‘Hooties’ and the Bomb.

Blog 1May 2015 Worker’s Day.

 

This Worker’s Day some fine young plumbers came to the house and replaced the geyser that had decided to spring a mean leak, and drip water down walls, fortunately being caught by Madame, before damage to floors and other things became de rigueur. This distracted us from the News.
 

The news is about Nepal and the horror caused by a massive [7.9 ] earthquake; seemingly centred in the neighbourhood of the legendary, almost karmic, city of Kathmandu. The destruction is immense and reminiscent of Port au Prince in Haiti recently… too recently, not to mention a dozen other places around the world some memorable, like Christchurch some, some less noted… like Bam, the most ancient clay brick construction, dating back before antiquity or some unheralded like Pakistani villages also deep inside the Himalayas some years back… almost ignored… as is the rising tally and the notes it plays on the game called dischord… as the PLanet rings to a different tone.
 
The being ignored is always as curious as are the disasters themselves. According to the news they, the Nepalese authorities, are calling for helicopters to be sent… raising yet again the curious absence of vertical take off aircraft to deal with these increasing examples of natural disaster… or are they more properly ‘unintended outcomes’? There is not a week goes past these days without a volcano exploding somewhere [Chile presently], terrible storms blasting the countryside [in Philippines for instance ] or tornados flattening country towns {USA] and yet no aircraft manufacturer has managed to produce a vertical take off aircraft large enough o carry supplies. And runways are routinely destroyed in earthquakes it seems. We can of course crash a satellite into Mercury. No. Vertical take off is an ignored theme…
 
Like the blitzkrieg presently engulfing the relative No Place called Yemen, an ‘ignored’ theme. When the Israeli’s bombarded Gaza last year for a week or so the world was rightly outraged at the behaviour of an allegedly advanced country towards those who considered themselves enemies.
 
However the Saudi’s have rained destruction on an entire neighboring country using high tech weaponry to pulverize the region into what media footge suggests is a similar state of pre-history to that done by the Israeli’s, only on a more national scale, bombing, it seems, every building in the country: in order to destroy some people no one [well certainly not News junkies like me] had ever heard of i.e. [we the general mob out there in the feedosphere (sic) of media ].
 

When I first heard the targets of this venomous rampage mentioned I thought they were bombing out the rock group “Hootie and the Blowfish” … and couldn’t think what the poor artists had done to deserve such vindictive pulverizing. Then when it transpired that these so-called ‘Hooties’ had been a problem for years the idea that they had never before been mentined was simply ignored as if it were somehow our fault that we knew not who they were. By contrast one is almost routinely aware of Gaza.
 
Then one hears that almost every group that was [justifiably] enraged by the wanton vanquishing of Gaza, became the same people applauding the demolition of this apparently scurrilous collection of serving class persons [called Hooties [sic], like some weird collection of hillbillies?] in a broadly desert territory. Talk about overkill.
 
Even the venerable BBC, so routinely posturing their comforting opinions, have proved no more than tut tuttish about them. So they must be bad if you have to bomb the entire place into extinction to isolate a few rats… what about the ordinary citizenry… or are they all “Hooties?” What happened to the Yemeni’s who recently murdered some Mzansian missionary for not paying a bribe to be released?.
 
And then to add to the obfuscatory confounding puzzle routinely presented by people. We have a minister in our own government [Mzansi] who has been routinely rude about the Israeli’s and behaved in a way that most people would regard as anti-social were it a dispute between neighbours, and who is now apoplectic: because they [The Israeli’s] decided to refuse the Minister permission to enter their territory to talk with people they obviously dislike so much they keep ‘hitting’ them.
 
The MInister has expressed outrage at being mistreated… Like “I’m going to be rude to you and how dare you take offence?” Hello! This from a man who supported refusing the Dalai Lama, of all people, a visa to visit our country to spend a birthday with an old friend.
 
Surely it is hard to be more morally correct than the Dalai Lama… irrespective of whom you otherwise dislike. Of course the Dalai Lama had his country stolen by imperialists of a kind approved of by our minister. The Imperialists are in denial that their takeover of the Dalai Lama’s turf is/was Imperialistic. Perhaps the Saudi’s are doing the same to the Hooties [whoever they are] with our Minister’s approval? Wouldn’t that be odd?
 

Does this indicate that our moral precepts are as ephemeral as Nietzsche suggested they were a century of more ago… so we are slow learners? To rephrase someone [or other] “This is my moral position and if it confuses you: this is an alternative one. And whichever i choose; i’m right and you’re always wrong”.
 
What all these demonstrations do reveal though is how ephemeral all our achievements are, when placed up against nature; and the question I am left with is: which presents the bigger ‘natural’ disturbance… a 7.9 earthquake [Nepal 2015/04/25] or a nuclear bomb? OK according to the standard guru [Wikipedia] “Little Boy” [Hiroshima was a magnitude 6.0. Meaning 15 kilotons versus 7.9 10-15 MEGATONS]. There have been much bigger Nukes tested than Little Boy but as we know his was the real thing.
 
According to the same Wikipedia piece there have been some 64 explosive effects greater than Hiroshima of which we have a record. Of these 33 have been recorded this century i.e. over the past 14 and one third years. One of the the oldest, Toba [800 megatons], was 75,000 years ago. In including all of the Post-Hiroshima era, we are talking more than half that number again out of the 64… That;s a lot of pounding in a short period of time by Geological standards, never mind our history, it is close to instantaneous, and that therefore the idea that we have somehow managed to “move the planet” in some way becomes ever more plausible.
 
The “Ringing” is perhaps becoming more strident. For those who have followed the tale of the Jomnker Memorandum [JM] events are following my script [JM] even if the fragments I pieced together don’t quite follow current events. Either I or nature improvise. OK that route is madness [especially if you’ve never followed the tale of the JM… or have not searched my site for the meaning of JM.].
 
And what if this has all happened before… times without number
 
Really: I preferred the plumbers … excellent fellows. At least my hot water is comfortable… and i can feel sad about the Nepalese until my turn comes again.