the lotus casino scenes were so severely lacking in shenanigans but the car part was so fun like what do you mean percy’s so obsessed with annabeth’s approval and validation that when he finally does something marginally decently after causing complete and utter terror he looks at her and meets her gaze to be like “see? are you proud of me?” and gets distracted and immediately totals her side of the car

Half Pant Final

by Paul Teodo & Tom Myers

He was 7 feet tall, wearing yellow flowered shorts that stopped an inch above his deeply scarred right knee. Muscular calves supported long legs that ended in crooked toes sprouting from lime green sandals. The image of a blues man wailing on his Stratocaster was silk-screened in silver on his black tee shirt. “Buddy Guy” in script identified the artist.

“You play ball?” I didn’t know what else to say.

“Turkey,” he said, straightening his black cowboy hat, “Slim” embroidered along the left side, silver coins embedded in its red satin band. There was nothing slim about him. He wasn’t a seven-foot bean pole. He was a muscular seven-footer with a well-manicured salt-and-pepper goatee.

“Turkey?”

“Yeah, they have a league. They needed a ‘big.’ I dabbled.”

I’d heard of pro basketball in Spain, Italy, Israel, even Australia, but not Turkey. “Well, that’s not what we’re here for. Thanks for coming.”

He kept looking out the window as if someone was out to get him. “Ra said you were okay.”

“Ra?”

“Raheem.”

“Our cook?”

“Yeah, we ball together, over on Madison, 24-hour gym, just down from the stadium. He vouched for you.” He glanced out the window again.

I resisted the urge to follow his stare.

“When do you have time? You’re already at three hospitals, Lourdes, Nicoletta, Pious, and you ball?”

“Sleep’s overrated. You only die once. Like I said, that’s why I came. Ra, he said you were okay. Said you were open,” he chuckled, “to a little different, and I can be different.”

Yeah, I thought, he was different. “Glad I got a good recommendation.”

“So what do you need?”

“I’ll be straight with you. We got a problem. Our orthos think they own the place.”

He looked back at me. “I’ve heard. You got Vince who thinks he’s the Don of the hospital and should get paid juice.” I cringed at his bluntness. “Schweingart, the Nazi, is flat-out scary, and Seamus can’t stay sober, and came close to killing a guy last month in the OR.” He looked out the window again. “Yeah, you got problems.”

How’d he know about all that shit? Were we that infamous? And what the hell was out the window? “How’d you hear about all that?”

He smiled, towering over me like I was a child. My chin, maybe, came up to his waist. “C’mon.” He clapped his hands shut; the slap of his palms, like a bullet, echoed off my office walls. “People talk, and they tell others not to talk, which makes them talk even more.” He studied his hand as if he was examining a wound. Empty. He shook his head with disappointment. “I used to be better.”

He folded himself like a wounded crane into a chair, making it, and my desk look miniature next to his out-sized frame. 

I scanned his CV. It smelled like cigarettes, coffee stains obliterated most of his references. “Guadalajara Medical School?”

“I like the sun.”

“What else do you like?”

He shifted, struggling to find his “spot” in a human-sized seat. “Mexicans, they’re so laid back, and their cuisine.”

“And?”

“I quit. I don’t do that stuff anymore.” He tapped his chest. “Bad for the lungs….” He wrenched his neck with a giant hand, Big-foot came to mind, looking around the room trying to figure out a way of answering me without sounding stupid. A bone somewhere inside cracked, exploding like a firecracker, making me jump.

“Jesus,” I said, letting him off the hook for a second.

“C-4. I took a charge from a kid from Kenya. Fractured my spine.”

“You quit…you were saying.”

“Yeah. I mean I got into Michigan, Rush, Hopkins, but I wanted sun, and chill. So ‘Mexico, here I come.’”

“That’s when it started?”

“Naw, in high school, but I stopped when I got to Mexico.”

“Get busted?”

“No way.” He said like he was proud of himself. “I had a vision.”

“Totally done with it?”

“Yep, twelve years. She stays on me.”

“She?”

“My wife.”

“What she do?”

“Sex therapist.”

The conversation was making me feel like I was the only old maid in a popcorn machine.

“You have a colorful life.”

“I get interested in everything really easy, and I get bored even easier. So I bounce around.”

“You think you can handle it here?”

“I can adapt to just about anything, and because of how I am,” he smiled and waved his hand over his Goliath-sized frame, his flowered shorts, his skin-tight Buddy Guy tee, and his silver-studded, red-sash hat, “I’m used to taking a little shit.”

I imagined it wasn’t too much shit, given his imposing stature. “I can’t have you giving it back. These guys are vicious. I need to run a hospital.”

“You like Mexican?”

Back into the popcorn machine. I tried to keep the conversation going. “Good people. A big part of our patient base. A bit shy for me. But terribly discriminated against.”

“I mean food.”

“Food?”

“Yeah, tamales, tacos, empanadas, and horchata, my favorite drink. Saved my ass when I got off the stuff.”

“Why?”

“Why?” He repeated.

“Why are you interested in my palate?”

“I’m hungry. Let’s eat. If I’m gonna get my ass grilled, it might as well be where the grilling isn’t just my ass.”

“I gotta check my schedule.” I hate Mexican food.

“Screw your schedule. I’ll drive.”

More bones cracked as he uncoiled from the chair, sending shivers up my spine, “Jesus.” He straightened his right leg, massaging it with the longest fingers I’d ever seen.

 “IT band. Tighter than a freakin’ bungee cord. It’s all connected.”

 “Kenyan kid?”

“Yep, a nice kid. Coulda played in the NBA . But he broke my freakin’ back. He got me into medicine. I owe him. Killed a lion with his bare hands. He could really play ball.  His family didn’t want him to leave. He’s in line to be a chief or something.”

“Who coulda played in the NBA?”

He paused, his eyes darting out the window again. “Both of us. Let’s go eat.”

“You’re something. What’s with the window?”

He shrugged. “We keep in touch. I told you I like different. Let’s go.”

We walked to the door. “Sasha. Dr. Vuckovich and I are going to lunch. I’ll be back in an hour.”

“Make it two,” he said, removing his hat, revealing a polished skull, wiping beads of sweat from his extremely broad forehead. 

Sasha gave me a disgruntled look, then a disapproving grunt, acting as if she was writing something distasteful on a piece of yellow paper to show to all of her friends. 

“We’re getting Mexican. Can I bring you back something?”

“You hate Mexican.”

So much for my diplomacy with Dr. V.

He smiled, grabbed my arm and pulled me forward. “Let’s go. You’ll like this, Boss. I parked in front.” I stumbled to keep up. His gait was about 142 feet longer than mine. “Hope I didn’t bend the rules too much.” He turned, giving me a shit-eating smile.

I was now his boss? Were we making progress?  Who the hell could figure? 

Just to the left of the front entrance, taking up two spots, one a handicap space, sat a vehicle that should have been repossessed by a chop-shop on 63rd Street. He waved his hand at this long black piece of metal, bowing as if he was introducing royalty. “Meet Miss Koko.”

“Koko?” I asked, trying to hide my displeasure at both his cavalier attitude toward our parking regulations and being carted off to a Mexican lunch in this ridiculous piece of shit.

“Yep, Koko Taylor,” he said proudly. “Best blues singer this city’s ever had.”

“You named your car after a blues singer?”

“Better than Impala or Bonneville, or Arthur.” His voice rose, echoing off our one-hundred year-old building. “C’mon, all bullshit names.”

I popped open the door. “It’s a fucking hearse.”

A huge grin spread across his face. “Not anymore. I had a patient trick it out for me. I did his shoulder. Put him back to work. He was broke. No insurance. He got what he wanted and so did I.” He opened the door threw his hat into the back seat. “It’s more like a cargo van.”

“You really drive this?”

“Yep, everywhere, and check this out” Despite his size he slid in effortlessly, and arched his back against the black velvet front seat.  His legs stretched under the dash deep into what would normally be the engine compartment. He wiggled his snake-like toes and smiled, and let out a satisfied groan.” Leg room. A shit-load of leg room!”

I looked into his back seat, sliding in, imagining all the dead bodies that had rested there. I noticed what appeared to be a neck of a guitar peeking out from a Navajo blanket. Across the top, embossed in gold on shiny black wood was the word Gibson. “A guitar?” I nodded to the back seat.

“For my band,” he said, popping a mint into his mouth. “Want one?”

“Band?”

“Well, not really mine, we got a gig tonight. Wanna come? I’ll comp you.”

The popcorn kept exploding all around me, and I was still the old maid.

“Gig? Where?”

“Let’s go.” He slammed Koko into gear, kicked it in the ass, and sped out of the parking lot.

“Sure.” Why the hell not?

 “Great! Rosa’s. Armitage, near Western.” He leaned over, not slowing one bit, his shoulder jammed into my chest, ripped open the glove compartment and the pulled a ticket from the box. 

He handed it to me then slammed on his brakes, and screamed. “Asshole!”

Dr. V. was able to hand me my comped ticket for his gig and avoid crushing a neon blue Prius at the same time.

“That was close,” I said looking down at the ticket.

“Naw, I’m a defensive driver.”

I wanted to tell him he was an offensive driver but I bit my tongue. I looked back at the ticket. It read: Chicago Blues Pussyhounds, Featuring Dr. Slim. Slim? from his hat.

“Provocative name.”

“Gets people’s attention. Layla thought of it.”

“Layla?”

“My wife.”

The sex therapist. Jesus.

It was like I was in a movie. And I was having a helluva time keeping up. Vuckovich’s  Most Excellent Adventure. 

“Relax,” he ordered, and flipped on the stereo, multiple pulsing speakers rattled my bones. A soulful woman’s voice rose over it all. He pointed in the air, bobbing his head to the beat of the thumping music.  “Koko! Let’s go! I got a hip at Pious at 3!”

“Any bodies back there?” I asked, looking at the cavernous area behind us.

“I keep ‘em alive,” he smiled and popped another mint. “I don’t kill ‘em like your boys.”

He’d heard that too?  Shit.

                                                                           ***

“He wears half pant.”

Dev Balakrishnan, unlike Igor Vuckovich, was nowhere near seven feet tall. In fact, he barely cleared five feet. I didn’t think he’d fall in love with Dr. V, but I thought he’d at least give him a chance.

“He’s got great experience.” I was grasping.

“And auto is for dead people.”

Shit, he’d seen Koko.

“Dr. Balakrishnan,” I butchered his name every time I tried to say it.

“B,” he said “call me B. I’d rather hear you say B than you pronounce name like a contagious disease.”

I peered into the conference room where B had been interrogating V who now sat alone upright and uncomfortable, in a wooden chair, drumming his hands on the table, head bobbing up and down, probably grooving to Koko or Buddy. I indulged myself for a moment, imagining their interview, popcorn exploding all over the room.

“Why do you wear half pant?”

“Half pant?”

“Yes. And your car is for dead people. And toes should not be seen.”

“Ever listen to Koko Taylor, Doc? I think you’d dig her.”

I would have bought a ticket to that show.

“We’re dying here,” I said to B. “With only three orthos, and they run the department like gangsters.”

“The man would not fit here.” He pointed to Dr. V, now standing, rocking out on his air guitar. “He is too much, how you say, eccentric. Plus, training is bad. Mexico.”

“And Vince and his boys do fit?  Schweingart got his training in the Caribbean at a pop-up school that closed right after he graduated.”

“They do not wear half pant or drive car for dead people.”

“I’ll bring it to the Board.” I lowered my voice trying to make him think.

Dr. B winced. “Board is for major issues.”

“This is a major issue. They’re killing us. They’re all trying to squeeze us, and we got nothing left.”

“I do not know this squeeze.”

B was dumb like a fox. He knew what those guys were. He did it once in a while too, but overall he was a good guy. He played fair and was a good surgeon. He took who came in the door and didn’t try to bullshit his way out of treating people who had no dough. Vince and his crew were different. No money or insurance? Then it was… Too big a case. We don’t have a bed. We’re short staffed. No supplies. Too much a risk. So ship ‘em out to someplace else. The County was always their fallback. If they could pay, then Vince and his boys would roll out the red carpet. What they did was plain wrong, a royal pain in the ass, and illegal. If Medicare pays your hospital and doctors, you have to care for those who can’t pay. And while docs were making lame excuses not to treat a banged up guy laid out in the mangled and broken, the entire place would back up like the traffic on the Jane Byrne or worse yet, the Hillside Fucking Strangler. Bullshit, and we were all tired of it.

“Doc, you know what I’m talking about. You accepted the position of President of the Medical Staff” and its stipend, I implied. “It’s time for you to man up.”

Pondering what he should do, he studied me with puffy eyes and labored breath, looked to Dr. V, still grooving to his tunes. He rubbed his disheveled hair. “Temporary,” he said, clearing his phlegmy throat. “We will give him temporary opportunity. Vince going to vacation home in Florida for February month. He can take his call. Ten days.”

“Temporary…” I began…but stopped. B could tell I was ready to fight, so I countered with silence.

“But,” he pointed at me, “no Board. We will work this out man to man.”

So, what direction should I go?  Eat the entire enchilada, I hate Mexican, or take it one bite at a time? “I’m not sure Dr. V would go for that. Would you?”

“He will agree.”

“How do you know?”

B looked at me.  A wry smile peeked out from under his scruff. “He already told me he would.”

                                                                               ***

“A John Doe.”

“Who’s on call?”

Shaneese, our ER traffic cop, paused. “Vince,” she said, her voice low, filled with disdain. “He won’t take it. You know that.”

We paid the asshole a grand for every call he took. But she was right. He’d hem and haw and make everybody sit on their hands, listening to his excuses.

I could see her standing in the ER, hand on hip, head tilted, staring at the ceiling, waiting for my response, judging the shit out of me.

“John Doe?” I asked, as if I hadn’t heard her, trying to buy time.

She did not respond. She let me dangle.

“What’s the damage?”

“He was thrown off a roof.” Her voice flat. “Multiple cervical fractures.”

“Jesus.”

“People are animals.”

“How many?”

“I stopped counting at C-5,” she said, growing more impatient.

“Stable?” Stupid question.

Her voice rising. “Stable? At least three of his seven vertebrae are busted. His spinal cord probably sprung a leak. He’s NOT stable. He’s going to die. He needs surgery now!”

“Call Vince. Tell him what you got and let me know what he says.”

I could feel her scorn as she hung up. And I deserved it. I’d let this shit go on too long.

Fuck. I grabbed my phone and called the front desk.

“Hello.”

“Shanda could you get me Dr. Endrizzi?”

“He don’t like me to call him. He only likes to talk to medical folks.”

“What’s his number?”

“Office or cell?”

“Cell.”

“312-665-3987. Good luck.”

                                                                              ***

“Hello.” His voice thick, filled with the hills of northern Italy.

“Vince, it’s Jim. We got a situation in the ER.”

“The John Doe with the spine?”

He’d heard already. “Yeah.”

“Too complex for us.”

“You’ve done them before.”

“Not too complex for me, but your staff isn’t qualified.” He hung up.

Sonofabitch. That arrogant prick. Isn’t qualified? Our staff was good, real good, and brave as shit. I redialed. “This is Dr. Endrizzi, I cannot take a call. I’m gone in February with important Medical Business. If you have big problem, call 911, or go to Hospital Emergency. They take care of you.”

Important Medical Business, my ass. 

I yanked open my office door and headed to the OR. 

 I swiped my card and the panels slid open. I asked the OR Receptionist Denelle, “is Dr. Balakrishnan in there?” I pointed to suite #1, where we configured the surgical table and the lighting for a man of his small stature.

“He’s got a TURP,” she said, without looking up from her desk. 

“How long before he’s done?”

“Depends on the size of the prostate.” She smiled.

I wasn’t in the mood for jokes. “I’ll wait.”

“Put this on.” She handed me a package of scrubs.

In the middle of my rage I struggled to yank on the gown, booties, gloves, and mask. She pointed to a chair in the corner of the room. I sat dressed in my surgery get-up like a child waiting to be punished by Mother Superior.

Denelle picked up the phone and tapped numbers with her pencil. “This is Denelle,” she said, “Tell Dr. B the boss is here for him.”

I stared at the thin red second hand on the wall-mounted clock, swooshing around the face in slow motion, my leg jumpy, like a junkie, full of rage. Important Medical Business, my ass. Your staff aren’t qualified. Fuck him.

The surgical suite door slid open. The tiny man waddled toward me, his disheveled hair peeking out from under his blue cap. He unpeeled his bloody gloves, the rubber making a snapping sound. He sighed and shook his head. “Big case.” His voice tired, never looking this old. “What is it?”

I stood. “Vince.”

His face contorted. “What now?”

“We got a John Doe in the ER. Busted neck. Vince won’t do the case.”

“It sounds complex.”

“Doc, don’t go down that path. He can do it. We can do it. He blew me off.”

“These are difficult decisions.”

“My ass. It’s a John Doe. He wants nothing to do with them. That’s why we pay him a fucking grand a call.” I was too loud.

B took me by the arm and led me to an empty suite. “He told me he wasn’t going to take any cases today. He’s leaving tomorrow morning.”

“What the hell are we gonna do with the patient?”

“Half pant.”

“What?”

“Call half pant surgeon.”

Was he shitting me? “No way. It’s Vince’s call. He’s already got his grand.  It’s his case.” 

“Call half pant.”

John Doe needed help. I’d deal with Vince later.

                                                                            ***

No cell reception in the OR, so I rushed to the waiting area. As soon as I walked in, a flock of petrified family members approached me. For a moment, I was disoriented, like a man just entering a room with the lights out. Then it hit me. My scrubs, mask, and gloves.

“I’m not a doctor,” I said, sounding like a moron. “I’m not,” I pleaded with them to believe me.

I fumbled with the buttons on my phone. Vuckovich, nothing came up. I couldn’t have. I tried again. V-U Still nothing. Then it hit me. I looked around to see if I’d get caught.  7-footer. I punched it in. Bingo. The phone rang once. “Yo.” His voice so loud it hurt. Koko Taylor blasted in the background. I could picture him, head bobbing, fingers fretting his invisible Gibson. “Yo,” he yelled again. “What’s up?”

“We got a John Doe in the ER.”

He didn’t let me finish. “On my way.” Sirens blared over Koko. I pictured him speeding down 63rd Street in that black chop-shopped hearse. “Don’t get pulled over. I hear sirens.”

“Siren’s mine. I told you, my guy pimped this baby out. Ten minutes.” His phone went dead.

         ��                                                         ***

I called Shaneese in the ER. “Dr. Vuckovich is on his way.”

“Dr. Who?”

“Vuckovich,” I said. “Send the John Doe to the OR with everything you got on him.”

“One second,” She said. “Can I help you?”

“Where’s the OR?” I heard over the commotion.

“Who the hell are you?” Shaneese did not mince words.

“Igor.”

“Igor?” Her voice rose over the craziness.

“Shaneese!” I shouted.

“I can’t talk!” she said. ”I got a crazy monster in here, wearing flowery shorts,” her voice rose, “a black hat, and a pair of nasty feet, telling me he got to go to the OR.”

“That’s Dr. Vuckovich.”

“You playin’ with me.”

“Shaneese, I’m not. He’s got temporary privileges. He’s gonna do the case.” 

“A big ass man comin’ in here…”

“I’ll explain later. Just get him to the OR.”

“Who parked a hearse in the doctors’ parking lot?” Al, our ER security guard, yelled over the ruckus.

“It’s not a hearse.” I heard Dr. V retort.

“Shaneese, get him to the OR.”

Five minutes later, the elevator door opened. Removing his hat, then ducking his head to get out, Igor Vuckovich appeared, carrying a red duffle bag with a white crescent and TURKEY emblazoned on its side. He looked around the waiting room, spotted me, and smiled.

I gave him a confused look.

 “From my playing days. You doin’ surgery now?” He pointed at my scrubs.

“He’s in there.” I nodded to where they’d taken John Doe, ignoring his joke.

“You are a doctor,” a visitor said.

“He’s not,” Dr. V interrupted, “but I am.”

“I never seen no doctor who look like you.”

“Me either,” V smiled. “Let’s rock and roll.”

I swiped my card and the doors slid open. 

He entered, again bowing his head, this time not removing his hat. He dropped his bag on the floor and grabbed a package wrapped in plastic and a CD. He ripped open the plastic removing the largest pair of scrubs I’d ever seen and began dressing in the middle of the OR.  The legs traveled past my chin. The arms could have served as a strait jacket for a lineman on the Bears, and his booties looked like canoe paddles. Our staff was in awe, speechless, jaws descending to the floor.

Dr. Balakrishnan approached Dr. V, “Thank you for helping us.”

 “Dev, you assisting on this?” 

“I…” B paused.

“C’mon, it’ll be fun.”

“I…”

I’d never seen Balakrishnan so lost for words.

“Here.” V tossed the CD to one of the techs. “Koko Taylor track 2. Anesthesia?”

“In the suite already.” Danny, our tech, said, looking ready to jive to Koko. “Wait!” Danny shouted.

V swung around. “What?”

Danny jumped removing V’s cowboy hat. “Now you’re good.”

“Thanks,” V said.

Dr. V scrubbed his immense fingers, paws and forearms in the sink. He motioned for Dr. B to join.

They toweled off and donned fresh masks, eyes meeting each other’s. “Let’s go,” V said to B. 

The sight of this odd couple entering surgical suite 1, B’s suite, that he shared with absolutely no one, caused me grave consternation. What scared the shit out of me was a squatty little urologist assisting a seven foot orthopod with complex surgery. At the same time I was invigorated like a man who’d just slugged a double espresso. 

“We gotta fix this.” I heard Dr. V laugh, raising the OR lights to their highest, then sliding the tiny platform stool we had made for Dr. B, in his direction. 

The doors to the suite slid shut.

And that was that. Our new eccentric, Blues-playing, Koko Taylor-loving, orthopod worked side by side with our diminutive, Board-fearing Chief Medical Officer, saving the life of Mr. John Doe.

This is what we did. This is what we should do.

I waited in the family area, still wearing my scrubs, playing chess, losing to a man with no teeth. 

The door slid open. B standing next to V. Both tired, sweaty, and smiling. Visitors’ eyes rose to the men in the doorway. “He made it.” V announcing to the crowd. “He made it,” B softly echoing V.

“You were magnificent,” Balakrishnan placed his hand in Vuckovich’s. “Magnificent.”

“We worked well together.” V rubbed B’s shoulder.

“No, what you did was remarkable.”

“Koko.” He smiled.

The toothless man, who’d just beaten me in chess four times in a row, stood. “Thank the Lord Jesus for these two fine men.” His smile warm, his eyes bright. He then began to clap. Another visitor stood, then another. The room now full, with deafening applause bouncing off the walls.  Igor and Dev, exhausted, soaking in their well-earned recognition.

“Let’s go.” Dr. V’s voice cut through the acknowledgement.

We stripped off our scrubs and headed toward the parking lot.

“Go? Where?” Balakrishnan asked.

“Celebrate! Mexican! We’ll take Ms. Koko. My treat!”

I paused…fuck me…I hated Mexican. 

“You in?” B asked me like an excited little kid.

I’d brought this strange creature here, a mammoth guitar-playing behemoth, but without Dr. Dev Balakrishnan’s help, Mr. John Doe would be dead, and I’d be going after Vince like a hit man.

But Mexican? C’mon.

“You’re wasting time. Let’s go. I sit in front.”Balakrishnan was almost giddy.

John Doe was not dead. He was alive.

“I’m in,” I said, reaching for Koko’s back door.

“Nope,” Dr. V said.

He tossed me the keys. “You’re driving.”

Expert: Human Evolution of the Mind Is Like a Hind Teat on a Texas Bull… Here we are witnessing The Great Collective Amnesia of the Western World…. The great Forgetting, from the political crass class (total), intellectual wanderers (not all, but mostly all) and the general public (most, and these huge blocks against intelligence follow from generation to next generation with a fluidity equal to the amount of information – mostly junk – exponentially increasing on the world wide web and the number eye gazes at the weekly sales worldwide a la eBay, Amazon.dot.steal and any other number of aggregators and on-line scams) is like bubonic clouds in our industrial and post-industrial nations’ cortexes. The lack of intelligence is deep, to include all those drone makers, the data collectors, the A.I. freaks, the robotics innovators (AKA, people killers), the war makers, the profiteers of toxicity, and any other shill in the giant Facebook-Mass Suicide (intellect) Media Kingdom with their legions of grovelers in their armies of financial and investment classes. Forget History and Forego Other Peoples. This lack of humanness, which is defined by forced and accepted agnotology – large portions of the human fabric and the positive human condition propagandized into complete lies or chopped into meaningless vestiges, remnants of a complete whole – makes daily the thrust of thinking and saying in this country almost like peering into the looking glass. Confusion and anti-thought, anti-knowing. Thus, the deadening of intellect, atrophying of those so-called smarts, that is, as we hear and see from those Hollywood and Wall Street scum deeming what is and is not smart which includes anyone displaying electronic-coding-algorithmic skills or tinkering or hedge funding acumen, whatever modern business groper brings to the table. They are vapid, lacking true intellect which has always been tied to understanding history and knowing what is right and how to wrest control from the wrong-doers, and, of course, understanding the world, from sea to shining seabed, to lost tribe of Ecuador, to every beetle yet cataloged by science and shaman kind. The depth of stupidity and genuflecting to all-encompassing consumption (suicide) is astounding in its coverage and voracity. It’s a total great collective forgetting that is both serendipitous and planned, and our dementia has created untenable damage to the rest of the globe. Call it Stockholm Syndrome tied to our murderers’ well-being, their own sustainability while we frog-march into oblivion death marches. We just cannot keep from fawning and vaunting corporations and chemical eaters, war mongers, money cachetting freaks, living off the flesh of humanity. This is US, us-ay, USA, this overvalued by every measure exceptionalist country of the so-called tuned-in, wired-up, and dialed-in leaders of the Western World. Our collective raping and then impregnating the rest of the world with Disneyfication stupidity, and then riding that ol’ train a slow time comin’, but rest assuredly comin’ to all corners of the globe with the splash-splash of glaciers Humpty-Dumpty-ing into their own march to catastrophe, oblivion –this DEFINES us, USA! You Shit Here, Piss Here, Dump Your Dump Your Carcinogenic Offal Here . . . And We Get to the Now Generations! The gut reaction and media devolution around probably one of the most coalescing written pieces in the past few years on climate change-global catastrophe caused by humans polluting the planet with cooked up fossil fuels and the various feedback loops of methane releases and the reflectivity (albedo effect) of the earth’s surface going negative (our land masses and oceans sponges for heat, now) are in real time despicable. The flinging shit and mud against the writer and his written facts and projections are now embedded in the very nature of how humanity in this western dystopian paradise of constant growth (with entropy quickly back-filling that sickness) puts the he and the her and the they smack in the middle of creation, which is the middle of destruction. The amount of ire, hate, and condemnation tied to his thinking and pseudo marketing-psychology-rhetoric vilifying the piece by David Wallace-Wells (“The Uninhabitable Earth,” New York Magazine, 7/9/2017) is reflective of the insipid quality of thinking that has come to define the consumer-capitalist-predator investing/divesting society we have shaped and embraced for more than 60 years. This piece by Wallace-Wells has garnered absurd critiques in the so-called liberal-left greenie press, and the mainstream disastrous press, the pseudo journalism of the big great and digital kings on the east Coast vying for a new Zion in every nook and cranny of the bankster world. The usual libertarian and conservative suspects are trying to burn Wallace-Wells at the stake, for sure, since his article compiles thousands upon thousands of researchers’ work – that is, evidence and prognostications based on those many webs of writing about the research on climate change (which is a catch-all phrase for global warming, weather destabilization, climate uncertainty, geo-engineering, greenhouse gas expulsion through fossil fuel burning and the various parallel defamation of the earth mostly through deforestation and hyper urbanization/ consumption/over-population of Homo Erectus/ Sapiens/ Consumopithecus). Do we need a list of those thinkers and doers years ago who predicted the outcome of the despoiled commons and over-impregnating Homo Sapiens eating the edges and now the center of all the other species, who, in a quick nod, have so-so much to give than a billion “I Wanna Be A Star” cretins who can’t wait for the next and the next bloody mess viewable in the next Netflix world of lies. The subtitle of the piece, “Famine, economic collapse, a sun that cooks us: What climate change could wreak — sooner than you think,” has bristled the hackles of the me-myself-and-I bros and sisters, all from the various stripes of the political quagmire. Imagine, truth to power, truth to stupidity, truth against the prevailing Cellophane-wrapped essence of nano-particle humanity. Then the greenies start shedding their thin epidermis of green-o-atic colors to show the real flavor of their existence – eating cool, living cooler and propping up everything that is American. I’ve heard crap from Grist and so many other naysayers splaying (attempting, though) David Wallace-Wells’ thinking; many parts of the many numbers of NGO-like, non-profit “looking” environmental concerns (most are money-making harbors of war-loving, capitalism S & M driving nuts who love Hillary or even think Bernie is twenty-two degrees removed from the party he ran under) think going truthful and objective with the reality of the many dynamics tied to climate disruption which Wallace-Wells does, is worse than being a denier, than a Pence or Trump or any color of them ruling DC and the palaces of the stupids. I’ve been listening to our local Pacifica Station, KBOO-Portland, and today (7/19/17), on one show, Robert Hunziker, who wrote a piece, “Unhabitable Earth?” over at Dissident Voice talked about Wallace-Wells’ piece with Paul Roland, and, Hunziker is more or less right on, spot on, agreeing (to a degree, though) with the predictions and creative thought experiment David Wallace-Wells unfolds in a very prescient piece. Hunziker still has qualifiers, as is the style of the day – you know, us digital kings and writers having so much more with it and together than the real hard researchers and satirists. You have to give it to the ameliorating masses in the liberal class, the so-called environmentalists, and the shills that play this marketing/narrative framing/meme-ing game, saying that “too harsh a picture on the global negative implications of climate disaster can cause people to turn off and do nothing . . . scare them into paralysis . . . push them back to the all-you-can-eat/buy/consume/burn/immolate /dump/throw-away ways.” Yep, the so-called environmental b.s.-pushers, the majority of which are happy campers in their Subaru-tooling, Prius-loving, eco-capitalist REI lovefest, go on hyper-drive attack of this man’s well-reasoned and fabulously important piece of climate change writing. Hunziker and Roland on KBOO talked it out, about the Wallace-Wells piece, and the fallout. The call-in folk, well, they have so-so much mixed-up hope, and some cited Bill Gates as savior (those corporate Nazi saviors, don’t you know), or others talking geoengineering, you know, iron shavings by the millions of metric tons, dumped into the oceans, to, as most readers know, human engineer the planet to absorb CO2 – **“Iron fertilization is the intentional introduction of iron fines to iron-poor areas of the ocean surface to stimulate phytoplankton production. This is intended to enhance biological productivity and/or accelerate carbon dioxide (CO2) sequestration from the atmosphere.” ** The absurdity of this human ecocide on the oceans is telling, very telling. How we are living in our own shit and waste, tailings from the crimes of resource theft, the burning and slag piles smoking and curing our unborn, the stripped soils and exploded mountains beautiful images of earth gas chamber, diverted rivers to bred desertification, chemicalized water systems to cause death and migration, the entire mess of genetic engineering ready to latch onto the gene codes of the earth eaters, so perfectly captured in macrocosm with the example of salmon crossed at the DNA level with fat ass bass, and penned by the hundreds of thousands forced to eat soy and chicken entrails tablets. One good fishy example of humanity’s human shit and total species hate makes for emblematic ways to really show how warped a species we are. The ever-increasing Franken-fish/Franken-food/Franken-people experiments funded by tax monies, pushed by the controllers, yet average Joe and Jane Blow think this is the new normal. Then we have confused Rachel Maddows and Al Gores and the lot of them on their Van Jones high horses, empty of intelligence, blasphemers of the precautionary principle, small-minded and closed-headed people who look at a climate change article (which should be a triple-clarion call out) with real mettle, real predictions, not only poo-pooing it, but downright eviscerating the facts in order to play some full-of-shit narrative framing, shit, a la Freud and Bernays and Madison Avenue Zionist slave to consumerism shit. How much shit makes hubris and delusion capitalism? Imagine, the pencil necks at Grist (“Stop Scaring People About Climate Change: It Doesn’t Work”) attacking the reality, calling this man to task, for his look inside and outside at the real and unfolding possibilities of this that’s world a comin’, like a fast freight train a thousand miles long with every species ready for the Mother of All Dachaus — every species but that lying, raping, murdering, polluting, insane, blubbery, superstitious, vapid, inelegant Hominoid of modern atrocities. These people, advertising-seeking, for sure, and vetted by that political and non-profit enviro class so easily despised for their hypocrisy, they are grandstanding saying scaring doesn’t work? What sort of Wallace-Wells work is this writer leaning on, or wanting? It’s not his job to get people to revolt, overthrow, throw down, end the entire shooting match. “Quit scaring people” is so-so telling of the liberal class who gives shit about the illegal wars, the massive murders of millions by this empire, the massive deportations, massive destabilizations, massive inequities within their own shores. Almost anything coming out of their people’s cloud-digital-print asses is worth less than that one political orifice’s total value. Sanity Found Not Between the Lines, but in the Alarms and Emergency Sirens Apparent in the Words To give us a bit more to chew on without replicating the piece, here, the sectional titles of Wallace-Wells’ article: I. ‘Doomsday’ — Peering beyond scientific reticence. II. Heat Death — The bahraining of New York. III. The End of Food — Praying for cornfields in the tundra. IV. Climate Plagues –What happens when the bubonic ice melts? V. Unbreathable Air — A rolling death smog that suffocates millions. VI. Perpetual War  — The violence baked into heat. VII. Permanent Economic Collapse  — Dismal capitalism in a half-poorer world. VIII. Poisoned Oceans — Sulfide burps off the skeleton coast. IX. The Great Filter — Our present eeriness cannot last. Even the climate change piece looks at the rotten form that is capitalism, and the great day trading of the commons, the willingness of man to barter for more money with the future commons of ancestral havens. We’re talking war, too, rarely mentioned by greenies. War is the power, the engine, of greed, destabilization, the end of food, the lack of preparedness for everyone to adapt and adjust to the impending collapsed societies. Wallace-Wells nails it. Then, look at these opposing points of view, sick, really, spewing liberal elites with their pedigrees, whatever that means in this sell-out science landscape: “Doomsday Scenarios Are as Harmful as Climate Change Denial” By Michael E. Mann, Susan Joy Hassol and Tom Toles Analysis of “The Uninhabitable Earth” Published in New York Magazine, by David Wallace-Wells on 9 July 2017: Sixteen scientists (all male, all White/Christian/Jewish) analyzed (attacked) the article and estimated its overall scientific (what is this, really, in a sell-out world of science for their own profits) credibility to be ‘low’. (yet more mumbo-jumbo from the science arena). A majority of reviewers tagged the article as: Alarmist, Imprecise/Unclear, Misleading. This grouping of puke scientists, who we all must bow to, don’t you know, with their Ivy-League and powerhouse Stanford and Big 20 university laurels, well, they are vapid, untenable when you think about their own contexts – first world, elite, white, privileged, ivory towered, and never grasping the reality of an uneven world for not only their fellow billions, but for the entirety of the wild world. Hmm, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has been reporting a huge loss of population in thousands of vertebrate species. Researchers have studied 27,600 species of birds, amphibians, mammals and reptiles, finding huge losses in over 8,000 species. The animal species are not yet technically extinct, but the loss of numbers is severe enough to collapse breeding, viability, and their own roles in their eco-webs, let alone their own rights to exist on this planet. The findings mean that billions of animal populations that once roamed the Earth are now gone. This is the great Sixth Great Extinction of animal species caused by climate change and loss of habitat – all perpetrated by Man and Woman and “they”. “The sixth mass extinction is already here and the window for effective action is very short.” Kieran Suckling, executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity, continues: “If we continue the trend we’re on, we’re going to be looking at 50 to 75 percent of our species lost over the next hundred years.” Here’s what the capitalism-adoring Atlantic magazine says of the work of Wallace-Wells: It’s into that morass that this week’s New York magazine walks. In a widely shared article, David Wallace-Wells sketches the bleakest possible scenario for global warming. He warns of a planet so awash in greenhouse gas that Brooklyn’s heat waves will rival Bahrain’s. The breadbaskets of China and the United States will enter a debilitating and everlasting drought, he says. And millions of brains will so lack oxygen that they’ll slip into a carbon-induced confusion. Unless we take aggressive action, “parts of the Earth will likely become close to uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as soon as the end of this century,” he writes. “No matter how well-informed you are, you are surely not alarmed enough.” It’s a scary vision—which is okay, because climate change is scary. It is also an unusually specific and severe depiction of what global warming will do to the planet. And though Wallace-Wells makes it clear that he’s not predicting the future, only trying to spin out the consequences of the best available science today, it’s fair to ask: Is it realistic? Will this heat-wracked doomsday come to pass? Many climate scientists and professional science communicators say no. Wallace-Wells’s article, they say, often flies beyond the realm of what researchers think is likely. I have to agree with them. This is the tribe of elites, the publishing mainliners, the gatekeepers, controllers, the myopics and the critics of anything outside their own narrative frames – America good, or inherently good and all-knowing, all-solving, leaders of the world and technology and in ideas. Words like scary and vision and morass, oh, those wordsmiths, oh those literary kingpins of the big East Coast tribe. Humanity’s chosen people, these publishers and writers and editors and pundits and cultural icons. Here, from Wallace-Wells in an updated and annotated version of his piece: Since the article was published, we have made four corrections and adjustments, which are noted in the annotations (as well as at the end of the original version). They are all minor, and none affects the central project of the story: to apply the best science we have today to the median and high-end ‘business-as-usual’ warming projections produced by the U.N.’s ‘gold standard’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But the debate this article has kicked up is less about specific facts than the article’s overarching conceit. Is it helpful, or journalistically ethical, to explore the worst-case scenarios of climate change, however unlikely they are? How much should a writer contextualize scary possibilities with information about how probable those outcomes are, however speculative those probabilities may be? What are the risks of terrifying or depressing readers so much they disengage from the issue, and what should a journalist make of those risks? The End Game is Capitalism-Delusional Thinking-Soylent Green is People! Now, let’s get really real. How many minds were talking about no-growth, steady-state economics, the three e’s of sustainability (environment, equity, economy, in that fucking order!), small is better, de-industrializing, eco-socialism, and on and bloody on? Forget Muir, or Pinchot or Stegner or Rachel Carson or Mumford or Kunslter or Jane Jacobs or any number of proponents of fair and environmentally gauged communities. One part Wallace-Wells, another part, hmm, Derrick Jensen? While we face ‘hard choices’ about which species and ecosystems to conserve, it’s odd how we face no such quandaries over which of our frivolous luxuries to refrain from, or what murderous weapons system not to build, writes Derrick Jensen. This look at the hard choices of species and ecosystems, over pornography, sweat-shop clothes, next generation iPhones, animal-shit coffee, Ikea lasting six months, endless cruises and buffets, disposable internal combustion vehicles, jets and satellites and drones and backyard pools and chemical trails circling the globe and, well, you know what humanity is not willing to sacrifice! Sure, we’re supposed to choose whether to extirpate or save Bulmer’s fruit bats or Sumatran Rhinos, wild yams or hula painted frogs (with the default always being extirpate, of course); and we’re supposed to make careful delineations of how we choose who is exterminated, and who lives (at least until tomorrow, when we all know there’ll be another round of exterminations, complete with another round of wringing our hands over how difficult these decisions are, and another round of heartbreak; and then another round, and another, until there is nothing and no one left). But just as after Fukushima a Japanese energy minister said that nuclear energy must continue to be produced because no one “could imagine life without electricity”, so, too, entirely disallowed is any discussion of what technologies should be kept and what should be caused to go extinct. There’s no discussion of extirpating iPads, iPhones, computer technologies, retractable stadium roofs, insecticides, GMOs, the Internet (hell, Internet pornography), off-road vehicles, nuclear weapons, predator drones, industrial agriculture, industrial electricity, industrial production, the benefits of imperialism (human, American, or otherwise). That’s the rub, every single SOV day (single occupancy vehicle). I can’t even help my homeless and beaten-down young foster kids without being forced to drive miles upon miles and meet them at the quintessential rot gut everything that is bad about society Starbucks, because that’s company policy. I drive in a rural area near Oregon City, Estacada, and daily, the number of sacrifices on the road, AKA road kill, is in the dozens. Daily. We cut and maul and pave over and build over and divert and seed with invasives, and daily, hourly, each minute, on this planet, not one shit product or idea or lifestyle is sacrificed, but each and every square inch of soil and cubic meter of river and 2000 foot of altitude is raped and re-raped. By us, the supremacists. The dunces. The ones sitting, lying and sleeping in our own shit, using the cadavers of the real world – ecology, environment – as our rationale for putting us at the top of the dung heap. The murder of the planet is not some tragedy ordained by fate because we’re too damn smart. It is the result of a series of extremely bad social choices. We could choose differently. But we don’t. And we won’t. Not so long as the same unquestioned beliefs run the culture. Don’t get me wrong. Anyone who is working to protect wild places or wild beings from this omnicidal culture is in that sense a hero. We need to use every tool possible to save whomever and wherever we can from this culture. But it’s ridiculous and all-too-expected that while there’s always plenty of money to destroy the Tongass and every other forest, and there’s always plenty of money for various weapons of mass destruction (such as cluster bombs or dams or corporations) somehow when it comes to saving wild places and wild beings, we have to pinch pennies and ‘make difficult decisions’. Also, I need to say that the whole Ark metaphor doesn’t work. In the original story, God saved two of every species (as He, like the humans who created Him, destroyed the planet). Here, modern humans are going where even God didn’t tread, and explicitly not saving every species, but instead deciding which species to save, and which species to kill off. This is, of course, both pleasing and flattering to human supremacists: they’re making decisions on questions even God punted. How cool is that? http://clubof.info/