Saturday, August 07, 2010

Get your kicks

Life is temporary, a gift, a big win in a cosmic lottery. I like it. It's mine, and I like spending it like a wild guy, or sometimes like a miser, or sometimes like a sick man who can't even move to the toilet. But I get my kicks. I've gotten some on Route Sixty Six.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcZ1k4d02KA

I've been kicked pretty hard some times. I laugh about it, even when I'm kicked. Roll with it. Swing with it. Dig it, and groove with it. Crazy, man. Yeah, dig that crazy beat. Dig that crazy ditch. The ditch to die in.

I live in a nice apartment now, and I'm giving it up to hit the road again, real hard. I have a really nice place to live, and I'm giving it up to wander around. I will wander and find me a fine young cannibal like Susan Kohner, some exquisite beauty who moves me. Or I'll keep on moving. It'll be a few months before I set off, and till then I will wander around this place, looking at the wonder that is life at this parallel place. Then, the stars aligned in other ways, there, somewhere, a giant black cat stretched across the night sky above the South China Sea, maybe I'll bob till the chill takes me. Or something. It's life. One can never tell what kicks come.

A medical doctor examines the dark earth of the human soul

Primitives aren't going to destroy the modern world: Modernists are going to do that. Modernists are going to destroy Modernity by allowing primitives to destroy all that is good in our world. It's up to us whether we decide to stop keeping the primitives alive by giving them food, which we could cut off and let them starve to death en masse in three weeks; or whether we allow them to run amok among us at will, us standing silently by while the world falls apart and is taken over by mad-dog primitives like Muslims.

Oh, am I writing that all Muslims are mad dogs? No; only that all Muslims are mad dogs if they practice Islam in any meaningful Islamically orthodox sense. That to be orthodox Muslim is to be a primitive, a dog of a man, and a mad dog at that. Would I kill all Muslims or maybe instead let them all die? No, I would only destroy Islam entirely, root and branch. Islam is a primitivism, and it must be destroyed. It's a vile disease of the mind, and those who can't be cured of it must be kept separate from the world of the sane. I don't hate Muslims, but I won't shy away from arguing that they must be treated like mad dogs if they exhibit Islamic traits. When it comes to it, my guess is that to destroy Islam will mean to kill millions of Muslims. Many millions. I'm not going to weep over that. I don't care. Years ago I watched the video of Nick Berg. I know personally people who would do that to a man. I know from living with Muslims that Islam motivates men to act like mad dogs. Islam certainly motivates me.

Below is an account from a novelist and medical man of the murder of Nick Berg. It's interesting to read between the lines here, and even moreso to read further of this doctor's encounters with murder in his daily profession as medical examiner. One sees the mind of Islam in his works, if one is sensitive to such. But, I leave it to this writer, Dr. Hayes.

Jonathan Hayes, "A New York City medical examiner watches the video of Nick Berg’s beheading and wishes he’d looked away." nymag.com.May 21, 2005

I watched the video. It took only a minute or two to find the link; I didn’t hesitate before clicking—I felt I needed to see it. The true nature of this war has been so carefully hidden, every supplied statistic and every image pruned like a prize rosebush. But the slaughter of Nick Berg seemed unspinnable; like the Abu Ghraib images, it was digital information, free to anyone who chose to look.

There was professional curiosity, too: I’m a forensic pathologist, and my everyday responsibility is the dispassionate and meticulous analysis of death. For more than a dozen years, I’ve probed violent or unexpected deaths—homicides, suicides, accidents. I was part of the team that handled the bodies after 9/11, attempting to identify victims and to inform families. I’m particularly interested in drug-related deaths and strangulation, and I’ve been translating a nineteenth-century French monograph on death by decapitation, which had originally been prompted by public concern over the guillotine (an object of controversy since its creation).

Anyway, I watched it. A matchbook-size, low-res image of five masked men in a white room, Nick Berg trussed at their feet. As much for effect as for identification, the tape begins with clips of Berg speaking a bit, talking of his family and his home, humanizing him for the audience before he is murdered. One of the men reads in Arabic for much of the tape, the tension increasing as he plows on and on with his manifesto. He stops, then cries out “God is great!” and they fall on Berg, picking up the refrain, one man dropping to pin Berg as another carves at his neck, all the while shouting “God is great! God is great!” The sound is six or seven seconds out of sync: Berg’s screams begin long before they start cutting, and then there is silence as they lift his severed head and jerkily pan to the pixelated slick of blood around the body.

Of course, it was nothing like a guillotine. The guillotine blade, massive and extremely sharp, cleaved the head off effortlessly, causing instant spinal shock, with complete loss of sensation and immediate death. In the video, the killer uses a large knife to cut through the soft tissues, and then struggles to saw through the ligaments and bones of the neck to separate the head.

Watching, I try to do the math: If someone’s heart stops immediately, he still has about fifteen seconds of consciousness as the brain burns off the last of its oxygen. Maybe, I think, he could have had an air embolus—when the large veins of the neck are cut, air can be sucked into the heart, where it’s whipped into a froth, which forms a vapor lock, and stops the heart from pumping blood. That, I tell myself, would kill him a few seconds faster.

But I know that the notion is a distraction, the possibilities collapsing because you can hear him screaming, and if he’s screaming, his trachea hasn’t been cut through yet, and he’s in pain, and he’s alive, and he’s conscious.

The thing is, when I work, I never think about the pain. It’s all about the structure of the body, the pattern of the injuries. I think about the kinematics of violence as abstractly as an astrophysicist calculates the movement of hypothetical bodies approaching a black hole. But Berg’s murder is a completely different type of killing, one that tears right through the feeble barriers I set up to protect myself.

“Two years after 9/11, the Berg video unearthed emotions I had no desire to feel.”

And despite all that I’ve seen before, no matter how able to handle it I thought myself, I knew immediately that the decision to watch had been a mistake. There was no way for me to step back from the images, to gain distance or perspective. Two years after 9/11, the Berg video unearthed emotions I had no desire to feel: fury, despair, the desire for revenge. I no longer cared about the atrocities committed in Abu Ghraib, the images of which had outraged me the week before. I wanted every man in that little death club captured, torn from their families, and dragged into the darkest basement interrogation room.

I have done pretty badly since 9/11. It took us eight months to do the preliminary recovery work, eight months in which we worked around the clock in shifts, struggling to examine all the remains as well as taking care of the daily autopsy caseload. I thought I was okay afterward, but I wasn’t; I was just crumbling rather quietly. I made it to February 2003 before I really lost it. Nothing exciting: In Chicago for a conference, I found that I couldn’t bring myself to leave my hotel room. When I got back to New York, I started seeing a counselor specializing in post-traumatic-stress disorder. He said to me, “While a lot of soldiers came back from Vietnam with PTSD, not everyone did. But every person who’d been charged with handling the bodies developed PTSD.” I supposed this was what they were saying to everyone to give them permission to grieve.

My life seems to be gradually slipping away from me, or perhaps it’s the other way around—I’m slipping away from it. I’ve become reclusive, rarely seeing my friends. Last year, I broke off my engagement; she deserved better than what I have to offer. I don’t want a new relationship. I communicate mostly by e-mail now, and these days, if my phone rings, it’s probably a junk fax.

Despite all the violence I’d dealt with before, I’d never thought seriously of leaving New York. But the video changed something for me, crushed the necessary buffer between the abstract examination of a dead body and the pain and horror of that death. It left me aching to leave, to run away, to live a purely aesthetic life, a life of quiet sensual contentment. A beautiful, ordered life where my main concerns would be how to look after wisteria, or whether or not a tarte composée needs a glaze, somewhere by a lake, surrounded by mossy woods. And I could leave, really. My one-bedroom apartment is now worth an absurd amount—I could sell, and escape this city, and go somewhere small, somewhere still untouched.

But of course, there isn’t anywhere untouched. I lectured in Des Moines a few months after 9/11; the local TV news had a “Terrorism: Target Iowa” segment. Anywhere I’d go, I’d encounter the same tacitly legislated paranoia, the same dully isolationist groupthink disguised as patriotism.

Predictably, the release of the video has pushed the paranoiacs into high gear, and the footage is rapidly becoming the conspiracy theorists’ newest artifact of choice, like the Magic Bullet and the Zapruder film before it. And I’ve heard that you can download the clip reconfigured as a sing-along.

I can’t speak to the claims that the beheading was faked—I watched it only once, and my emotions got in the way. The autopsy will answer some questions, though likely many of the answers it provides will be rejected by the doubters. But the footage looked real to me. And I’m not going to watch it again, not out of professional interest, not out of any personal compulsion to know. I wish I hadn’t made that choice: to look at something I have managed to avoid seeing, while looking at it every day.

http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/columns/witness/9183/

The writer is a novelist of some renown. Here's a link to some of his more recent work:

http://www.leelofland.com/wordpress/?p=5651

I find the link provides some interesting insight into Islam, into the mind of the primitive murderer. In reading about Muslims who murder we might see in ourselves something of interest, a difference between us and them that is fundamental, the difference between the primitive Irrationalist and the Modernist transcendentalist. We might see the difference between us as vatic and the cannibal Muslim.

We Modernists do not devour blood, vampire-like, as do Muslims and other primitives. For us, deliberately and cruelly spilling blood is tabu. For us, blood is sacred, the life of others, something to be protected from harm. For the primitive and the Muslim, blood spilt is the glory of sadistic meaning of self.

When we kill Muslims we don't generally do so as a blood-rite. We kill them with machinery, from a distance, cleanly, as it were, and clinically. We might not feel any particular remorse in killing them, but neither do we exult in the blood flow. Blood of others separates us from our our selves, whereas for the Muslim and the general primitive it connects him to his daemon. We are sullied, and thus leave death-dealing to professionals; and the primitive is opposite, revelling in the gore as a personal emotional satisfaction, a matter of delving into the deepest root of non-humanness. thus it is that most of us don't hate Muslims as individuals, don't care if they live or die; we care only-- those of us who care at all-- that Muslims not be. It's not personal. They mean nothing more than sanitation problems. They are, to borrow a phrase, a matter of Social Cleansing. There's no great pride in it. It's simply what rational people do when needed. Jonathan Hayes has his encounter with the primitive, and it shakes him. If we see what he sees, then we too might see what is to be done to save ourselves from the madness that is the usual humanness of primitivism.

Exterminate Muslims? Well, whatever. I'm not saying I'm for it. It's just what it is. Primitives are wild animals. If they're dangerous to us, and if we are dangerous to ourselves in allowing them to run free among us, then we have a serious problem that needs to be dealt with. I don't have any answers to that.

Friday, August 06, 2010

Aubamica in AurOville

Welcome to Auroville/Oroville, also known as AurOville. Lovely place, and it's the people who make it so. It's America as only Aubama can make it. You're going to love it, and be loved by it.

Yeah, some things have changed since I was a boy. I remember when the town was just a stop on the highway, a place to pull in to buy a box of cherries or peaches or whatever was in season in this wonderful aurchard land. I liked watching out the car window to see the rattle snakes coiled up on the roadside to get the heat from the pavement before the full sunrise woke them up to slither off back into the desert to bite rodents and such snake-tasties. I liked the cherries and the peaches particularly, though the snakes were excellent too. I didn't realize that in time to come all would be one in a basket of cosmic awareness of The Great Motherhood.
Shows what I know. America just ain't what it used to be. Some call it progress. I call it really confusing. I mean, "Really confusing, man." A trip down Memory Lane with me? I need someone to hold my hand on this on.

AurOville is set somewhat off the beaten path, a small place with big spirit. It's the coming thing.


WE EXTEND OUR NORTHERN HOSPITALITY!
WELCOME to AurOville, 98844 - Area Code (509)

aURoVILLE CENTENNIAL (1908-2008) - "Honoring our Past, Celebrating our Future."

What makes a town? Is it the street layout, the buildings, or is it mainly the people and their spirit? A town is a community and only people make that. AurOville was a pioneer town, a service point for gold miners, a railroad town, and servicing cattle ranches, farms, and orchards bearing many different fruits. It is also a border town. One of the first customs offices for a border crossing east of the Caskhushcades was established in the center of what is now downtown AurOville.

"AurOville wants to be a universal town where men and women of all countries are able to live in peace and progressive harmony above all creeds, all politics and all nationalities. The purpose of AurOville is to realise human unity."

Visit the Customs Cabin and The Depot Museum. Our area also provides an opportunity for adventure and as a get-a-way from the big city. We have a beautiful lake that provides fishing, boating, tubing, water skiing and sailing. There are facilities for horseback riding, hiking and biking. AurOville belongs to nobody in particular. AurOville belongs to humanity as a whole. But to live in AurOville, one must be a willing servitor of the Divine Consciousness. AurOville will be the place of an unending education, of constant progress, and a youth that never ages. AurOville wants to be the bridge between the past and the future. Taking advantage of all discoveries from without and from within, AurOville will boldly spring towards future realisations. AurOville will be a site of material and spiritual researches for a living embodiment of an actual Human Unity.

Check out our events calendar [See 'About Our Area" to the left] for great planned activities, such as the N.W. Ice Fishing Festival; May Festival; Run for the Border; the circus; CAN-AM hydroplane races; Heritage and Airport Days, The Toast of AurOville - A Grape Experience and the Rendezvous Rhythm and Blues Festival. Remember, it is not what you can see or do here. It is the people and we all welcome you to visit us soon.

Conditions for living in AurOville:

On 19.6.1967, the Mother declared that:

“From the psychological point of view, the required conditions for living in AurOville are:

To be convinced of the essential unity of mankind and to have the will to collaborate for the material manifestation of that unity.

To have the will to collaborate in all that furthers future realisations.

The material conditions will be worked out as the realisation proceeds."

Thereafter, the Mother clearly indicated the broad lines that were to be observed in our material life. These are to form the basis of our collective existence, but should not be applied in a dogmatic and rigid manner. Therefore the framework of the collective life of AurOville should be vast and very flexible; it is evolutionary in character and will change according to the individual and collective growth of consciousness and with the progressive emergence and expression of the inherent truth of AurOville.

The foundations of this way of living are trust, sincerity, responsibility, and goodwill.

1. Collective life

AurOville wants to be a city where people from all over the world live in harmony, striving to realise human unity and to be at the service of the Truth beyond all social, political and religious convictions. Thus all are invited to come and join us in this evolutionary endeavour. While it is not for us to question the ways of spiritual development or the private spiritual practices of any individual, AurOville must not be used as a place for proselytising or recruiting followers to any political, religious or spiritual organisation.

Relations in AurOville should be based on sincere collaboration and fraternity. Conflicts among residents are to be solved within the community, in a manner that is consonant with the spirit of AurOville. Any form of violence or abuse has no place in AurOville.

A friendly relationship with the local population as well as respect for their culture and traditions is indispensable. Learning to speak Tamilican will greatly facilitate this relationship.

Respect for nature and the environment is expected from all.

Thanks for for stopping by to check us out.

Thought of the month: "The simple act of caring about your client or customer - you have to care about and love what you do." - Warren K. Kong, Warren K. Kong Design.
http://www.AurOville.com/

And

http://www.AurOville.com/

Wednesday, August 04, 2010

Let us now praise Anjem Choudhary

I've sat on this story for a few days, and now I think it needs a bit of introduction to save me from coming across like a maniac as bad as the subject below.

I take the position that some people will transgress all good behaviour if there are no boundaries to show them where a reasonable man would halt; and worse, that some will go far beyond set boundaries if there is no price to pay for having a good time at the expense of every living thing regardless. Some people are scum. If no one stops them from behaving badly, they just keep on going. One such fellow is Anjem Choudhary of England, a Muslim clown who loves getting himself on the telly being a bad boy. He loves the act, and he causes endless grief to those who have to watch his performances, people who have, for example, lost loved ones in our wars against jihad. Chaudhary and his mates provoke families of fallen soldiers with Muslim chanting of death to British soldiers. He not only gets away with such outrageous behaviour, he is amply rewarded by the British state, given some good amounts of cash on the dole. The government basically pays him to perform this kind of evil clown stunt.

Where I come from, and it's not so typical of America, really, a guy who acted as badly as does Choudhary would be killed by people in the area. We have our rough justice, which I don't say I agree with. If a guy beats his wife, for example, and his mates warn him to stop and he won't and doesn't, then he has an accident. That's how it is where I come from; and I let you know, people are very friendly, open, welcoming, and delighted to meet strangers there. It's the kind of place you'd like to visit. That's because we follow rules and don't break them without payment. I like that system. So, I like Choudhary. He breaks every good rule of behaviour one can think of, and he does so flamboyantly, rubbing the faces of the English in their cowardice to the point that someone, sometime or other, is going to make a prime example of him. In the long term-- even in the short term-- it saves a lot of marginal people from committing disgraceful acts. They soon enough learn there is a price to pay for such misbehaviour. That is a lesson no one is teaching as yet in Britain. But the time will come, and sooner rather than later if the likes of Choudhary continue acting like this. There's a limit, and this fool is pushing to the max. I like it. The more outrageous he is, the better. Thus, I wrote earlier and now post:


British television host Jeremy Clarkson provokes Muslim clown Anjem Choudhary to shout about “rivers of blood” on Britain’s streets. Clarkson said on television that he saw a muslima tip over in front of him, and he saw that she wore a g-string under her burka. It's the end of the world, folks. Now Choudhary is calling for murder and death.

Oh. Same shit again. I love this monkey. It creeps me out to see him eat a banana without peeling it, but such is culture, I s'pose. The jihadi stuff, I like that a lot. Choudhary is my friend.

John Ward, "BIGOT ANJEM CHOUDHARY APES ENOCH POWELL'S RACIST 'RIVERS OF BLOOD' SPEECH," Daily Star. UK. 1 August 2010

[H]ate preacher Anjem Choudary warned Islamic fanatics will “go to war” to protect the honour of their women.

He declared: “Clarkson may think he was funny or was telling a joke when he said these things. “But this is not funny to everyone. And by making fun or disrespecting the burka and Muslim women he has deeply offended many people. It is a grave offence to disrespect a Muslim woman. People have gone to war to protect the honour of Muslim women. And they will go to war again. Clarkson has stirred a hornets’ nest among young Islamic fundamentalists. He has fanned the flames of their cause. I believe that one day Britain, and indeed every part of the world, will be governed by and under the authority of the Muslims implementing Islamic Law. And it will happen. It may come peacefully. But it may come through a holy war that will see rivers of blood on the streets. Clarkson has brought this day closer.”

We can only hope. But since I do hope, Choudhary is my friend.

So, no, Choudhary is obviously not my friend. I long for the day that men and women stand up to this fool and take back their culture and make England a social and decent place for ordinary people. It's going to take a lot of pushing to make them react like adults to this too prevalent juvenile provocation, but it must happen sooner or later. Sooner is better, and Choudhary's childish behaviour is helping that day come.

Tuesday, August 03, 2010

A video for Muslims on their knees.

http://blazingcatfur.blogspot.com/2010/08/psy-ops.html

Dwarf rapes nun, escapes in spaceship. Or: ...

A 23-year-old illegal immigrant is accused of killing a Virginia nun while driving drunk over the weekend. The suspect, Carlos Montano is an illegal immigrant who was scheduled to be deported.
http://www.breitbart.tv/nun-killer-was-set-to-be-deported/

For the headline, see link to the novel. Really, fiction ain't even close to stranger.

Limpieza Social, Escuadrónas de la Muerte, and You.

When one mentions "social cleansing," the first thing most people assume is "death squads." There's no reason to assume that today's common assumptions are particularly meaningful to those other than today's opinionators. Things change, and so do assumptions from here to there and in between. Social cleansing might to some mean the Nazi genocide against Jews, the murder of Gypsies, the killing of eugenically unwanted others in German territories, e.g. the deaf, and so on. But that's not the end of understanding social cleansing, nor the end of death squads. When I think of these things, I think of you.

My friend Rachel pointed out, (that depending on where one is and where one comes from,) how strange normal can be. Most people are "normal." That can mean some horrible things about horrible people. But it means they are, if not now, at least born educable. Maybe now they're beyond redemption, so enured to evil that they're beyond redemption in the greater world of Man. I'm one of those "normal" types. If I had my druthers, I'd kill a lot of folks. That would be a good thing. That's why I think of you.

A buddy once said, "There should be an ad. in the paper calling for death squad members." Long pause waiting for me to jump in saying I'd join up. "And then they should kill those who answer." So, I think of you, and I wonder who will protect you from lunatics who will come to the call. That call comes daily, sometimes in the newspaper. Funny how so few people pay attention to the fact that it's so obvious and lethal, and that the call is well attended. We see it every day. It's not that no one says anything about it, which might be some relief, it's that so many are so enthused about it, or at least in excusing it and then glamorising it. If it were up to me, I'd kill lots of those folks. I'd kill them because they want to kill you, and I assume, rightly for the most part, that you are what I would call normal. You, dear reader, are not likely one to call for social cleansing. More likely still, you're not likely to go out and try to do it by killing strangers at random just because of the way they live their lives, well or not-- according to you. I take you, the average reader, to be a normal and decent person who has no real concern about the lives of most people. I assume you're a private person with a personal life that you live to the best of your ability. I like that, and I hope it for most if not all people. But we know that there are many who take the call personally and go forth and cleanse till the blood runs thick and deep in the streets. I'd join up in killing such folks, at least in my dreams.

When we use the Spanish language to cite death squads practising social cleansing, we mean something evil. We limit our understanding to Spanish-speaking people, mostly "right wing" death squads run by military dictators in dark sunglasses and shady multi-millionaires emerging occasionally from luxury jungle retreats for photo ops with minor European politicians, when we speak of "Death Squads." Why? well, obviously, Death Squads are bad, and for the average multi-culti suburbanite metro-sexual at a cocktail party it won't do to speak well of such people. Say "Death Squad" and everyone cringes and hisses. Call them damned near anything else and one finds a swarm of simpering Leftards lining up to coo and mince. I'm not saying we should kill the average Obama-supporting idiot just because they support, at least in word if not in deed, death squads. If one were to punch such a person in the face and then piss on his proneness, well, being the nice guy that I am, I'd have to say that's not right. When it comes to those who promote death squads, actively pursue their formation and delegation and entry into the world to do their work, those are folks I would happily kill with my own bare hands. I don't like death squad people. When they kill normal and average people like you, which they do on a daily basis, I don't care what leftards call them. Leftards make me sick; and I would kill the death escuardranos, no matter what others call them.

But I'm not killing anyone, and I don't intend to. I'm pretty average and normal, given that I live in a land of law and reason. I just live my life privately and wish others would do the same. But they don't and they won't and probably they can't. Our nation is filling up with people who are or will be death squad members, and they are actively encouraged to kill at random by cheerleaders among us. What I'd like to do and what I will do have little in common. Stirling Silliphant writes that if you could be invisible and no one would ever know what you did, what would you do? One man writes that if he were invisible it wouldn't matter, he'd still look the same to his wife. He's lucky. I think many people would find they look pretty bad to themselves. I think I would. But I live in the real world where thoughts aren't yet outright crimes. So I'm not killing anyone. Not even members of death squads. I don't even punch out Death Hippies cheering on death squad members. I should, but I don't.

Europeans aren't even the worst for cheering death squads on. We can find Americans going at it full-tilt. Europeans are mostly cowards, plainly so since that's what they do, cower and tremble and give favours to death escuadranos. Call it what we will, acting that way is cowardly. But Americans doing that must be, for the most part, really into it for some evil reason. But America just ain't Europe. In America we don't always roll over and grit our teeth when we get screwed. Sometimes, sometimes even often, we fight back. That makes me concerned about you, dear average person reader.

How long till you face the death squads in person in your home and find you have to fight on your own because the Death Hippies have let the death squads loose in your land? When our government condemns you for anguishing over the destruction of our nation and our homes, when our government and our social leaders are committed to promoting death squads in our land against you, when you are the ones to be socially cleansed from the nation, then my thoughts turn to you, and I wonder: Are you as lazy and apathetic as I? Will you sit back and let yourself and your family and community be slaughtered by death squads because to object raises the ire of Death Hippies who love death squads on the loose?

Everything gets to be normal if one lives with it long enough. You can, maybe will, maybe have already, accustomed yourself to strange and evil. Death squads run amok and we mostly don't do a thing about it. Leftists cheer them on. I sit and wonder how long you can stand it.

They rampage against each other, dear reader. I wonder what they would do to you.
The decapitated head of a gang member is seen on the ground after a prison riot in Guatemala City.

http://bop.nppa.org/2006/still_photography/winners/INS/68974/137029.html..

Sunday, August 01, 2010

Los perdidos, los olividados, y los muertos

Murder (al)most foul.

Just across the Mexican border into the city of Ciudad Juarez there is a war going on that's taking the lives of thousands of people, most of whom will be buried without ceremony or memorial. They are the lost, the forgotten, the dead. I don't know them, and they ain't no friends of mine. I don't care. Most of the dead seem to deserve whatever horrible fate they meet. But....(Graphic: Chris Howard)

Yes, they seem, these thousands of dead in Mexico's drug-wars, to be worthy of murder. I can't say more than to grump; but if I could, I wouldn't. It's not my place in this world to decide such things. I do though make it my task at times to look into things that my business is no part of. I don't care about that either. I want to know, and sometimes to record, the stories of the people I meet, their lives and doings, the little meanings they have in this life, the time they were here and what it meant, if only to them. Everyone has a story, no matter how bitter or evil such a story might be. If possible, someone, (says me,) should record it and save it for those whose curiosity might be as wide and pointless as my own. I hate to see the nameless dead dumped into mass graves, people lost, forgotten, and just plain dead. They have a story, and they could well tell us something, if only something bad. Recuerdo.

“That’s 12 today?” a young man standing nearby asks, in the matter-of-fact tone of a baseball fan confirming the number of strikeouts. “Ten,” I answer, meaning that 10 people have been slain in Ciudad Juarez so far on this chilly Tuesday. It is barely 3 in the afternoon. Seven more people will die later, bringing the day’s total to 17 in the city of 1.3 million residents.

The young man nods. Around us, amid cut-rate dentist offices and bars with names like Club Safari, the looky-loos keep their rapt silence as workers from the coroner’s office wrestle the newest victims from their car.

Ken Ellingwood, a reporter quoted in Columbia Review of Journalism, Dec. 2008.

The death toll in Ciudad Juarez, "more than 1,350 slayings in 2008, about a fourth of the country’s total,” is, of course, far higher today, closing in on 7,000 this year, as of early days in August 2010.

William Booth from The Washington Post wrote about his visit to the Juarez city morgue, [headed by morgue manager, Alma Rosa Padilla]:

“In the Juarez morgue, the three walk-in freezers are filled to capacity with more than 90 corpses, stacked floor to ceiling, in leaking white bags with zippers. After a few months, those who are not identified are buried in a field at the city cemetery at the edge of the desert.” (Ibid.)

This "drug war" seems to have a beginning: "At the end of 2007, authorities in the city began hearing rumours that hostilities were about to break out. 'They even had a date, Jan. 7,' local lawyer Jose Reyes says. 'It actually started on Jan. 5.' "

"The municipal graveyard, called San Rafael, on the outskirts of town, [is] near the trash dump. The dirt road leading there is carpeted with fallen garbage from the passing trash trucks. This is the final resting place of the drug war's unidentified dead. [....] The unknown are buried separately in the fosa comun, or communal grave, without headstones or crosses."

Though there is a great deal of violence among drug gangs, it doesn't stop there, according to geweedopig.com in Sept. 2009:

"[T]here is near-absolute impunity for murdering “malandros,” a colloquial term for an underclass of young addicts, small-time drug dealers, homeless people and others at the bottom of the social pile, according to Gustavo de la Rosa, a senior investigator of the Human Rights Commission of the state of Chihuahua, where Ciudad Juarez is the biggest city.

"We estimate that between 300 and 500 malandros have been killed since July of 2008,” de la Rosa said in an interview. “Not a single one of these murders has been solved, which leads one to believe that what is going on is ’social cleansing’ with the tacit permission of the state.” Oscar Maynez Grijalva, a former state forensics chief, has talked about death squads whose activities should be, but are not, investigated.

It ain't too pretty, and the picture keeps getting uglier. We see at Stop the Drug War. org. that the death toll In Ciudad Juarez is worse than ever, as of last week, over 6,000.

Since Mexican president Felipe Calderon took office in December 2006 and called the armed forces into the fight against the so-called cartels, prohibition-related violence has killed nearly 25,000 people (the Mexican attorney general put the death toll at 24,826 on earlier this month), with a death toll of nearly 8,000 in 2009 and over 6,000 so far in 2010.

Saturday, July 24

In Ciudad Juarez, the murder rate passed 6,000 since January 1st, 2008. As of Saturday, there had been 235 murders in July, and 1,645 so far in 2010. In 2009, there were 2,754 and 1,623 in 2008. On Saturday, 10 people were killed in several incidents in the city. Four of the dead were killed when gunmen attacked a barbershop, and another three were killed in an attack on a house.

And here, a few days later, we find that someone is killing and making sure others know why:

Wednesday, July 28

In Ciudad Juarez, two severed heads were discovered in coolers with the bodies left nearby. Along with the bodies were left notes which read "I'm a kidnapper and extortionist. I'm an Azteca" and "I do carjackings and work for La Linea and the Aztecas." The Aztecas are a street gang affiliated with the Juarez Cartel, and La Linea is the enforcement wing of the Juarez Cartel.

Total Body Count for the Week: 236

Total Body Count for the Year: 6,671

That note looks mightly much like the work of the police, though I could easily be totally mistaken. It's not my place to make any judgements here about who is killed or why or whether they should be. Whether the police and military are killing the lumpen proletariat of Mexico is not my business, no moreso than whether it is internecine murder among drug gangs. Regardless, the dead had names at some point, before they were lost, before they were forgotten. I say that someone should record.

Ghost:
Pity me not, but lend thy serious hearing
To what I shall unfold.