Report From FSWHQ

We here we are, the end of a rather remarkable year and the beginning of the dreaded 2012!  It's got us so stirred up here on the Far Side that we've retreated once again to our jungle nest, known as the Far Side World Headquarters, or FSWHQ, for short.

Looking like a scene from the old King Kong movie, we moved our clan back to the forest.  The four wives carried my sedan chair, while the kids and animals were loaded with important things, like a new plasma TeeVee, a pedal-free generator and the new Far Side Satellite Telecommunications Center (FSSTC).  We're going deep undercover for the coming year.

Looking back, we marvel that the world limped past the finish line, though technically we still have hours to go.  The US markets battled to a 'flat' return in the closing seconds of the year's market.  The euro ended up as the worst-performing currency in the world, which is why we brought all our euro-bonds into the jungle with us.  Perfect fire starters.

As far as economics go, Asia looks to be standing head-and-shoulders above their western counterparts.  Indonesia, Vietnam and China are red-hot.  Thailand was doing well until the floods.  Japan is white-hot, though for a different reason.  In fact, we've been collecting the new glow-in-the-dark Yen.

What's really been interesting this year, though, has been watching the PTB/W absolutely panicked, as in cold sweats and sleepless nights.  Their reckless and wild abandon in trying to nail down their little Medieval World Order (MWO) has been rather entertaining to watch, as long as you weren't in a country they destroyed to protect their little fiefdoms.  The MENA (Mid-east/North Africa) folks weren't so lucky to have ring-side seats.

One has to laugh, though, since the MWO is positively falling to bits.  The desperate invasions and attempts to control true grass-roots uprisings across the MENA regions have been like watching the Keystone Kops Kapers.  Part of their problem is something that will never change...human nature.

You see, the MWO has been a multi-century pax belli between a bunch of inbred nutcases, who are so rich and so bored, they cooked up this world domination game to have something to do.  The problem is, the closer it got the reality, the more they started fighting among themselves to be the one king on the top of the dung hill.

As fast as the inbred crowd started sniping at each other, the normal humans out here in Reality Land decided it was a good time to exercise some God-given rights.  So as the self-annointted elites tried to outmaneuver each other, the World was out-maneuvering them, and when they turned to try to nail down the World, the elites would shoot each other in the back.  Now, when you stop laughing at the mental image of that, take a look around and see the results.

Egypt was supposed to be a controlled Soros-colored revolution, but then the revolution revolted against itself to get rid of the MWO clowns.  The MWO clowns wanted to install radically fundamentalist Islamic authoritarians, which the MWO control.  But the good and very intelligent Egyptian people wouldn't hear of it.

The same is happening all across the MENA.  Folks just want to be left the hell alone.  They are tied of trading one totalitarian yutz for another of a different stripe.  Real people really enjoy just going about their business, living in peace and harmony with their neighbors, regardless of what building they choose to worship in.

Amazing how that works.

In Europe, folks everywhere are getting fed up with the whole damn package.  They are tired of the German Neo-Nazi unification called the EU.  They are tired of a completely fabricated currency shoved down their throats.  They are tired of having Goldbar Sacks alumni brazenly take over their countries in un-elected coups after watching the banks rape and pillage their economies.

The Irish fought the EU until it was literally rammed down their throats.  They then watched their red-hot economy turn to ash.  Greece and Italy, while not exactly massive industrial economies, had perked along just fine for centuries, until the EU came along.  Spain and Portugal the same.

The US is quite a tale.  The largest, most powerful economic engine ever known completely imploded due to fiat and regulation.  At the same moment the country was shipping its heart and soul overseas in the name of profit, the Puppetmasters were shoving ever draconian regulations through CONgress to prevent competition from springing up naturally to fill the void.  As a consequence, America poured gallons of Round-Up on its garden since they figured they could buy cheaper veggies from the Asian gardens.  Then the Asian gardeners got properous and wanted to keep more of their produce, so now the American garden is dead and the cheap alternatives have gone on to better deals elsewhere.

All that led to the OWS, which originally was a home-grown movement of folks sick and tired of being Rounded-Up by the bankster classes.  Of course, the Giant Sucking Media (GSM) tried to package that movement and give it a little Soros treatment, so the real folks drifted away, and it became another Tea-Licking Party (TLP).  All the real people are flooding into the Ron Paul camp, which absolutely mystifies the PTB/W crowd, because they did such a fine job of hiding Paul from themselves that they can't see what's going on.

In the meantime, the US, once global champion of peace, human rights and economic miracle-cures, has become a rogue terrorist state that is eating its own children and trying to cobble together a controlled economy without any of the ingredients that constitute an economy.  If you get enough perspective on it, it really is quite entertaining.  Harder to see that part when the bastards are auctioning off your worldly belongings in the yard where you raised your children, while you stand in the icy drizzle clutching your photo album watching your neighbors pick through your DVD collection.

Yep, we gotta admit 2012 is going to be a verrrry interesting year, and no, it doesn't have a damn thing to do with Mayan calendars.  It is, though, a self-fulfilling prophesy.  In their in-bred scramble to keep us in terror-induced zombie mode, the PTB/W made up this whole apocalypse thing, hoping it would keep folks busy battening down the hatches, just like Y2K did.  Instead, it is quickly shaping up to be The End Of The World As They Know It (TEOTWATKI).  They have successfully created the Second Coming, only it's coming for them.  Those who live by the apocalypse, die by the apocalypse.  The rest of us are free to sit back and watch with amusement as everything the PTB/W predicted and tried to scare us with comes true...for THEM!

We, however, meaning us here at FSWHQ, will be happy to sit back and watch the whole thing on the new plasma TeeVee being set up in the village clearing.  The kids are busy scrambling up the coconut trees to put the new dish up.  The wives are busily nattering and playing with the new pedal-less generator.  We're preparing for our celebration tonight by tying sparklers on money tails.  It's just so damned entertaining to watch them run through the tree-tops with their tails on fire!

Out here in the jungles of Borneo, nothing changes much.  Empires come and go.  Currencies rise and fall.  Revolutions sweep across the globe.  But tying fireworks to moneys is always the same great fun.

The world is too much with us, as someone once said.  Time to put away our fear, because the PTB/W are so damned terrified that we can all just sit back and watch the in-breds shoot each other in the foot.  Think of it as the Saturday matinee writ large.  We could even open a window in Vegas and start laying odds on which in-bred families will die-off first.

Oh, they're calling us over to the TeeVee hut to do the honors of tuning in the Thai horror movie channel.  Great fun that.

So we'll wrap up the year by wishing all of our great readers a Happy and Fortunate New Year/Selamat Ulang Tahun Baru.  We'll light up a monkey for you!

And thanks for making Life on the Far Side increasingly popular!  We have added hundreds of new readers in the past year from 93 countries.  We will continue to offer arguments and diversions, and we hope you will continue to enjoy them.

Ah, wife #4 just brought us a large shell full of cap tikus (mouse piss), which is fermented coconut milk.  Nasty stuff, but after the third or fourth shell-full, you can eat the fetal deer at the bottom of the jug and not think twice about it.

Don't give the fascist pigs any reason to haul you off tonight, and we'll see you all again in 2012!

Back To Borneo, Part IV

A note to our Indonesian readers: Barangkali anda sebaiknya membeli kalium iodide (KI) yang bisa mencegah sakit kena radiasi. Karena reaktor nuklir di Jepang di bahaya, harus pikir kami karena melindungi sendiri dan keluarga-keluarga kami.

As the saying goes, March comes in like a lion, and goes out like a lamb.  Certainly, that's been true here in the wilds of Indonesia.  In two weeks, we have been to three countries, spoken four languages, and visited five cities.

For that reason, we have retreated to the LFS world headquarters in the jungles of Borneo for rest and rehab.

And we're already regretting it.

Wife #1 is a mean cuss.  She suspects everyone, trusts no one and hates all of Humanity.  Don't know how we landed her, but we wish we could throw her back.  We are seriously considering sending her back to her parents for additional training, which is our right under village law.  If her daddy gives her a thorough spanking, it might have more impact than if we did it.

Wife #3 has been complaining endlessly about her job as goat-tender.  She says the little buggers can get out of anything.  She's even built a bamboo dome over the goat pen, and they just dig out.  We solved the problem by slaughtering all but one ram and one ewe.  That'll teach the little snorkers.

Only wife #4 is quiet.  She is only 15 and was payment for a debt after we installed HBO on the village's only TV set in the square.  She's just happy to be out of the house, we think.  Her job is threshing the rice, and she just sits there all day picking bits of chaffe out of the pile.  One day, we have a plan to teach her how to winnow.  It might speed things up a bit.  For now, we're too tired to worry about it.

Since we have the only generator in the village, we enjoy things like A/C and a cold beer once in a while, when the tiny refrigerator actually gets one cold enough.  For some reason, though, the generator kept popping in the middle of the night, and we couldn't figure out why.  We checked all the wiring and outlets, and everything seemed fine.  Last night, however, we woke up and wanted an Aceh cigarette and a cup of coffee.  The village looked like Times Square on New Year's Eve.  We think we figured out the problem.

It's been raining like hell for a month now.  Normally, we don't mind that very much, but it does have its drawbacks.  When we go monkey hunting, our loin cloth gets all muddy, which just sets off #1 all the more, even though #2 does all the laundry.  It also washes all the poison off the tip of the arrows, so we have to spend hours tracking the little beasts through the tree tops,  Very annoying that.  We are working on a solution to chemically bond the poison to the arrows, but so far, all we've achieved only a new form of chemical preservative, for which we've already filed patents in seven countries.  So far, it's only been found to cause cancer in one out of four people.  That's a damn sight better than most of the crap in the public food chain right now!

We had a little excitement when a 23-foot Kymoto dragon wandered into the village and ate seven dogs and three children before being subdued.  That was a serious impact to the village food supply and we are worried about what will happen when the Dry season starts.

We did discover that Kymoto dragon is pretty darned delicious, especially bar-b-qued in the classic Texas style, slow-cooked in the ground for 24 hours.  We whipped up some baked beans and potato salad, and the entire village was quietly satiated and happy, except for #1, of course.

Not being satisfied with living in an idyllic location, close to Nature and blissfully uncaring about the outside world, we have created a Public Works department, so that we can engineer the jungle to our satisfaction and start sending bills to all the locals for the service.

The first project is a sewer system.  Seems for generations, folks have been taking care of business upstream from the bathing area.  We designed a sluice box to carry the waste down the banks of the river and deposit it just upstream from the next village.

Someone had the gall to ask why we didn't just move the toilets down the river a bit.  We, naturally, pointed out that if it were that easy, why didn't anyone do it 125 years ago?  So now, the village must pay us one kilo of rice per person two times a year for our thinking ability.

This, of course, leads to project number two: building a silo to store all our new-found wealth.

At this rate, we figure we can recreate the US government in roughly 55 years.  We're already making plans for a vastly expensive space program using hollowed-out trees, so we can place warung in every conceivable place in orbit.  We figure this will give the astronauts from all the other countries little stores where they can pick up coffee and cigarettes between supply runs.

We're testing various designs right now using old plastic cups and used soda straws to create pressure suits.  We're not too concerned about radiation, since most folks around here already have plenty of genetic damage from in-breeding.  In fact, our first astronaut-in-training has seven fingers and six toes on each appendage.

And here comes the rain again.  We were dreading that, since all the wives get randy when it rains.  Looks like there'll be four more mouths to feed come December.  Guess we'll have to raise taxes again.

It ain't easy bringing civilization to Paradise.  People resist paying for things they never needed before, and frankly they were pretty happy without.  But, they need to learn that complex systems are the only way to live.  After all, they could never have watched the Super Bowl if it weren't for us pirating satellite feeds off of G-2.  Not that anyone watched, but it's the idea that we COULD have seen the spectacle of over-paid entertainers in bone-crunching competition trying to move a ball from here to there.

The heathens around here like Australian football, because they don't wear pads and all the entertainers are bleeding and toothless at the end of the game.  How uncivilized!

So, nothing for us to do now but wait for the next Bird to pass over so we can upload our musings to the waiting world.  The wives won't leave me alone.  Even #1 is almost being nice to us just now.  That makes us very nervous,  It means she wants extra today.

We just want to lay here quietly in the A/C and plot our next major civilization project, so we can turn this jungle paradise into the Las Vegas of Borneo and make huge piles of filthy lucre so we can fund our aspirations.  Perhaps a giant ice maker down by the river, so we can bring all the glories of modern life to these savages.

Here's hoping you have a lawn to mow, bills to pay and only one wife.  Happy Sunday at the Temple of Plasma Entertainment.  If, during the commercial breaks, you offer a quick prayer to the gods for us poor, suffering conquistadors out here in the jungles of the world, we'd be more appreciative.  We're still hoping for that new Harley-Davidson, so we have an excuse to build super-highways here in deepest, darkest Borneo.

Sampai jumpa!