Several hours ago I came up with yet another optional TV series. I am already working on ‘How to Assassinate a Politician’ (about the end of the politician Geert Wilders) for Al Saudiya and it has hit a few bricks. The first line setting is done, now the detail work and that meets with challenges, especially as Final Draft is new to me. Then there is ‘Residuam Vitam’ which plays mostly in New Orleans and I have for the most, worked it out in my mind and is supposed to be a mini-series. Then there is ‘Kenos Diastima’ which is mostly completed in my mind and is a series set to 3 seasons with an open ending. I did not want to dredge it on and I like the thoughts that Terry Gilliam had on 12 Monkeys and Brazil. The last setting is ‘Engonos’ which my mind is currently developing and I am somewhere in season 2. As such my plate is full and here you as readers are about to get some free IP, feel free to use it anyway you can.
The story has references. There was a TV series once (about 30-40 years ago) which centred about a special effects dude and he uses his skills to give certain targets the idea that there are aliens and exploits them to do the right thing. Then there is A Christmas Carol by the legendary Charles Dickens. This story is lovely and very vanilla, which considering it was published in December 1843 makes perfect sense. The world was very innocent those days (I miss those days) and a such my mind made an overhaul. The first target is that wench Candace Owens who called for an invasion of Australia with its Taliban government. She will do nicely. As a public person she has no expectations of privacy. As one calling for the invasion of Australia (my country) she can be made an example of.
The stage The stage is that the episodes start with a person who seemingly is in a nightmare, they (in this case she) are in hell. She faces her darkest nightmares according to Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy and as we go through 2/3rd of the story, we see her struggling with the darkest fears. Then we see that she is set into a medical coma and she is influenced by the latest technologies in a truck, so that she and the setup remains mobile. We see her being bruised by people monitoring her and it reenforces her nightmares, she is naked so that the hot air touches her skin making her darkness deeper. Brambles cut and chaff her and she is wearing a helmet with a visor making the sounds and should she momentarily wake up slightly, the images continue. After 36 hours she is dumped somewhere in a simple Jute gown that is covered in blood and tar. The blood is human and is a mix of dozens of different blood types (to keep the police busy) and the tar is especially created using brimstone (sulphurise coals) with some additional elements in the mix to boggle the mind of scientists. Then we get into the final stretch and we see how actors who were part of the process are around her reenforcing her thoughts in subtle ways outside of the ‘experience’.
The question we leave out in the open at that point is what would a despicable wench do when we expose her to her nightmares? Now this could be a mini series (3-4 episodes) or a series with multiple people (the real despicable ones). You see, I do not believe that there is a horror story out there that uses the latest technologies for some ‘subjective’ mind screwing. I think that idea has merit and that is as far as I got in 2-3 hours.
So, if you can make this work, you are welcome to it. The smallest request (from me) is that you use Candace Owens for this example. There should be a consequence of being this stupid and calling for the invasion of Australia. We have our pride and you better not piss us off. The 6 deadliest animals on the planet live here as someone once said.
Enjoy a more vanilla weekend than I am at present, preferable with a someone you desire more than anything else (real, valid or not).
Yes, it is a weird term, but it happens. It is happening all around you and you might not be aware. It hit me in the last week. Two events took place and it shone a limelight on the event. Yesterday morning I got drenched. In 10 minutes I faced more rain (without an umbrella) than in the sum of rain events over the last 17 years. So you better believe that there was not a dry thread of clothing on me. This started the train, but the train was already on its tracks leaving the station. You see, the second train is not that obvious. I saw a copy of Dante Alighieri’s Inferno. I really liked the pressing, the cover, the way it was all depicted (with images). It was a fine piece of work. So I enquired about the other two parts. Purgatory and Paradise. But the other two parts were never released. I never got that part. It was not the first time, yes to part one and no to parts two and three? An incomplete work? It seems odd to do this. My mind stored the information, but I did not know what to do about it yet. It was yesterday when the trains collided. You see I needed a rain coat, a waterproof coat and I went to the best place for this. Kathmandu. The coats are not the cheapest, but they do tend to be the best.
Here we have a larger issue. You see One report gives us “In 2017–18, an estimated 2 in 3 (67%) Australians aged 18 and over were overweight or obese (36% were overweight but not obese, and 31% were obese). That’s around 12.5 million adults” and this is the link. I am not a small person, I am well above 3XL. Shops like Kathmandu, David Jones, Country Road and a hell of a lot more they will not cater beyond 2XL. Now consider that they are all catering to one third of the population, how screwed up is that? It is like they merely cater to a margin and let the rest drown in rainwater. It is not the first time I witnessed this, but it is the first time I was in actual need of something waterproof and the shops told me in no uncertain way to stop being a fat fuck. It is not that three heart attacks are not motivational. It is not the fact that my medication has side effects. But it is the shops who knowingly and intentionally set the premise of discrimination. In 5 other shops visited I got the same news “We do not have anything beyond 2XL”, so when these places get some kind of bankruptcy deal, I will be happy to register a complaint that such places are not eligible for protection due to a matter of discrimination. And it is time for the governments to make sure that this rule is stamped on the premise of application for bankruptcy. It is time for those who walk on margins to lose their appeal. Yes, I do get it, it might merely be me (and 67% of the rest of Australians), but it is happening all over Europe, all over the US and in many other places. Those above 2XL are not allowed to be fashionable, why is that?
Why is the stage that we merely learn about inferno, yet Purgatory and Paradise are stricken from the stage of learning? In a stage where a complete body of work is important a stage of partial filtering, a form of dedicated discrimination is merely allowed and merely overlooked by too many.
As such when you can no longer get a complete set of Harry Potters, a complete set of Dune books. How long will it take for people to realise that filtering has been part of their lives for decades. They might not realise it, they might not care, but when the missing parts become adamant, how will people react?
Go to a store and you will find 38 David Bowie albums ranging from $10 to $55. And yes limited editions are a bit more expensive, there is no objection to that. Yet now seek the Soundtrack to Dune, that has become import only for $55. When we seek a game like NHL22, we see none in Australia, and it makes sense. Yet you cannot order it either. Yet the game store in Canada does have NHL22, and they offer it $40 cheaper for PS5. We are already being filtered. We are becoming redacted as margins and in an age of online shops this does not make sense. Yes, we get it, no EBGames in Australia will have a stock of the stuff, but not to be able to order it? And it is not the first time this is happening. We see more and more filtering of goods, limiting what we are ‘allowed’ to buy as a consumer. Try getting a cricket game in Belgium or Sweden. Yes, they will have NHL, hockey is big in Sweden, but the filtering is on the road, it is growing and it is taking global proportions. We accept it to some degree, that is logic, but when the margins of logic are bordering our movements? When will we shout out? Dedicated discrimination is as dangerous as filtering the news, the problem is that not everyone sees it that way and when it is too late, it will merely be too late. A stage of choice is moving all over the place, but the question becomes, who is making the choice, and who is making choices FOR us?
It started last month when I decided to create a new TV series out of thin air, well, it is in space, so air was not a factor. It was a little homage to RendezVous with Rama, yet I added a twist, as one does. I started that journey in ‘And that was a hard sell?’ (At https://lawlordtobe.com/2020/09/21/and-that-was-a-hard-sell/), whilst I was exploring a few ideas, I stumbled (for more than one reason) on Thalia, the muse of comedy. Leave it to me to seek out the history and optional origin of my bad sense of humour. Now, when we consider the origin of humour, or better stated the muses, Their origin goes back 7 centuries before there was even a christ, and even then there was some correlation to comedy (the muse Thalia) and her mother Mnemosyne the goddess of memory. The heralding of the muses starts (as far as I can tell) in 800BC when the poet Hesiod makes mention of them. Over the three millennia two of his works survived. The first is Theogony, the second one is called Works and Days, describing the peasant life. The Theogony is basically a story of crime and revolt (by Zeus) and set the story of gods and titans, yet I do not want to digress, it is not bout the gods, it is about Hesiod. He sets the stage of muses, he sets the indication of Mnemosyne and her 9 daughters Calliope, Clio, Erato, Euterpe, Melpomene, Polyhymnia, Terpsichore, Thalia and Urania. They are the depiction of Epic poetry, History, Love poetry, Music and song, Tragedy, Hymns, Dance, Comedy and Astronomy, in all this, we merely whisk them away as the stories of those with angst and superstition, yet in all this Hesiod was apparently a native of Boeotia, a district of central Greece. It is said that he had mastered the technique and vocabulary of the epic by memorising and reciting heroic songs. He himself attributes his poetic gifts to the Muses, who appeared to him while he was tending his sheep. So a sheep herder focussed and learned the setting of entertainment to an almost eerie level of precision in a time when none of it existed (or mostly none of it). In this no one is wondering how that happened?
I was wondering about the setting of comedy, about the stage of dance and what christianity broke and almost destroyed. Is no one wondering why? A stage of entertainment and insight into the mind and we are seemingly dumb do the notion, I was, and I was this to the largest degree, schooling made me this way. We have been said to a stage of moving forward, all whilst we ignore the past, the past that leaves us with more questions and not a lot of answers. You see, Hesiod did not merely have a muse of poetry, he had two, Calliope the muse of epic poetry and eloquence and Erato, the muse of love poetry. She was also part of the Aeneid almost 750 years later. So consider that we have lost the texts of most of the events between 1250 and 1400, a lot of it destroyed, yet this work survives. It also sets another person, the writer of that work Publius Vergilius Maro, who before there was a christ created three legendary works, the Aeneid, Georgics and Eclogues. In one of hist works we see the growth of tension as a forward momentum and hist work would be the larger inspiration to Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, where Virgil becomes the authors guide. 6 notable legendary works in a stage where works mostly did not exist. More important, these works were kept safe, in an age where we now are swallowed by trash, spam and fake news, we disregard deeper works of optional philosophical nature and are left in the dark on their existence.
Yet in this age, in the age of streaming entertainment, it seems natural that we take a deeper look at the old works, we might have to, even as the Vatican did it best to remove as much of the Rhaetian language as possible, they did not remove all and when we see these old works, we might ask actual questions that matter. You see, if a man herding his sheep sets the stage of entertainment to a much larger degree 3,000 years ago, even as his own audience (the sheep) had no clue what he was on about, he sets a larger frame, that frame is seemingly important, because of the goddess of memory had a sense of humour (Thalia), we better figure out what that is and how it affects us.
It is perhaps best seen in: “Do not, I pray thee, do not weep for me, neither pursue me thus ominously as I go to the stern shock of war. Turnus is not free to dally with death. Thou, Idmon, bear my message to the Phrygian monarch in this harsh wording: So soon as to-morrow’s Dawn rises in the sky blushing on her crimson wheels, let him not loose Teucrian or Rutulian: let Teucrian and Rutulian arms have rest, and our blood decide the war; on that field let Lavinia be sought in marriage”
Now consider his assumed past “Virgil was from an equestrian landowning family who could afford to give him an education. He attended schools in Cremona, Mediolanum, Rome and Naples. After considering briefly a career in rhetoric and law, the young Virgil turned his talents to poetry”, which I do not debate, yet consider that he died at the age of 50, he was at home the first 10 years, yet after that he attended 4 schools, over a distance of 1100 KM, which would have taken at least a week per part and in that setting he would have been exposed to all kinds of issues. And when we see this work (one of three important ones) over 12 books, hundreds of words per book, we forget the important question, how was this created? There was no typewriter, this is the work on scrolls, likely several per book and now consider that this would have to survive well over a thousand years. Each fact gives us something more to consider, and when we look at then, perhaps we are doing something really wrong now, have you even considered that part?
If we consider merely these two writers and the massive impact that they had, what did we lose over time and more important was was removed from sight since the 11th century? These are part of the questions that were plaguing me as I was setting the tone in my idea for a TV series, but here I am, I already forgot the title, but not the setting. And in all that there is the choice, but what happens when we never had a choice? Did you consider that? Some might have seen the movie How It Ends, but did you consider it? Basically Theo James had a lot less options than he thought he had, and we merely see that ending come to us as the movie ends. Yet what if Hesiod and Publius Vergilius Maro were telling us about the fight, the fight that is coming in the only way that they could grasp and we wasted 90% of 2750 years and 99.9% of the 47 years that followed, with the last 3 years 100% wasted due to spam. We consider and we accept that some (in the most weird corners of life) can be the stage masters of life and creativity (JK Rowling being an example), but we have something to look back to, we have (to some degree education), as did Publius Vergilius Maro, yet what about Hesiod, who pasturing sheep on Mount Helicon? Shall we write it all to ‘imagination’?
I am happy to do that, but from what we know now bout then, his work leaves us with all kinds of questions, questions that we (for the most) cannot answer. How many people (of non noble origin) had the ability to write? Were versed in all kinds of manner? And consider that Mount Helicon was close to 150KM from Athens, not a trip sheep herders tend to make. So where did the refinement of his work come from? We are left with questions and some people (academics) will give bright answers that make total sense today, but 2000 years ago, a lot less so.
As such, when I was considering memory and humour as I was trying to find a scientific narrative in season one of Keno Diastima (I had to name it again) and that is where I find myself. A station of choice where the choice is an illusion, because the option of choice was only valid for a while and we decided to waste time and options, as such what would we face then?
There are days when things go pear shaped, we all have them. Some go pear shaped in the best of ways, others less so. Now, I am not a big fan of Time magazine. I have nothing against them and the pictures tend to be pretty awesome. Yet, until today I had no idea that they had an interesting sense of humour. So, let’s take a look at ‘This Is What the U.S. Can Do to Help End It‘ in regards to the Syrian war (at http://time.com/5195442/eastern-ghouta-syria-civil-war-anniversary/).
It starts with “as it stands today, the U.S. is essentially a bystander. The Trump Administration has on cruise control the same ISIS-centric policies of the Obama Administration. The small contingent of U.S. troops present in eastern Syria only marginally stabilize territory liberated from the Islamic State while preventing Iranian and Syrian government forces from seizing the region. The Trump Administration has ended the CIA’s arm-and-equip program for the Syrian moderate opposition, a program which was created under President Obama, which was never sustainable or substantial“, which is true, there is nothing in opposition of that and in that regard we remain serious. That is, until we see: “Find a way to deliver aid. The U.S. must work with the international community to find an effective means of getting resources to the region. The stream of videos coming out of Ghouta shows a population subjected to the worst conditions imaginable. We should take the lead in enforcing United Nations demands for a real cease-fire to alleviate this brutal suffering. We can save lives now.” Is that so? Perhaps some can remember the ceasefire that was unanimously set in motion at the UN around the 1st of March. So, how did that pan out? Knowing that Russia and Syria hold the US in even less regard than the UN, the chances of the first part becoming reality is not that much of a reality to begin with and re-iterating that point 12 days later is a little bit of a joke at the very least. In eastern Ghouta, according to SBS, the death toll has passed the ‘thousand mark’, implying that the Ghouta region gets depopulated by close to one hundred cadavers every day. One could argue that until the culling stops, it will be too late for humanitarian aid. If the players had only acted 6 years ago, instead of waiting, sitting on ones hands and hoping for diplomatic resolution, or accept the reality that Syrian lives have no counterbalance in oil and let them pass away (it is not humane, but the reality we see here will never ever be near humane). Wasn’t it Friedrich Nietzsche who said: ‘To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering‘? So how much meaning can we find in Syria at present?
But that was merely their opening act. Getting to the main event we get “Repair relations with Turkey. In the end, U.S. policy in Syria rests on the U.S. and Turkey working together. Turkey is currently engaged in Operation Olive Branch against Syrian Kurds in the northern Syrian city of Afrin, to stabilize its own southern border and to prevent the establishment of a Kurdish state“. So, how delusional is that? Turkey only cares about Turkey, which in itself is nothing they can be blamed for, that stance is fair enough. So, how will the US continue in regards to the Armenian genocide? Let’s not forget that we might soon have the situation that Turkey could be blamed for two genocides, at that instance Turkey would in theory surpass Nazi Germany. The entire PKK issue is one that hangs around the necks of both the US and NATO. The headline ‘Kurds threatened with beheading by Turkey’s allies if they don’t convert to extremism‘, which we see in the Independent (at http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/syria-civil-war-assad-regime-turkey-afrin-kurds-eastern-ghouta-us-allies-militia-a8252456.html) also shows “Mr Abdulrahman, who is the leading human rights monitor in Syria with a network of informants throughout the country, says he is worried that international attention is entirely focused on the Syrian army assault on Eastern Ghouta and “nobody is talking about” the potential slaughter of the Kurds and other minorities in Afrin“, with in addition: “as many as one million Kurds may be threatened and adds that it is becoming extremely difficult for them to escape from Afrin because Syrian government checkpoints on the only road leading south to Aleppo “are demanding bribes of up to $4,000 per family to let people through.” Mr Abdulrahman points to growing evidence drawn from videos taken by themselves of militiamen claiming to be members of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) that the units advancing ahead of regular Turkish troops are extreme jihadis“, the reasoning there is “Isis recruits had been instructed by Turkish trainers not to use their traditional tactics, such as the of extensive use of car bombs, because this would identify them as terrorists. He suspected that Isis fighters would be used as cannon fodder in Turkey’s war against the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) and then discarded“.
Perhaps we should also remember the part that Time Magazine did not give us. “The Turkish military responded with a ferocious counterinsurgency campaign that led to the deaths of nearly 40,000 people, most of them Turkish Kurdish civilians, and the displacement of more than three million Kurds from south eastern Turkey“, which is seen in The Middle East by Ellen Lust. My knowledge of the PKK goes back to the days when we saw Öcalan pleading for an independent Kurdistan. I am not stating that the PKK was innocent, there are questions on both sides, yet as the Americans are so actively ignoring the Armenian issues as well as trying to please Turkey, a nation that has never proven to be a true ally, will the US and NATO remain in denial in regards to the 40,000 dead Kurdish civilians? That would be wrong on a whole new level. In that regard there is one additional part. The claim that ‘the PKK had been accusing Turkey of supporting ISIS at the time when the PKK was part of several offensives against ISIS in Iraq and Syria‘, an issue reported by Al Jazeera in 2015. Was that ever proven or disproven? You see, allowing an ISIS supporter in our midst is one part that should offend everyone, yet that too does not make it to the radar of Time magazine.
And it does not end there, the comedy gets to be better with “Only Turkey has the credibility, resources and geopolitical heft to steward U.S. interests in Northern Syria“, it is Saturday Night Life (SNL) in magazine form. Turkey has not had any credibility for close to a decade; perhaps some Americans remember how Turkey wanted all their debts wiped to allow US planes over Turkey. This happened shortly after 9/11, so when you remember that part, how dicey is their allegiance? And the only resources it clearly has are the ones they have and others pay for. That is seen with “Turkey’s continued membership in NATO means that American taxpayers subsidize the Turkish state in the form of guarantees of military defense in case of military conflict with non-NATO nations”, which implies that at least in part, the US is paying for the conflicts that Turkey is currently in. When was that going to be exposed and in that light, what resources does Turkey actually have, bought and paid for with non US supported funds? I do not know, I am merely asking.
So after the main event we get a small collection of one-liners like “Threaten additional, immediate sanctions of Russia. Putin is directly responsible for the Syrian government’s actions. Options at the U.N. have been exhausted. Accountability mechanisms are non-existent — even investigative mechanisms like the U.N. probe into chemical attacks in Syria have been undermined and curtailed by Russian veto“, sanctions have never worked (so far), Syria will never listen to Russia but will knock on their door for aid (linked to clear profitable agreements that is) and the UN options were never exhausted, in fact none were actually used in the end as none had any chance of working.
It is like me stating that my sex life with Scarlett Johansson is exhausted! That part is absolutely true, yet I never have been with her in the first place and as I never have had any Dangerous Liaisons with the youthful young lady (read: 33 years, 3 months and 21 days at present) and I am merely looking at optional non-existing future endeavours, so for that part I am completely honest (and equally unrealistic), just like the United Nations.
So as the article ends with the truth in the shape of “There will be no winners in the Syrian Civil War, and the reconstruction costs of returning the country to even a minimal level of functioning will be enormous. Neither Russia nor Iran alone can afford to support it, and the Syrians will bear the costs of this debacle for decades to come“, we all agree that this will be the case. So as the EU and US are preparing to make some good will gesture in the shape of 3-4 billion, I wonder how much of that will in the end make it to the people. I personally see it as a path that will invigorate corruption and self-indulgence of the administrations that receive such funds. UN oversight will be close to pointless and in the end a fair bit of that will go towards paying the Russian constructions firms like LLC Priceline, who had the connections to end the war by culling the opposition of President Bashar al-Assad. So in the end it is like watching the UN feeling better about themselves because they added some relief funds. When we set the entire spectre of events into a classical frame, we could be watching the reality of the Divine Comedy. When you consider that in the end well over 500,000 soul ended in eternal torment, the setting of reality is worse than the one Dante Alighieri envisioned, but then the Syrian war was no Time Magazine Comedy, or a classic Italian Poem, which is at present 700 years old. Syria will end up being the damnation of us all, we will end up being damned through our inaction to get anything done because in the end none of us got anything positive done towards the Syrians, not those in Syria and not the millions of refugees, we ended up disappointing them all close to completely.
Yet with the end of the Divine Comedy we got ‘My guide and I did enter, to return To the fair world‘ making it a fairy tale compared to the Syrian reality, the reality of the world we helped create, merely the darkness of caves and the evil we harbour in our midst. I feel certain that is how the refugees feel for generations to come, the eternal curse of inaction and those watching those remain absent of action towards their survival.
Lawrence van Rijn - Law Lord to be 