Court Dude's Magic Mexican Chicken Enchiladas

Ingredients

12 corn tortillas
3 cooked chicken breast halves, no bones or skin, shredded
½ cup chopped green onions
½ cup chopped fresh cilantro
2 cups chicken broth
1 cup sour cream
¾ cup minced onion
12 oz shredded cheddar cheese
4 oz chopped green chilies
¼ cup butter
¼ cup all purpose flour
Vegetable oil for frying 

Preparation


Preheat the oven to 190 C. Heat 2 tablespoons of oil in a large frying pan over a medium high heat, and then fry the tortillas on 5 seconds per side until they are pliable. Do them individually and add more oil as required. Drain the tortillas on paper towels and keep them warm.
Divide the chicken, onion (not green onion) and 10 oz of the cheese between the tortillas. Roll them up and place in a greased baking pan, seam side down. Melt the butter in a pan over a medium heat. Add the flour and whisk until it begins to boil. Add the broth, stirring continuously.
Add the chilies and sour cream. Stir occasionally and do not let the mixture boil. Pour this mixture over the enchiladas when hot and thick. Bake the Mexican chicken enchiladas for 20 minutes then top with the rest of the cheese and bake for a further 5 minutes. Use the green onions and cilantro to garnish them.

Serves 6!

Cthonia 4

Arriving at the Ministry of Transhumanity early in the morning on New Years Day, Primo Foglet was surprised to see his therapist waiting for the same lift.

“Dr Fury! Couldn’t sleep?”

“Oh...Happy New Year, Primo!  Sad, isn’t it?  Us two here on a night like this”.

“I guess so. Would you like to talk about it?”

“Ha! Then you would have one over me...”

“Couldn’t be any worse than what you have on me”, Primo relied wistfully.

“Don’t bet on it. When are we booked in next?”

Primo closed his eyes for a split second and scanned his databanks.

“Next Wednesday, 3pm. Isn’t it in your....”

“Yes it is”, she replied coyly. “But why waste electricity thinking about it when others will do it for you!”
 

Dr Jacqueline Fury was blonde, tall, elegant and terrifying. Primo supposed that even if she wasn’t one of the country’s top psychiatrists, with a reputation for taking no shit and getting the job done, he would still be in some kind of awe of her. To listen to what she must listen to, he thought, day in, day out, and stay sane (or at least successfully pretend to) was almost incomprehensible.

They stepped into the lift.

“Primo, why don’t we do a session now – unless you have something urgent on.  I’ve got nothing pressing... and I’m in the mood to hear about your love life!”

“I wish you wouldn’t say that,” he squirmed. He thought for a moment. Primo liked his sessions with Dr Fury. She was beautiful, charming and, it seemed to Primo, hyper-intelligent. He had no idea of the extent to which she had been augmented – or “augged” – but he suspected it was significant.  And above all – he needed to be able to sleep!

“OK. Let’s do it,” Primo affirmed.  Dr Fury smiled and they both stepped out at her floor.

After the usual preparations and small talk, Jacqueline Fury settled into being serious and professional.

“Primo, when we left it last week you were saying that your experiences with the Bios have changed you in ways you don’t understand. That something has happened to you, and you want to understand what it is.”

 
“Yes. I do. I need to understand”.

She was looking through her notes as she spoke.  “We have been talking about the girl, the young female that you met, Laura.”

“Yes”. Primo shifted in his seat.

“You described,among other things, experiencing a shortness of breath and an intense feeling of excitement when you spoke with her, and afterwards.”

“Yes”

You described a loss of appetite and inability to sleep when you returned to Sydney two weeks ago. And, I would assume from the fact that we are here now, you still can’t eat or sleep, and you’re still excited...”

A long pause.

“Yes. Except...it’s getting worse”.

“Primo, how much do you know about the human brain?” 

“A lot”, he replied simply.  Dr Fury did not doubt it.

“Well then, you will know what pheromones, dopamine, noreoinephrine and serotonin can do to it?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Those just happen to be the chemicals released by the human brain when the owner of that brain is in love. And some of the side-effects are precisely the ones you’re describing. You’re in love, Primo! What’s so bad about that? Why don’t you want to admit it?”

“Doctor, I don’t quite know how to say this to you but...this is just not supposed to happen to me.”

“Why the hell not?”

“Because...I don’t have a human brain”.

Cthonia 3

In the year 2020 Primo Foglet was five years old. He lived with his mother Nadia in a modest two bedroom apartment in inner Sydney; not far from the harbour, but without a view. Views of the harbour were for the rich, and Primo and his mother were now anything but.

One year earlier, Primo’s father Ferrillo had died at the age of just 45. He had left behind a pile of money, but with some very specific instructions to his beloved wife Nadia on how he thought she should spend it. She had followed them to the letter...

The industries of cybernetics and artificial intelligence, soon to become the largest and most important in the world, were at the time only just beginning to move in the public perception from science fiction to practical reality. But as a neuroanatomist at the University of New South Wales, Ferrillo Foglet had seen the future of humanity – and it was no longer simply human.  He knew better than most what the recent advancements in nanotechnology and three-dimensional molecular computing might mean for medicine in general, and the augmentation of the human brain in particular. He wanted these advancements to be available to his only child, Primo.  And that would cost money.

The pancreas lies deep in the belly, in front of the spine. In the year 2019, a pancreatic tumour was still quite difficult to pick up early, and often it would only be revealed after pressing on nearby nerves, or the intestines.  In Ferrillo Foglet’s case, it was both. He was a big man, standing nearly two metres tall with broad shoulders and a large, stern-looking head. Loss of appetite was something he had never really experienced before to any great degree. It was followed by slight bouts of nausea, then weight loss – and two months later, after a few quick tests, came the news. By then, the cancer had metastasized to the liver, the lymph nodes and the lining of the abdomen. He had two weeks at the most, they said.

After the shock, reality set in. He had to make some arrangements – fast.

For the past four years, Ferrillo had been working on something that he had hoped would make the family their fortune. It was essentially a mind-altering medical procedure that, if it worked, virtually everyone on the planet would want to have.

Nanomachines or “nanobots”  would be inserted into the brain and interact directly with brain cells. Once it was fine-tuned, the nanobot technology would, Ferrillo and his colleagues had determined, allow an external, independent source almost total control of incoming and outgoing electrical brain signals.  Nerve pathways leading from the body to the brain could be deliberately and selectively blocked, leaving the user with a pure and very real “out of body” experience.

They called it Full Immersion Virtual Reality.

Problem was – it was just a theory. A blueprint for a machine that couldn’t be built yet. In 2019, the technology just wasn’t quite there. And now, Ferrillo Foglet did not have time to wait.

On a perfect Sydney autumn day, a day so sunny, crisp and beautiful it was almost impossible for Ferrillo to believe there was anything wrong in his life at all, he went to work for what he knew was the last time. He agreed to sell the blueprint to his business associates for a fraction of what he knew it was worth, and then went home to tell his wife and son that he was about to die.

Cthonia 2

During the decade leading up to 2020, high-quality internet access became available almost everywhere in the world – for those who could afford it.  Mobile phones were built into clothing and projected sounds directly into the ears of their owners. The user was now interfaced with the Noos in a truly mobile sense.  
 

Computers became "ambient" - sensitive and responsive to the presence of people - and then "ubiquitous" - completely integrated into commonplace objects and activities. Technology practically disappeared into our everyday surroundings.
 

During the previous 120 years or so, five world-changing leaps forward in computer technology had occurred in quick succession. From the electromechanical era that began in 1900, we moved to relay-based technology; from there to the vacuum tube; onwards to the transistor and, finally, thanks to a largely unknown radar scientist at the British Ministry of Defence by the name of Drummer, we had arrived by 1952 at the age of the integrated circuit. The basic building-block for  technological advancements that were previously considered to be in the realm of science fiction had arrived... and the world would never be the same again.

The purpose of Drummer’s integrated circuit was to cram as many transistors as possible onto a microchip, making the technology far smaller than had ever been thought possible - and capable of being mass-produced.  From 1965, transistor densities, the size of hard drives and the amount of information capable of being transmitted along an optical fiber were doubling approximately every two years.  

By 1995, the ground-breaking chips of the day had more than nine million transistors.  In 2001, a cutting-edge microprocessor had around 40 million transistors. By 2015, each such processor contained more than 15 billion transistors.  Computers that were the size of a room in the year 1900 were now the size of a walnut.  And - literally - billions of times more powerful. (than the computer - not the walnut). 

In 2017, under instructions from the US military, IBM built the first supercomputer capable of performing more calculations per second than the average human brain. By 2020, mass-produced personal computers were at the same level.

The Turing Test, invented in 1950, required humans to ask questions of both a computer and a human and try to figure out which was which.  In 2018 a computer passed the test for the first time. Two years later, a computer wrote and successfully tested its own version of the Turing Test.

But then, in the year 2020, scientists reached a startling and somewhat unexpected brick wall – they realised that 150 billion transistors was, for reasons that remained largely unclear, the uppermost physical limit of an integrated circuit.  Transistors had by now become so small they were at the atomic level.  There was, it seemed, nowhere to go...

It was time for the sixth paradigm shift – three-dimensional molecular computing. 

Instead of flat "two-dimensional" microchips, two Russian computer scientists operating out of a poorly-funded and mostly volunteer research facility in Khaborovsk built the world’s first three-dimensional "micro cube" processor to operate at an atomic level. It was the much-anticipated (and for many scientists, long-overdue) breakthrough of advanced nanotechnology.

Suddenly, across the world, technology exploded.

It's All Greek To Me...

Court Dude is not Finance Dude. So it is with some significant degree of cross-eyed bewilderment that recent events in Europe - most dramatically, the impending default of the country of Greece on its $400 billion sovereign debt -  have been observed by this spring chicken. 

The guy who should perhaps be known as Finance Dude is a 40-something Texan by the name of Kyle Bass. In late 2006, according to a new book by Michael Lewis called Boomerang: The Meltdown Tour, Finance Dude bet big that the sub-prime mortgage bond market in America would collapse. He was one of the only people in the world to do so.  In 2008, the collapse happened. He and his hedge fund made hundreds of millions of dollars.

In late 2008, Finance Dude invested a significant proportion of that money in betting that whole countries are about to collapse – specifically, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Spain and even (believe it or not) Switzerland!

Apparently, this is because the Global Financial Crisis, the good ole GFC, was never actually averted – it was simply delayed. People believed that their governments could borrow whatever was needed to rescue their banks. The problem now is – the governments themselves have ceased to be credible.
 

According to Lewis, if and when Greece defaults, Finance Dude will make somewhere around $700,000 for every $1100 investment he made in Greek Government default insurance back in late 2008. To make the same bet today would cost not $1100 but $230,000.  And the bookies for the bet? Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, and Morgan Stanley - all Wall Street banks that have recently been bailed out by their government!

Strange days indeed...

U.S. NATIONAL DEBT

Cthonia 1

The first seconds of the new year were born in perfect silence. At least, that’s how it seemed to Primo Foglet.  His bedside nano-clock made no noise whatsoever as it casually, suddenly, soundlessly, announced the arrival.  His neighbours, every one of them hooked almost permanently into their virtual reality machines, didn’t seem to notice a thing. 

Primo recalled his mother’s stories of New Years Eve parties – thousands of revellers filling the streets, laughing, dancing, singing. It sounded so chaotic, he had thought at the time.  But here, in Sydney Australia at 12.01 am on the first of January 2045, there were no fireworks over the harbour; there was no singing; there were no streamers or drunken congo lines in the street.  Just – silence.

Still, Primo could not sleep. Sleep had been a major problem, in fact, for two weeks and 3 days now - ever since the moment he had seen her.

Even when compared with other Transits, Primo was seriously high-tech.  He had the usual nanotech brain data storage enhancements, together with parabolic hearing, solar protected skin and some synthetic internal organs.  But his most advanced enhancement by far was the prototype in vivo fiber-optic communications spinal cord known as the SC5. It had cost the Ministry of Transhumanity the equivalent of 60 years of Primo’s salary to install and was, although still being tested, already considered one of the greatest technological achievements in history.  While every Transit was, of course, linked directly into the world wide web (now called the Noosphere or just "the Noos") via wireless three dimensional computer chips implanted at birth into the base of the skull, only a select few could boast the ability to process and distribute the information they received throughout their body at the speed of light.  

 In fact, on the rare occasions when he came across another Transit similarly equipped, Primo could participate in a form of telepathy, independently of the Noosphere, known as “techlepathy”. 

Primo got up slowly and looked out his one-hundred-and-thirty-third floor window.  To the east, the Pacific Ocean stretched out as a vast blanket, dark and foreboding under the waning moon.  To the west, in the near distance, shining and proud, was the Ministry that had been his life and virtually his home for the past 9 years.  In the absence of sleep, and in the absence of a woman to hold him, Primo observed wryly, there was only work.  He showered, dressed, closed his eyes, navigated mentally to the airtaxi website and double-blinked on “immediate departure required”.

Court Dude's Beautiful Bee Larvae in Coconut Cream

Favoured by villagers in Northern Thailand - a delicious treat when a plain old steak just won't do...

Ingredients:

200 grams bee larvae
2 onions
lime leaves (to taste)
200ml coconut cream
fresh cracked pepper
rice


Preparation

Marinate the larvae, sliced onions and lime leaves in the coconut cream with some pepper. Wrap in pieces of linen and steam; serve over rice.

Serves 2.

Cthonia - Prologue

It is the year 2045 and 14 billion people walk the earth.  Many of them are no longer entirely human…

The Transits worship technology as the means of achieving human enhancement. 

The Bios live in Nature Reserves and regard the Transits as nothing more than computers made of meat. 

Primo Foglet, Head Nanotechnician at the Ministry of Transhumanity, is in love.  At least...that's what his therapist keeps calling it.

As Primo works on the controversial Awakening Program he begins to reflect on the indisputable fact that life has been getting very weird lately.  For decades, the Transits have been becoming more powerful, with almost daily advancements in technology, but now these advancements have slowed to a trickle.  Technology has reached critical mass – or has it?  There are rumours that the Bios are on the move.  And…as for love…wasn’t that supposed to have been overcome by now?

Court Dude's Vote for Best New Invention

QANTAS Court Dudes Schtup Union Court Dudes

When QANTAS was ordered back into the air on Monday after grounding its entire fleet, at least one thing became immediately apparent: it pays to get good lawyers!

The legislation relied upon by QANTAS was designed by Julia Gillard so that, in the event a strike by workers was dramatically affecting the national economy, Fair Work Australia could call an end to the strike and order the workers back to work while they negotiated a settlement. As it was prior to the weekend, QANTAS employees were only sporadically on strike, wearing red ties and sometimes wearing their hats backwards, and this was not enough to argue that the national economy was being affected to any great degree. The Unions' sneaky lawyers thought they were pretty smart...

SUDDENLY, QANTAS THEMSELVES created the necessary dramatic danger to the national economy by grounding its fleet without any warning to the public, leaving tens of thousands stranded across the world!  Their lawyers, who are apparently far, far sneakier than their Union Lawyer opponents, then supported the government's predictable application to "terminate" the industrial action, thereby forcing themselves to fly again! Of course, since all action was "terminated", this also means any industrial action by the workers will be illegal. Even wearing their hats backwards...

So in the end, QANTAS have forced the workers into complete obediency and subservience by arguing there was a massive threat to the national economy - a threat created entirely by themselves!  Genius!

If Court Dude was not an uber-advocate of the criminal law jurisdiction, and was instead a commercial lawyer (God forbid!), he would have argued that QANTAS cannot take advantage of the legislation by intentionally creating the dramatic situation that triggers it. The fact that QANTAS' lawyers did what they did means that the law itself is flawed; their lawyers were good enough to exploit that fact and that the government unwittingly provided the authority and legality for the whole sordid show.

Having said all that, when you buy an airline ticket and take your family (for example) to the other side of the world, you place a lot of trust in that airline. You trust that they will honour their agreement with you. You trust that they will get you home. You trust that they will not leave you stranded.

QANTAS' Court Dudes are clearly smarter than the Union's Court Dudes - but what QANTAS has done to their passengers is simply unforgivable. QANTAS can never be trusted again. Come to think of it, QANTAS are sooooo sneaky that it would hardly be surprising if this, too, was part of their evil plan!

QANTAS is either our National Carrier, or it isn't. If it is, then the majority of jobs should remain in Australia, and if this isn't profitable, government ownership (at least in part) is needed. If QANTAS is not going to be our National Carrier, then it really doesn't matter WHO flys the planes!

 It's a good thing Court Dude can fly without a plane - and he NEVER goes on strike!