Fog-in planet this Wednesday morning up here along California’s north coast, and in extremes, mirrors the horrible, sad fixation of mankind with war.
War and whores have been around a long time — which one is the oldest profession?

Let’s see here: The shit in Syria, the doo-doo in Mali, the crap in Afghanistan, the re-bubbling cesspool on the Gaza strip, the never-ending poop-fest in Iraq, and that’s just to name a child’s hand-full of conflicts defecating all parts of the world right now.

(Illustration: Francisco De Goya’s ‘The Disasters of War,’ found here).

Armed conflict via science-fiction in the past all seemed to have a picture of what’s happening today — a bleak environment and a half-assed crazy guy in charge — Korean leader Kim Jong Un is more than half; maybe even more than three-quarters, though, he could be fully assed: “One day he’s threatening to blow up Austin, Texas, another he’s sitting there with [former basketball star] Dennis Rodman saying he just wants Obama to call him. North Korea has always been a little weird, but these are extremes of behavior we haven’t seen before.”

Situational contours on the Korean peninsula are creeping toward a bad-news point. Yesterday, Pyongyang (which is code for Kim Jong Un) closed the Kaesong industrial complex, a manufacturing space operated jointly by north and south, which also employs about 50,000 North Koreans and earns the financially-crippled state some hard cash. And the day before, the Northern-fruitcake guys claimed they have restarted a nuclear reactor, mothballed in 2007, to make some more plutonium — necessary and vital in any nuclear-warhead-producing scheme.
Meanwhile, inside the embalmed North, average citizens know very little and listen to all the talk — and it ain’t pretty:

“North Koreans want to go to war soon and unite the country. They want to get out of their difficult lives through war,” said Kim Seong Min, with Free North Korea Radio.
“North Koreans are not getting any information from the outside world.
They think they will win if a war breaks out.”
…
“The sources we’re hearing from are exhausted with the drills and the mobilization of the masses. Some feel nationalistic pride that comes with the rhetoric out of North Korea.
At the same time, they’re aware of the stagnant economy on the decline and the real need for change and opening,” says Daily NK’s Gregory Pence.
…
Pence says opinions at the Daily NK, which is staffed with North Korean defectors, vary.
But many at the publication fear that poor decisions can be made in times of fear.
What will hold back war, Pence believes, is regime preservation.
“North Korea risks outright annihilation. If a war broke out and escalated, it would cost the peninsula, the world,” Pence adds. “In the end, North Korea would not exist.
And the leadership is aware of that.”

Hopefully, the boy is just running his yap and nothing way-serious occurs in this current dust-up.

However — shit happens.
Philip K. Dick’s forecast from his ‘A Scanner Darkly‘ (quote found here):

“One of the most effective forms of industrial or military sabotage limits itself to damage that can never be thoroughly proven – or even proven at all – to be anything deliberate.
It is like an invisible political movement; perhaps it isn’t there at all.
If a bomb is wired to a car’s ignition, then obviously there is an enemy; if public building or a political headquarters is blown up, then there is a political enemy.
But if an accident, or a series of accidents, occurs, if equipment merely fails to function, if it appears faulty, especially in a slow fashion, over a period of natural time, with numerous small failures and misfiring — then the victim, whether a person or a party or a country, can never marshal itself to defend itself.”

War is raw spelled backwards.
In the way-distance and through the gloom-quiet, and just a little while ago, a rooster tried to crow — sounded long-ago sad and right-now pathetic.