Friday randomness.

Just some musings on a slow Friday at work.

Yes, I know it's old and has been floating all over the Internet forever.

And, yes, that's pretty much how I feel, despite the good work the present Pontiff has been doing shaming the shit out of the plutocrats. If you want a God to hug because it makes you a happier, gentler, kinder, more humane person? Good on you. You are part of a lovely, inconsequential majority. The relatively small minority of Bible- (or Koran-, or what-the-hell-ever-Buddhists-bash) bashing, snake-handling, sectarian-hating religious nutjobs out there are doing a terrific job of making you all look like credulous tools.

What the fuck, over?

We risked our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor...for this?

And yet the fuckin' Teatards are all pissed off about the wages paid to public schoolteachers.

[Facepalm]

................

One of the many things I love about living in the Northwest is our weather. Yes, the Black Months are gruesome (try spending weeks in the gray drizzling rain with temperatures that rise from a low of 44 Fahrenheit to a high of 46 and back and see how you like it...) but the rest of the year we enjoy some moments of aching beauty.

Winter mornings are often among them.

The combination of cold ground and cool are produces dense fog. The mist enfolds the land, softening the hard surfaces of civilization and returning us to those pre-Conquest dawns when the only noises were the slow dripping of the dark fir-boughs and the calling of the wild geese rising from the morning waters.

I love to emerge from the house to see my little street dim and cool with whorls of miniscule gray beads of vapor, hot coffee steaming in my hand and all the sounds of the city around me dampened and far away.

Makes for some lovely sunrises, too.

(To give credit where it's due, both the above images are from a wonderful little photoessay by Thomas Boyd from the World's Worst Newspaper. Even the deepest dungheap produces the occasional gem.)

I am so fucking totally going to name my next garage band "Chinese Donkey Meat".

(And I should add that the whole question of "Who put the fox in the can of delicious donkey meat?" does sort of highlight how foolish the notion that usually goes under the general heading of "small government".

China - and the U.S., and Brazil, and Australia, and about every other goddamn polity outside Andorra - is an immense, complex, insanely complex and interconnected industrial state. This isn't the fucking colonies circa 1789. We are, daily, constantly, confronted with things we don't control, made by people we cannot see and cannot influence, in places we do not know or understand, that can, if they are badly made, or poorly designed, or simply capable of being shipped, or stored, or used, in certain ways that will injure, maim, or kill us.

And, frankly, those that make them may not understand the actual dangers. Or, worse, may know and not care, counting on the distance from source to destination, the weakness of the intervening polity, or their own desperation and/or greed to shield them from the punishment appropriate for their negligence.

There is no other organization other than ourselves acting in concert (that is, as some sort of public corporation - which is more-or-less the same thing as an arm of government) that has the power to prevent this malfeasance or the power to punish it if it occurs.

It's really just that simple.)

The silly season for soccer here has been more-than-usually-silly. Especially with our women's soccer club, Thorns FC. After winning the league in 2013...

First we parted ways with our manager, Cindy Parlow Cone, who guided the team to championship in it's very first year of existence.

Then we added another U.S. Women's National Team player, Amber Brooks.

Now we're looking down the barrel of the first expansion draft gun next Friday; the new team in Houston gets to pluck a yet-unknown number of players from our team. And right now we, the supporters, have no idea how many players we can protect.

And speaking of footy, did I tell you I scored the awesome Cat Scarf?

Nitty Kitty seems unimpressed, having never had any balls to begin with. But I love this, perhaps the silliest soccer scarf I've ever come across.

And with that I really have to go clean out the equipment storage room. Back with some Friday jukebox in a bit.

Under the wall

A sort of fascinating look here at the post-Soviet murals of Kazakhstan.

Very like the abandoned monuments of Yugoslavia, both in their hierophantic style and their air of already-ancient desuetude.

What I find fascinating about these things is the monumental quality they share. The heroic figures, immense and grave, in their postures of struggle or triumph, seem to shrink the passerby like Caesar's colossus. I can't help but feel like a petty man staring up at the images on the walls, so very different from the sort of commercial imagery I'm familiar with. No happy smiles or enticement to buy this or that, just stern reminders that the paths of duty are hard and the rewards for service are more service.

It seems impossible that these images are mere decades old; they seem to me as remote and distant as the winged bulls on the walls of Sumer.

I wonder how the local people feel about them, living as they do under the impassive gaze of the icons on the walls?

(h/t to Ed at Gin and Tacos for the linkage)

No Orchids for Satan

Fascinating little piece of governmental incunabula: did you now that you can get the "Atheist" symbol on your Veteran's Affairs headstone?

Seriously.

There's something like 57 symbols the VA will carve into the rock that let's people know where your personal worm-buffet is scheduled. All the biggies are there, of course; cross, star, crescent, the wheel of samsara for Buddhism. Hell, the various flavors of Jesus-pesterers all have their various flavor of execution device available; I had no idea, but hokey smoke, Bullwinkle, there's more flavors of Christianity than there are at Baskin-Robbins.

Some of this stuff reminds me how little I know of what people believe.

For example; what the hell are "Kohen Hands"?

Oh.

Live long and prosper, then. Except the whole "being dead" thing, of course.

But it's pretty impressive the tolerance the VA shows for who gets what on their last set of dressing-up clothes. You want Baha'i? You got it. Sikhism? Jainism? No problem.

Or the Hammer of Thor, or the what-the-hell-is-Eckankar "EK" symbol?

Done and done.

You notice that the poor Satanists, however, have to content themselves with the pentacle of Wicca, which, as my Satanist pals remind me, ain't the same thing.

Anyway, just a little oddity for Friday.

Two if by sea

It was back in June of last year that we talked about the bizarre little "Battle of Clatsop Plains" where a single Japanese submarine lobbed some random 5" shells at the continent of North America and succeeded in sinking the U.S. Army Coastal Artillery Corps.

The whole magilla was one of those fascinating but utterly trivial bits of history that have always intrigued me. But as part of the whole conversation about the events of June 1942 and their part in the final quietus given fixed fortifications by airpower I commented:

"These brick-and-mortar (or steel-and-concrete) fortifications) were a huge part of human geopolitics, economics, and society for, what, something like 400-500 years? Pretty much from the invention of cannon to the middle of the last century. They squatted pretty much everywhere human beings traveled by land or sea, peering out or down at the passageway they blocked off with a frown, ready to hammer away at anyone or anything that tried to pass through against the wishes of the holder. They helped make and break nations and empires, rerouted trade, shaped people's lives and politics for generation after generation.

And in a single human lifetime they were gone. Sure, there are minor tactical fortifications and bunkers here and there. But these huge coastal defense forts, their cannons, logistical support, infrastructure...gone as if they had never been.

That's a hell of a huge change. And yet we don't really even think about it other than to sort of shrug..."

I think that's a pretty good summation of my thinking about these structures; like an abandoned colossus, they are fraught and yet empty, a clanging reminder of what was important at the same time they remind us of how so much has changed.

Here are yet another example of "abandoned strongholds": the Maunsell Sea Forts.

Apparently the British Ministry of Defense set up about ten of these proto-oil-drilling-platforms in the early Forties as a sort of unsinkable antiaircraft/patrol vessel in the waters of the narrow seas of southeastern England:

"Part of the Thames Estuary defense network, the anti-aircraft tower-forts were constructed in 1942, with each fort consisting of a cluster of seven stilted buildings surrounding a central command tower. When operational, catwalks connected the buildings. Built on land and then transported to their watery homes, the forts were designed by Guy Maunsell, a British civil engineer, later known for innovations in concrete bridge design. Originally there were three of these forts (in the Thames approaches), but only two are left standing: the Redsands Fort and the Shivering Sands Fort."

Note that the structures referred to here, and shown in the picture above, are the "Army" forts. The Royal Navy had another four of these things but built on a very different design:

The all of these structures were designed to destroy or deter German aircraft, either commerce raiders or mine-layers. I have no real idea how successful they were at doing this; one suspects perhaps not particularly, since the Luftwaffe doesn't seem to have bothered to really try and destroy them.

They were abandoned soon after the end of the war and their subsequent history ranges between the faintly grubby and rather sordid to completely ridiculous.

And when I say ridiculous, I mean that in a good way; the tale of the "Principality of Sealand" is right up there with the great burlesques of history;

"On 2 September 1967, the fort was occupied by Major Paddy Roy Bates, a British subject and pirate radio broadcaster, intend(ing) to broadcast his pirate radio station, Radio Essex, from the platform. In 1968, British workmen entered what Bates claimed to be his territorial waters in order to service a navigational buoy near the platform. Michael Bates (son of Paddy Roy Bates) tried to scare the workmen off by firing warning shots from the former fort. As Bates was a British subject at the time, he was summoned to court in England on firearms charges following the incident. But the court ruled that as the platform (which Bates was now calling "Sealand") was outside British jurisdiction, being beyond the then three-mile limit of the country's waters, the case could not proceed. In 1975, Bates introduced a constitution for Sealand, followed by a flag, a national anthem, a currency and passports.

In August 1978, while Bates and his wife were in England, Alexander Achenbach, who describes himself as the Prime Minister of Sealand, hired several German and Dutch mercenaries to spearhead an attack of Roughs Tower. They stormed the tower with speedboats, jet skis and helicopters, and took Bates' son hostage. Bates was able to retake the tower and capture Achenbach and the mercenaries. Achenbach, a German lawyer who held a Sealand passport, was charged with treason against Sealand and was held unless he paid DM 75,000 (more than US$35,000 or £23,000). The governments of the Netherlands, Austria and Germany petitioned the British government for his release, but the United Kingdom disavowed his imprisonment, citing the 1968 court decision. Germany then sent a diplomat from its London embassy to Roughs Tower to negotiate for Achenbach's release. Roy Bates relented after several weeks of negotiations and subsequently claimed that the diplomat's visit constituted de facto recognition of Sealand by Germany.

Following his repatriation, Achenbach and Gernot Pütz established a "government in exile", sometimes known as the Sealand Rebel Government, or Sealandic Rebel Government, in Germany. Achenbach's appointed successor, Johannes Seiger, continues to claim via his website that he is Sealand's legitimate ruling authority."

Prime Minister of Sealand, indeed...

I hate to even admit this, but the first thing I thought of when I saw pictures of these things was; Waterworld!

Yes, I'm a dork; I actually watched that dog, though in my own defense it wasn't until it was out on video. But you get the connection, right? Freakish industrial artifacts sitting derelict and alone in the middle of the limitless ocean.

We just seem to have...outgrown seems like the wrong word, but...changed all out of compass with these fixed fortifications. Like the hand loom and the wooden plough they seem hopelessly outmoded; unlike the loom and the plough they seem useless even for antiquarians and handcrafters. One can still weave a shirt on a hand loom and plough a furrow with a wooden moldboard plow. What earthly use are these damn things other than as rookeries for seabirds and the setting for the adventures of radio pirates and loopy fantasists with comical principalities?

At any rate, there they sit, slowly losing their war against the sky and sea, strange artifacts that seem as antiquated and obsolete as the Pyramids for all that they are younger than my own father.

Hmmm.

I wonder if being a Knight of Sealand would help me get out of parking tickets?

Something to look in to another day...

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Friday Oddity - Bunked Off

Rather fascinating little oddity at Wired about one of the less-toxic legacies of Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha; bunkers:

"Hoxha’s suspicions also extended beyond Albanian borders and the bunkers, which number 24 to every square kilometer, and were built in preparation for a multi-front war Hoxha expected from invading countries, East and West. Every citizen in Hoxha’s plan was a reservist. Twelve-year-olds were trained to fire rifles. The bunkers never saw action."

And lucky for the Albanians they didn't; the fucking things look utterly useless from a military standpoint. Worse - small, poorly constructed, either isolated or bunched up these things would have been at best speed bumps and at worst pre-cast tombs for those rifle-firing twelve-year-olds. They don't appear to have been sited with any sort of actual intent to provide interlocking fields of fire or anything else of value; they're just there.

I paged through the slideshow and the thought that came to me was; I think we here in the United States underestimate the way that weirdly random fuckedupness dominates (or influences) the lives of a hell of a lot of people all over the rest of the world. And not the sort of things that we think of as "fucked up" around here: losing your job, getting sick, falling out of love, finding out your kid has gone over to the Dark Side of the Force.

No, I'm talking about REALLY bizarre, genuinely headscratchingly WTF?-sort of fucked up things. Your government forcing you to build a bunker in your gas station.



Some foreign oil company killing off the fish you catch and sell, or, worse, subtly poisoning them (or your water, or your air) so that you and your kids sicken and die. Some official in some quiet office hundreds of miles away making choices that suddenly take away your land, or your home, or your kid, or your husband. Pointless wars that suddenly descend on you for no reason you can imagine. Massive typhoons or earthquakes or tsunamis that devastate your life and leave you scrabbling just to survive because there's no one to help you; the lives of everyone around you are as broken as yours.

I yield to no one in my estimation of the messed-up nature of current U.S. society; we have far too many people making shortsighted choices that will make their and their children's lives harder based on idiotic trivia. But at least our commonest problems are, well, sort of sane. Comprehensible. More-or-less amenable to reason.

The bunkers remind us that out beyond our well-ordered lives, past the tidy subdivisions and strip malls are people in places where there is a madness that has become their sanity, a freakish randomness that is their everyday. And that that random madness is not the product of some malicious external Evil but the firing neurons of the human brain. Which within its bony shell contains things stranger than any bunker in Fushë-Krujë and as horrible as the bronze Dubya raised above it.



(h/t to Ed at Gin and Tacos for the link.)