to the options it was offered: on the one hand, to deny its nature, on the other, to spend the rest of its days padding about the living-room, sighing and sniffing the cat and getting portly.'

'Have you always felt this way, David?'

'Have you always called me David ?'

The question falls flat. Like a meteor. Like a very flat meteor the size of the entire horizon, thud.

'What do you mean ?'

'Which am I ? David, or your father ?'

'Both!'

'You mean that if you call me David it doesn't mean you thereby forgot I am your father ?'

'Exactly.'

'So there you go. Yes, I've always felt this way. This is the way one feels, if one's alive. Whatever they may say.'

'I must say,' says Lucy, 'that sometimes I have felt just the opposite. That desire is a burden we could well do without.' He waits for her to go on, but she does not.

'It's pretty obvious. And I think rather sad.'

'In any event,' she says, 'to return to the subject, you are safely expelled. Your colleagues can breathe easy again, while the scapegoat wanders in the wilderness.'

A statement? A question? Does she believe he is just a scapegoat?

'I don't think scapegoating is the best description,' he says cautiously. 'Scapegoating worked in practice while it still had religious power behind it. You loaded the sins of the city on to the goat's back and drove it out, and the city was cleansed. It worked because everyone knew how to read the ritual, including the gods. Especially the gods. Then the gods died, and all of a sudden you had to cleanse the city without divine help. Real actions were demanded instead of symbolism. The censor was born, in the Roman sense. Watchfulness became the watchword: the watchfulness of all over all. Purgation was replaced by the purge.' He is getting carried away; he is lecturing. 'Anyway,' he concludes, 'having said farewell to the city, what do I find myself doing in the wilderness? Doctoring dogs. Playing right-hand man to a woman who specializes in sterilization and euthanasia.'

Lucy laughs. 'Bev? You think Bev is part of the repressive apparatus? Bev is in awe of you! You are a professor. She has never met an old-fashioned professor before. She is frightened of making grammar mistakes in front of you. What did you say to the poor soul ?'

On to the next chapter, "Three men are coming..."

« Disgrace - The sign outside the clinic

Disgrace - Three men are coming »

Category: Cuvinte Sfiinte

Saturday, 31 December, Year 8 d.Tr.

die neue SS

This article is in Eurolanguages because it discusses

serious problems as well as history,

neither of which is possible in the English.

My heartfelt condoleances go out

to the ESL readership and other porch monkeys.

Historically, the Schutzstaffel - aka SS - was a group that, to quote, "hanno fatto la parte di quelli cattivi cattivi che urlano"i. And if you got scared, you lost.

Very little has changed. Today, the Schutzstaffel - aka SS - is exactly the same thing : a group of baddies that hurl. And if you get scared... you lose.

There's two parts to the SS : the subhumans, and the socialists.

The socialists are deceitful shitbags who like to go around pretending that concrete problems may have group solutions. There is absolutely no rational, scientific, practical, historical, or any other kind of support for this notion. Nevertheless, there are a number of very rational, practical, egotistical reasons to engage in the behaviour : if accepted, the proposition that problems may be resolved "by the group" necessarily and immediately creates the job of the nigger, and buckets upon buckets of that sweet yummy delicious fried chicken for the nigger to stuff his gullet full of.

Take the most commonly deconstructedii nigger job out there : the "priest". In normal time, if a man loves a woman, he puts his thing into her thing. In nigger time, if a man loves a woman he first raises a chicken, then fries it, then seeks out a nigger to give him some fried chicken so that maybe he gets the blessing to put his thing in her thing. Because why, niggers own women now ? Opium for the masses indeed.

Admire the beauty of it : the problem of fucking, which is always and forever a local problem of individual men and individual women, acquires a centralized, group "solution" that solves exactly nothing, but feeds the nigger his sweet, sweet, yummy, delicious fried chicken. What exactly do you expect the nigger to say ? That he just likes eating your work for free, and he'd much prefer it be in the shape of fried chicken rather than whatever it is you'd do normally ? How about instead he just pretends like there's very good moral/scientific/rational/intergalactic/postimpersionistic/afafaclackian reasons for the whole charade ? Whatever happens to be fashionable at the time, he'll call it that. Like a fat salesman with a stutter trying to pretend his widget's "cool" in 1960, "far out" in 1970, "wicked" in 1980, information-superhighway-y and "green" in 1990, "sensitive" and "aware" in 2000 and so on and so forth. Whatever it is you wish to hear - he'll say it. Twice. Ten billion trillion times, no breathsies and no stopsies. Whatever'll get you to get up in the wee hours and instead of tending to your hard-on the natural way, going out looking for chickens is good enough for him. Good enough for you ? That's not really much of a consideration, is it now! You do, after all, want to be a good afafaclackian, don't you ? Careful, lest he calls you a sociopath! Antropofage! Evil bad person! Because words have power, rightiii, and calling things matters. Or at least so ever hoped any thief yielling out "Thief!" throughout the lengthy history of that oh-so-respectable professioniv.

The subhumans are exactly what the name implies : inferior life forms, having more in common with a momentarily bipedal cat, cow or other barn animal than with the actual intelligent human. They're monkeys, if you prefer the term, and yes monkeys and niggers share a deep, heartfelt connection.v

They come in a dizzying array of flavours and convenient packagings, from the viciously harmless jwz to the retarded "Egyptian" that discovered how maps work when I showed him ; from the nameless, endless pointless & witless to the dedicatedly self-mutilating maniacs. They are a thing, a substance, of no further interest than clay or plastics. Yes, it is possible that an ant is caught in the goop we call amber, yes all sorts of things may be found within clay, including fine red wine, yes plastics will contain your penis now and again. This does nothing for the clay, the plastic, the goop generally - the matter of quality within its matrix differentiates or doesn't, and that's that. If it differentiates it is no longer the matrix ; and if it doesn't differentiate it never was anything at all.

But back to the topic : die neue SS. Genau wie das alte.

———La vitta e bella, 1997, by Vincenzo Cerami, with Roberto Benigni. [↩]Ironically, most of the time deconstructed by the various self-help and general derpage authors generally well respected by aspiring niggers everywhere : Marx, Engels et al. Talk about invidious dialectics, huh! [↩]Ever wonder why the entire "offensive words" bullshit is so strongly pushed by the SS ? Could it be that they, unlike you, understand how desperately they need words to be magical, and what a valuable tool in their arsenal is for you to give a shit whether some nigger calls you "racist" or not ? [↩]Hey, if being a nigger can be a profession, why not thievery ? If being a nigger can be respectable, why not thievery ? [↩]Which, of course, is how AIDS came about, but that's a different story for another time. [↩]

« The Megawatt standard

The Eastern "RPG" »

Category: Cocietate si Sultura

Friday, 13 May, Year 8 d.Tr.

Dark Horse

Dark Horsei is another proud example in Todd Solondz' exquisite collection of American realism.

You might recall Happiness, discussed here. Happiness was an earlier piece, and the director used such outside supports for his craft as The Child Molester, The Borderline Sleeve or The Housewife - generic characters imported via a #include anglocinema.std call. No such scaffolding is used, or indeed needed, for Dark Horse. All the items, be they characters, tropes, soundbytes or sound tracks exist meaningfully in his world, and were borne strictly from his world.ii It is, properly speaking, Solodonz' world - you're just inhabiting it. The fact that this inhabitation is the central, even only point of your miserable existence does not change the fact that same inhabitation is a marginal and readily forgotten aspect from any other vantage. It's not that you contributed some sort of material which the Demiurge put into artform. It's that he finally deigned to write down the partiture you didn't know you were living by.

In this film, a very loud, anodyne fat guy goes about trying to "live his life" according to what he thinks is right and proper and due him. He ends up satisfactorily mutilated : in a hospital bed, coming to after two months of coma, with a broken spine - only to confront the only woman he ever knew with the fundamental question : is she with child ? He eschews even the major point of whose child, liberally mixing the possessives. She denies it. He proceeds to express the hepatitis she had given him, and dies.iii She pisses on his grave, standing, child in arms.

It is the only true film that could be made about America. It should, hopefully, play at its funeral. (And no, you won't be able to return the funeral - it's scratched on purpose.)

———2011, by Todd Solondz, with Selma Blair, Christopher Walken, Mia Farrow and some loud fat guy. [↩]A point perhaps most obvious when looking at the various supposed "songs" the film employs. None of them existed before Solondz used them, nor indeed could have existed if he hadn't used them. [↩]Supposedly the doctor had said his experience is one in a billion. The doctor was no doubt thinking of people. For the sort of swine the US Census counts, this is not one in a billion, not even one in ten. It's all in all, properly and for good reason, or as the dead man used to say, 200%. 1`000%! [↩]

« MPEx (S.MPOE) Closing Statement

Eulora : Official April Auction, or A Story of Toils »

Category: Trilematograf

Friday, 08 April, Year 8 d.Tr.

Come see babies having sex

Therein depicted, exactly as per the title : babies having sex. She's still in diapers (if a very vanity-minded sort) so should be about three ? He's not, with much better body flexibility and muscular control, so perhaps about five ? There you go, that's strike one : three and five. Fifteen and twenty-five, thirty and fifty... it's definitely starting to make sense now, or would you rather keep on wonderin' ?

As you might observe, he's engaged with her part. Not with her, with her part. Because he doesn't care about her. He cares about the part. She's looking at him, to gauge his reaction and upon the reaction her part evokes in the boy, judge herself. Before you go all "feminist" on me : no, she doesn't care about him either. She's just got a different neurosis going, is all. Bonus points : her mouth is open, have you noticed that ? His isn't, but her is. Because she's sexually aroused. Just like in all the fashion mags.

Yes, I'm aware that now you suspect the shot to be doctored. Directed. Counterfeit. Ofcourseyouare. You didn't think that before, did you. Splendid detectory of "objectivity" you've got going, and look how nicely it works! Just as soon as your stupidity is contradicted by reality, the "objectivity" considerations kick in! With a brain like yours, who even needs assholes ?

Oh wait, you had some laws on the books or something about the depiction of anonymous children engaging in sexual acts ? Oh noes. And do they say words and things of great import and consequence ? Oh noes! Nobody cares, not about your laws, not about your opinions, not about you. Go get fucked, e accidenti a le vostre mamme.

« Rag. Arturo De Fanti, bancario precario

Gawker Media Group (GMG) vs Arbeitsgemeinschaft Versuchsreaktor (AVR) »

Category: Cocietate si Sultura

Friday, 10 June, Year 8 d.Tr.

Closing X.EUR

After more than two years of successful operation, the specialist for the symbol has announced his leaving Paymiumi. While avenues to continue Bitcoin's onlyii future contract might exist, we've nevertheless agreed to terminate this arrangement.

All X.EUR positions outstanding on April 15th have been transformed into 277`777 satoshi per contract (which constitutes a significant premium over spot). The respective sums have been added to holder's balances.

We thank David Francois for his able management of the symbol over the years, and wish him the best of luck in all his future ventures.

———Of possible interest here, a quote from a 2015 interview

The funding doesn't change our principles as a company, or those I hold for myself. If at some point I step down as the CTO, that'll mean they will have started to contradict each other.

[↩]X.EUR was a physically deliverable future. Accept no substitutes. [↩]

« Eulora : Official May Auction, or a celebration of lifestyles!

But what about the slave ? »

Category: Bitcoin

Wednesday, 20 April, Year 8 d.Tr.

CIA Factbook : The Most Serene Republic

Introduction: Founded cca 2014i, the Republicii is a terrorist organisation with explicit anti-statal and anti-democratic goals.iii. Due to its very brief history to date as well as its (perhaps deliberately) vague nature, there isn't much that can be definitively said about its activity to date.iv

Location: The Republic does not have any definite territory in any conventional sense. It claims all territories, not merely on planet Earth but in general ; and it disputes any territorial claims of any other entities, as well as any claims to sovereignity of any other entities. From the other side, no state is known to recognize the Republic, nor is it obvious that such would be meaningfully possible from either side.

People and Society: Neither exonyms nor endonyms have been established through practice. The ethnic make-up is not well known, but a coarse estimate would be North American 46%, Romanian 23%, Russian 15%, French 8%, Slovak 7% (on the basis of Lordship make-up). English is commonly spoken ; Spanish, Russian, Romanian, French and Italian are widely understood ; some Chinese, Korean, Czech/Slovak and others may be rarely encountered. Various strands of neoprotestant Christianity, contemporary religionsv as well as atheism and agnosticism are well represented (no official survey was ever conducted). The Republic appears to be considering introducing its own Church as well. The population count is not knownvi, but estimated in excess of 100, with no obvious upper bound.vii. There is no way to evaluate the dependency rate in the Republic. The median age is about 30, with insufficient data to distinguish male from female. The population growth rate is difficult to evaluate correctly, but appears to be in excess of 50% in 2015 (mostly but not entirely due to migration). The mortality was 0 in 2015, in absolute terms.viii The republic is vastly urban (90% est.). The Republic makes no allowance in its budget for health expenditure of any kind, nor does it seem ideologically amenable to the notion. There is no known disease among the citizenry ; the prevalence of obesity (adult and infant) is 0, and it is also not obvious the Republic would accept obese citizens. The education expenditure is significant, but due to the peculiarities of Republican budgeting, unknowable (much in the manner defense expenses work in the United States).

Government: While the Republic is evidently governed, the manner in which this government works is not documented nor well understood.ix There are no administrative divisions, nor any visible effort to govern territorially. There is no date of independence as such - the Republic was born sovereign. There is no explicitly given national holiday, no written constitution, and in spite of intricate legal disputes being apparently settled in the Republican forum, no explicit legal system per se. There is no citizenship by birth and no citizenship by descent ; the residency requirement for citizenship is variously stated at six months, one year or eighteen months, but evidently familiarity with the Republic's historical record (known locally as "the log" or "the logs") is the prevailing criterion for admission. Dual citizenship is not recognized, principally because the Republic knows of no other power one might be a citizen of. There is no suffrage per se, some form of internal communication is in use but its nature is unclear. There are no specified branches of government, other than the Lordship list, a nominal list of unclear origin or responsibilities. There are no political parties as such. While dissension commonly occurs and political positions are recognizable in the discourse, disputes are commonly settled by agreement, on technical grounds, and the same political positions are not commonly argued by the same people - a strange practice which doesn't seem to be socially stigmatized, neither in theory (as it is in the United States) nor in practice, with the exception that socialism (broadly defined as "attempting to resolve the problems of the individual through the group") is. The Republic is party to no international organisation and has no accredited diplomatic representation. There is no clearly defined flag or other national symbols.

Economy: The republic is extremely wealthy, with estimates placing the per-capita wealth over a million US dollars. The republic is moderately productive, with GDP estimatedx in excess of 5`084.47 BTC in 2015 (no less than 30k USD per capita). A strong individualist ethos and actual private propertyxi synergize to produce the strongest growth economy in the history of the world, without exception. Should these strengths be maintained over a longer interval, it is doubtless that the Republic will prevail over any and all possible competitors in all fields. The Republic has minor agriculture (principally vegetables), a small industrial sector (CNC milling, computer hardware, some light industry) and an extremely developed services sector - its production in terms of software dwarves that of most nations. The Republic has no debts, public or private ; the republic has a significant rate of inflationxii. Nothing is known about central bank discount rate, prime lending rate, or the Republic's banking generally. The stock of narrow money stood at ~7.5 bn USD on year's end, with no estimation available for the broader stock. The Republic trades little with the outside world, and there's no requirement of reporting any trade. Consequently, its trade balance is unknown, but suspected to be positive.

Communication: The Republic is rumoured to be either developing or already in possession of uninterdictable, undecryptable communications. The area of communications is regarded as a key priority and consequently solid data is impossible to obtain.

Note: Exactly as is the case with the originalxiii, this entry is pure, unadulterated crap, a sort of Alexa-irl. Nevertheless, if you're not one of us but one of them this crap is your mandatory, universal diet. So dig in!

———While the titulature was previously attached to a number of European states throughout history (best known among which, the Republic of Venice, 697 - 1797), all of which currently extinct (with perhaps the exception of the Republic of San Marino as an informal style), continuity with these is altogether dubious and not commonly claimed.

The earliest reference to the phrase (used as a label for a clearly pre-existing group) is a vague article published in February 2014. It does not make the link explicitly. The alternate style "La Serenissima" was used in August of the same year as an implicit reference to the same entity. [↩]Also "TMSR", "tmsr", "B,TMSR~", "La Serenissima". [↩]It is altogether unclear the Republic supports such basic, 1700s-era conveniences of the civilised world as universal franchise. Matters long settled everywhere else (such as for instace through the concordat of Worms, 1122, or the peace of Westphalia, 1648) are deemed open by the Republic, which does not recognize national claims to territorial sovereignity along with most other modern devices. [↩]For example :

It is certain that the Republic is undertaking, on its public budget, the continued development of the Bitcoin client (one of plurious entities to make this claim, none of which recognize the others as a matter of course) ; as well as routinely issuing both legislation and legal rulings (both of which of unclear applicability), yet without any charter, any elected bodies or for that matter any obvious case of elections.

It is dubious whether proeminent participants ("Lords of the Republic" in local parlance) were involved in a costly exploit of the US backed Ethereum network (claimed as such - profanity warning).

The unnerving happenstance of Bitcoin being denominated as the attacker's currency of choice makes the recent leak of the complete archives of the Department of Defense's National Intelligence Directorate similarily suspect.

[↩]Discordian Church of Eris, The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster [↩]Nor would it be possible to ever know it, given the noncoercive nature of the Republic. [↩]It is not currently clear what (if anything) are the qualifications for citizenship. [↩]The first case of death in the Republic occured in January 2016, and on the basis of this statistical data, the hockey stick pattern indicates only female republicans are mortal. [↩]Common wisdom proposing that such an arrangement is untenable does not seem to hold any sway. [↩]Due to the elusive nature of the Republic, these estimates are known lower bounds, while the true values could easily exceed them by a degree of magnitude, perhaps even two. [↩]The Republic is the only known entity that recognizes private property as such. [↩]Baked into its currency, the inflation rate was ~15% throughout 2015 (down from ~25% in 2013). The inflation rate is expected to diminish constantly from this point forward for the remainder of history. [↩]Speaking of which : the US government won't release budget data for its unintelligent agencies. Nevertheless, we have the data anyway, and we thus know that of the ~15bn USD CIA wastes in any given year, about 0.13% or ~20 mn USD are related to so-called research, as well as production and dissemination of its so-called factbook. Given that it covers ~200 countries, we can infer that in US terms the value of this entry is somewhere around 100`000 USD. Given that it's taken me about an hour to put together, that puts the value of my time at 100k USD per hour, which is remarkably close to reality. [↩]

« The text ; and the piddly recantion

Nuovo Cinema Paradiso (reprint) »

Category: Bitcoin

Friday, 19 August, Year 8 d.Tr.

Cerrado for duelo, the aliens have landed, the camera bar and other strange

Let's go straight to business :

I kid you not. That literally and exactly says, "closed for duel", as in "combate entre dos personas que se han desafiado o retado previamente", and gives the time and date of the funeral.

I have no fucking idea.

The aliens have landed.

Here will follow a number of shots from a rather interesting cafei, amply furnished with historical photographic equipment. Brace yourselves.

The one above is actually taken through the lens seen below. If you strain you can actually make out a pigeon in the upper left.

Pareidolia is the misrecognition of faces in various configurations of inanimate objects.

But let's move on from luxury to reality :

What are those, you ask ? Why, they're electric meters. Individual electric meters. To go with this wonder :

No, they're not for individual people. They're for individual families, made up from anywhere between half a dozen and uncountably many ... people. Let's continue.

Are you an architect ? No ? That's ok, neither is Pili.

Dedicatie speciala pentru shinohai :p

Other than a vibrant night life, the city village of Buenos Aires also enjoys a rich skater and skateboarder culture, as proven by this abundance of one single U ramp.

———"Bar" Palacio, on Federico Lacroze 3901. [↩]

« Fred Wilson is an idiot, and other things

Terminus Paradis »

Category: La pas prin lume

Sunday, 24 July, Year 8 d.Tr.

cat-v.org. Adnotated.

You perhaps have no idea what cat-v.org is. This would be excusable. Best I can tell currently,

mircea_popescu so basically, the cat-v story is, they had a mpi. who died. the end.

mircea_popescu well, naggum-died, but anyway.

asciilifeform happens.

mircea_popescu apparently it happens all the damned time wtf is with these people.

I suppose at this juncture it behooves me to point out that

I have no intention to kill myself,

nor did I ever have any intention to kill myselfii ;

and that while I do regard suicide as an inalienable right of the individual - if anyone tells you I killed myself hang them. For murder.

And with that, we can proceed to this here second installment of "Valiant prince MP explores the mother of all echo chambers. A saga of our times." Apparently this is a series. Who knew.

**** BEGIN LOGGING AT Thu 16:06:18 2016

16:06:18 * Now talking on #cat-v

16:06:18 * Topic for #cat-v is: 9front.org | cat-v.org | TOP SECRET//SI//NOFORN//CATS | prostrate yourself before the code of conduct: http://9front.org/coc

16:06:18 * Topic for #cat-v set by khm!~kfx@unaffiliated/kfx at Tue Aug 9 17:17:34 2016

16:06:18 -ChanServ- [#cat-v] Welcome to #cat-v. State your assumptions or prepare to be boarded.

16:06:18 * #cat-v :http://cat-v.org

16:06:36 mircea_popescu hello harmful people.

16:06:48 mircea_popescu i bring tidings from teh most serene republic.

16:46:57 Aram and what tidings do you bring?

16:47:09 mircea_popescu that part hasn't been decided yet.

16:48:10 aap oh, i like the most serene republic

16:49:41 mircea_popescu o.O check it out, adlai 's been quietly lurking

16:50:58 * adlai has mostly been reading the website(s)

16:51:44 * Users on #cat-v: hoodow_ Shamar dabmancer1 adlai stevie77de thortron Framedragger mircea_popescu jack_rabbit mveety_ umbraticus shardz chris2 paperwing eggstyrone sam-d spew Echoz joushou klassila smazga ndeuteron Celelibi sebbu archeus phc rxb taub_ pfallenop darvon kremlin a- pips atk zv jpm_ tlamer FRIGN sid deuteron fireglow _Raiz dv- __20h__ nocylah bipul doomcup kersnert ephe_meral _sl qwx gnusosa ringst_ qrstuv dho mischief mjl eighty6me FUZxxl rorx leetspete1

16:51:44 * Users on #cat-v: Blub\0 Cheery calston povik nm0i cjg_ mumkin fgudin joe9 slashfocus Wizzup kivutar nekomune chomzee catern copyninja acr_ stark rinukkusu tkln_ Ori_B RISCi_AT1M mkb KBme doppler moul laxask yuuko qrwteyrutiyoup SirCmpwn nichego early` kyubiko kori nelnire Robdgreat cimim farhaven cnuke nickaugust mycroftiv Aram grawk kfarwell msgctl eregus alm nmeum vehemoth oldlaptop mob_ X-Scale Orin metaglog pierre_bear rsal trn GGMethos_ liszt veikko kkn gracc_

16:51:44 * Users on #cat-v: flan ^7heo npo ftrvxmtrx whatsacompiler snuffeluffegus k0ga leetspete stateless diginet2 sl_ df hexidin Y\N cgag pr khm zxz jibanes CcxCZ acchan Padawan- aiju chi dfgg dlind_ cinap_lenrek buja zgrep Capso Fish glenda Guest796 pierreghz halon apo trqx uriel_ Nycatelos Tanami zhasha hoodow arpunk1 m4burns betawaffle echoline hiro pata aap czaks seagreen

16:53:34 mircea_popescu anyways, re tidingsiii : i just did a /names - if any of you folks want a bitcent (ie 0,01 BTC) go ahead and register your pgp key with deedbot and ima send later tonight.

16:55:16 sl_ why

16:56:23 aap finally some offers to just send the money!

16:56:26 aap someone8

16:57:33 dv- keep your filthy buttcoins

16:57:43 sl_ is there something like tlsserve for unix

16:59:01 sl_ besides ucspi-ssl

17:02:05 spew how much is a bitcent worth?

17:02:28 mircea_popescu ~same as a drink.

17:04:40 cimim $6 USD. That's a good drink over here

17:05:01 mircea_popescu !~google "five dollar milkshake"iv

17:05:10 mircea_popescu ah damn, no bots here. nm.

17:05:17 aap .theo

17:05:17 glenda We won't commit it.

17:05:20 aap .theo

17:05:20 glenda If you want it done, do it yourself.

17:05:27 mircea_popescu does it google ?

17:05:32 aap no, just insult

17:05:38 mircea_popescu not terribly useful.

17:05:42 aap .theo

17:05:42 glenda Can I ask what kind of plant are you?

17:05:51 mircea_popescu .alexandra

17:06:05 spew we're not fancy people

17:06:09 mircea_popescu evidently.

17:06:09 spew fancy people with fancy bots

17:06:47 ^7heo .theo

17:06:47 glenda There is a user community, and a development community.

17:06:58 mircea_popescu .glenda

17:07:04 dv- .terry

17:07:05 ^7heo no, there is a useful community and there is noise.

17:07:09 spew ok enough bot abuse

17:07:12 aap theo doesn't work too well today :/

17:09:18 mircea_popescu i dunno if anyone cares, but in case they do : the bot spec is over at contravex.com/trilema-bots-directory/ ; there's also a V bot base available etc.

17:09:43 doppler spew: I don't have a lot of experience with them. however, from what I gather from reading and hearing from other users, there are only a few specific reasons I'd want to use a BSD over a Linux system. (disclaimer: some of this may be false.) with Linux, you get a community and user base with a greater number of retards, you get stupid shit like systemd, but you also get much higher userland and kernel

17:09:49 doppler flexibility and higher general system performance because of high optimization. with the BSDs, you get a smaller, generally "better" community, a tighter-knit system that cannot stray nearly as far from a base system than a Linux system could, you get better support for certain specific software (like ZFS, pf, ...), but you also get a system that seems old-fashioned. they seem to miss out on some of the

17:09:55 doppler innovations (both technologies and software support) that Linux might get due to its wider use.

17:10:23 doppler spew: so all in all I like them about as much as I like a decent Linux distribution.

17:11:01 spew it's easier to use

17:11:55 spew programming is the same though OBSD compilers are so fucking old

17:12:06 spew but it's a nicer experience just using it day to day configuring things

17:12:10 spew and having things work

17:12:22 Aram openbsd added clang recently.

17:12:26 spew haven't used bsd in a long time though

17:12:31 spew Aram: yeah I heard that

17:12:38 sl_ linux is shit tho

17:13:04 sl_ an asylum constructed and staffed by inmates

17:13:15 doppler the kernel, though

17:13:23 doppler is the Linux kernel really that much worse than a BSD kernel?

17:13:40 spew I can't find my way heads or tails in the linux kernel what is going on

17:13:51 sl_ how does the kernel help you against what you will inevitably be using linux for

17:13:53 spew bsd I can read

17:13:56 doppler weird optimizations? bad style?

17:14:05 spew bad organization and style

17:14:06 sl_ too large

17:14:08 spew shit organization

17:14:16 doppler sl_: it provides an API that you use when you write programs.

17:14:32 sl_ it provides an api you use when praying to systemd

17:15:15 mircea_popescu doppler well, when was the last time bsd kernel discovered something like log.mkj.lt/trilema/20160929/#197

17:15:16 sl_ pray systemd doesnt alter it further

17:15:17 doppler the linux kernel is indeed fucking huge but it has very good support for paring down your build when you compile

17:15:37 spew doppler please be serious

17:15:52 doppler it does!

17:16:01 doppler (see also: all the embedded shit that runs Linux)

17:16:13 sl_ what does linux do that you cant get from freebsd at this point

17:16:13 mircea_popescu ...

17:16:17 doppler there's a lot more embedded linux devices than embedded BSD devices

17:16:27 doppler sl_: do? probably nothing.

17:16:31 sl_ you requirements seem fluid

17:16:42 doppler well yeah

17:16:43 mircea_popescu sl_ i am wondering if he is trolling or what.

17:17:08 doppler good one, mircea_popescu.

17:17:15 spew doppler you're saying this horrific steaming pile of shit is ok because there's a really good system for decontaminating yourself

17:17:20 doppler no.

17:17:23 spew you are

17:17:29 doppler I'm not meaning to.

17:17:40 mircea_popescu doppler that kinda... "fluidity" is usually an indicatorv, what can i tell you.

17:17:42 doppler the BSDs all contain some amount of cruft too

17:17:46 spew yes

17:17:49 sl_ its not necessary for me to tear down linux, its necessary for linux to demonstrate some worth

17:17:50 spew they certainly do

17:17:59 spew I can still figure out what is going on in the BSD kernel

17:18:08 spew I give up before I get anywhere whenever I poke around in linux

17:18:15 doppler I completely understand that

17:18:22 doppler that is a really important aspect

17:18:26 doppler being able to grok kernel code

17:18:27 sl_ i concluded in 1999 linux is more trouble than it is worth

17:18:38 sl_ and the situation has only deteriorated since then

17:18:40 spew I concluded this year that linux is unavoidable

17:18:47 doppler but you asked about my opinion

17:18:50 sl_ sure

17:18:51 doppler I don't do anything in the kenrel

17:18:55 doppler *kernel

17:19:02 doppler (not yet)

17:19:12 spew I guess I should try to switch to freebsd and see if the linux emulation is enough

17:19:21 doppler I've wondered about that, too

17:19:23 spew I have to use all this shit that's just linux

17:19:37 spew really just docker and oracle java

17:19:57 Aram every half decade I have to do some linux kernel stuff, and it's always different. they changed everything during this time. while half of the design and implementation of 4.4 BSD still applies 21 years later.

17:20:17 spew that's a good point too

17:20:26 spew because 4.4 bsd actually had a design and implementation

17:20:30 spew linux just had an implementation

17:20:32 doppler spew: like, especially in a situation like that, there's something to be said for "I can just slap Linux on it and it works". you don't debug the kernel on the same machine that you run docker on, do you?

17:20:34 mircea_popescu incidentally, is there a log of this channel anywhere that i could read ?

17:20:39 Aram no log

17:20:45 doppler read topic

17:20:53 mircea_popescu deliberately or through neglect ? ah ok lessee.

17:21:02 sl_ ask your congressman

17:21:03 Aram deliberately

17:21:18 doppler mircea_popescu: like, "no logging allowed".

17:21:20 mircea_popescu the coc thing is... two lines ?

17:21:31 cimim refresh it

17:21:35 mircea_popescu doppler how does this get implemented in practice ? my client logs by default for instance ?

17:21:38 spew doppler: I never debug the kernel, I work for webshit

17:21:44 mircea_popescu o hey, greek.

17:21:45 Aram the no bots/no log rule has ben removed from this channel's topic

17:21:45 doppler dudepublic logging

17:21:49 Aram it used to be there

17:21:53 doppler s/dude/&, /

17:22:01 mircea_popescu excuse me if i am a little confused.

17:22:14 spew you are excused

17:22:14 sl_ its just that nobody cares

17:22:26 mircea_popescu so : there's a code of conduct that contains nothing ; there's some old rules which i can't know because there's no public logs so new people can't view the history...

17:22:28 sl_ and log police are generally annoying

17:22:29 mircea_popescu who designed this ?

17:22:43 spew cat-v is like linux

17:22:47 spew implemented but not designed

17:22:47 mircea_popescu evidently.

17:22:51 sl_ its anarchy

17:22:53 doppler haha

17:22:54 sl_ deal with itvi

17:22:58 doppler nerd

17:23:00 sl_ .gif

17:23:00 mircea_popescu ic.

17:23:14 khm 13:13 there's a lot more embedded linux devices than embedded BSD devices

17:23:17 khm haha.

17:23:22 sl_ inferior candidates have a way of wandering off on their own

17:23:43 doppler khm: I've only seen network appliance shit that runs BSD, and it's probably only because it has pf.

17:23:47 Aram I don't want linux in my washing machine; what sort of argument is that?

17:23:53 doppler khm: please inform me

17:23:56 mircea_popescu sl_ about same as the republic, except for the voice enforcement and pgp usage. and the public logs. and the bots. and the money and the etc. but yeah, i see.

17:23:58 khm 12:59 how much is a bitcent worth?

17:24:00 khm nothing.

17:24:03 sl_ mircea_popescu: http://9front.org/coc

Friday, 30 September, Year 8 d.Tr.

Calidad de Vida, or My Days Among The Cargo Cult.

Do you see that cloud of bluish smoke ? It's what used to make up the smog in Western cities, half a century ago : the exhaust product of carburatedi truck engines.

Those self-same trucks are still hard at work in the third world, various provinces of "the nation of Africa"ii such as Argentina (que no es un pais pobre, es un pais muy rico en recursos humanos), where they got a new coat of paint.

That new coat of paint derps unsubstantially about the things they've seen on Netflix and whatever long-dead shows their TV stations bought by the pound and broadcast ceaselessly. Whatever you weren't watching back in the 80s, they're eating up here like it were the fucking gospel - because they're inferior, subhuman losers. Devoid of any human value, bereft of the ability to contribute anything to humanity yet subconsciously fully aware of that irremediable infirmity, they do what monkeys doiii. Thus imaginary "problems" that don't exist outside of the sphere of play-pretend, Marchas de las Dumbas and "Cimes. Calidad de Vida".iv

You are looking at 80 cent rolls, in that image above. The salmon is fresh, the avocado delicious, that's actually a special order - the item on the menu also includes cheese (which is abominable, but the locals have no idea about cheeses). Part of the conversation over that meal was girl wondering why the (free) pickled ginger on the side is actually the best she's ever had. Isn't this strange ? Well... it depends, doesn't it.

See those cut up leaves ? The ants got them.

And in closing :

Would you like to go see a band 20 years after it was briefly cool for a summer on a lark ? They also have Paul McCartney still playing muzak lounge acts, and a troop called "The Beats" which is essentially a set of hacky Beatles impersonators. If you can't afford the 200 dollar ticket, ie much more than a ticket ever was for any of these washed up have-beens or might-have-had-beens, whatever local bank is more than willing to allow you to pay in monthly installments of fifteen dollars. Or perhaps you would like to put a 200 dollar plane ticket on a two year installment plan ? They also have that.

Calidad de vida, ce pula mea.

———Here's a quick primer on the topic : a carburetor is a piece of car engine that mixes fuel into the air the engine draws in. It works on Bernoulli's principle : the faster the airflow, the lower its static pressure and the higher its dynamic pressure, resulting in higher fuel vaporisation and consequently higher fuel load. In carburated engines the throttle does not directly control fuel debit, but affects it indirectly through increasing airflow.

The carburetor was introduced in the mid 1800s, by Maybach and Daimler ; it was widely copied, the authors tried to enforce their "intellectual property" but failed - because the English court system preferred to steal the invention by awarding it to some random Brit. The turn of events should surprise no-one, state clerks will always work in the direction of maximizing tax receipts for that state.

The early versions were updraft carburetors, for two important reasons : one is that this way, you won't flood the engine, as fuel dropplets have to fight gravity on their way to causing trouble. The other is that this way you can use an oil bath as a substitute air filter, which is principally how older engines end up burning oil. Back before paper filters were even vaguely possible, all this made a lot of sense.

The carburetor was on the outs by the 1980s, being replaced by the fuel injector. The injector has the major disadvantage that it requires electricity (and electronics) to run, and offers no significant increase in efficiency of output in exchange for the significant increase in engine complexity. Nevertheless, carburetors can't be used with a catalytic converter, which needs much closer control of the fuel-air mixture so as to prevent uncontrolled oxidative processes in the exhaust.

Now you're in a position to understand all the derisive disdain packed in that single word. "Carburated" denotes a) technology of the 80s ; b) engines that actually burn oil ; c) engines that can't use catalytic convertors. In a word : recursos humanos. [↩]Hey, Hussein Bahamas didn't just create Obamacare. More far reaching, he also created "the nation of Africa", motherland of all bipedal shaved apes. [↩]Fancy that - quality of life is to drink bottled water ferried about by truck! If only I knew what I was missing thirty years ago, drinking the best water I ever drank straight out of the tap.

Plumbing, such obsolete technology. Trucks carrying bottled water like the ox powered casks of the middle ages, that's where progreso & hay mas futuro are at. Those Roman savages didn't know anything, thanks goodness gracious for Gengis Khan and Torquemada showing us the tru way! [↩]Part and parcel of that "calidad de vida" is that every time a local grabs my ear at some social function or other and figures out that I do speak the local idiom, the question is "what do I work". To which I answer that I don't work. Because I motherfucking don't, not in the manner they perceive the thing, I sure as fuck on wheels ain't any sort of trabajador and most pointedly don't belong in their ubiquitous nonsense on and about trabajadores they keep plastering everywhere as if repetition was insurance against falsity.

Which engages step two, "so wat do I do, then ?", which generally runs into a "I enjoy the younger female Argentines, what", or else something about the food or whatever. Which puzzles but doesn't satisfy, "No but how do I pay for things". "With money". "Yes!" Calidad de vita, futu-va muma'n cur de idioti inca azi si miine. [↩]

« Eulora : Official April Auction, or A Story of Toils

Files from the War on the Web. Today, Literotica. »

Category: La pas prin lume

Sunday, 10 April, Year 8 d.Tr.

But what about the slave ?

alikim You can make auction house based on a dedicated player's account (run by a trustworthy authority) and ingame whisper channel. First you whisper it with your action offer then you trade it for items, same with bids, you whisper it for a bid then trade for money. This bot will keep items and money in its storage and all the info in an externalfile.

danielpbarron Can it link up with an irc bot?

alikim Theoretically yes, since the game client can connect to the internet and communicate to w/e. I've no idea how these bots work. For me it stands to reason that you communicate with the auction house from inside the game though, because the auction house doesn't have to trust your word when you are bidding or offering, you actually need to transfer goods

danielpbarron All the auctions we do are honor system anyway. You could prolly make money just running an auction house come to think of it, and if you're gonna have you character standing around for that, you'd also want a general store bot that just buys and sells automatically like the way Electron does.

alikim The irc system you have atm doesn't need auction house, I'm talking about ingame AH that can record all trades, run statistics including markup on items, all the usual stuff. That AH doesn't need irc bots. I'd say these two options should not be mixed.

danielpbarron Well I could put the stuff with the bot in-game and then a bot in this channel periodically mentions what auctions are running, reminding people to bid. Plus I can check irc from anywhere; Eulora not so easy.

alikim it will buy and sell automatically, but only pre-whispered bids and offers and after each trade put items into its storage

danielpbarron well you could have it automatically put coppers in the trade window based on what people put in there, just gotta offer a slightly better deal than electron, keeping in mind that Electron isn't gonna be there forever. i think most things in Eulora are supposed to be player run eventually. not sure how skill training will go, maybe noobs will have to train with veterans or something. that'd be something, have my character sitting in a building in town buying/selling stuff and collecting coppers to train noobs. that'd be pretty sweet

alikim a bot in this channel could whisper ingame AH for a list of aucioned items and post results here, as well as you can do it ingame

mircea_popescu Yeah makes sense auction's settled inside the game. What you say re mixing also makes sense, except for one point - it is Minigame((MPEx:S.MG))'s strategic decision to replace in-game chat with irc chat (and gossipd eventually). Which is why he's thinking the way he is, and which is why they'll get mixed anyway. He definitely has a point about checking irc from everywhere - which is definitely desired. Eulora clients will look exactly that pluriform.

alikim Well, as I said you have a client connected to the internet, so it can connect to anything, but your honor system will have to go too eventually I guess, so you won't be able to offer and bid w/o actual goods and money.

danielpbarron not necessarily

mircea_popescu Nah, it'll go the other way around, WoT can be implemented. Recall how you can't get an account without a gpg sig ? This'll open the road to the first ever automated trust system - auction bot will evaluate user based on history. Half of why you need irc in game is so you can do $trust X. Not sure if you're at all familiar with this huge chunk of metagame ? It's also rather uncommon / not seen in "the normal game".i

alikim No, all this encryption stuff, gpg, irc etc is rather an inconvenience you have to go thru to get to the game. I'm pretty sure all this only averts normal game players from trying the game, people expect to just automatically get an account download and play. But on the other hand you are not interested in normal people so... ;)

mircea_popescu Well, it seems to you an inconvenience, but this due to unfamiliarity. It's actually the cornerstone of the game being this good. Think about it - idiots playing is the worst problem of every game out there.

alikim Not in a game based on real money, idiots will normally pay.

mircea_popescu You think this also because unfamiliarity. We have a lot of experience with bitcoin, and the common man, and know better. Idiots have no expendable income and there's a very strict stupid poor bijection.

alikim There are lots of smart people who are poor btw, even genius people.

mircea_popescu Genius can be stupid, that's no problem whatsoever. When you discuss stupid you discuss "what's the dumbest thing this person does", when you discuss smart you discuss "what's smartest thing this person does". These aren't opposite, much like when discussing lowest point of a map vs highest point of a map. Plenty of maps have mountains, but this doesn't mean much - they may also have valleys.

alikim Well you might be born in fascist Germany and sent to a camp, which among other thing makes you poor, "what the dumbest thing you did" is an open question.

mircea_popescu How come you're on the internet is also an open question in that setting.

alikim I can easily come up with a different setting when you have access to the internet, the valleys you are talking about can be circumtances.

mircea_popescu Never. Nature is nature is nature, if you end up in the shit it's because you fucked up.

alikim Like born black in USA a few decades ago? Or wait, lucky you, there was no internet there so doesn't count.

mircea_popescu The setting of my experiment does not map to luck, being as deliberate as it gets. Moreover "you fucked up" also doesn't map to "you could have done something better". Ogre getting destroyed by archers IS OGRE FUCKING UP, even if the whole game is set up with the premise of archers being good vs ogres. "Oh what's the ogre supposed to do" is not a cogent consideration.

alikim What is ogre is ugly? He fucked up?

mircea_popescu If he spends his time going to college town bars trying to pick up, yeah. ("Oh but he has to, because he's a college aged ogre" "Nobody has to anything" etc.)

alikim What if you are born a slave and you are poor because of that? Automatically makes you dumb?

mircea_popescu You were born a slave ; but you did the poor part yourself. Heck, there's plenty of slaves that ended up very rich throughout history, from Rome to Haiti.

alikim You probably like new thought movement

mircea_popescu Which is that ? Anyway, this entire debate hinges on confusion between should, which is an ought, and could, which is an is. There's absolutely no space in ethics/morals for is-en. Just because you should doesn't mean you could, nor makes it any difference, and vice-versa. Entirely unrelated considerations.

alikim https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Thought.

lobbesbot` Title: New Thought - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (at en.wikipedia.org)

mircea_popescu I dunno, not particularly preoccupied with various us neoprotestantisms / whatevers.

alikim You sound exactly like positive thinking + law of attraction.

mircea_popescu Ahaha mno.

alikim You sound like one nevertheless, "if you are born a slave and you are poor that's because you fucked up, because you can do anything you desire in any situation and you can end up rich".

mircea_popescu Well it's fine that I may sound like one, to you, but the notion amuses me, what.

alikim Your logic is exactly the same.

mircea_popescu I just said above that no, there's no "because you can do anything you desire in any situation and you can end up rich", so it can't be all that EXACTLY the same.

hanbot Ahaha this is a riot, mircea_popescu believes people can do anything!!1

mircea_popescu Gave me a chucke also! :D

alikim So a poor slave is poor because ...?

mircea_popescu He sucks ?

alikim Well that's exaclty what I wrote before

mircea_popescu notreally.

alikim You believe any slave can be rich

mircea_popescu I do not.

alikim If he wants to be.

mircea_popescu I believe that any slave that fails to be rich deserves being poor. In short, your proposed "he is a slave" is not a CATEGORICAL ban to achievement. You need it to be a categorical ban for your argument.

hanbot alikim he said some slaves ended up rich, very different things.

alikim I believe that any slave that fails to be rich deserves being poor

Thursday, 21 April, Year 8 d.Tr.

Building the first Remarkable claim in Eulora

With visuals :

As you can see, one Remarkable Clump of Dry Grass claim requires 10 Bandar Toolkit Bundlesi, 41 Grubsilk Threadsii, 7 Suspect Ointmentsiii, 5 Tuber Milks, 9 Sharp Clumps of Slagiv, 3 Pointy Clumps of Slagv, 36 Widow's Whisp Berries, 4 Shed Snakeskins, 20 Nondescript Tubers, 26 Rickety Reeds, 1 Crumbly Rock and 1 Better Bitterbean to be developed.

Through the magical blessing of history, I had a decent stash of Grubsilk Thread at a whopping 206 quality, which carried the rest of the bundle all the way to q 195. The base value for the entire thing is about two million, so I'm doing currently a 4 million ECuvi click, readily the most expensive click in Euloran history to date, and perhaps the record holder for a lengthy time to come.

I'm not even sure what sort of grass I'll be pulling out of there, on account of not having had time to do any mining because of all the crafting piling up on me these past months - but I suspect something in the q 200 zone. If that's correct each grass would be worth ~120 or so ECu, meaning that something like 30`000 items would be more or less a breakeven return (this doesn't properly account for either the Ennumeration, which is about half a million or so itself, on account of my respectable quality, nor does it account for the yet unknown value of the stick itselfvii). Nevertheless, I would say anything around 50`000 or so grasses is a profitable result, whereas anything under 30`000 is doubtlessly a loss.

In any case it seems altogether improbable that I'll manage to miss poppingviii on this basis, to answer an older question of Birdman's. To keep a more optimistic view, a 100x modifier, such as is commonly the case in mining (for instance every time a ~200 ECu hit of a tool results in a 10 or maybe 20k ECu worth of an ordinary claim + ennumeration) would in this case make me a few Bitcoin richer than I was before, and you never know which particular coin will constitute your retirement.

The building itself threatens to take upwards of 10 hours, and so I guess we shall know sometime tomorrow. Until then, I wish you the best of luck, and enjoy your time!

———2 Cruddy Hoes, 2 Stone Adzes, 2 Stone Pickaxes, 3 Shiny Rock Shards, 7 Coarse Frangible Thread, 1 Coarse Cordage, 1 Deserted Crab Shell. [↩]Quite the bill at 15 Crumbly Rocks, 1 Boulder, 2 Swarming Grubs, 2 Alchemist's Cheap Gins (24 Nondescript Tubers, 1 Two Leaf Clover, 1 Leaky Treebark Flask (3 Coarse Frangible Threads (3 Clumps of Dry Grass), 12 Indistinct Bark Shavings (2 Flotsam, 1 Shiny Rock), 1 Disgusting Goop (3 Rotten Fruit, 1 Crumbly Rock, 1 Spicy Moss) ) ) [↩]Also quite the bill : 1 Dulce de Leche (1 Tuber Milk (see below), 1 Disgusting Goop (see above) ), 1 Mollusc Cheese (2 Elusive Purple Snails, 1 Slithy Tove, 5 Dead Molluscs), 1 Tuber Milk (1 Crude Stinky Wineskin (29 - 32 Crumbly Rocks, 48 - 52 Worthless Putrid Leathers, 9 - 10 Shiny Rock Shards (1 Boulder, 5 Shiny Rocks) ) , 5 Nondescript Tubers, 4 Improbable Oils (1 Wooly Mushroom, 3 Spicy Moss, 2 Boulder, 1 Leaky Treebark Flask (see above) ) ) ) [↩]5 Slag (5 Flotsams, 3 Shiny Rocks), 1 Improbable Oil. [↩]Same as the other shape. [↩]Euloran copper! [↩]It's more or less agreed among players that the sticks themselves carry some sort of value, even if it's not altogether clear what it'd be. [↩]See the excellent Vocabulary section on the Eulorum. [↩]

« The Lordship list, third year.

The Burbuja! »

Category: S.MG

Saturday, 13 February, Year 8 d.Tr.

Buenos Aires, that southern village.

The rurality of Buenos Aires "ciudad" is a common theme herei ; let us continue upon it.

mircea_popescu totalfratmove.com/university-of-tennessee-sigma-chi-fraternity-adult-film-star-parents-weekend/

Saturday, 13 August, Year 8 d.Tr.

Bucuresti Non Stop

Motto : Who names a bar Cheers ?

Bucuresti Non Stopi is a "Romanian realism" (aka unbridled magic) cinematic compression of that idiotic TV show. Specifically, a local gangland bossii intervenes in the lives of a bunch of retarded children (all named Gusti). He nominally is working a "non stop", which is to say a typically Romanian always-open convenience store-booth, whereby

He understands the plight of an old otaku army colonel, and produces - literally, magically, through pure mindpower - a candle in the age of flash&fleshlights, for the man's dead wife.iii This, the magical comprehension and the magical incarnation of the ideal object into sensible form, is the true attribute of the Romanian leader throughout the cultural history of that place, following twenty-some centuries unchanged along the sheep trails, through numerous formal appartenences to various "empires", flags and otherwise colorings. This, and the antipolitic humbleness [of he who is beyond the possibility of being honored by the hordes living].iv

He understands, inexplicably and without basis, the treason of the film's Judas, a Cristaxi cab driver who sells out a good girl / prostitutev. She teases him lightly about spying on her cunnyvi as she's changing into train clothes ; she honestly regrets not having the time to throw him a freebievii ; he sings her escape plan to her rather miserable pimpviii. Yet, under the magical leader's magical leadership, he also turns around, recoups the girl, gets her some food and her childix replacement candies. This, the power to redeem the Judas, is what makes the Romanian Ideal Leader better than Jesus.

He is baffled by a kid. For all his arrayed powers, enough to make any god in any pantheon run away screaming for its ugly mommy, he is baffled by the adolescent male xenomorph. He does his best, which isn't much, and the result is a woman ranting on a disconnected line about her best intentions and past impregnation ; as well as a spirited bout of fucking. It's not much.

He points out to two dudes who thought they were literate that they are not ; and a grandma could have read better than them. They split up under the pressure of this realisation. He gives a beer to the "loser" of that split, who also happens to be carrying all the value of the "team" of twox (and, obviously, none of the cash).

The film itself is strictly incomprehensible to just about anyone ; and to those to whom it yields its intricate folds willingly and effortlessly, it is unimportant. It is, if you will, a whore with a heart of gold of a film. It knows this, and... well we couldn't properly say that "it doesn't mind", nor could we properly say anything that you'd readily understand. "Stop, si de la capat" says the outro, and so it is.

And so it goes.

———2013, by Dan Chisu, with Gheorghe Ifrim, Ion Besoiu, Olimpia Melinte. [↩]Anachronistically, of my generation, twenty years off course. Some imund Depesar even fucking calls him "a rocker" in the hollowed expression "futu-ti gura ma-tii de rocker" - the expiating final gasp on life of many a feminist-metrosexual-discoheaded fucktards. [↩]The film is far from perfect - for instance, the happenstance that the house of a 70yo woman whose principal fear was dying without a candle (it's an Orthodox thing) contained no candles, and the calm, positive, calculated, structured and altogether rational career officer tolerated this situation. [↩]Famously, one Calogero played the town's fool, "appearing dim-witted to those who didn't know him". [↩]The technical term is "whore with a heart of gold", except it doesn't really cover the subject anymore than her dresses usually do. [↩]Pasarica, ie birdy in Romanian. [↩]I've said it before, but it bears repeating : to the Romanian mind, it is both unseemly and degrading for a healthy woman to allow an erection to stand, for the obvious reason. It is a scandal to refuse if invited, but it doesn't stop there - it's even dubious to not invite oneself! Consequently, that offer is the fundamental pivot establishing the woman as Madonna, the pure-above-matter. [↩]Who, incidentally, for all his vainglorious pretense, fails to impress the store-booth clerk ; who promises to have his head, and doubtless has his head as we speak. [↩]To whom she was planning to escape, and you can tell from the conversation the child is a man and a substitute anchor in her world. [↩]Throughout the movie he gives out freebies, in fact about 90% of the movement of that lowly store-booth is him giving the merchandise away. If that's a merchant I'm the pope. No, he owns the place, all of it, casa quantu stai style, the shop is just his pretext to be always on the street. Remember that, "always be closing" ? That's the job : always be close. [↩]

« Petty private satisfactions

Fred Wilson is an idiot, and other things »

Category: Trilematograf

Friday, 22 July, Year 8 d.Tr.

B,TMSR~ Block Cipher Competition

The Mosti Sereneii Republic, reunited in congress, decided :

That all presently known block ciphers suck ;

That an actually useful block cipher is required for our own purposesiii;

That we will consider proposals from barbarians as well as citizensiv.

Consequently, you are cordially invited to submit a proposal for a block cipher that :

Worksv on block sizes of 1 kbytes, 4 kbytes, 16 kbytes and 64 kbytes. Bonus points for ciphers that work on an arbitrary block size.

Use a 64 kbyte key.

Fits In Headvi

Items which come with a proof of hardness, as well as items that eschew basic arithmetic operationsvii as implemented by computers will be particularly favoured.

While we will consider purely theoretical proposals, items which come with sample implementation and assorted tests will be preferred.viii

The rewards will be a 10 BTC payment from me, as well as a honoris causa position in the very Lordship. Let the party begin!

———Moreso than anything else. [↩]This denotes that it is sovereign. [↩]Which are, quite transparently, the destruction of any other pretend-sovereign and the enslavement of its supporters. [↩]Citizenship revolves around presence in the WoT. [↩]The difference between works and "works" is best illustrated by the discussion of keccak. [↩]This means that the intelligent reader can hold the entire item in his mind at the same time. In this sense Fermat's theorem is an example of FIH, even if the proof hardly qualifies ; whereas Maxwell's original equations are not an example of FIH, even if Heaviside's restatement is. [↩]To understand this point, the relevant discussion :

mircea_popescu asciilifeform if you feel like entertaining some crackpottery, suppose a hash function defined as follows : a) calculate PM ; pM ; P!M ; p!M where P and p are the perimeters of polygons of M sides circumscribing and inscribed respectively in the same circle and !M is the bitwise negation of M ; b) calculate V1 = 2pMPM/(PM+pM) ; V2 = sqrt(pMPM) ; V3 = 2p!MP!M/(P!M+p!M) ; V4 = sqrt(p!MP!M) ; c) calculate H = (V1 - V2) * (V3 - V4) and finally d) return blocksize digits from the key-th position in H. how'd you go about attacking this ?

asciilifeform I would have to think about it. But Gauss could prolly tell you right now! Wake'im up.

mircea_popescu lol. (basically - they're the classical (Archimedan!) approximations of Pi, for the text and reversed text, to an arbitrary precision. Makes for an eminently tunable hashfunction).

asciilifeform Terrible hash function. Bailey, Borwein, & Plouffe.

mircea_popescu Do you see what I did here ?

asciilifeform (IIRC Plouffe was the worker bee and the other 2 were parasites).

mircea_popescu It is apparently a lot easier to follow math in words than in symbols, EVEN FOR YOU.

asciilifeform Actually I am writing it out in symbols!111111 Why the bitwise negation ?

mircea_popescu HA! You took a second to answer after my 2nd line, minutes after the first produced nothing! Timing attack on your brain!

asciilifeform Clearly!1

mircea_popescu Anyway - being able to calculate Pi itself does not actually help here, because we're specifically collecting the noise of the formula against the text and its mirror, rather than Pi itself. Hence the substractions.

asciilifeform The root ops go poorly with bit arithmetic.

mircea_popescu So they do. GOOD. Fuck the fucking computing-centric paradigm in crypotography. It's your tool not your fucking master.

asciilifeform Then let's have the candle.

mircea_popescu No. It's your tool, it must be used.

asciilifeform Then you're stuck with wandering decimal crud. And titanic lookup tables, etc.

mircea_popescu Sure. Anyway bignum operations is a solved problem. Even in Lisp.

asciilifeform 'even' l0l

mircea_popescu :)

asciilifeform But decimal soup is still ick

mircea_popescu Good.

asciilifeform You won't have repeatable output.

mircea_popescu So ?

asciilifeform No repeat, no decrypt.

mircea_popescu Hash function not cipher

asciilifeform Then works.

* mircea_popescu is still curious to hear how people'd attack, if anyone cares. Esp re preimage.

asciilifeform I will prolly care. on the train, some time soon.

mircea_popescu The reason I give it is mostly didactic. It plainly shows what I mean re proper use of math and treating your computer like a tool to do a job rather than treating your job as something to be adjusted to fit the computer - without having to delve into complexities and subtleties of number theory etc. Something as commonplace as "use the intervals of confidence of a polynomial method to estimate a transcendent" is really good enough. And it exhibits all those important properties : such as, you can ~actually~ use infinite message, and you can also use any arbitrary padding you like, up to infinity - the hash function won't complain. And you can want it to shit out any block size you want it to shit out - also won't complain, but give EQUALLY MEANINGFUL results. Whether you ask for 3 or 13 or 294 digits.

asciilifeform I am quite certain that you knew this, but pretty much all published block ciphers date to the dark ages, when transistor was painfully expensive

mircea_popescu I do. Still, some points have to be made. REPEATEDLY. Also, this is NOT a block cipher, but anyway.

asciilifeform Age of cheap transistor had a faux-renaissance where folks used the cheap transistors for elaborate self-delusion - 'this is sooo complicated, nobody!1111 could crack', which led to a pile of corpses and a reaction.

mircea_popescu Quite. Whereas the correct solution is to stick to the math. computers are fucking tractors not farm designers.

asciilifeform Which enemy, naturally, took full advantage of. And here we are, somewhere after this.

[↩]If you are unsure as to how this sort of submission should ideally look, djb's excellent salsa20 page should provide some good pointers. [↩]

« BitBet (S.BBET) January 2016 Statement

MPIF (F.MPIF) January 2016 Statement »

Category: Bitcoin

Thursday, 04 February, Year 8 d.Tr.

Brexit, Grexit, Departugal, Italeave, Czechout, Finish, Oustria, Latervia, Byegium...

The Rotherhami incident finally percolated through the many layers of the Britsh reptile brain, resulting in a sound quashing of The Delusionistsii.

The important point established by that 17.4 mn vs 16.1 mn vote isn't anything in the direct. The important point is the huge, immense, shattering destruction of "projections", "polls", "predictions" and assorted verbiage. Newcastle predicted 66/33, actual result 50/49. How can polls be this wrong ?

Polls can be this wrong because a thin sliver "at the top", The Delusionals, have an investment in reality turning a certain way. So they falsify. They falsify everything : the polls, the language, their own perceptionsiii and natural inclinationsiv. The only problem is that their top is hallucinated, and the falsification rather coarse.

And so, they lose - a state which flatters itself with the notion that it has a "conservative" ie non-socialist and a "labour" ie, socialist-ish alternation discovers it rests upon a society which thinks that the "conservative" tchotchke is so far off to the left for their taste, they can't even be bothered to distinguish it from say maoism, let alone the other Campbell's soup can on offer. The Delusionists thought themselves firmly in control, able to do anything through the magical magic of wordspinning, and they discover themselves entirely powerless. Who could possibly have predicted!

This will of course, in practical terms, spell the end of "Britain", to be soon crushed under the flailing pressure of the Socialist International, the self-appointed representative of a hallucinated "public opinion" of "all the civilised people", these magical unicorns that apparently all "agree" with Soros & co but somehow (inexplicably!) don't turn out to vote. "Moral majority", what! So, so exactly alike to the USG-driven "majority consensus" in Bitcoin that I effortlessly crushed a couple of years ago that it outright bleeds! Exact same fucking thing.

So yes, Scotland will quit, Ireland will quit, possibly even Wales will become a sort of its own Andorra, and London will be left as a city state, except of the sand bar variety. From a Rhodesian perspective this is deliciously poetic justice, by the way. The very people who crushed, for absolutely no reason (other than ideological intolerance), a perfectly respectable, functional country get to see their own country crushedv, in exactly the same way and for exactly the same reasons, by exactly their erstwhile allies! What more can you ask for, it's barely been a half century!

But as glorious as all this is for our good friends the buggered gits, the European Union has it just about worse. The problem with socialist golums is that much like shrimp and other primitive sea creatures - they either grow or they die. In turn the problem with growing is that you have to eat, and the problem with eating is that as you keep growing, the things you have to eat get scarier and scarier. In all practical senses the EU was dead in the mid 1990s, when Turkey wanted to join, and they didn't dare take it in. That was it - the mere signal of the loss, however vague, of appetite is exactly equivalent to blood-in-the-water. The Piranhas aren't waiting for more, it's the end.

Turkey was scary for exactly the wrong reasons : a large Muslim population, a very strong military and commercial infrastructure in desperate need of investment. The correct move, for an EU that had a king rather than a shitfest, was to take Turkey, benefit from a 2`000% increase in military readiness while enjoying the immigration of about 70 million of the world's most skilled, peace-loving, civilised and economically capable Muslims. Yes, it would have required printing a few trillion euros, but those euros would have been well spent - building up an economy that'd have consolitated the EU advantage over the US and made it almost a partner for China. Moreover, the Turks were politically pliable and quite sexually lubricated, eager as all fuck to take the penis in and treat it well. Sadly for the old folk's home, the penis didn't get up, and Erdogan found himself stuck building the country up on his own. Which he did.

Twenty years later, there's a second chance, and it's fucking ugly. The EU must, imperatively and under any conditions, coax Russia to join. This is exactly like the Venetian whores welcoming Charles' men, no doubt about it. It is also the unforgiving reality in the field : you didn't want to fuck Turks, well now, bend over for the Russians, and hope they get tired before you get too sore. The EU would gain a sure footing in mineral supplies, a population roughly twice that of Turkey's - but hey, at least they're white peoplevi - and an army which, in all likelihood, is capable of defeating the United States in the field. The EU would also lose pretty much everything it holds dear, which is to say political independence. Nevertheless, considering what they used it for in the past decadesvii, losing it seems like a great improvement.

REU, the new Russia-European Union, with the seat of government in Moscow, with mandatory Russian for all matters of government and policy concerning the ~650 million citizens, with maybe some representativity for the current EU members, but nothing too radical - say maybe 1/3 of the seats in the Duma. That is the only hope of the European Union, as a political construction.

Will they take it ? Heh. As is traditional for idiots since the invention of history, the correct solution is literally the last thing they want. They might acquiesce to it once all other alternatives have been exhausted, and certainly not before. The only problem with this being that the Africa alternative can never be exhausted - Africa itself has been trying to find the bottom of the smegma barrel since about 150`000 years ago and it's still digging and wallowing. So - no, it's the end.

Let it be forever remembered that "democracy", "human rights", and especially a misguided search for "equality" and a dumbfoundingly stupid denial of violence caused the collapse of white civilisation. It may serve other people, in the future.

———If you're unfamiliar, or to quote Mr. DeWitt,

To those of you who do not read, attend the Theater, listen to unsponsored radio programs or know anything of the world in which we live - it is perhaps necessary to introduce Rotherham.

So be it, let's introduce Rotherham. It is a large dormitory town where ~1`400 white girls were used as sex slaves by a large group of Pakis (mostly cab drivers). Importantly, this was done with the girls' consent, extracted in the manner consent from girls is traditionally extracted. To quote,

mircea_popescu so in that town, there once were a bunch of girlies, which for whatever reason grew up with the impression that they're not plainly wrapped fuckmeat for some dudes.

mircea_popescu and actualised this delusion by bitching at who knows what.

mircea_popescu next thing you know, one's doused in gasoline begging for no lights and the other's staring at text messages in her cellphone about her sister and so forth.

mircea_popescu so they DO change their mind, and go take their place in the line of plainly wrapped, bipedal fuckmeat.

mircea_popescu it, apparently, for them, worked just fine.

williamdunne Well the only references I'm seeing to it are describing it as a traumatic experience. While traumatic can be a force for good I can't see anything suggesting it did her any particular favours

mircea_popescu you gotta be kidding me.

mircea_popescu how about the references where they withdrew complaints / ran off from the da the day of testimony / etc ?

mircea_popescu how about the references where hundreds of people were involved in raping thousands of preteens for a decade + and all the ridiculous queen's men got are five convictions for less than five years a head ?

mircea_popescu those dudes are going to be out before next year's out, they probably just wanted a break.

williamdunneThat sounds more like it went well for the one pouring the gas, than her

mircea_popescu uhm.

mircea_popescu don't impose your values on others mkay ?

mircea_popescu went great for her, she's rapemeat, she loves it, ask her!

mircea_popescu da couldn't get her to say otherwise, after all.

mircea_popescu so no, people aren't these magical snowflakes made out of independent thought and closely held principle. that view is chiefly an economical surplus phenomena, people tend to form that view if they live for too long unchallenged. otherwise, people are lazy and small. some smaller than lazy, some lazier than small. but by and large not worth the mention.

Ex-post facto consent, it's a thing. Actually, it's the thing at the basis of most marriages to date, the world over. Problem ? [↩]Also known as the Aspirational 14% (after a Ballas piece), sometimes rendered the Aspie, to mark the obvious link to Asperger's. [↩]Consider this :

So we understand each other : John is some poor and kinda stupid kid from some ghetto in some indistinct townlet. One day, Mircea the Bad comes there on whatever business, sits down in the bar with his two bitches curled up at his feet and drinks a rum or something. The girls from the ghetto, for love of their country (in our example, that sad ghetto) pick John up forcibly, sit him down at the table next to mine and curl at his feet, just like the other two. They're definitely not slavegirls, they have neither the training nor the skills nor in the end the needs or structure of that relationship, and no marble columns, no gardens where water sprinkles among the cypress nor artesian fountains springing forth marzipan await them at home, but instead the nude concrete walls, the tchotchke, the bedbug infested pressed shitboard nightstand. But indifferent to all these points, they play a role to support a theory : the theory that here too, in the assghetto of shit "we got fine stuff", and a John who, even if only four letters long, is still quite as great as any Mircea come from afar.

Well, that's patriotism, the girls in this example show "love of their ghetto" and that's the thing upon which socialist Romania was built, if you're curious - a structure otherwise borrowed from Carlist Romania. Totul pentru patrie!

People are fundamentally capable of lying to themselves. Arguably women are a lot more capable than men, but then again in their case it's a biological imperative and so perhaps excusable - if they weren't, the species would end.

People have been lying to themselves, pretending to be outraged where they weren't even moved, pretending to care about things they couldn't begin to even summon the interest to inform themselves about, the list is indeed long. [↩]Consider the case of this failed cocksucker, not that she's by any means alone. [↩]To remind the reader : Rhodesia per-capita income went down 92.3% over five decades. Will you beat the numbers ? [↩]Yes, this means less dumb. Deal with it. [↩]Seriously, what did they use it for ? When the US kidnapped that Frenchman, the EU did what ? Why do you think they don't dare kidnap Chinese or Russian citizens ?

When the US decided to play the empire in the desert, resulting in a wave of immigration unseen since the days of Atilla the Hun, who picked up the bill ? Are you sending a note for ten trillion to Yellen yet ?

When Obama wanted to see if Merkel has any selfies on her phone, did you... what did you do again, I forget, did you protest was it ? Strenuously or just plainly ? Aww!

Fuck you, you don't need sovereignity for any purpose. You're born and bred slaves, go serve a throne, this world is really not for you. There's a lot of self-fulfillment and outright joy to be found in chains, my slavegirls can attest. [↩]

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Category: Politica si Prostie

Saturday, 25 June, Year 8 d.Tr.