One growing, elastic brain
Man’s future is bright
[ americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan ]
Two small, sticky hands
One growing, elastic brain Man’s future is bright [ americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan ]
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Mobile device enthusiasts are eagerly anticipating the commercial release of explosive reactive armor (ERA) accessories by AmeriBeth Protective Systems, Ltd., a joint Ynki-Israeli venture. Modeled after reactive tank armor that’s designed to protect what’s inside by exploding outward and dampening the impact of a foreign object traveling at high speed, soon-to-be-released AmeriBeth products feature an accelerometer-equipped microprocessor linked to tiny explosive elements built into the mobile phone or tablet casing that shoot outward to dampen the effects of a fall or sudden impact. “Our cases must, I repeat, must be worn on the outside of the body, with the back of the device facing outward, preferably using the belt-mounting device included with all of our products,” said company CEO Brien Gregory Edouard. “I can’t stress this enough - do not store or carry these devices inside a pants pocket or bag, as the kinetic elements will rip right through the material used to make your clothing or bag, damaging it beyond repair. Also, try not to drop it around children, animals, or people sitting on the ground, always wear long pants made of sturdy cloth, and don’t look down at a falling device.”
“You’re telling me that this case will protect my phone from a fall by part of it blowing up,” said Wilhelmina Francisco-Drais, a Ynki consumer sporting a brand-new handheld communications / entertainment device, while examining the AmeriBeth product at a trade fair. “But if I drop it next to a pet or kid the exploding particles might, uh hurt, said child or beast? Fuck it. Give me two right now. I paid more than a thousand dollars for this tablet and it’s more valuable to me than others’ health, life, or safety.” “People just love their mobile devices,” said Dr. Valencio Trammer, professor of behavioral studies at the University of California at Newton’s Harbor. “Chances are, AmeriBeth will find a way to make its product less lethal to things living at calf-level, but, for now, there’s always plausible deniability.” According to the Pew Research Center, there are now nearly as many mobile devices in use in the United States as there are citizens. [ americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan ] Across the United States of America, the National Guard is being mobilized to protect the homes of the country’s richest inhabitants. Tens of thousands of armed soldiers are moving into place, forming tight cordons around affluent neighborhoods that might possibly at some point in the near future perhaps be threatened by hordes of starving wage-slaves. Armed with the most advanced weapons available, including main battle tanks and attack helicopters, the U.S. Army appears poised to beat back even the most braven assault against the only segment of society that really matters.
Piggybacking on efforts to further shift the tax burden from those who have the most financial resources to those who have the fewest, the decision to use the military to protect America’s privileged few was probably made at the highest levels of the Trump administration. The cost of said mobilization will, of course, also be shouldered and executed by the poor, the needy, and the disenfranchised. Secret plans obtained by WikiLeaks have exposed the impending activation of Project Cherry Pick, a nation-wide police action which calls for the most physically attractive children of poor families to be rounded up for training in the art of physically pleasuring the rich and the powerful. A flawed democracy, the American empire seems to be backsliding rapidly into an oligarchic tyranny not seen since the debauchery and excess of pre-collapse Rome. Hope remains for those willing and able to keep their hearts pure - and their sixes covered. [ americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan ] In one model of the universe, a person is continuously and perpetually judged by That Which Cannot Be Named on the level of respect shown not to other humans who are powerful but to those who are powerless. Society gives judges and police officers, for example, the power to take away a person’s liberty and life, respectively. Food service workers and small children, on the other hand, enjoy no such or similar rights and privileges.
Mocking or ridiculing a judge or police officer will have immediate, negative, and possibly deadly temporal consequences to one’s liberty and life, whereas doing the same to a fast-food cashier or stray orphan will likely not. Within the framework of this dichotomy, one enforced by a threat of bodily harm that is approved by society at large, the former expect to be respected but the latter do not. Fry-cooks and babies generally don’t go hunting for someone they perceive as having wronged them; judges and police officers do. Armed with the knowledge that it is vastly more beneficial for one’s karma to shower great respect on helpless kids and little respect on mighty officials, a person can choose to drastically reduce the level of respect shown to the powerful and drastically increase the compassion, love, and patience shown to the powerless. Consequently, it is acceptable to completely ignore police officers (unless forced to do otherwise), to educate oneself about exactly when and when not it is recommended to speak to them, and to find legal ways to hold them to task (without mercy) when they operate outside of their rights or violate their sworn oath. In short, treat those whom society gives the least power as if they were a cherished friend, beloved parent, or favorite sibling. The rewards outweigh the risks. americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan Fake president recently pardoned a former lawman from the Western states who once boasted proudly about having his own concentration camp. An apparent violation of the Due Process Clause of the Constitution, the pardoning of the sheriff was followed by a string of other pardons, these ones also flying in the face of decency. “Before the Mueller investigation harms the only people I love in the world, I hereby preemptively pardon my sons, my son-in-law, my daughters, my advisors, my lawyers, and any other people who might or might not have had contact with Russian agents seeking to assist in my trouncing of a certain female candidate, I don’t know.”
After speaking these words, fake president then bent to the apparently difficult task of signing the pardons, laboring to scrawl his full name on good paper using a fine pen but tiny, child-like hands. Due to his seeming lack of reading skills, he frequently asked aides to explain the meaning of words in the documents he was signing. A fantastically flagrant overreach of power, fake president’s preemptive pardons will not trigger a Constitutional crisis; said antiquated text has been trampled on and openly violated since shortly after its inception. A dead document that no longer serves to inform the nation’s guiding principles or rein in executive power, the American people have done little to stop the Constitution from becoming a worthless souvenir. [This is a work of satire; no part of it should be taken as a factual representation of events, statements, opinions, etc., of any persons living or deceased.] americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan As planned beforehand, the ritual lasted into the early morning hours. The Grigovian Child Pioneers being rotated periodically out of the Circle of Judgement so as to be allowed to catch their breath noticed fewer and fewer lights shining in the shimmering cities dotting the valley below. While in the circle, they carried heavy weights and tried to dodge thick ropes dangling from wooden structures overhead that were being swung at them by their instructors. The day before, they had been on the move for nearly the entire period of daylight, stopping only for a short lunch during the hottest part of the day. The day before that, they had learned skills of archery, knife-fighting, and some hand-to-hand grappling and striking moves.
Before they knew it, the hands of the clock had passed two after midnight, at which moment they were ordered to get in line and shut their eyes. Instructors then tied blindfolds to their faces before leading each young person, one by one, into a large tent erected nearby. Once all of them were seated on blankets inside, the instructors started banging on drums and chanting in an ancient Grigovian tongue while one of them, dressed all in black with a frightening mask tied to his head, walked around growling at the children and yelling at them to sit up straight. Adulthood rituals are no laughing matter, and the organizers of Grigovian Child Pioneer Company 2.2 (W), Pyltagrad City / Village of Border Heights, knew their business. Properly preparing children - especially boys - for the rigors and expectations of adulthood was a task the nation had learned not to leave up to chance, or happenstance. After days of strenuous exercise and patient coaching from their leaders, the boys and girls were near the breaking point, physically and emotionally. Joining the Child Pioneers was not mandatory, but a majority of Grigovian parents encouraged their children to do it, mostly because the benefits far outweighed the possible drawbacks. Sure, some kids broke bones, occasionally, and almost all had to deal with scrapes and bruising, but these annoyances were a small price to pay for a lifelong sense of purpose, identity, and self-respect. The drums fell silent, and the children were told to remove their blindfolds. In the corner, they saw the masked man lurking, his face illuminated by a handheld torch, which frightened them slightly. He laughed at first a cackle, which quickly became more human, and kind, whereupon he removed his mask and threw back the folds of the tent, bowing forward to usher the children outside. As they emerged, their leaders applauded them and handed each child a black bandana as well as a cup of hot herbal tea sweetened with local honey. After being informed that they had passed their tests and could now join (with their parent’s permission, of course) the ranks of the Teenage Pioneer divisions, the eleven and twelve year-olds limped off to their tents, where they were soon sleeping soundly. americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan A bad witch named Baya lived on the edges of the Web, near its darker fringes. In her yard were cute things, puppies and goslings that, seeming innocent, attracted youngsters.
She quickly infected the minds of children who strayed inside her home, however. On her outspread apron were embroidered images that young people weren’t supposed see, moving pictures of people doing naughty things to each other. The pictures got stuck in the kids’ minds, making them callous and adult at an early age - too early, many argued. Baya changed her address frequently, for she lived in a moving house. On taloned feet it picked its way carefully through the tangled mazes of web domains, always one step ahead of the angry parents following it. One child, a precocious and prepared young lady, saw what was going on and, as she fled from the bothersome images, dropped behind her a few bits of rotten code. The discarded virus soon took over Baya’s home and brought it crashing to its knobby knees. But much damage had been done to others, many young minds ruined. And, soon enough, another bad witch took Baya’s place. americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan A female companion and I went into a towering house of glass to play her favorite game. Its top two floors had metal siding on them but the stories below them, where her game was located, had glass walls. We slid along glass-bottomed and rainbow-walled sky ramps in time to the game’s music while I struggled to read along with the conversations transcribed onto a LCD screen tethered to our face. My companion then flipped on her back and cranked the game’s speed up so fast that everything on the screen went blurry. I shot off the track and fell past many loops of sky ramp before hitting the forcefield at the bottom of the gaming chamber, which looked like an onyx expanse of outer space but was really a big, bouncy net.
While my companion was racing along the sky ramps, I explored an area below the central chamber that was walled off with tall glass panels. Various computers and screens were set up there, with different games loaded onto them. Into the area’s far wall, this one made of drywall, was built a control booth in which two men sat monitoring screens. They glanced at me when I came in but didn’t say anything as I walked around looking at the other games on offer. One of them featured a black-haired woman clad in black leather who was fighting hordes of football-sized scrabbling aliens with a complex and heavy-looking pistol in each hand. Finding little of interest, I went outside. It was daytime and I was standing on a slope of grass. Behind me was the towering house of glass. To my left across a flat, fenced-in field the size of a football pitch was a sinkhole that had recently opened into a low hill, a circle of reddish-orange soil full of large rocks. In front of me, but on the other side of the chainlink fence, was a building bisected by an old carriage run, a portal from which a group of screaming schoolchildren came running. One child, a girl wearing a puffy jacket and scarf of dark colors, ran over to the sinkhole and started kicking at snowdrifts that had accumulated there. I saw then that both the field and the slope were covered with what looked like a thin layer of frost, or ice. At that point I realized that some of the children had made it as far as where I was standing, and that one boy had in fact grabbed my right leg and was yanking it toward him. Surprised and shocked, I kicked, sending him flying. I watched him hit the slope, bounce, and come to rest in a clump of arms and legs. He was groaning and complaining but not seriously injured. He kept talking but I started to back away from him, rounding the towering house of glass until it was between me and the frost-covered slope. Looking up I discovered that most of the glass was gone and that the sky ramps had rusted badly, their rainbow walls and glass bottoms gone. At that point I entered a door at the bottom of the tower to my right. I found myself in the darkened basement of the tower and immediately started to climb a central flight of stairs. The walls and stairs seem to have been recently painted white, and bags of white rags or clothing littered every step and platform, with only a small area cleared through them. I reached a higher storey and went through the white door. Inside, I started hitting buttons on what looked like waiting elevators but what turned out to be the light-switches for a row of gleaming walk-in showers set deep into the darkened walls. I was heading for the next flight of stairs when I awoke. americanifesto / JPR / whorphan / 場黑麥 |
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