Gimme Shelter Two!

This is becoming, well, shall we say... woo-woo?


The preceding post jokingly talked about becoming a "refugee" in Argentina: this morning, we have this from Voltaire Network: "You explained that your request for refugee status within the terms of the Geneva 1951 Convention is still being considered by the Argentinean Senate, while in 2005 you were granted political asylum, albeit, on a provisional basis. That probably makes you the first U.S. citizen in that situation!"

The article deals with the strange case of FEMA cameraman Kurt Sonnenfeld and should be read in its entirety. My interest in it here is that it represents one more psycho-linguistic "coincidence" among the many that have begun to occur since I began this blog and the "resettlement in Argentina" meme. Momentum has begun to be trackable. The language barrier will break down as one English-speaker after another decides to effect Paradigm Change on a new continent and in those countries which prove themselves hospitable and not easily intimidated by the giant to the north, as has Argentina in the Sonnenfeld case.

The Southern Cone, with its vast, nearly empty stretches of virgin, arable land, provides freedom from the nearly ubiquitous sense of confinement settling like a cafard over life in the "developed" countries of the north.

"With its hard hope, the South exists as well," goes a (translated) verse in the 1985 anthem El Sur También Existe, with lyrics by the late Uruguyan poet Mario Beneddeti and sung by the Catalan Joan Manuel Serrat. Yes, the South exists, and nothing here is easy. Nevertheless, for the intrepid and daring, leaving "the North that gives the orders" for the challenge of creating something here that can no longer be created or perhaps even maintained there, for these, the rewards will be great, particularly for the young, who will leave a living legacy for their children, the legacy of a New Paradigm and land upon which to create it.

"Oh, a storm is threatening
My very life today
If I don't get some shelter
Oh yeah, I'm gonna fade away"

Thanks, Mick. Gimme Shelter

Now if the Rolling Stones roll into Argentina, or Jagger joins Jacko on the big stage in the sky, we'll know for certain that psycho-linguistic vortices are gathering with the storm.

Gimme Shelter in Argentina

The news is all over the place: missing South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford was in Argentina!

No, he hadn't come To the Catacombs, but to pay a visit to his paramour, rumored to be a 40ish artist of the type we call down here a "morocha," which means dark-haired, sometimes mestiza, though María Belén Chaput is more European in appearance if she is the woman pictured in a Facebook photo.

This is a psycho-linguistic event of the first order, clearly demonstrating that the Argentina meme will soon go viral and the Catacombs will be overrun by shelter seekers, refugees from the encroaching miasma of yuck that loads the everyday atmosphere of the northern hemisphere with psychic toxicity.

Gov. Sanford himself probably doesn't understand all the ramifications of his involvement with his Southern Cone cutie, but those trained in mind-beaming know only too well what inferences must be drawn.

Argentine magnetism, folks. Feel the force!

Ratso Rizzo Republic

Another terribly dated pop cultural reference, but becoming terribly dated myself...

Ratso Rizzo--a character in the movie Midnight Cowboy
--made his name in America in 1969, forty years ago now. Forty years before that, the year was 1929, the year of the stock market crash that ended the "Roaring Twenties" and initiated the Great Depression; all that seemed unimaginably shrouded in the mists of time to the twenty three year old I was then, so the Sixties to a young person today... And as for the Great Depression, well, its place in time for today's twenty three year old equates to 1889 for me at that age, and 1889 was for all practical purposes akin to the Pleistocene for me. Puts things in perspective, doesn't it?

But Ratso is an archetype of sorts, one who may be about to make a reappearance on a wider stage than that upon which he limped back in 1969. Ratso was what in the New York of that era was known as a skell: dirty, smelly, a butt-sniper (as in pick-up-cigarette-butt-from gutter), pickpocket... got it? And, of course, he lived in a squat, and it is there that he pops through the time tunnel to appear on city streets not just in New York, but soon on a coast-to-coast simultaneous appearance tour, leaving the unemployment lines when the checks run out to revert to the hunter-gatherer culture of yore.

Ratso is far more likely to be the avatar of the New and Greater Depression than the Okie or the freight-train-hopping hobo, basically benign figures who appeared at the back door to split firewood in exchange for some three-day-old apple pie and a steamin' cup of java. Ratso don't want no handouts, and those surviving suburbanites who hang their clothes to dry in the back yard now that carbon tax and all has made it impossible to use that big electric dryer for anything other than a giant hamster treadmill, well they'd better hook the clothesline up to the refrigerator circuit if they plan on wearing them again. And they'd better pull up those croquet stakes, and the wickets too, and keep the pets indoors, because otherwise Ratso will set up his own little equivalent of Sonny Bryan's Texas Bar-B-Q pit, and they'll be lucky if he doesn't take Lassie's fur to line his overcoat, or maybe his busted-sole, blown out shoes.

The movie's theme song was perhaps more memorable than the film itself, and fits in with with the psycho-linguistic mind set of the street person:Everybody's Talkin' At Me. Many times, "everybody" consists of any number of voices inside the boom box of the brain, but, for once, no matter how high the thing is turned up, you can't hear it, even though the distortion is present.

How long will it be before the wandering Ratsos begin linking up in groups of three or four, at first lurking in the shadows of shop-windowed streets, then amalgamating into larger groups like the body-snatched out in San Francisco? How long before refugee Ratsos begin turning up in tiny towns, their remaining teeth filed into fangs, the better to tear your flesh with, my dear?

A whole catalog of horror films begins flickering before one's eyes: Night of the Living Dead;I Am Legend; 30 Days of Night... you get the picture, I'm sure.

The Ratso Republic: Nightmare on Main Street.

The Final Frontier

The "frontier" in the United States was "officially" declared closed in an 1890 bulletin of the Superintendent of the Census, wrote Frederick Jackson Turner in an 1893 essay later published in The Frontier in American History. In this case, "frontier"meant an unsettled area beyond the last "city limits" of the furthest extended hamlet incorporated into some larger unit under the control of government. In 2009, there are no frontiers of this sort in any place that is fit for habitation.

Frontier is a state of mind now, having more to do with lightly settled places in which there is much that can be done starting well-nigh from scratch, if you're so inclined. Young people in the developed world now entering its dotage might take this into account; older people might begin to see the advantages of teaming up with those younger people.

Paradigm Change is the Final Frontier going forward. Twenty first century pioneers are Paradigm Changers, those willing to leave behind the consumer societies and go forward to a societal model in which cooperation and not competition is the norm, in which social Darwinism is rejected for the soulless monstrosity it is.

Here's a headline from the June 23rd Daily Telegraph that's a sign of the times if ever I saw one: "Pensioners 'kidnap and torture' financial adviser." These weren't poor pensioners either; they'd been burned in a Florida land "investment," but none would go hungry as a result.
Look for more stories like this as economic conditions worsen. Decide for yourself if it represents a societal paradigm that is one in which you wish to participate.

Come south, young people, come south young and old alike!

Synchronicity and Resettlement

Fans of C.J. Jung take note: I just had downloads of Miracle on 34th Street (Special Edition),Robocop 2
and Last Man Standing
entering simultaneously, while 134 others remained idle. Is that trippy, or what?



Space does not permit a detailed explanation of the synchronicity at work here regarding the titles and themes of these very different films; suffice it to say that those readers with cultural depth and highly evolved psycho-linguistic intuitions will understand almost at once the implications of this apparent "coincidence." The three titles have been placed in random order in homage to chaos theory, but it should be readily apparent that even a reshuffle of the order inevitably leads to the same general conclusion about the direction in which humanity is headed: South of No North: Stories of the Buried Life
to use a phrase coined by the always-sensitive seer Charles Bukowski.

Well, that aside, I find that I am getting more inquiries about what it might really imply to emigrate To the Catacombs here in Traslasierra, inquiries sufficient to have led me to decide to offer a full-fledged resettlement service should demand warrant it. There are a number of organizations out there that have been doing this sort of thing for a long time, but it is my understanding that they overcharge, that they are touts for properties in which their principals have invested at a much lower cost, that the people involved neither speak the language well nor even live all-year-round in the places they promote. If you believe it could be in your interest to consider emigration to the Southern Cone countries, and particularly to this area, contact me and we'll see what we can work out. I am not running a resettlement business, a real estate business, a newsletter business... This is a community-building effort with flexible financial norms. Think of it as a refugee relocation project. Think of just who the refugees might be.

Then act!

Biiiiiiiiiig Trouble in Big China

Hard on the heels of the last post comes this: "The Shishou Mass Incident."

"Hundreds of baton-wielding police on Sunday dispersed protesters and cordoned off a city hotel in central China after a young man's mysterious death sparked unrest, a local official and a witness said," according to an AP dispatch filed by Gillian Wong.

Photos posted with the article indicated clearly the level of unrest. But photos don't tell the whole story: "At around 2am, June 20, more than 500 police officers and armed police officers got into formation and proceeded towards the hotel to seize the body. When they reached the vaccine station nearby, citizens attacked them with bricks and rocks. The police officers and armed police officers withdrew. The crowd chased them for about 1 kilometer. Police vehicles were toppled. The crowd did not lose their vigilance just because the armed police withdrew, as many people continued to stay in front of the hotel. During the early morning clashes of June 19 and 20, several dozen citizens were injured or arrested. Many police officers and armed police officers were also injured," stated the dispatch.

This is a tip-of-the-iceberg story with respect to what may occur in China as economic and political conditions worsen. Censorship was imposed, but it proved inadequate; the story is spreading throughout the web. Could incidents such as these spread to nations now entering the long, hot summers when riots occur? The NWO press is already heralding this for Iran: "I think we are in for a long hot summer. I don't think it's going to end quickly. I think the hardliners will fight trench by trench and it will depend on the other side really maintaining the momentum," claimed Ali Ansari, director of the Institute of Iranian Studies at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, cited in a Voice of America article datelined June 17th. Readers may remember that "The long hot summer is typically a phrase that strikes fear in the hearts of politicians. In the '60s, it meant race riots in American cities," wrote Eleanor Clift in an April 30th Newsweek web exclusive "Long Hot Summer: Obama must brace for more stormy weather".



In the first decade of the twenty first century, riots in American (and perhaps European) cities would likely be equal opportunity events, provoked by economically derived rage with all races taking part, given that the target of said rage will be the bankers and their political allies rather than the ruined of other races.

Catacombs time? Could be!

Chinatown

In the movie of the same name, Chinatown was the place where the normal rules didn't apply: everyplace is Chinatown now, not surprisingly, starting with China.




A June 19th article in Caijing.com.ca, "Fear the Dark Side of China's Lending Surge," adds to the growing suspicions that China will not be the world economic savior many hope it may be. What's more, one wonders if perhaps the Insidious Dr. FuManchu has gone into retirement and the Yellow Peril is no longer threatening to put a noodle shop on every corner.



Andy Xie, the article's author, believes that the current commodity boom has been fueled largely by speculation and not by production needs. Zero Hedge has a guest piece by Terence Doherty entitled "China-Economic Catastrophe Unfolding," which treats of the looming disaster in Chinese real estate. Read them and weep.

Meanwhile, Goldman "Sacks" will be handing out gigantic bonuses, never mind that these parasitic sacks of offal are to a great extent responsible for the current distress in the West and now, perhaps, globally. It beggars the imagination that the public will stand idly by and let this take place instead of confiscating the ill-gotten gains of these non-productive financial manipulators who would have been denied entry into medieval communities in which usury was outlawed.

Is Mussolini's the fate that may someday await the financiers who are destroying the West? One certainly hopes not. Mob justice is wrong, even savage, but things have a way of getting out of hand where money or the disappearance thereof is involved.

Vigilantism is very Chinatown.

But so are so many things nowadays, and that too is a sign of impending Paradigm Change.

It is time to cash out if you have not already done so. This is not investment advice; this is a common sense suggestion. As far as "investments" go, what with the black box boys moving shares around for tuppeny profits that add up to millions for them, well, this commentator would have to say that all bets are off. Take whatever money you have left and run might be what Tom Joad would suggest, and I'm with him.



The "there's something rotten in China" meme seems to be going viral, not a great surprise, really, given that there's something rotten nearly everywhere you sniff. Down here in the Southern Cone, however, Chinatown is everywhere and nowhere, because there is no "normal" here; things are as they are, no expectations offered, none surmised.

This is pioneer country. Think nineteenth century America, heading west: O Pioneers, Giants in the Earth... books we oldsters read in school back when Sputnik was beeping its way around planet Earth. Think Little House on the Prairie, but not quite as wholesome.



There is an actual "Chinatown" in the Belgrano neighborhood of Buenos Aires for those who buy Chinese food and herbs, as I do, but up here "Back-O'-The-Mountain," we have but one Chinese restaurant nearby, and no Chinatown at all, save for the Chinatown of the mind.

Elsewhere, it appears there's not only Big Trouble in Little China, but big trouble in big China as well. Trouble, it appears, is spreading. Best to get out of its way before it finds you.