When interests diverge

What Trump should do in North Korea, plus a bizarre and tangential rant about a Bering Strait Bridge

North Korea's relationship with the world has been shifting uncomfortably through the new Trump administration.

This is what Trump should do - and I'm not a Trump supporter by any means. Trump should tromp in there with his hat down and offer to build a bunch of Trump Hotels in Pyongyang and all up and down the mountainous coasts of North Korea and turn the country into a massive tourist attraction and invite the whole international community in droves - even Americans plus Canadians, Europeans, Saudis, the whole international community - and create a whole tourism industry; invite other non-Trump competitors like Marriott or whomever, insert huge amounts of jobs and money into the country, and North Korea could change radically overnight. It would be comparable to Izmir, at the western coast of Turkey, a liberal bastion in a country which has been descending into chaos. But North Korea is much smaller than Turkey, so the country could transform overnight. As more North Koreans gain access to monetary resources, they will gain the freedom/ability to do all sorts of things:

- Visit other countries

- Study abroad

- Live in other countries

- Return home with education

In addition, it would be very comical if Trump could stroll in there like a Loud Howard, establish rapport with this Jong-Un, and hold a big press conference him and his buddy Dennis Rodman. Trump and Jong-Un are natural allies. They could shake hands and grin like jerks in front of 1940s-looking cameras as Trump monteizes the shit out of North Korea. Even the Jong-un regime will be happy with their new cash cow. Imagine Koreans on both sides free to work and study on both sides of the demilitarized zone, maybe even get those land mines out of there. As North Korea develops a middle class it will gradually drift towards democracy. Death camps will be exposed and closed.

What will China think of all this? China needs to be on our side because they know they can't control this guy. You know what would be great? Or terrible? If USA and China establish some big bilateral trade deal while Japan and Australia and everyone else goes ahead with the TPP and these two economic blocs try to rival each other; that is to say, imagine if Trump jump-skips the US like a jet ski from the TPP side to China's side but have everything else remain more or less the same. The Philippines will follow us. Why does China even need a US buffer? Perhaps a reunification of Korea could occur, in the decades to come, perhaps even as a highly-functional democracy with which both China and the US agree to respect that - *as a democracy* - it can and will pivot frequently between radically pro-USA and pro-China agendas. Perhaps one day such shifts won't matter.

And don't forget the Russians. The current flair of tension is because Hillary Clinton and the DNC have chosen to blame Russia for there being a President Trump, rather than take responsibility for their own actions. It's less about the Syria war, which has more or less maintained the status quo since Trump hit Assad. Let's predict something. If LePen wins, will the mainstream blame Russia? It's still early enough to take bets. I'd put it on yes, they'll blame the shit out of Russia, but we can only see, if that happens. My point is that countries with healthy and strong democracies and social systems have not pivoted towards Russia; Wilders lost, support for AfD is waning, and now we're all just waiting to see if France goes one way or the other. Either way, Europe will survive, even without France, they'll survive; the other 26 plus a strong Euro currency backed by reliable and dependable Germany will maintain the participation of tons of awesome states like Spain and Czech Republic and maybe one day Serbia and Albania and still stand as a bastion of things like European values and a government that recognizes the reality of climate change and giving a shit about the environment and workers rights while the United States continues to hand itself away to corporate powers. France will be France. The UK will be the UK. The UK needs to urgently fix its housing crisis by building more Londons and less suburbs, and France, too, needs to combat ethnic segregation by building additional highly-functional urban centers (additional to the highly-functional urban centers France already has) in which all religious and ethnic groups can buy flats in the same neighborhoods and sit in benches in the same parks. It is in fact the recent decades of high suburbanization in Europe, as in the United States, which has led it into this political, economic, and social turmoil. You can blame ethnicities from the desert, and you might have a point but the youth are radicalized at home. Only integration can combat segregation, which a lot of European countries have a high degree of. Ethnic segregation leads to separate schools, separate neighborhoods, separate cities, separate streams of cultural communication, separate societal mythologies which become about one another.

My point is that after this cycle of elections will subside, perhaps we can collect cohesion between Europe and the ARC Arctic Powers; America, Russia, and China; to form a kind of EARC (pronounced like 'ear'). Canada is like the South Africa of this. This is the point I've been getting to the entire time: Let's right now today build a Bering Strait Bridge. Let's make certain it is for passenger trains and for bicycles, and then for automobiles, which are necessary to include humanity's enormous driving segment, especially in one of the two countries of my proposed bridge, good old USA. Trump, you're smart, I *dare* you to build this bridge. *This should have been done already.* It's time for a Bering Strait Bridge. Some men want to put the world on this or that calendar; some want to start a cult; I just want there to be a Bering Strait Bridge, even if somebody else builds it, in fact especially that way because how the fuck am I going to build a bridge, but that's why I'm saying it must necessarily contain the spaces for **functional** human transport, passenger trains and bicycles rather than cars. Even self-driving cars are not functional; they do not solve the critical and long-term infrastructural problems caused by car-dependence; the massive concrete plains we have built to park our cars in have hampered our physical and psychological health and our ability ever go anywhere on foot, and together with the lawns we grew for no reason, they are preventing the trees, flowers, and flower-dependents like bees from coming back. This suburbanization is happening in many, many countries; not just USA. Why is it that the next thousand cities humanity will build are more likely to look like Detroit warehouse parking lots than, say, Prague? What effect will that have on humanity? When we land on Mars, are we going to stick everybody into groups of three in single-family-home shoeboxes in which they will be trapped forever until they run out of resources; or will they look more like, say, San Sebastian, Spain, which you should all go look at in Google Maps? Will giving humanity the ability to *walk* and *interact with their neighbors* finally start to make people well-adjusted? Everyone wants to see liberal Canada in the EU, sure, but what if we could hook up Europe to the ARC Powers on free movement of people and a passenger train? The entire world will transform overnight as average people on four continents - counting Europe with the rest of Asia as one, plus two Americas plus Africa which has also been unionizing while you weren't paying attention. This is about the Bering Strait Bridge. I will produce illustrations of this bridge. American, Russian, Chinese, even Canadian and Japanese and European and whoever else's engineers are welcome to come turn this bridge into a spectacular and world-known tourist attraction like the Golden Gate Bridge but maybe in a sleek black like the shadow of a glacier, titanium like a new bicycle - or some completely different material, I'm not on the engineering team - but earthquake resistant, attractive like the Brooklyn Bridge, or maybe even a tunnel like the Chunnel but with a bridge connecting the Diomedes Islands, who cares, even if it's some obnoxious piece of modern art, as long as it gets trains, bicycles, and (for now) automobiles through there, I want this bridge built. It's really important that all three methods of transport are included. Humanity is overdue for this. You might be thinking, who will bike all that? I fucking will, and so will tons of other people because everybody wants to do that kind of shit, and for those who don't want to bike it, just having walking-distance access to a train station which can bring you to Mexico and Portugal will inspire lots of people to just try it, young and old, and then humanity will start to flow in currents like the spiraling oceans, and we will be released from our suburban cabin fever. We need to encourage all countries to make it super-easy to bring in and send out international students and workers. In Europe they have begun to achieve this regionally, but in North America we're going to spend twenty billion dollars on a wall, and even after Mexico it's still still just more walls all the way down plus a good solid border with Canada. But South America is opening. Good for them. So is CARICOM, the Caribbean community. North America, ironically, may be one of the most difficult continents to integrate. But it's not impossible. We just have to fix the twin crises of urban planning and public transport - suburbanization - in the United States and Canada and even Mexico; in America. That brings me to my second point, which is that we are going to put the United States on the Metric System, even if I have to do it myself. There is no excuse for such a delay in this stupidly simple imperative of ours.

Moons story part III

One moon has developed three hominid species, Homo up, Homo down, and Homo sideways, which lived contemporaneously across the landscape.

Homo up lived in the mountains. They walked with their noses high in the sky. They raced through the thin air, becoming short, lean athletic creatures. Homo down relaxed in the valleys, farming themselves into absolute stagnation. Homo sideways were the weirdest of the bunch. After losing a series of wars, H. sideways launched themselves from the coast and went far, far away. But they came back. Boy, did they.

H. up and H. down never had a particularly good relationship, but they tolerated one another for long periods. Gradually H. down, ridiculed among H. up for being lowbrow and reproducing a lot, precipitated a simultaneously ecological and economic disaster due to agriculture. H. up was forced to flee into the mountains one fateful evening after a young member of their species insulted his counterpart's mother during a rap battle. H. up had barely outpaced the angry farmers.

H. down, satisfied that H. up was likely aware that they were the bitch, returned to their farming villages. However, one young man decided to start a fire.

"Don't do it," one of his neighbors had warned him. "Why would you do something like that?"

"It will be funny," said the young arsonist as he set fire to a tree. "Why not?"

The fire spread quickly up the dry forest. Hundreds of square kiloflats of old growth trees just went up in flames like it's all good like whoosh. A young arsonist of the H. up persuasion felt hot anger about this situation.

"I'm going to go kick somebody's ass," said the boy, only for one of his companions, Gary, to say something like, "Really? You want to turn around and go fighting?"

Needless to say, Gary's buddy's answer was yes, and there he went into the flaming vegetation like an idiot. And he didn't have to go far before he found exactly what he was looking for: a bunch of angry youth of the other flag's variety. "Hey, fuckers!" he greeted them.

"Hey, you dick shit duck! Why did you burn down the forest?"

"You burned down the forest, assholes," he replied.

"No, you did."

He thought about it. Had it been someone from his own group?

"You mom is fat!" he exclaimed, and ran off into the growth. The attack was effective, because the other boys raced after him. Before long, the entire lot of them arrived at a precipice. The sun rose over a glistening ocean. It was clear to the young mountain arsonist that he would have to fight or the valley gentlemen would push him over the edge. And so he fought, but they pushed him over anyway, because there were like eighteen of them.

His fall to the beach was exciting. First, he was able to bounce off tree branches sticking out of the rock. Next, he smacked the mountainside with the left half of his body and rolled like a gas station empanada across a number of smooth semi-vertical surfaces. Then, a flaming tree bark the size of a boogie board drifted next to him, and he hopped onto the thing and rode it into the sand where it was left sticking up diagonally.

"Hey, fuckers!" he called. "You're going to have to do better than that!"

And so they returned, an army of them, and quite a number of his own boys as well, some of whom were frustrated with their own speciesman for having been such a belligerent jackass.

And it was during this exact tense moment that Homo sideways returned to the mainland.

yet another hand-drawn world map

[.:.:.•..:.:.::.] moons story

[.:.:.•..:.:.::.]

The first moon to develop life was the third one from the Planet Gasfapples, eighth around Procyon A, the raccoon star.

This life, obviously, started in the oceans.

It would not be the last.

Coming up next: Episode two.

As luck would have it, due to complex geoastronomical abnormalities, seven of the moons of Gasfapples were located in habitable zones.

Only five hundred million years later, life wiggled in another.

By a billion years in, five moons had life on them. By then, land plants had begun to carpet moon four.

Ordovician sea fauna flourished on the fourth moon first. But by the second billion years in, the sixth moon had seaweed. But nothing like the seaweed  we're used to.

Transmission Three.

[...:::•::.::•:::.::•:.@...::•:..::::•:::..]

These symbols are the sun with the planets and all the moons, in case that isn't clear.

Moon four had dinosaurs first, too. And they were the first to develop mushrooms, after quite a humid carboniferous period. They were first to crack angiosperms out of land plants, nearly three billion years along.

Vertebrates developed on moons six, three, and seven roughly at the same time, a full billion years after moon four. Moon four's vertebrates crawled out of their oceans during a pangeaial desert period. In fact, crabs on that world became quite the significant land animals. They grew giant and juicy, traversing deserts as camels do. They kicked pieces of sand into the sun

As they ran. They gathered at rivers and water holes. They dug. 

Nothing of the sort happened in moon six, for example. Moon six's fauna was tame to the point of boring. Though they did get quite the snapping salamander, in only the second amphibian group to show up in the solar system after moon four's. Formidable snapping salamander this guy was. Angry alien creatures who could easily ward off the enormous carnivorous fish from the depths of earlier on. So big you could ride them, those snapping salamanders. They traversed the oceans of moon six. "We're going go to go fuck shit up in this boring-fauna-ass world," they said. They fought megalodons in canyons in the deepest oceans, deeper than Earth's, but on a rock only six seventeenths her size.

Meanwhile, back on moon four, the breakup of the continental shell gave rise to lush coastal mountains, from their tropical zones all the way to their polar regions. In moon three, a non-vertebrate fish developed tetrapods. They slid along volcanic cliffs, eating the squickly purslane from the sea. Like octopi, they sluck in and out of tiny pores.

But moon four was the first to get reptiles, as you know. It just took a few vertebrate amphibians to wander into those deserts, where they were baked into reptiles. They grew and swelled into the aforementioned dinosaurs, but they were not blasted into extinction. They were hunted.

And so it went that moon four was the first to develop primates, just a few tens of millions of years after the first mammals. Humans had developed.

And in no time they were all over the planet, which by then was a bunch of small broken-up continental masses and islands, some hot, some cold - due to the presence of a continent at one pole and a semi-closed sea at the other, lucky them - and they developed quite a complex marine culture based on hunting and kayaking massive animals and distances, as well as a rich diet of seaweeds. They were also endowed with the understanding that long-distance swimming made their bodies more sexually desirable. If dolphins are chimpanzees, the first peoples of moon four were bonobos. Moon four developed religion, but it would be considered bizarre and heretical by the religions of Earth. Their religion was about boats. Boats and hoes, you might say. Moon four developed a complex boat-making culture as a result, and habitually planted a rich biodiversity of trees from the shores inward, which they needed to build their boats. Moon four's people ran through the forests. Naked. They scaled towering snowy mountains. Drunk. They urinated on each other. Sober. No. They did not do that last thing. Anyway, they learned to bathe in live jellyfish tentacles, learning to enjoy it the way Earth children love to eat atomic Warheads, and it carried quite the disinfectant effect, from the skin to the blood. In return, they attracted biting asshole fish, which the jellyfish loved. Now nice and clean, the people of moon four ran back into the forests.

Veritable coastal cultures developed next to the sparkling oceans of moon four. Adapted to both marine and terrestrial environmentalists, the monkey men and women of moon four were still hundreds of thousands of years ahead of agriculture, if it would ever happen at all. Also, they were occasionally gobbled up by dinosaurs.

Three unknown moons had developed life around the same time as moon four. Moons one, eight, and nine, far off in the darker recesses of not-that close, had also developed fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals, and, bizarrely, primates. These remarkably similar conditions drove crazy the agricultural primates of moon eight.

"He has left evidence of His work," said some groups of them, while other groups claimed that you must wear the parachute trousers twenty-four hours a day forever, or you will be acting against the rules. One day, shortly after a set of middle ages, somebody with tight pants set a telescope to moon nine - remember we're on moon eight - only to discover farmers only 5,000 years behind! Naturally, it created a great political and spiritual upheaval among the peoples of moon eight, still centuries ahead of space travel. The peoples of moon nine, of course, had no idea. They simply traded livestock for their daughters, just like here on Earth. Just like in the hinterlands of moon eight, as it was still going on when the first moon eightling pointed a telescope at moon nine and saw activity, clear as day, sharp as the shadows of men and camels treversing the steppes. For the first time in moon eight's turbulent history, there was proof of human-like life on the brown-green continents afloat in the bright blue oceans of moon nine. You could see their farmland. You could see the places they had not yet traversed; five of their eight continents were still covered in deep green forest or white ice. Neither of these two worlds would develop space travel before the people of moon one, who had reached a technological level just a few decades beyond that of early twenty-first century Earth, all while absolutely none of you were paying attention. They had launched a satellite in orbit around moon nine in their year 6968, just in time for local (and controversial) celebrations ringing in the one time in history in which the year would match everybody's passwords. People stood around in formal groups, but instead of drinking champagne, they drank fermented juice of an extraterrestrial pumpkin squash. They high-fived one another, even as people protested in the streets: leaving the peoples of moon nine alone, they demanded. Hot Claudiora Bananerson burned her bra, and all the boys gathered in a university square to watch. Bacteria, guys, come on. What are we doing?

But the satellite arrived around moon nine and hooked into orbit nonetheless. There it was. What a disaster.

A world away, the peoples of moon eight had mapped out the surface of moon nine on paper, and they published and distributed it with a Gutenberg press machine. It sparked controversy and imagination. "What if there were continents still undiscovered on our own  world?" they wondered. In fact, there were three continents, plus dozens of large islands, at least two-thirds of which had anatomically-modern moon eightlings on them.

The moon eightlings were deeply affected by their observation of the satellite from moon one, orbiting moon nine. "What the fuck is that thing?" they contemplated. They came up with theories.

"It's natural!" said Karl Turnhopper of southern Whackhammer Village. "It was formed by collisions and smackages."

"It's clearly manmade," said Septembifer Chockman. "There's no way the primitive clowns of Willayner World could produce their own space machine."

"It was placed there by the Great Giggers Himself," said the Mayor, His Most Important Jackals Sandberdoo. "He watches over us all."

There were those on moon eight who were not impressed by the announcement of mysterious unreachable people on moon nine. "It's a happy accident," they said. "The presence of life on our two moons is the result of unique conditions in our lunar system, not nearly enough to imply that life may have formed anywhere elsewhere except these two places in particular."

And, of course, just as on Earth where this happens regularly even before mass announcement of direct observation of extraterrestrial life, people on moon eight would come out of the bushes with stories of probing, yonking, and no-nutter-grabbing. People on moon nine sometimes did this as well.

As far as the people back on moon one were concerned, they were <i>were</i> the only intelligent life in the universe. As far as they could tell, there was nothing out there but the wet yuckly salamanders of moon six, and the athletic smug assholes of moon four who were even behind the dumb barbarians of the eighth and ninth moons, having not produced agriculture. "Screw those guys," people liked to say, over there on moon one. Well, them and the sniveling jerks they had observed on a moon of the next planet closer to Procyon. Are you following all of this? Do you care?

Show me some signs of giving a shit, and I will continue to elaborate on this concept.

[...:::•::.::•:::.::•:.@...::•:..::::•:::..]

In 7682, the people of Moon Eight experienced a hot war followed by a cold war followed by a space race.

It was quite bizarre, however you roll the dice, that such a specific arrangement of pool balls could occur twice in the same universe, but indeed, it happened. In fact, such a situation occurs on about 40% of the worlds on which intelligent primates sprout. Other common scenarios include a space race followed by a hot war followed by chaos and destruction followed by the taking over of a delicious species of potato across new continents followed by long periods without war, and a cold war followed by a lukewarm war followed by a severe shoe shortage caused by nothing other than incompetence followed by a space race. There's no limit to the possibilities here.

In 7706, the first manned space vehicle was sent into space by one of the powers. In 7712, a crew landed on a particularly large round comet which had been in orbit around Moon Eight the entire time, which is why Moon Eight had tides in its oceans. One by one, individuals and crews were sent out into space to marvel at how stupid everybody back at home was. "Wars and environmental destruction? Really?" they said. "That is what you are going to do when you're sitting atop a rock that beautiful?"

These developments were not lost to the people of Moon One. They watched Moon Eight's space race with both amusement and trepidation. "The fools," they thought, in accordance with their local stereotypes about the people from Moon Eight. "Who do they think they are? They'll never pilot a propeller-plane, let alone a space ship. Oh? They did it? Weird. Let's keep an eye on them."

Moon Eight's big dream was Moon Nine. Imagine, they thought. Landing there. Playing pranks on the primitive locals. Breathing the air of another world.

And on Moon Nine, a Black Plague raged, but caused by a completely different category of organism and with completely different symptoms. Still, the death toll was high on Moon Nine, during their 300s and Moon Eight's 7700s. Moon Oneians, aware of the ridiculousness of the story they were being written into and unwilling to interfere, let it happen, although they did send in occasional covert biohazard guys to help clean up the bodies.

One evening in space, a contingency of biohazard guys from Moon One had a collision with a contingency of explorers from Moon Eight which had been en route to Moon Nine on a momentous and historic journey. The political aftermath of this unlikely blunder was therefore very intense.

Moon Eight's spacecraft was totaled. It was bunched up at the hood, and a spiderweb of cracks ran through the windshield and a total of seven of the side windows on both sides. Terrified and embarrassed, the biohazard crew began to discuss who was at fault.

"Definitely their fault," said the driver. "Those idiots have no idea how to navigate space. They have no business out here. Look at all these safety violations. Sending a manned crew to an inhabited planet without even properly sterilizing their equipment. Mouth breathing."

"No, this is our fault," said Leon, the ship's cook. "We're the adults here. We're the ones with navigation skills and advanced equipment. We knew they were going to be taking this route."

"Don't be daft," said the driver to Leon, the cook. "When a sixteen-year-old and a forty-year-old crash  into each other on a country road, is it ever not the sixteen-year-old's fault? So they're kids. They should have been watching out. They can steer. They should be watching for objects."

"That wouldn't fly in court, they're no way this is ever going to fly in the political disaster that will surely follow. People at home are going to crucify us in the media. They'll hate us."

"Hey, look, the crew is freaking out," said Jim, the co-pilot, who had been silent until now.

The biohazard guys quickly and easily rescued the astronauts, using available technology that's routinely built onto ships in that world; namely, a vaccuum cleaner.

Political outlook 2017; 2016 quick review; 2016 - 2020 second-half-of-the-decade general five-year plan

"So how bizarre was 2016, right?" When exactly will that whole thing become a thing?

- There have been many developments in the recent past, in many fields, from jazz music to new solar system photos.

January - enero - [________]

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February - febrero - [____]

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March - marzo - [...]

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April - abril - [_..._..._...]

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May - mayo - [withasideofcheese]

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June - junio - [......_...]

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July - julio - [..._......]

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August - agosto - [........:...]

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September - septiembre - [.:.:.:.:.:.:]

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October - octubre - [.....•......]

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November - noviembre - [..:..:.•:.:.]

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December - diciembre - [.:.::..•.:.:]

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2016: .........

ad infitum 

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