Thus far, this tiny thing has been a solo effort.

But now it appears a new voice will be added, a monstrous fiend from the depths of Heaven code named King of the Chavs.

By his fruits, ye shall know him.

waved tauntingly before me by the simultaneously sweet and sour Warren Ellis…

An excerpt:

Under Two Flags is about Bertie Cecil, a young British noble who is a member of the First Life Guards, a cavalry unit. Bertie’s life is ever so tiresome. His languid personality is just so strained by the sheer effort of being Bertie, or “Beauty,” as his friends and admirers call him. The horse races, the hunting, being the darling of the fast and first sets, it is all such a bother. Bertie is popular and handsome, admired by his male friends and the object of universal female admiration. His life is nearly perfect except for two difficulties: he has next to no money, and to live properly, that is, with the best of everything, and to gamble as a man should merely worsens his debts…

[...]

more

The indispensible Amazon link…

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In the future, to solve the problem of fanaticism, people will change their religion every month.

Once all of the standard permutations have been exhausted, new faiths will be randomly generated by neural networks. These hybrids, inserted into our thoughts via re-engineered viruses will arise complete with complex tenets and elaborate rituals. But after a month, the beliefs will fall away and we’ll adopt a new faith.

In this way, we’ll simultaneously satisfy our evolutionarily determined need for religous belief while avoiding the warfare that vexes us today.

Of course, there will be new problems but these will be intriguingly, beguilingly strange.

American society, I’ve found, is ambivalent about the fact of immigration.

This isn’t a new observation but when you’re alert to the two main, and conflicting, immigration stories told in the US – at one moment, a story of triumph over terrible odds to build a new life of unprecedented freedom and prosperity and at the next, a blood curdling tale of barbarians hording our limited resources, altering our sainted culture and increasing our crime rates – often told by the same person, you’re startled by the cognitive duality into seeing the thing anew.

It seems to come down to this: when my family arrived, it was a good thing because we (fill in the standard list of accomplishments). These new arrivals however, lack the (fill in the list of standard virtues) my family displayed in super abundance.

When immigration comes up in American discourse, it’s not very long before words such as “responsibility”, “rewards”, “punishments” and “obedience” are tossed into the circle. The language of immigration debate in the US is, in many cases, the language of child rearing; which is very revealing.

In the US, there is a simulated immigration position – which speaks of open vistas and blue skies – and there is a real position which is, we can say, more complex and contorted.

The center of current concern is Sen Frist’s bill, S.2454, which has the thought engineering name of the Securing America’s Borders Act.

Of the two bills on offer (the other being sponsored in the House by Kennedy and McCain which is built upon the idea of “guest workers”), it is, by all accounts (unsurprisingly) the more draconian creating new types of criminal activity around being, and perhaps aiding, undocumented immigrants.

The response to this bill’s announcement has been swift and quite large.

Washington Post reports…

Frist Immigration Bill Would Target Bosses

By SUZANNE GAMBOA

The Associated Press
Friday, March 17, 2006

WASHINGTON — Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist sidesteps President Bush’s call for giving illegal immigrants temporary work permits in an election-year immigration bill the Tennessee Republican unveiled Friday.

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., faulted Frist’s bill for not addressing what to do with illegal immigrants already in the U.S. “Countless businesses rely heavily on their labor and it’s long past time to provide legal avenues to bring this underground economy out of the shadow,” he said.

Frist’s bill would:

_Require all employers to verify the identity and immigration status of their employees through an electronic system.

_Assess civil penalties of between $500 and $20,000 against employers for each illegal immigrant they hire and criminal penalties of up to $20,000 per illegal immigrant hired and up to six months in jail for engaging in a pattern of employing illegal workers.

_Add 4,400 Border Patrol agents over six years to the 10,000 Congress provided for in the intelligence reform law passed in 2004, and 1,000 more immigrant smuggling investigators over the next five years.

_More than double the number of employment-based green cards, from 140,000 to 290,000, and make more employment based visas available to unskilled workers. It also would free up other visas by exempting immediate relatives of U.S. citizens from being counted in the annual pool of 480,000 visas, and increase country-by-country ceilings on family sponsored and employment-based immigrants.

[...]

full at the Washinton Post

School Walkouts Protest Immigration Proposals

By Anna Gorman and Michelle Keller, Times Staff Writers

March 24, 2006

A day before organizers planned to rally downtown against U.S. border restrictions, hundreds of students walked out of four high schools in Los Angeles this morning to march for immigrant rights.

The atmosphere was festive as 500 Huntington Park High School students waved Mexican flags, held balloons colored green, white and red, and periodically broke into cheers of “Mexico! Mexico!”

Without immigrants, this country wouldn’t be anything,” said Anna Benitez, 15, a ninth-grade student who moved to Los Angeles at age 5 with her mother from Mexico. “We’re people. We’re human beings. We’re not criminals. We’re in this country to work.”

In a separate demonstration, another 1,500 students converged on Evergreen Park in Boyle Heights after walking out of classes at Garfield High School, Montebello High School and Roosevelt High School, according to Rafael Escobar, a Los Angeles Unified School District official.

[...]

full at the LA Times

The LA Times reports…

500,000 Pack Streets to Protest Immigration Bills

The rally, part of a massive mobilization of immigrants and their supporters, may be the largest L.A. has seen.
By Teresa Watanabe and Hector Becerra, Times Staff Writers

March 26, 2006

A crowd estimated by police at more than 500,000 boisterously marched in Los Angeles on Saturday to protest federal legislation that would crack down on undocumented immigrants, penalize those who help them and build a security wall along the U.S.’ southern border.

Spirited but peaceful marchers — ordinary immigrants alongside labor, religious and civil rights groups — stretched more than 20 blocks along Spring Street, Broadway and Main Street to City Hall, tooting kazoos, waving American flags and chanting, “Sí se puede!” (Yes we can!).

Attendance at the demonstration far surpassed the number of people who protested against the Vietnam War and Proposition 187, a 1994 state initiative that sought to deny public benefits to undocumented migrants but was struck down by the courts. Police said there were no arrests or injuries except for a few cases of exhaustion.

At a time when Congress prepares to crack down further on illegal immigration and self-appointed militias patrol the U.S. border to stem the flow, Saturday’s rally represented a massive response, part of what immigration advocates are calling an unprecedented effort to mobilize immigrants and their supporters

[...]

full at the LA Times

Nir Rosen writes:

The Americans came for Sabah one Friday night in September. His house in Radwaniya, on the western outskirts of Baghdad, stood in a dry, yellow field surrounded by brick walls. Three cars were parked in front the day I came to visit, two weeks after Americans had shot him. It was the month of Ramadan, and our mouths were as dry as his yard. The resistance was active in Radwaniya, and we drove through fields and dry canals to avoid any checkpoints that might reveal to locals that I was a foreigner. Journalists were targets now too.

The Americans had come maybe 20 times before to search for weapons in the house were Sabah lived with his brothers Walid and Hussein, their wives, and their six children. They knew where to look for the single Kalashnikov rifle the family was permitted to own. They had always been polite. “This day they didn’t act normal,” Hussein told me. “They were running from all sides of the house. They kicked open the doors. They didn’t wait for us.” With Iraqi National Guardsmen standing outside, the Americans hit the brothers with their rifle butts. Five soldiers were on each man. Sabah’s nose was broken; Walid lay on the floor with a rifle barrel in his mouth. The Shia translator told them to kill Walid, but they ripped the gun out of his mouth instead, tearing his cheek. The rest of the family was ordered out. The translator asked the brothers where “the others” were and cursed them, threatening to rape their sisters.

As the terrified family waited outside on the road, they heard three shots and what sounded to them like a scuffle inside. The Iraqi National Guardsmen tried to enter the house, but the translator cursed them, too, and shouted, “Who told you to come in?” Thirty minutes later Walid was dragged into the street. The translator emerged with a picture of Sabah and asked for Sabah’s wife. “Your husband was killed by the Americans, and he deserved to die,” he told her. He tore the picture before her face. Several soldiers came out of the house laughing.

Inside, the family found Sabah dead. Blood marked his shirt where three bullets had entered his chest; two came out his back and lodged in the wall behind him. American-made bullet casings were on the floor. The house had been ransacked. Sofas and beds were overturned and torn apart; tables, closets, vases with plastic flowers were broken. Sabah’s pictures had been torn up and his identification card confiscated. Elsewhere in the house one picture remained untouched—Sabah with his three brothers and their father, smiling in happier times. When Sabah was buried the next day his body was not washed—martyrs are buried as they died.
[...]

full at the Boston Review

Because now it’s possible to find yourself, quite accidentally, in the midst of a philosophical discussion with people half a planet away.

“sheggers” writes:

Rarely a day goes by where more news is not splashed on our screen about religions fanatacism in some of the Islamic countries – countless news stories fill our papers about their wayward beliefs and dedication to destroy our civilised way of life (this, is also questionable I know).

All the while, little or no attention is paid to religious zealouts in America who, as we speak are:

-Succesfully campaigning for creationism to be given equal footing with Darwinism in schools as viable theory
-Succesfully campaigning against abortion through Pro-life groups, effectively outlawing it in some areas through threats of violence and repercussion.
-Started sending modern day disciples around the world to spread its pro-life message/anti abortion

Are we blind to America’s behaviour? The stories of the east fill our newspapers with horror and condemnation whilst the behaviour of the west slips neatly under our radar. We consistently repeat our disgust of nations who use religion to guide their politics whilst bizarrely remaining quite friendly with the worst perpertrator of all.

Who should worry us more? Both east and west have immeasurable influence on world politics – or should we just let em fight it out.

[...]

Which leads to a milk chococlate flavored discussion at the Huge Entity Forum

Oh Internet, my new God, how I adore thee.

spotted on the side of a newspaper dispenser…

CHORUS

Look ye, countrymen and Thebans, this is Oedipus the great,

Wait till free from pain and sorrow he has gained his final rest.

Tuesday morning…drove into a parking lot and noticed this vignette which is captured for ephemeral posterity…

The interesting thing you can’t discern from the images is this: the angle at which the Lexus is positioned guarantees the car will be completely parked in (because of its size).

Later, I’m sure the driver will curse like a sailor tossed out of a selective brothel for being ‘too ugly’.

Here’s what I want.

I want a special floating camera.

A camera that will record the consequences of everyday acts of stupidity and other sorts of avoidable error.

The real time visual record will be displayed on flat screen monitors distributed across your town or city…an endlessly streaming object lesson of how things go wrong.

Of course, parsing error from arrogance from inattentiveness from naked stupidity will require a vast surveillance superstructure. Perhaps this will be the future use of the anti-crime, anti-terror panopticons being built around us.

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