parents own their offspring - and homo-sap 'owns' all other things, animate and inert. Why? and how did this attitude develop? We may experience the final answer about our madness, in our lifetime(s) - it seems to be coming together as if a novel. Each day sees more clinical insanity magnified by artificial techno 'communication' (actually it's just shouting - there's no message).

..it's an easy step for credulous tots, from the Tooth Fairy to - the God who will protect us from those nasty alien Others (and their God), will listen to our prayers for the enemy's evisceration and *will do it for 'Us'*. Magically! as always. (May as well ask for the Mercedes too - what have you got to lose?)

After a time and from a so common denominator, inculcated from the crib: everyone believes they 'own' a private Avenger (as the comic books teach, reinforce, entertain) and thus is created.. a fanciful security in a manifestly unpredictable world, where appearances are only the surface of life, in any case.

HTF did we tarry so long in our primitive fearfulness? Beats the shit out of me. We've always had other views of 'life' which balance this LCD one of course - since the first. But worldwide we appear as superstition besotted as the caveman VS Fire! and the irony of all this techno- whiz-bang stuff - heightens the absurdity of present behavior.

The extreme 'organization' noticeable in techno, from the masks for ICs to the err network of on-off switches which move infobabble around: give the comforting appearance of 'control', even over the things that go bump in the night. Of course there is no such control, nor is the psyche fooled by the diversionary toys (!)

Yet the fear persists - not merely of the same Unknown, but nowadays.. the fear of other individuals increases. For good techno- cause. Witness the Murican stimulus/response and the fear of that Unknown: groups here are convinced that the wisest course in life is - to be armed against one's 'fellow Muricans'.

Given up here, for the most part: on making it possible for all people here who work, to live decently (most of our impoverished work one or more jobs yet have no med. coverage, nor affordable housing nor vacations). The *only* rich nation whose work week has increased over the past 20 years.. all the while, as the wealth concentrates in fewer locations.

And everywhere, the techno has magnified the potential power an individual may wield, even so far as to the little Cheeldrun, molded by sociopathic parents and their peers - ready to not merely immolate selves - but wrap cordons of plastic around torsos and.. blow some Other bastards away (ie anyone not-Us) with their tiny bodies and already-killed psyches.

Musical theme: Kindertotenlieder. Mahler knew us *cold* too. Though this theme is about the accidental loss of children - he may not have been capable of writing music for the intentional conversion of children to auto-bombs.

The techno- capabilities have now for several generations, completely outstripped any social accommodation of.. these new destructive capabilities + our ancient superstitious response to all of life.

Sorry, but... the only theme I hear in the distance, just audible over the incessant and increasing daily noise of egoists and greed-besotted hucksters - is the Liebestodt theme, the slow, exquisitely enveloping simple chords - while the larger background theme is surely

G\ufffdtterdammerung. Dickie Wagner plumbed the Teuton soul to the fullest ever - even reducing so monstrous a homo-sap as Herr Shiklgruber to *actual tears* such as he might otherwise have shed, only for his dog Blondi.. or for his lost nymphet love, Geli Raubal - whom he drove to suicide.

The Nazis are baaack - here and in der Vaterland and elsewhere. The noise precludes 'the sane dialogue' advocated in these forums and others, and it is electronically enhanced noise such as has never been experienced before by homo-sap. We have no defense against the rising din - so alien to our 'lifeform'.

I guess that you are geographically near ground-zero (?) so you may not even 'experience' the implosion in the first \ufffdseconds. But the blast-wave will make the full 12.5K miles and roundtrip, as stimulus breeds other mindless response.

I was a child at end of WW-II and all I can opine is: deja-vu. I've heard the same saber-rattling live (and with better diction and usually better syntax too). We have not grown-up in the slightest. My father bought it probably ~ April of '45, somewhere in the Pacific - likely via kamikaze on his ship. His and those millions of other lives - have made no dent in our blind superstitions. None I have observed, despite the occasional eloquent pleas for sanity.

We are in fact a species of stupid and determinedly anti-clueful ones bent upon suicide. (It'll be God's Will\ufffd of course!) The nukes are still functional - more than 20K of the 'better ones', last I heard authoritatively.

Good Luck! to those now at ground zero. You won't go alone, if our unbroken history is a predictor. We're with ya! as Tom Lehrer noted in the '50s:


"We will all go together when we go..
(ta ta da ta da ta ta)
Yes, we'll all go together when we go..
(refrain) - Dickie Wagner would have Loved Him!


Ashton