Author notes

108 - Cockroaches and Politicians

El Cid

on Sept. 3, 2016

Words! So many words!

This talky page gets a Saturday burial. But it's not all bad. Some of this stuff is… sort of important.

Since I'm too lazy to do an honest-to-god blurb today, I'll leave you instead with some CliffsNotes for this page. I guess it's useful stuff if you skipped reading it altogether, or maybe just didn't understand what you were reading.




Ozzy has just revealed to Jetta that the government of Neptune is planning to eliminate her friend Rana. Rana, a powerful underworld figure with close ties to the government, has apparently been abusing her power to the extent that she's now considered a public menace and a liability. Because bringing her to trial would result in her exposing government secrets, she is to be assassinated.


Ozzy views himself and his government cronies as kingmakers. When he cynically describes the High Council as “the biggest, baddest gang there is,” he appears to be paraphrasing a number of crude formulations about the nature of government power (Mao Tse Tung: ”Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun”). In this view, the government's power derives from the fact that the government has more coercive force at its disposal than any private entity and has the legal prerogative to use that coercive force against those who don't comply with its edicts. A government then is nothing more than an armed gang which the civilian populace – willingly or otherwise – agree to subjugate themselves to.


backspaced – “killed;” though a misnomer, this term is generally used specifically under circumstances in which a person is killed in a manner which renders them permanently unrecoverable (also: deleted, bricked, scrapped, wiped, blanked)

Up to this point, there's been no indication that anything was going wrong for Rana. She's a ruthless super criminal, and deals with challenges from rival thugs and law enforcement on a routine basis. But if she were aware that the High Council was moving against her – and we don't know at this point whether she is or not – then there's no telling what she might do. She'd be a cornered animal.