LUDIC LOG

The first-time visitor will, first of all, want to blend in, and second of all, amass a large personal fortune under the local economic system. This allows the advance scout to make preparations for the invasion in privacy and solitude. Don't be taken in by counterproductive rhetoric: money does matter. It buys you a place of your own, away from the prying eyes of soldiers, scientists, governments, documentary filmmakers and vivisectionists.

Fortunately, however, modern-day America is ripe with moneymaking opportunities for the intrepid extraterrestrial advance guard. (We do not advise visitors to set up shop anywhere but the United States, due to its unprecedented access to communications equipment, "advanced" technology and mutual funds. Great Britain may seem like an attractive and less crowded alternative, but please see the entry under Icke, David.) A number of high-profile professions are easily learned, highly profitable and, as an added bonus, nurture the level of treachery and deception required of a expeditionary scout. As a service to our readers, we offer a review of some of the more worthwhile pursuits.

1. INSURANCE. This is a favorite of the Alphanes of Proxima Centauri, so if your people have any longstanding rivalries with them, please consider another profession. Insurance began as an attempt to service the public, by offering low-cost protection against the eventuality of disaster, sickness or unexpected catastrophe. However, like most social functions on the Earth, it was quickly entrusted to businessmen, who immediately turned it into a form of legalized gambling. Essentially, you offer to bet your client that something bad will not happen to them. They, in turn, bet that something bad will happen, and pay you a regularly occurring fee on the odds that they're right. It's already a good deal for you, strictly from a statistical standpoint, but as an added incentive, you can actually use actuarial data in your favor! That's right: under the law (see below), if someone is actually a risk to have a bad thing happen, you get to charge them even more money. Amazingly, the more likely they are to need your insurance, the more you can make them pay to get it! Eventually, you can refuse to give them insurance at all, especially in the medical insurance field, but you still get to keep all the money they've already given you. Best of all, many types of insurance are legally required, so your customers have no choice but to use your services!

2. LAW. All societies are founded upon the rule of law, and the Earth is no exception. Interestingly, however, the U.S. sees no particular reason to explain the law to people, despite the fact that legal matters dominate almost every aspect of their daily life. It is difficult for a visitor, even one who hopes to enslave or eradicate the local population, to understand why a society so dominated by law and finance does not deem it necessary to educate students about either, or why legal and economic matters are governed by a tiny elite with specialized educations. However, there's no real reason to understand it just take advantage of it! Their heads will all be on spikes before too long anyhow. The interesting thing about the legal profession is that the overwhelming majority of political leaders are lawyers and millionaires, even though a miniscule number of their constituencies are either, but this works to your benefit, since that means the people who write the law, the people who change the law and the people who interpret and make a profit off the law are all the same. That is to say, you. Another fun fact about the law is that while a common belief is that everyone is entitled to a lawyer, this only applies to criminal law, not the far more frequent civil cases, and even in criminal cases, public defenders are notoriously incompetent. How does this work for you? It means that if you're a good lawyer, you will only get wealthy clients!

3. REAL ESTATE. Before too long, the land will belong to you. From mountain to valley and coast to plain, you will possess all that you survey, and as you stride triumphantly across the ruined Earth, you will track behind you a trail of blood and reptilian ichor. In the meantime, however, why not take advantage of some of the Neanderthal local laws concerning property ownership in order to make a financial killing? Under U.S. law, the land does not belong to the state, but to any individual or fictional entity with the money to "buy" it. This means a tremendous amount of money can be made in maneuvering around the arcane laws about property rights in order to "sell" land from one person to another. Believe it or not, simply transferring ownership of a domestic domicile from one Earthling to another Earthling requires the intervention of highly paid specialists who collect huge fees for "closing" a transaction no more sophisticated than giving your offspring its allowance. Other moneymaking endeavors including staking out ruined property for people to throw money at for a "tax loss" (see the special section on Governmental Fraud), staking out the homes of recently
deceased locals in order to cajole some cash out of their heirs or opportunistic passers-by, or "rent". While our underlings live or die merely at the whim of their cruel alien overlords, on Earth, one actually has to pay strangers in order to continue living! There is untold money to be made in buying a building, dividing it up into tiny partitions, and then having people pay you to sleep in them.

4. BANKING. Now that we,ve established the importance of making money, brace yourself for the best news of all. Astoundingly enough, when Earthlings get money, they don,t merely acquire goods and services with it: they pay large amounts of it to total strangers for the "privilege" of keeping the money for them! The buildings on downtown corners that look like run-down temples are actually "banks" -- large repositories for money that does not belong to the people who own the bank. In one of the most profitable scams since the casino (see index under Free Money), bankers have established a process whereby people work all week for money, and then simply hand all the money over to the bankers. Of course, they claim to offer "services" for the money, but as you might expect, it's all pretty much a scam. Here's how it works: you take their money and keep it in a metal box. Then you invest it all and make piles of money. You can offer them a "checking" account, whereby they get paper representations of their money, but they have to pay for it! You can offer them a "savings" account, whereby they get more money than they put in, but it's far, far below the amount you make investing their money in the stock market. Or you can offer them a "credit card", which is a piece of plastic that allows them to spend money they don't actually have. If they don,t pay you back on time, you get to charge them ridiculous amounts of money (the same goes for "loans"), and if they don't pay at all, you can take everything they own! There are also hundreds of other so-called financial services, all of which are highly profitable, require almost no work on your part, and not only make tons of money in and of themselves but allow you to charge "fees" that can get you thousands of dollars and that no one ever questions, no matter how obviously fraudulent they are. Best of all, like insurance, the law as much as requires people to do business with banks; many things cannot be bought without credit cards, checks or the intervention of "financial services" companies. Honestly, the cash just flows in like water. We're a little ashamed we didn't think of this ourselves before spending all that money on our galactic suppression fleet.

5. ADVERTISING. Despite the bogus rhetoric of management consultants (about whom we could write an entire book), the Earth, having inexplicably rejected slavery and compulsory labor, is still based on a production economy. But trust us, you will want to avoid factory production like the Valkurrian Worm Plague. The last thing you need is government intervention, labor difficulties, and having to worry about your shipping costs, when what you really want is to spend most of your day figuring out where the first photon artillery hardpoints should be placed on Invasion Day. This doesn't mean, however, that you shouldn,t be able to make lots of easy cash off of the brick-and-mortar crowd! Here's how it works: production facilities on Earth do not exist to service needs, as they do in a rational military-imperialist-fascist economy. They exist to make money. And the best way to make money is to get people to buy your products even when they don't need them. How this is done is to begin producing goods that no one has asked for, and then hire someone to convince people that they really, really need them. Sounds like for-profit propaganda, doesn't it? Well, it is. But they choose to call it "advertising", and as hard as this may be to believe, it's considered quite a respectable career option. Yes, in America, the process of systematized lying, of duping the public into paying money for transparent colas, pre-damaged clothing and electronics that are designed to fail, is one of the most honorable and profitable ventures that a visitor can undertake. The ambitious space invader would be a fool to pass up the chance to become an advertiser, or, at the very least, employ an advertiser just prior to the invasion. A few well-spent dollars with Leo Burnett (an excellent Chicago-based firm run by some Orion pirates) may save you millions in military spending later on.

As a further service, here are a few things for any potential invasionary vanguard to keep in mind:

- Any good scout knows to act like the natives. Take a look at the Earthlings. Note how many of the brown, tan and black ones are incarcerated and how few of them are to be found in places of high finance. There's a reason for this: it's because they are an oppressed slave culture, although no one will admit this for reasons none of us here at Desolate Planet have been able to figure out. Be smart: think pink.

- A $2,000 suit may seem like a foolish waste of money, but it's actually one of the best investments an alien invader can make. If you're wearing an overpriced suit, people will pretty much listen to anything you have to say no matter how crazy it is, especially if the person in the suit is white. Sometimes they'll even give you money for no reason.

- Stick with your own kind! Most of the people who run the banking, insurance, advertising, law and real estate industries are aliens anyway. And don't worry about attracting unwanted attention by getting together with other people in your profession to plot against the public. Not only is this accepted, it's actually expected!

Please feel free to contact us with further tips and tricks, especially if you're already on earth and are working in the medical, consultancy or political fields. Good luck, and happy hunting!