All Entries in the "Fractured Opinion" Category

China to send aid to Puerto Rico

(San Juan) In what leaders in the US are calling “provocative action” the People’s Republic of China has pledged to send disaster relief to the island of Puerto Rico, an unincorporated territory of the United States.

Despite the saber rattling in Washington, China is stockpiling food, water and computer parts destined for the weather-riddled Caribbean colony that has received little or no “up north” help since the days of Donald Trump and Hurricane Nicole.

“We see an opportunity to extend our influence in the Caribbean,” said a Chinese news release, “and are responding to our humanitarian sense of justice. The United States has dropped the ball and we are simply kicking it onto the beach again.”

It was not clear if the gesture would provoke positive response on the part of the US or if an ongoing global feud would once again leave the needs of the populace in the dust.

Meanwhile locals say that any help would be appreciated and hoped for egg roles and installation instructions in Spanish, the common language on the island. 

“We remind China of the protectorate it never has had,” said one victim of tropical storms who has yet to receive a thatched roof that was promised back in 2021. “My name is Monroe and my doctrine is a simple one: Talk is cheap. Building supplies are not,” he said.

-Pepper Salte

“…Report us fairly

how we slaughter

for the common good”

–Seamus Heaney in “Kinship”

RV Zombie Zone Designated

Enjoy a drive over Red Mountain Pass before the tourists show up in their little dogs and RVs. Always remember: June through August is tourist zombie season and must be considered every time you make a road trip. Here we see a stretch of Ruby Wall in 1962 when the world was quite different.

Redes de estudio ermitaño poco

(Gunnison) Un intento de ultra-censo de entrevistar y catalogar a los ermitaños de la región ha sido declarado un rotundo fracaso por los burócratas que “ya cobraron el cheque”.

      De los más de 100 ermitaños contactados en sus casas entre diciembre y febrero, solo uno habló con los investigadores.

      “Y quería fumar un cigarrillo”, dijo un miembro del personal abatido. “La mayoría de estas personas ni siquiera vendrían a la puerta si tuvieran una”.

      Los ermitaños que estaban acorralados a menudo miraban sin rumbo cuando los científicos sociales y nutricionistas del personal les preguntaban. Muchos solo miraron sus relojes de pulsera ficticios por temor al cierre de la reunión.

      “Estaban a la altura de sus pequeños trucos de ermitaños tímidos, pero somos sabios con esa acción”, dijo Lolly Zippee, ella misma una ermitaña en recuperación. “¡No están tratando con idiotas aquí!”

      Según los informes, muchos ermitaños trabajan de noche y no eran bienvenidos en su lugar de residencia durante el horario comercial. La mayoría no tiene teléfonos ni redes sociales.

      “Me sorprendió lo bien que vestían”, dijo un pasante. “Uno generalmente piensa en un ermitaño como alguien con una barba larga, un bastón y un saco, lo que sea que eso sea.

      Un mezclador After Hours está programado para más adelante en el verano. Los organizadores esperan que pueda atraer a los ermitaños para que conozcan a otros ermitaños.

      “Si esto no les llama la atención, los citaremos”, se rió Zippee.

NAACP Cool to Back to Europe Movement

(Denver) The Colorado NAACP has reacted cautiously to a call for the redistribution of white people to their geographic origins in Europe. These Caucasians, currently living in the United States, would be shipped back to their native lands if the plan is adopted.

“The majority of Blacks in this country can trace family heritage back to the 16th and 17th centuries,” said Rev. Abraham McCarthy, an associate of Rev. Al Sharpton and former welterweight boxer from Harlem. “Despite the plague of evil slavery, our people can prove landed immigrant status far before most of the white folks even got their feet wet in the Atlantic. 

Slave ships, which did little to chronicle the lineage of its human cargo, arrived on these shores centuries before the Colonial Revolution giving Blacks basic squatter’s rights and a valid claim as the continents second Americans, following the indigenous group of former Asians who have been here since the before the Dark Ages began in Europe.”

The plan, which seeks an atonement for slavery as well as a restructuring of the power base in this country, calls for the forced migration of all Europeans back to their ancestral homelands despite political upheaval and creeping overpopulation there. It is modeled after the notorious Back to Africa Movement which was introduced before Jin Crow and during the Civil War, reputedly fought over the practice of slavery in the Confederacy. Abolitionists such as Abraham Lincoln flirted with this solution even though history remembers him as the great emancipator. 

“The Back to Europe Movement is more logical and certainly a valid approach to problems in this country,” said McCarthy who is said to favor certain exceptions such as the Irish and Italians who faced similar discrimination, but not technical slave status, upon arrival in the later 19th and early 20th centuries.

“Possession is nine tenths of the law and we were the majority in many locales during the early days. This is nothing more than retro democracy in action,” he smiled. 

“Our plan is not meant to be punitive but rather a prudent proxy to the problem of overpopulation,” continued McCarthy with bold alliteration. “After a few decades when the dust settles, Whites in good standing can reapply for citizenship in the New United States of America.”

Most Caucasoid groups have pledged to fight the proposal while it is still in a fledgling state. Transportation logistics, cost and the status of mixed race citizens had not been undressed at press time. 

“The initial implementation and monitoring of the shift may be a bit tedious as first,” explained McCarthy, “but after a century or two things should fit back in place quite nicely. I myself have always wanted to own an antebellum mansion, sipping lemonade under a sweeping magnolia tree ”

– Shondelle Washington 

“The (economic) revolution will not be televised, not least because Ireland did not yet have a television station” (in 1957).

-from We Don’t Know Ourselves by Fintan O’Toole

Music in Punta del Diablo

A spectaclar autum afternoon in the South Atlantic Ocean town in Uruguay

Grace O’Malley, warrior from Connemara

Sure as I am a mountainy man from the wilds of Connemara she once lived here among us. The pirate goddess who said no to the queen of England. She robbed them all in good time-The Spanish, The Brits, the Portuguese… She might well have lightened the purse of the Russian Czar if she could have gotten at him. 

Sailing the sea in the 16th Century with her loyal crew Grace O’Malley (Graine Ni Mhaille) massed riches beyond belief and in 1593 met and told Queen Elizabeth to take a leap when her majesty offered royal recognition. She then refused to bow to the Queen of England, who she did not honor as the Queen of Ireland.

In  her 2006 biography of O’Malley, Irish historian and novelist Anne Chambers described her as:

a fearless leader, by land and by sea, a political pragmatist and politician, a ruthless plunderer, a mercenary, a rebel, a shrewd and able negotiator, the protective matriarch of her family and tribe, a genuine inheritor of the Mother Goddess and Warrior Queen attributes of her remote ancestors. Above all else, she emerges as a woman who broke the mould and thereby played a unique role in history.