The Baskin-Robbins of Politics.

The mainstream media has spoken and made up our minds for us. Here we are nine months away from the big election and they’ve whittled down the field for us. Thanks to the fourth estate the horse race is now down to a handful of sway back nags, frothing at the mouth for the finish line. Too bad we are still in the first corner and have a long backstretch to look forward to. At least our summer won’t be ruined with all that ‘perlitikel’ junk.

Now that the Un-Fab Four are set, it’s time to do what any other red-blooded American should do. It’s time to take the piss out of the surviving bathing beauties so we can focus on the important races that the average American might actually have a chance of determining the outcome for; such as who will be the dog catcher in their county. I’ve got my eye on Billy Bob but I’m not certain if the CFR or the Trilaterals have given him the green light to pick up our strays. There are actually five candidates in the race but the press corp is ignoring Ron Paul as though he's the guy who shows up stag for the senior prom and hangs out at the refreshment table. I'll give him some love here but remember, this is a take the piss out of them post. Don't flip out on me.

Here, for your enjoyment, is a look into the future. I’m going to tell you what will happen to each candidate 10 minutes after being sworn in. This way, when the CFR makes it’s final decision and the Diebold machines get their new logarithm uploaded, you won’t be surprised by what happens in the dreary year of our Lord, Two Thousand Nine, on a depressing afternoon in January:

Ron Paul – Ten minutes after being sworn in he breaks out a gigantic blackboard eraser and he wipes the slate clean. Everything gets reset and he mobilizes the National Guard to clear the halls of every government agency and locks the doors shut. We will all be on our own, which wouldn’t be bad since he would probably have the courtesy to go on TV and tell us to pack sand and figure out what to do on our own. Hey, the system is already broken, let’s just Mad Max it and be done with the foreplay.

Mike Huckabee – Ten minutes after being sworn in he looks to the heavens, says “Thank you, Jesus! I’m commin’ to see ya’!” and asks which button he’s supposed to push to kill everyone. Nukes fly, billions die, Mikey Boy has to be removed from office by force and the rest of his un-natural life is spent endlessly rocking back and forth while singing Amazing Grace under his breath and out of key; occasionally interrupted by his shouts of “Why’d yew fersake me, sweet Jesus?” or “Just give me one more missile to shoot? Please? I won’t be bad again. Honest, I won’t”

John McCain – Ten Minutes after being sworn in he orders the Navy and Air Force to “Bomb the living shit out of any place that isn’t America.” When confronted by his aggression during his first press conference, President McCain will look and point toward the TV camera and ask, “Is that thing on?” after being told the camera is indeed working he’ll stare right into it and say, “Tough titty. Suck it, Uncle Ho.”

Barak Obama – Ten minutes after being sworn in he’ll be given secret papers out of the White House file labeled ‘BUSH, GEORGE W – LIST OF BROKEN SHIT FOR THE NEXT PERSON TO FIX’ For the first time he gets to see just what it is he’s dealing with, which prompts him to ask the closest Secret Service agent, “Okay, who’s got Marlboros and a light?” While browsing the stack with a smoke dangling from his mouth he can be heard to mutter, “What the fuck, man?” and after a few more pages, “Bull shit!” and upon finishing the last page, “Goddamn, man… I should have stayed in Illinois. Motherfucker! Go get me a carton of Marlboros!” Ultimately gives in and becomes one with the system after he realizes that “Change” is something you carry in your pocket, not something you make the real leaders of this country do.

Hillary Clinton – Ten minutes after being sworn in she has to tell Bill to get the fuck away from her desk, shoo away two of Bill’s groupies, investigate what’s going on with Bill after things get too ‘quiet’ in the Lincoln Bedroom. Spends the first day in office correcting heads of state by saying, “No, this is Hillary.” when they call to send their best wishes, and she answers the phone by saying, “President Clinton speaking. How can I help you?” and they say, “Bill? You sound funny. Are you alright?” Things go downhill from there. Richard Mellon Scaife, however, has a field day. Fills her evenings drinking whisky with John McCain and contemplates contacting Rush Limbaugh to see if he’ll take a blow job to back off a bit so she can “get my head together”.

Personally I am disheartened that Mitt Romney dropped out of the race. I had a feeling that sooner or later the stress would get the best of him and he would break out into his Sylvester the Cat imitation when asked his thoughts about some tragedy or some other inappropriate moment. Let’s face it, any country club lizard that has the balls to lie his ass off by declaring he saw his father marching with Martin Luther King and then have his campaign manager try to defuse the ramifications of that bullshit by saying, “He was speaking metaphorically” is a force of nature to be reckoned with. Romney’s metaphors are quite interesting and remind me of one uttered by the great Formula 1 racer Mika Hakkinen years ago when he was asked his thoughts over fellow racer Jaques Villeneuve, who said that driving his car through the Eau Rouge turn at Spa was like sex. Hakkinen thought about it for a moment and in all sincerity said, “I think he’s shitting in his pants and mixing the two emotions.”

President Mitt Romney…my head is slowly splitting apart beginning at the part in my hair just thinking about that scenario.

Uncle Sam's wire cutters

“To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.” Oscar Wilde.

In the span of less than a week, four major underwater telecommunications cables have been “cut”. Can you imagine being in a car wreck on Monday and the ambulance you are riding in after the wreck is also involved in a wreck and on Tuesday you wreck the rental car that the insurance company got for you and when you leave the lot with a second rental car, that one gets totaled too? Telecoms, governments and the media all want us to believe the car wreck story. That’s what they are force-feeding us when they aren’t busy trying to ignore the story.

What would be the reasons behind taking down an entire region’s communications grid in this way? There are several possibilities and I think the wilder ones could carry the most weight as this is an extraordinary set of equipment failures.

Some people are postulating that this is an opening salvo before Iran opens its oil Bourse. The latest given date for the opening is February 11th and it will be interesting to see how the communications situation is resolved and if there are other problems popping up when the Bourse opens. It is possible that the cables were taken down as a warning to not only Iran, but also the rest of the world, that their main means of operating in the modern financial world could be taken down with a moment's notice. I think this explanation carries the most weight as the timing and the “signal” of this communications outage is most prescient.

There are a few “I don’t know about that…” twists with a warning shot theory. Namely, the dollar is already being unpegged from Middle East oil producers and let’s face it, the US economy is already fucked six ways to Sunday. Sending some SEALs to the Med and the Gulf, armed with wire cutters and spare air tanks seems a bit like overkill. Then again, subtlety isn’t a trademark of the US Government.

There is also quite a bit of speculation that the outage is a byproduct of the US Government carrying out a large-scale surveillance program. I assume the NSA is capturing data streams en masse and in real time on most if not all international communications lines, so this seems less likely unless there were specific traffic routes that they had no access to. I have wondered, from an IT professional’s perspective, if the cables were cut to corner or head off a stream of communication that had the potential for damage. The idea of taking an all or nothing course of action with a dangerous communications link by cutting all traffic seems more damaging to the overall picture than helpful so I am not crazy about this idea either.

Time will tell what the real deal is behind the communications outage but we should keep in mind that if or when the shit really hits the fan here in the US we would never be able to find out in real time, from alternate sources, what has transpired. If the powers that be decide to pull the plug on our Democracy they’ll do it under the cover of night and we’ll all wake up to a glossy doll’s eyes version of the normal life we have become accustomed to. It will be as though surreal pixies remade our world overnight. The news will report that “something” has happened but we will not be privy to the reality. It will be as though someone snipped our transatlantic cables and satellite communications with the rest of the world. We will be blinded and unable to find content other than what they allow us to view. At this very moment, Iran is in that exact position.

One other thing to consider is the similarities of this outage and what ATT customers experienced during the transition periods when the NSA installed it's equipment in their COs. Add the BellSouth customers who couldn't get email when ATT "transitioned" those customers into their network and you have an interesting case study in how things don't flow when the feds snoop. To this day there are latency issues with email coming from BellSouth where looking at the header info will show an outbound email from a BellSouth customer, bouncing around like a pinball within ATT's network.

Downard's example

Back in the early 90’s I became quite interested in the works of James Shelby Downard through various Feral House publications. While the vast majority of his writings flew over my twenty-something head, I was still able to comprehend that Downard was tapping into certain methodologies that could be used by anyone on any subject. Want to know why watching TV can make you feel depressed? Pay closer attention to the real nature of what you are watching and you will find out why you feel so rotten. Understanding the nature of TV broadcasting forces you to use some of Downard’s methodology such as understanding the language and use of symbols and words, the etymology of words, the way we really communicate and the way we truly perceive. Downard even saw the lay of the land, geography, as a form of communication.

If you have lived or spent any good length of time in Atlanta you probably know a set of high-rise office buildings on the north end of the perimeter known as the King and Queen buildings. I’ve driven by them for years, even lived within viewing distance of them and could see them out my bedroom window for years. Imagine my surprise recently as I was stuck in traffic on 400 southbound and saw them for the first time in a new light. The official name for the buildings is the Concourse Towers. Locals know them as the King and Queen buildings due to their unique open beam construction at the top of the buildings, which makes them look like King and Queen chess pieces. Downard probably would have found the symbolism and place marks of his trade in a matter of moments, for me it took years to open my eyes.

The beam structures at the top of these two buildings are white and if they were lined up on a chessboard, the white player would be facing south, with the Queen to the left of the King. I wondered, “Who is playing chess and who is their opponent?” The black opponent, it would seem, would be the city of Atlanta itself.

There is no such thing as accidental design in architecture. All aspects of a building’s design are well thought out from the colors to the shape and there is meaning behind these and many other things on large structures. Look at the very old buildings in your city and look closely for details the architect placed into them. The idea that an architect or a firm commissioning a design for a multi-million dollar building would throw symbolism into a design with no real meaning behind those designs is absurd. Symbolism is a form of communication; even a company logo is a form of communication. Even if the logo’s real meaning is to simply elicit an emotional response in the public it is still there by design. It was talked about, thought out and debated by a group of people.

Let’s look at these buildings and the overall lay of the land in Atlanta. The buildings themselves are known as the Concourse Towers and they sit immediately on the outside center of the I-285 perimeter interstate and immediately east of the GA 400 toll road which bisects 285. If we look at the opposite end of I-285 and to the immediate west of where I-75 bisects 285; just inside the perimeter is Hartsfield-Jackson airport. There is a northern “concourse” and a southern “concourse” represented in these two locations. There is the coming together or merging of the rural, suburban, exurban and urban at the perimeter.

But there are no chess piece representations of these two buildings around the airport. The King and Queen buildings are figurative representations of a chess game being played by the northern end of Atlanta against the city of Atlanta itself. Well known as a city represented by, led and governed by African-Americans, the black chess pieces are the leadership base of the city itself. It is the white suburbs against the black inner city.

Where are the other chess pieces? This one is a bit more awkward as there is not even a grid style layout to Atlanta streets. You can still see symbolic relationships to chess pieces if you look at other landmarks around the city.

To the west of the Concourse in the position for King’s Rook you will find the Dobbins Air Reserve base and the main Lockheed aircraft assembly plant where the F-22 fighter is built. In King’s Knight position you will find the location where the Chattahoochee River makes an L-shaped bend, similar to the move that that Knight can make. In Knight’s Bishop you will find two very interesting places just a few thousand feet apart, Arlington Cemetery and the Sandy Springs Masonic lodge #124.

So, beginning in the west we have a military base and a major Military-Industrial Complex facility representing the Rook, the Castle, the Siege Tower. Three miles to the east of that facility we have a natural landmark where the river bends in an L-shape like the move made by the Knight, the only piece from the back row that can be moved before the Pawns (people), and in light of our recent water woes in the southeast where the movement of water is at issue, it is interesting to note this idea. Three miles to the east of the bend in the river we have Arlington Cemetery and the Masonic lodge representing the Bishop. Two miles to the east of the Bishop are the King and Queen buildings.

Atlanta has had it’s black King; the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. His tomb at the King Center represents the black King in this game of chess; the queen is the tomb of his late wife, Coretta Scott King. His Queen’s Bishop is represented by his church, Ebenezer Baptist Church, to the west. His Queen’s Knight could be symbolically represented by I-75-85 at the “Grady Curve” which makes a long arcing turn around the east side of downtown Atlanta, somewhat similar to the L-shaped move of the Knight. His Queen’s Rook would be the Auburn Ave. district, a “stronghold of black culture in Atlanta. If his late wife is buried to the west of his body at the King Center, I would not be surprised. This is something I would like to investigate in the near future.

Even more enlightening is to take a map of Atlanta and mark the King Center and the Atlanta Masonic Temple and draw a line between the two. If you look to the west of the King Center you will see Washington Park. Draw a line between the King Center and the park and then draw a line between Washington Park and the Masonic Temple. You now have a triangle. If you turn this triangle into the All Seeing Eye and look to the center of the eye you will find the campus of the Georgia Institute of Technology. The exact center of this eye is the corner of 4th Street and Fowler Street. If you look at a map of the Tech campus you will see that this is the center of Greek housing on campus - the fraternities.

Atlanta sits on the 33rd degree of latitude. 33 being a major number with Freemasonry and leads to all sorts of interesting ideas. The main Masonic Temple of Atlanta sits on the north side of I-85 at the Brookwood interchange, across the street from the Atlanta Amtrak station at the corner of Deering Rd. and Peachtree St. If you take 85 north it is impossible to not see the temple. Fraternal orders, secret societies, hidden symbolism..it is all-present even in my city.

Look around your town a bit, look for the odd and unusual but by all means, please keep your eye out for the obvious. Sometimes secrets are best told by leaving them completely in the open, where all can see the plans of the Grand Architect.