💾 Archived View for clemat.is › saccophore › library › ezines › textfiles › ezines › CON › v07.con03… captured on 2021-12-03 at 14:04:38.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Capital of Nasty Electronic Magazine Volume VII, Issue 3, AD MMII Monday, February 11, 2002 ISSN 1482-0471 ------------------------------------------- <deadmike> how can i argue? an unlubed goat is a hateful thing <deadmike> godamit...my goat lubrication cream ran ------------------------------------------- Captain America: I heard they might bomb the Super Bowl, "they" being "the mad bombers of the world." I wouldn't really want that to happen, but it's fun to think about. Goatboy: Suddenly the world's IQ average would jump up. ------------------------------------------- 1. Editorial 2. What the Media Aren't Telling You about the War on Terrorism 3. Federal Reserve Fan-Fiction 4. Fish-processing in Alaska 5. Livin' in by Regent Park and how to Dodge Bullets ------------------------------------------- This week's Golden Testicle award: http://www.modernhumorist.com/mh/0105/guide/index.fm Welcome to America! ------------------------------------------- 1. Editorial By Leandro Asnaghi-Nicastro So you got yourself a brand new computer and you're thinking "yay! I can finally surf porn with style!" Or perhaps you're looking at your old one, unsure what to do. I mean, some of us, grow a certain degree of affection to our old clunker. Sure, it can't run the latest operating system, it slow and incredibly ugly when compared to some of the things out there. Books, as they grow older, develop a certain degree of fascination. Old computers turn yellow and look Palaeozoic. But to some of us, it's like your first car. We look back, almost with a nostalgic look, at the machine that was there, with us in the middle of the night, allowing us to write our school essays. Or sigh at the days of the many hours passed downloading off of BBS at 2400 BPS. Of writing and reading intelligent content in the message forums. Ah, the by-gone era of quality electronic content. I think I can safely say so for many of us (especially the porn bit). When it comes to throwing old computers out, I can't bring myself to it. I have difficulty throwing stuff out, period. Heck, if you search between the various stacks of paper neatly put on the bookshelves, chances are you'll find old papers and documents from 1994. Some even have BBS scribbles all over them, others IRC servers from around the world, or the address of now deceased and forgotten Archie sites. Now a day, some people seem to simply take their old machine and throw it out, together with the rest of their garbage, waiting for it to be picked up in the morning. I've rescued countless animals I've found out in the cold or in the rain. Every pet I've had or have is some animal I found on the street in pitiful conditions. I'm a sucker for that and my home has been the nursing ground for many little buggers of nature I've collected. Not all made it, but at least they got to spend their remaining time in better conditions. It was a cold and rainy night, as I was heading back towards the car after a party. But instead of finding another cat, I saw the unmistakable outline of a computer case. I approached the site of such abandon and examined what I had found. It looked old, a 286, I assumed. It always amazes me to see stuff like this. Yes, the machine is old, but I remember a time when my 486 cost me $3000. You'd never even think of throwing it out. Finding broken floppies or PC cards on the side of the road was a sight you never deemed possible. And yet, here we are, in a new century, with computers nothing more than a commodity that can easily be tossed out when something better comes around to replace it. So I did what any hardcore geek would do. Picked up the case, which weighted what seemed over a ton, hauled it over the car and gave it a home. I assumed that the rain had done some good damage to it, so at most, I may be able to use some of the parts that were still good. That 486 has been the very last computer I ever bought. After that, I simply recycle whatever friends toss my way. And old P133 that is pretty useless to you, turns into a powerful Linux server for me. When you cannot afford the latest machine, you use a bunch of old ones to do the job of one. Once home, I plugged it in, hooked a keyboard and monitor and turned it on. Nothing happened. It was fried. So I left it like that and went on to other things. When I returned that night, I was greeted by the blue warmth of the monitor, the machine having turned itself on, greeting me with Windows 3.11. It turned out to be a 386DX with 4 MB of RAM and a decently sized hardware. At the time, an IBM no less, it must've cost a fortune. I started fiddling around, checking out what kind of programmes it had and something occurred to me. When you're done with your chequebook, do you just leave it outside for everyone to see? What about legal documents? Your phone bill? I don't think so. And yet, this was exactly what these people had done. Every document that was every written on that computer was still on the hard drive. I knew where they were from, their cultural background, that they rent the basement and for how much. I discovered where the father of the house worked at and what he did. The experience their daughter had written on her resume. I discovered how much money they still had to pay back to the bank. And at which interest. And that's from only reading a small percentage of the files present. Let this be a lesson to you. Before you toss out your old computer, make sure you wipe it clean of all data. Hit the hard drive with a hammer, if you're unsure you did a good job. Play hockey with it, just to be double sure. Or, you can just donate the machine to me. ------------------------------------------- 2. What the Media Aren't Telling You about the War on Terrorism By Konrad the Bold The media coverage of America's war on terrorism has been so positive that it conceals the true state of affairs. The fighting in Afghanistan has been portrayed as the whole of the war - after all, it's a lot easier to report on real fighting in a concrete location than on a murky concept like a shadowy, loosely-bound network of terrorists located over the world. Since the war in Afghanistan has been a great success and is nearly over we are lead to believe that the same is true for the war against terrorism as a whole. In fact, the real war has mostly slipped from public consciousness. Who remembers that the defeat of the taleban was not even a goal of the American government until the taleban refused to extradite Bin Laden? The taleban's defeat is now being held up as the final victory. Amid stories of unveiled women and smiling girls going to schools that were once off-limits to them, journalists report stories that let us know the terrorists have learned their lesson and world is safe once more. Let's recall why this all started: the Americans needed to destroy Al-Qa'ida. Since Al-Qa'ida had its senior leaders operating out of Afghanistan, under the protection of the taleban, the plan was to go into Afghanistan and take them out. Somewhere along the way we declared victory over the taleban and forgot about the original plan. What happened to Al-Qa'ida's leadership? Are they still hiding in Afghanistan, have they migrated to Pakistan, do we even know who they are? Although the conflict resulted in a major military victory it seems the majority of the leadership simply left for another sanctuary. The Bush administration keeps repeating that although the war is going well it will take years to see concrete results. The reason for their cautionary tone is that the real war is not taking place in Afghanistan. The real war is a war to destroy Al-Qa'ida's support and sanctuaries all over the world. That means arresting operatives in the United States, collaborating with friendly governments to help locate terrorist cells in their countries, pressuring neutral or unfriendly governments to deny sanctuary to terrorists, and disrupting Al-Qa'ida's funding. This war will be a slow, long-term process that involves intelligence-gathering, coalition-building, political negotiation and the enactment of new laws. This process will sometimes have to be secretive, as in the case of intelligence gathering. Other times, it will depend on the willingness of other governments to pass laws that will make it more difficult for Al- Qa'ida to shift money between its cells. This is the war that's not making the nightly news for the simple reason that's it not possible to turn it into a five-minute story with nice visuals. Of all these challenges the most pressing is what to do about Pakistan. It seems certain that much of Al-Qa'ida's Afghanistan operations have moved there, yet any outright hostility towards Pakistan would cause America to lose support from its coalition partners. Like most countries in the Middle East, Pakistan's government remains in power by balancing the interests of its liberal and fundamentalist supporters. Pakistan's fundamentalists - and there are quite a lot of them - happen to have a strong affinity for both the Taleban and Al-Qa'ida. Despite the Pakistani president's pro- western rhetoric, he has done little to actually root out terrorists because he knows doing so would piss off his more extremist supporters and loosen his already fragile grip on the country. Even if he did want to crack down on Al-Qa'ida network within the country, the many Al-Qa'ida sympathizers in the government could easily make any crackdown ineffective. As it stands, most of what used to be Al-Qa'ida's network in Afghanistan seems to be alive and well in Pakistan. Washington has a major problem: it can't simply ignore the fact that Pakistan is sheltering its enemies, yet it knows that applying any more pressure would upset the balance between Pakistan's liberals and fundamentalists that keeps its American-friendly government in power. As the case of Pakistan shows, America's war against terrorism does not have simple solutions, and sometimes its many goal interfere with each other. Because having the support of the coalition is indispensable, Washington cannot simply invade Pakistan, even if it had the resources. At the same time it must deny Al-Qa'ida that sanctuary. Any solution to this problem, like most future progress in the war, will be delicate and time-consuming. Even inside Afghanistan America's problems are not over. When the Taleban abandoned the cities ahead of the invading Northern Alliance, the media portrayed it as a rout. In contrast with the press' optimistic proclamations, the Taleban were neither disarmed nor defeated. Rather than fight against overwhelming odds they made the only sensible choice: they retreated to fight a guerrilla war. The majority of Taleban soldiers were never captured but simply blended in with the local population. The feuding factions that make up the Northern Alliance don't care about America's problems with terrorism; its warlords will make no effort to hunt down Taleban soldiers unless it furthers their own interests. Once American soldiers leave it's likely that both the Taleban and Al-Qa'ida will attempt to regain influence by making deals with Northern Alliance commanders. The war has just begun, yet enthusiasm and support for it may quickly decline once the videos of victorious soldiers stop coming in. The real test will come over the next few years as Americans will keep paying the price in taxes, reduced civil rights and political favours for help from countries like Russia and Israel. The era of quick and decisive victories in the war on terrorism has ended with Afghanistan. --- Konrad the Bold is CoN's man-in-Afghanistan. He can be reached by attaching a note to a brick and throwing it through his window. ------------------------------------------- 3. Federal Reserve Fan-Fiction: The Day the World Came Crashing Down By Konrad the Bold I write fan-fiction. In case you're not familiar with the term, fan-fiction is fiction based on a movie or TV series, written by fans. For example, a trekkie may write a story that takes place in the Star Trek universe and involves characters and alien races from the series. I'm a big fan of the Federal Reserve's Annual Reports. These modern fairy tales tell the story of how our hero, Alan Greenspan, and his band of sidekicks fight the evil monsters Inflation, Unemployment, Stagnation and the dreaded Recession. As in any good series, the good guys usually win but are never quite able to stop the bad guys from showing up again the next episode. As a tribute to these great stories I now present to you the world's first Federal Reserve fan-fiction. Set in the year 2013 it purports to review the developments of the year before and is entitled The Federal Reserve's 99th Annual Report. --- THE FEDERAL RESERVE'S 99th ANNUAL REPORT Economic and Financial Developments in 2012 The last year has seen the tail end of the largest financial collapse in the history of the world. In this report I will attempt to reconstruct the causes of The Fall as they are understood today. The Fall started out as a currency crisis and ended up destroying civilization. Although no accurate census data exist, we believe that at least 80% of the world's population has been wiped out in the last two years. The collapse of all major financial systems led in turn to a collapse of social order and civilization. Industries, governments, nations, all these things no longer exist to any relevant extent. The lawyers and politicians were the first to go. As soon as supermarkets ran out of food the masses turned on their leaders. Outraged mobs stormed government buildings killed anyone wearing a tie. The few newspapers that were still functional had front-page pictures of politicians strung up on lamp posts or hanging out of office windows, sometimes hanging from their ties, sometimes with their throats slit and their ties pulled up through their throat and out their mouths. Reconstructing these events has been difficult due to the total anarchy following the collapse of the western world's infrastructure. What few documents were created during that time were mostly destroyed in the fighting and fires. Those people that survived the fighting in the cities burned every shred of paper they could find in a desperate attempt to stay warm in the brutal winter that followed. I have searched the remains of hundreds of burned-out shells of buildings. Each time I walk up a still escalator I see it as a ruin of our former civilization, like the remains of an ancient Persian palace. In the new world, "escalator" is simply another word for stairs. It takes a concerted effort to remember that these things once moved on their own, in a time that now seems so distant. The records others and myself have found have enabled me to give what I believe is a reasonably accurate portrayal of the events that caused The Fall. --- Most surviving economists agree that the spark that set off The Fall was the withdrawal of Euro bills and coins in 2011. After thousands of years of using physical currency the people of Europe switched to purely electronic financial transactions. All transfers of wealth went directly from bank account to bank account. It all seemed so simple; it was, after all, simply a logical progression. Early people bartered for goods, but transporting goods was difficult and time-consuming so people began using gold as a currency. Eventually some governments decided that gold was inconvenient because its value had to be measured by weight and purity, so they produced gold-backed currency. In the United States each dollar "represented" some amount of gold that the government kept in reserve. As long as people had faith that they could redeem their dollars for gold, those dollars had value. The problem with gold-backed currency was that the money supply was inflexible. In order to print more money it was necessary to acquire more gold. Eventually the United States abandoned the gold standard and the currency was only backed by faith in the government. In each of these changes a currency's value moved further from the goods which it was supposed to represent and became more and more illusory, yet it was an illusion that worked. As long people believed that a currency was valuable it was in fact valuable. The farmer accepted dollars as payment for his wheat and used to those same dollars to buy clothes from the shopkeeper who used them to buy bread from the miller who used them to pay the farmer. As long as the farmers, shopkeepers and millers of the world shared in the illusion of the currency's value that value became real. The system worked because people had faith in it. Sometimes people lost their faith and the system stopped working. In Germany in the 1930s people lost faith in the government. Since their currency was not backed by gold, losing faith in the government meant losing faith in the currency it printed. This lead to hyperinflation and Germany's currency became virtually worthless. Despite such problems, nations world-wide eventually turned to paper currencies without gold backing and these currencies were generally as stable as the government that printed them. By the 21st century the vast majority of financial transactions were performed electronically. Banks with billions and billions of dollars in assets usually only held several millions in currency. If transfers between accounts meant that one million dollars had gone from accounts in bank A to accounts in bank B while one million and one had gone the other way then only a single dollar bill needed to be physically transported from one bank to the other. The end result was that most transactions were simply done by communicating changes in records to a database rather than a transfer of physical currency. In 2011, the European Union decided that it was time to take the next logical step: purely electronic currency. The experts said it wasn't a big step at all since most transactions were already electronic. They said most people wouldn't even notice. The majority of consumer spending was done by credit and debit cards and even those sums of money were small compared to the amounts that passed electronically through banks and stock markets every day. They said physical currency had made up only a tiny fraction of the money supply for decades, cash transactions were rare even in tiny rural communities. And so it was decided to withdraw bills and coins from circulation. Currency had now become something completely abstract. In theory it was a brilliant decision. Counterfeiting became impossible when money was just a record in a computer. Tax fraud became impossible because all necessary taxes were deducted during an electronic transfer. In fact, most fraud became impossible because all money could be traced to its source. Cash can be hidden away, placed in a safety-deposit box under a false name - even destroyed. The police have to investigate fraud involving cash and track down the money. Under the new system there was no need for all that - when all one's liquid wealth is set by a record in a database a court can simply change that record. If someone was found guilty of fraud the proper amount was deducted from their bank account and returned to the victim. Then something went wrong. That illusion we all took for granted started crumbling. Maybe it was simply a programmer's mistake in the banking software. Maybe it was an intentional attempt by a group of banks to skim money from the millions of accounts they controlled. Maybe it was a very crafty "robbery" attempt by a group of hackers. Whatever caused it, at some point the records held by different banks began showing inconsistencies. The banks couldn't agree on who held what amounts and what transfers had occurred. Such inconsistencies were supposed to be impossible but nevertheless they were there. Banks started halting payments and transfers. Sometimes transfers could not be made because banks disagreed on what amounts were held where. Emergency meetings were called, different governments drafted different, usually conflicting, legislation on what the banks were to do. If a physical currency was still in wide circulation it would have been possible to revert to it until the chaos was sorted out. Even catastrophic, sudden drop in the money supply but would have been preferable to what happened next. Desperate governments ordered banks to restitute account-holders and passed laws literally creating money in millions of accounts. Of course, each bank was in favour of some other solution, which would maximize its own holdings. Bank records, already corrupted, became completely disjoint as individual banks simply changed them at will. It was like giving every government and bank in the European Union a license to print money at will; since anybody could simply create money the currency became worthless. Although the problem started in Europe its effect immediately spread throughout the world. Most first-world nations used so little physical currency that they would have had trouble dealing with a sudden stop in electronic transactions in the best of times. As it was, the world's financial systems and economies were so closely inter-linked that only the most backwards rural areas continued functioning. Cities became centres of death. An area the size of a city, as a closed system, cannot support its population with the basic necessities of life. To survive, a city must suck in food and fresh water from the countryside at a tremendous rate. When the monetary system collapsed this flow stopped. The planet's urban population, essentially the vast majority of the developed world, was stuck in death-traps. Very large numbers of people fighting for survival over very limited resources lead to predictable results. Only the most ruthless and violent survived. Gangs first pillaged their cities for food, then turned to murder and cannibalism and eventually turned on each other. In a drastic reversal of the demographic trends of the past centuries, more people were left alive in rural areas than in urban ones. The number of survivors among city dwellers is negligible. It is safe to assume that anyone who was in an urban centre once the roads were blocked is now dead. The countryside didn't fare much better in the long run. It seemed logical at the time that people would simply start planting crops and concentrate on survival. It turned out that the average westerner had no stomach for subsistence farming. Most people did nothing until their food stock ran out - they simply could not believe the chaos could last. Raised in the modern world, they were no more likely to question the certainty of stores stocked with food than a primitive man would question the certainty of the sun rising the next day. Farming was a foreign concept - people just refused to believe they should have to do it. Once the food stocks ran dry the strong would take food by force from those who had it - that concept was much more familiar. Instead of turning into a nation of small-scale farms we turned into a nation of starving communities and murderous gangs that took what they needed by force. The only groups that showed any semblance of organization were the armed gangs. There was certainly no large-scale organized effort to produce food. The gangs could easily overrun a farming town and steal what they needed, then move on to the next community. It was much harder to guard the farms from other gangs while growing crops. As a result, most farms were simply destroyed. Even the best armed gangs eventually found there was no more food to steal and most ended up starving to death. Communities that were able to survive the winter on subsistence farming still exist in small pockets here and there, usually in the more remote parts of the country. Unless the situation is radically different in the rest of the world, and there is no reason to believe it would be, the most prosperous areas of the world are what was once called the 3rd world. The people of most remote and backward parts of the world have been protected by their isolation. --- In the end the only conclusion we can come to is that people simply lost faith in the illusion of money, wealth, ownership. Bit by bit, these things became abstract and eventually people saw through the illusion. The disappearance of a physical currency was only the spark that set it off. People no longer had a physical manifestation of wealth they could see and feel. A piece of paper is arguably no more valuable than an electronic record but with the paper there is no doubt over who possesses it. That small-added uncertainty suddenly made people see the uncertainty they had been taking for granted all their lives. During the Great Depression, the people of the United States lost faith in the economy. That fact alone had more impact on the country than any drought, bank failure or stock market collapse. There was no physical reason the economy had to slow down: mines did not run out of coal, oil wells did not run dry, farm animals did not stop breeding. Certainly some economic slowdown was inevitable, but there was no fundamental reason the economy could not recovery from the bump. The real downturn came when people stopped believing in the illusion. It was people who decided to close down mines, to slow down oil exploration, to foreclose on farms. Those trains and cars and people that depended on the coal and the oil and the animals then had fewer resources. When consumers stopped buying as much, companies could not afford to pay out as much money in salaries and those lower salaries meant fewer purchases. Farmers could not afford the increased price of fuel and tractors and many were forced to sell their land, leading to mass unemployment. The price of food rose along with most prices and some companies such as those that refined oil and built tractors went out of business. This is in turn caused higher fuel and tractor prices for the farmers. The farmers that had no jobs because they lost their farms had been producing food before the crash, but without their farms they were producing nothing. The same was true for most businesses: the economic downturn led to mass unemployment all over the country. All those unemployed people could have been producing: farming, mining coal, building tractors. If all employers in the country suddenly decided to hire more employees those added employees would boost productivity. Those same employees could get wages and become consumers of the products they turned out. That act would have taken faith in the economy. However the employers had lost that faith. They believed if they produced more goods no one would buy them. Because they believed this they did not hire more, and because they did not hire more there were fewer people with money and thus less demand for goods. What they believed became true by virtue of their belief. For decades economists wondered why there were no more depressions on the scale of the Great Depression. Now another Great Depression has come, and with what fury. It was caused by no war, no shortage of oil, no natural disaster. This is the price mankind has paid for glimpsing the truth. For a brief moment, we saw through an illusion - only one of many - and it almost destroyed us. --- As a kid, Konrad the Bold had nightmares about inflation. ------------------------------------------- 4. Fish-processing in Alaska By REVSCRJ Don't do it. It sucks. It REALLY sucks -- I mean there are better ways to get carpal tunnel than slitting open the bellies of thousands of salmon a day, believe me. I was working on the processing line of a cannery where the "sweet shift" was when you got to sweep the blood and organs off the floor. Damn it felt good when all you had to do was shuffle around the guts on the cold cement floor. I got so numb to the presence of entrails that I used to squeeze the fish hearts to see the squirt-gun effect of the cold dead blood shooting out of them and think nothing of it. I once saw a shrinking violet of a girl pick up a handful of intestines, throw them at a friend and laugh in a giddy-schoolgirl sort of way. I had fish scales bond to me like I had grown them myself. Once I played hacky-sack with the decapitated head of a small salmon too young to be anything but a throw away. Don't do it. It's not worth it -- trust me. You work in a warehouse kept just below freezing for long hours and get soaked in icy bloody water. One time these HUGE king salmon came in -- heads bigger than a human's -- so big that they couldn't be processed by the regular line. A few of us get pulled aside to process them. "Process them"... so I'm cutting the head off this one that is so big another kid has to hold the body while I saw and I hit the primary bloodline near the back. Suddenly, WHOOSH this fucking gout of thick black semi-coagulated gore washes out of it all over my slickers all the way down to my boots. Me and the kid react like you'd expect: "WHOA! THAT WAS FUCKIN' COOL!!" Anyway, we get the heads off, the bellies slit and scraped when its discovered that the heads are too big to fit in the grinder. The foreman tells me, a girl and this Montana boy to reduce them to a size that will fit and hands us these huge heavy knives. At first I try sawing into the skull, as do the other two, when I realize that it would be a lot easier if I just hack. So I lift the blade up over my head and start bringing it down with these hard aggro chops. I use all my strength, just whacking down into the bone, cartilage, and meat. Eyes pop, bits fly all helter-skelter. I finish my portion of the heads and move on to help them finish theirs. By the end of the process I'd refined the motion into an almost wood chopping rhythm. I'm totally entranced in it. It's meditative. It's not like I am thinking about it, or really anything at all, I am simply the action of the metal passing through the head of the fish and I am perfecting the movement -- it's totally engrossing. We finish and I look up to see this girl who had been using the "sawing" method the whole time and she's got this wide eyed, half disgusted look on her face. She looks at me, puts a contemptuous pucker on her mouth and says "You fucking psycho!" I laugh, not understanding what brought it on, but Hell, I've been called things so dramatically worse that "psycho" is just funny. So I head to wash up and take a break and I see myself in the mirror: bright yellow rain slickers covered head to toe in bits of meat. Patches of purplish black blood, stains bloody handprint smears across my chest. My hair is blackish red, my beard has rivers running through it. There are bits of brain half dried on my face. Suddenly I'm out of my body looking at it almost horrified, but mostly fascinated by how grotesque and unfamiliar it looks. I mean the meat just don't look right like that! I stand there for a second shocked and then laugh like a sick dog's bark and heading out for a smoke, the taste of salt in my mouth like death. Don't do it. Trust me. It'll change you forever. --- REVSCRJ is a writer/musician living in Monterey, California. Constantly on the verge of homelessness, he hopes that you enjoy his work or else his life has been in vain. Contact REVSCRJ at revscrj@cloudfactory.org to lodge complaints, notify of lawsuits, or receive spiritual advice. ------------------------------------------- 5. Livin' in by Regent Park and how to Dodge Bullets By Rolo For those who do not know what Regent Park is, allow me to explain. Regent Park is an area of project housing on the east fringe of downtown. Meant to be low rent housing, it is forever synonymous with crack whores, drug dealers and gangs. A forever and infinitely poor district. I use to live on the other side of the Don River, in the much more civil and middle class Riverdale Area. For those of you who watched the soap opera "Riverdale", this is the real thing. I always figured I'd never live or have to deal with Regent Park. Now I live right beside it. My home, is a good neighbourhood, the Co-op itself is excellent. Moving in several months ago was a harrowing experience. The first week I slept with my martial arts weapons and machete in easy reach. I knew I was initiated and welcomed into the neighbourhood when I walked right through a drug deal in front of my Co-ops entrance. A fat wad of cash is exchanged with a baggy, and here I come, walking right through it with an "excuse me." Less than a week later I was up late playing Counter-Strike Online when my girlfriend remarked, "Did you just hear that? That sounded like gunshots." I barely turned away from my game at hand. "Hmm. Nah..." Was my only reply. Back I went to shooting virtual online Counter-Terrorists with my AK-47. Nummy. Three-Thirty in the morning, cops are all around the Co-op. Sure enough, the local drug dealer, who I had walked by only a week before, was dead. I found the following week hilarious. A miniature shrine was set up where he was shot. Flowers and everything littered the area. "We'll Miss you." plastered all over it. Regent park seemed to weep for the loss of its outstanding denizens. I inwardly laughed, then restarted the Safety and Security Committee. Ah the fun I've had. Its the classical situation, everyone bitches, yet no one is willing to help. Hey I don't mind. I get some satisfaction for at least trying. I once attended a meeting for Community and Police Relations and it was quite remarkable. I was surrounded by the upper middle class who wanted the poor to be cleaned up and out of the way. One of the highlights was that they wanted the poor to stop "public urination." They even managed to shut up the local Salvation Army Captain when he remarked that "these crack whores and addicts are people too." After all, he did freely allow them to use his meeting room in HIS Salvation Army building. It's ironic, really. Regent Park is a way of living. Living beside it, I have learned to have little pity for those who dwell in it. My reasoning? Simply because they choose to live there. Choice is one of the things we all have. Some, if not all of the people around me have made choices that lead them to be in the sump area of Toronto. I'm just lucky enough to be beside it, not in it. That drug dealer who impetuously was dealing in the open, got his ass shot off. That idea makes me smile. Life ain't that bad now. But if you consider every little decision, being Fated to a life doesn't seem so true. Life is what we make of it. The culture down here is alien. It is a counter-culture. Frankly I wish the went ahead with the plan to bulldoze the area. Put up a bunch of townhouses, since they seem to be springing up everywhere in the city. At least it would evenly spread the crack whores and poor across the city. That way everyone would see it, instead of it simply swept under the municipal rug. Besides, it would give the city a nice equal feeling to it. You cannot eliminate the concept of poor or poor people. They will exist and survive. It's human nature. It is also human nature to care only oneself. The extent of caring only extends to a person when it directly affects them. I find myself in a happy medium between them. Middle class and poor. It's kinda like a cheesy episode of those cop shows. The cops move in, the druggies, and drug dealers hide. When the cops go, everyone comes out of hiding. I am lucky enough to get front row seating to Regent Park. For some odd reason my Co-op is an untouched jewel. So when you actually see a poor person begging for change, do yourself and society a favour look at them carefully. Are they just obnoxious little teens doing it for fun? Because if they are, give them the friggin' boot to the head for wasting your time. Being poor doesn't mean they deserve your pity. Even pity is a commodity these days. ------------------------------------------- CoN would not be possible without the great help of Scriba Org. CoN: 'if the terrorists are going to go after out engineering miracles, they should go after micheal jackson.' - Adam Capital of Nasty Electronic Magazine "media you can abuse" In memory of Father Ross "Padre" Legere Published every second Monday (or when we get around it) Disclaimer: unintentionally offensive Comments, queries and submissions are welcome http://con.ca - http://capnasty.org - ISSN 1482-0471 A bi-weekly electronic journal. Subscriptions available at no cost electronically. Available on Usenet newsgroups alt.zines and alt.ezines. This mailing is sent exclusively to those poor souls who chose to subscribe to the Capital of Nasty mailing list. Spread the word! If you have friends who would like to receive CoN, ask them to send email to join@capnasty.org. If you'd like to unsubscribe because such email aggravates your monetary intolerance, simply send an empty message to leave@capnasty.org. Brought to you by C.C.C.P. (Collective Communist Computing Proletariat) Leandro Asnaghi-Nicastro Colin Barrett <leandro@con.ca> <tyrannis@con.ca> ZimID 708EC8D1 1994/09/14 EC B0 97 59 1D FE 7C 32 7E 04 2C 66 47 41 FB 7D