In an ESL (-- "English as a Second Language") class at the local state university, my Dad teaches a lot of foreign students. Chinese and Koreans are endemic, but manifestly present are flocks of young Saudis sent by their home government to learn the ways of Americans and become "good will ambassadors" to the West after relations looked "shaky there" for a while. After 9/11, Muslim students were chased from heartland campuses by rock-throwing mobs and down in Texas a man assumed an isosceles triangle stance like "Dirty Harry" and blew away a Sikh who wasn't even Muslim, but was wearing a turban as he refilled the ice machine outside of a gas station.

That was as all-American as rabid German-phobia on the outset of World War I when Hollywood starting churning out newsreels such as "The Kaiser: The Beast of Berlin" and showed a prince strutting around in military regalia, not so different than any yahoo who would self-appoint himself to positions of great importance and high self-regard like a Kiwani or Klansman or local official of the state Republican office.

These days, "the newsreels" are a lot more customizable, oriented towards one's demographic in the free market interest "and not quite as blunt" with the hissing of the noxious crowd "ready to lynch someone". Nowadays, it's all about pleasantness and feeding the children with milk. . . . . and you see "Rolling Stone" magazine-- among other companies-- in their desperate bid to rope in subscribers, customers, or what-have-you, sending out free issues, free Bibles (-- if you're in the televangelist business) in order "to hook 'em in" with the debt of some kind of emotional obligation-- like a tourist trap down in Egypt where the vendors play "mind games".

One thing they did to my younger brother, seeing him as "a fat, white target", was to place a tiny, cheap trinket in his hand with the expectation that he'd come back to their stall and bargain with them over goods that were mostly of questionable taste-- like a Russian market-place where you had a husband and wife team selling cast-iron Lenin statues of "The Old State" to tourists, or if you wanted. . . . . their daughter back in the alley.

Pretty X-Treme, man. And what does this say about us? In "Rolling Stone", they showcased Pearl Jam back in their glory days with Seattle-based earnestness, wild primate flailing, "Bulldozers n' Slaves", crass squid-eyed heroin addicts, and you had a picture of Eddie Vedder doing his "Monkey Bars Act" high above the stage from the rafters. I honestly pondered why the scaffolding didn't snap and send this young "Green Party" Jacobin howling to his death while a bunch of overly-earnest Lollapalooza fans looked on with furrowed brows.

Maybe he could have gone the way of Shannon Hoon, the singer from "Blind Melon" (-- taken from this sphere by the needle) as the sniveling, servile "rock journalists" quaver between worship and caution as they meticulously record it all for kids who can't, or don't read. And if they did, they would only get "the wrong ideas" about life as Jann Wenner rides around in a limousine lighting his blunts with $100 bills.

Where's Donald Rumsfeld when you need him? He'll clean up this town. . . . . as Blackwater security guards kick in glass doors on the ground floor level with combat boots like the Arnold Schwarzenegger "Terminator" robots and zero in on the slime of overly-putrescent free market economics with glowing, red eyes n' "take out the trash".

Of course, guys like me are probably their next target. . . . . and whatever you wanted to say about that fictional James Cameron universe where the machines of war grabbed hold of "SkyNet" and began to think for themselves-- namely that their human masters were old, outdated equipment--you had satellite communications that were owned lock, stock, and barrel by the corporations which were piggybacking on government research projects that were originally dedicated toward "the hard, geopolitical purpose" of beating the Soviets. Now that such "a hard threat" was gone, it was all over except for the spoiled pouting and soft-core pornography. . . . . passed off as "PREMIUM CONTENT". That's why it seemed important to understand the basics of technology, back to where it began in the days of wireless telegraphy that facilitated the rise of rapid-fire communication and allowed for "this skimming" of such tremendous power to such noble, enlightened ends unforeseen by "the space race".

No one back then could have dreamed that we would be asking ourselves the question if corporations have the right to tinker on deciphering the genome of plants, animals, or even humans and then turning around and "patenting a life-form". That would be like copyrighting an algorithm, or sequence of numbers, or a pattern, which is what the universe fundamentally is about and whether we can call something like that "our own". Something tells me that someone should have an ability to license out their creation to some extent, because the founder-- inventor-- or researcher, what-have-you, put in all the work to bring the discovery forward. . . . . hopefully for the benefit of man.

Then again, knowledge seeks to be free and degenerate from the monopolistic hold of its handlers trying to apportion out servings, whether by the market or by ideology. If liberal types take the neo-Rousseau position of being against science and genetic engineering, then they should take a serious look at their efforts of "social engineering", or when a select portion of the population becomes conscious enough to attempt the channeling of where society should go to achieve a certain ends. And besides, shrieking sentimentalisms such as "equality" and "equal outcomes" are but a feeble lever with which to overturn the immutable laws of the universe.

However, as many have noted in modern times-- technology has far outstripped mankind's semi-civilized moral capacity, itself a grab-bag of instincts, hard-wiring, social conditionings, and contact with "the divine spark" that makes him-- as part of the universe-- know himself as part of that whole and reach out to realize more with higher and higher levels of self-consciousness and awareness. An interesting philosophical theory is the one of Član Vitale, or the notion that when a man or species or any form of living matter "has hit a rut" and is struggling, the universe will grace it with the gift of a spiritual insight to work out its contradiction and climb up to a higher level.

This is certainly not the case with all men, or all evolutionary lines. If you have a thicket rising up in the air, the overall trend is "upward" even though the individual thorns and branches may point in a million directions and even turn inward on itself. This plays into an interesting idea about where "the duality of God" came from, that originally the universe was a cosmic whole before the divine consciousness split into two-- the white forces of order, the dark forces of decay, like the ying and yang-- in a constantly growing, fractal split of mirror-image complexity in order for the universe to discover more about itself in a cosmic experiment that potentially, will never end "but definitely has a purpose".

Back in the ESL class it can get pretty funny when the students are trying to explain something they don't have the words for, and finally a 24 year-old Chinese girl went up to the black-board and drew a scorpion, wishing to explain that they were a delicacy in her country. The Saudi students withdrew with a fruity "oooh!", meaning to express that such creatures were very feared in their region as they went on about 1001 schimitars and 1001 Arabian tales born of oil money that was trying to heavy-handedly hide the pretension that they were anything other than spoiled rich kids "who had been in the garden of delight" for far too long. The Chinese girl just rolled her eyes.

It was how the ex-FBI director from the Clinton years, Louis Freeh, had went through the revolving door of politics into high-profile lobbying and was now a mouthpiece for the Saudi royal family. He had to put on the pretense that these were strong, noble allies even when you had one of the princes jet-setting through America and Europe on a jet painted the colors of "The Dallas Cowboys" because he was a fan of the team and his father owned a substantial stake in the franchise. His harem of women would fill the plane with booty from expensive shopping-trips, then the models got into "cat-fights" out on the tarmac. When asked about "the military significance" of this plane, a faint glimmer of a smile came across the spokesman's eyes as if he and the entire press corps and everyone in Washington "was in on the joke".

But the grunts at home weren't. . . . . and you had to tell them something else.

This, as the Middle Eastern oil fields threaten "to blow up" if any extremist "should get an idea"-- and the line is held with bribery and the threat of extreme violence. Less so, over here if you're an entrepreneur "with little clout" who runs a coin-operated laundry or even "a boxing" machine that held down a bag that you beat for points. Knowing your luck, you would put one down in the ghetto and it would be stripped down for parts. It was like how "Chuck-E-Cheese" children's birthday emporiums were flash-points for violence, women walking around so fat that when you looked at the back of their sweatpants it looked like "two dogs fighting under a blanket".

But "George Thorogood & The Destroyers" would know little about this nor would they care if they were hired out to play at a Saudi wedding, the king clapping upon a perfumed pillow to this breed of "all-American Yankee music". They would shrug, and rip into "Bad to the Bone", bopping away in Tuxedos, little realizing that their bones would be thrown to the dogs wandering around the palace gates if they did not comply. . . . .

For that is the law of the world. . . . .