Diversions

This week’s musical news recap is called “Diverted”.  Every week I tell myself that I’m going to make it an easier undertaking and not throw so much behind the production.  Alas, I am a slave to my own ambition and once again I stayed up until 5 am to put the finishing touches on it and upload it to You Tube.  The upload process takes about 45 minutes.  All I want to do is go to bed, but I have to baby sit the darn thing in the event that something goes wrong.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you….”Diverted”

The Art of Misdirection

Every day, everyone of us is exposed to countless pieces of information. As I browse my Farcebook feed, i see an exponential number of reactions to different news stories.  The reactions run the gamut from shock to indifference or indignant resignation.  ANd where several weeks ago, I didn’t see any real action , I am happy to say that a large volume of my friends have taken up the struggle and are doing what they can to reverse the tide, shore up the embattlements and dig in.

One guy I know complains quite a lot.  He made a comment this week that kind of irked me. He posted a meme with some sort of “breaking now” kind of headline and the wrote, “you saw this coming, why didnt you read the writing on the wall?”  His response, like that of many Americans, just seems out of place to me.

I wrote back to him as lovingly as I could:

Dear ________,

I appreciate you, love your sense of humour and know that if we ever hung out we would probably have a ball.  You are an important person to me and I would never want to extend any disrespect.  That said,  I will ever understand why you or any american for that matter, would decry the state of your nation.

It is no secret that  30 years of Neo liberalism made all Americans this way. Republican or democrat, all of you, and I mean ALL of you, even the ones who say they believe in equality and justice and all that shit, have believed, for decades, that individualism and the pursuit of the almighty dollar are central to your being.  Deceit, covert activity and a strange kind of moral duality are central to most American business models. To make it all palatable, Americans have always created euphemisms to allow words like deceit to be changed into  “strategic planning” or, one of my favourites “collateral damage” to justify the murder of innocent people during war.

Your nation sets the global example by employing the corporate model for business.  We all know that corporations have been defined as psychopathic entities.  If these organizations are at the heart of your nation’s economic plan, why would you expect anything other than what you have right now.  A psychopath who runs a corporation is now running your country.  It makes perfect sense.  It’s poetic and all of the hate and lies he brings to the table are in keeping with decades of hate and lies that have been promulgated by your past leaders.  The only difference is that, before, everythign was covert.  Now it is out in the open.

Add to this fact that pretty much every home owner in North America is complicit in the theft of aboriginal lands and the use of property speculation for human subjugation and you have the recipe for Trump Stew.  You guys made it, now you gotta eat it or toss it out.  Tossing it out means completely destroying the current America and replacing it with a new one.  I don’t think that’s going to happen too soon.  If anything, America will move back to Deep State Politics from the current Shallow State politics that have pulled back the curtain on reality, but nothing will really change.  Too many people make money selling guns and war, which are also central to American ideology.

I don’t know how the rest of us are supposed to take Americans seriously when they complain about Trump and what he is “doing” to your nation.  He is the manifestation of everything Americans have come to represent and aspired to being.  Your should be proud, this is the society that you have been building your entire lives.

Your nation is built on stolen land, your global dominance has come on the heels of your destruction of democratically elected governments in countess other countries that don’t follow your economic ethos and your most powerful and influential people have all acquired their fortunes through subjugation and manipulation.

We tell our children that there is no honour in theft  and deception and yet Americans hold up those who do it and place them in your highest offices. You respect the billionaires.  You all want to be one.  There is a saying that all Americans, even the poor ones, consider themselves temporarily inconvenienced millionaires which is why poor red neck republicans would rather vote to shoot themselves in the foot rather than vote for any kind of real social reform.  That’s too communist.

Then Americans try to ignore the reasons why things got so fucked up and try to blame it on something else.  There is nothing else.  This America is the real America.  The only thing that is missing, in my opinion, is the veil of decency that allowed previous leaders and captains of industry to pull the wool over everyone’s eyes more easily.  Deep State politics.

I think it was Tyler Durdin in Fight Club that said, “You are nothing until you have lost everything.”

Having lived under the thumb of Americans all my life, lost jobs to them, gotten paid less than them, suffered ridicule by them and never being able to work there, I know this one thing to be true.

America is now Ancient Rome and Trump is your Romulus Augustulus.

Crypto Fascists

One of his friends answered me, in a singular german expression “Lech Mich”, to which I asked him if he was clean.  He proceeded to throw ad hominem ttacks at me and tell me that my arguments were facile, juvenile and a raft other insults.  I engged him for as ong as I could bear and then he just slinked away.  When someone slinks away like that, I know that they must be a Republican, an agent provocateur or some sort of Crypto Fascist and I move on.

It is so important no to allow yourself to be diverted from what is actually going on.  While everybody is immersed in their news feeds, laws are being passed.  I think it might be better to do less complaining and more campaigning, if, indeed, the complainers are interested in manifesting some sort of real change.  But is change what Americans really want.  And what sort of change?  Do they want to change from being capitalists to socialists?  Somehow, I just dont think so and even if they did, they would hve to undo 65 yers of programming.  We are talkong aobut some serious time management if it is going to happen in a single generation.

The Republican Agenda

Correct me if I ‘m wrong…

America’s two party system is about the normalization of slavery to increase profit. Republicans seem to push for anti abortion and “right to life” positions because it provides a platform for the creation of more worker and consumer “units”.

After a person is born they are required, immediately, to struggle as they grow up so as to instill the work ethic.

They remove education so that the unit cannot define hardship nor understand subjugation.

They pollute their environment so as to create more revenue for the medical industry.

Then, as the pressure of over work and under pay takes its toll, the units are required to pay for the services that keep them alive thereby always paying out and never being a drain on the corporate profiteering agenda.

If a unit can’t break free and can’t afford to invest in their health, then they are left to self exterminate and the new batch of young, unbroken, units comes to take their place to repeat the cycle.

That’s what I think, based on what I’ve witnessed. Am I wrong?

The Age of Connectivity

The Long Clap

This weeks song is called “The Long Clap”.  I watched Dumpolina’s address to Congress and was completely floored by his attempt to steer the focus away from all of his other problems by diverting attention to  the widow of a serviceman who got killed because of his lack of vision, leadership and control.  The speech itself made gratuitous statements about condemning hate and violence which makes no sense because any leader would know and understand that behaviour such as his would result in such outcomes.  Anyhow.  I hope you like the song.  Brian was sick this week, so you will have to put up with my very basic bass playing. With out further delay…

A Place Called ‘Other’

Last night we wanted to shoot a little video on my wife’s phone, but the phone, which didn’t have any photos or video on it, told us that there was no more memory.  Upon further investigation it was discovered that the phone’s memory was full of 5.1 GB of something called “Other”.  Apparently unknown third parties are allowed to harvest and store information about you and your connected activity on YOUR phone for future use so that they can monitor your every thought, keystroke and movement so that they can sell you shit you don’t need.  This data gets stored in the ubiquitous category of “Other” and eats up your memory over time if you don’t know about it, or how to delete it.  I didn’t and it destroyed our one fun evening this week.  So much for technology improving our lives!

There is no easy way to remove this data and you can’t open the data and look at it either.  To clear the memory, it is a four fold process and can take a substantial amount of time.  First you have to back up the phone.  It is not clear if doing this also backs up the data, or some reduced form of it that will relaunch later, contained in the “Other” category.  Once you have backed up the phone you then need to “Reset” the phone which means erasing it completely and reinstalling the iOS.  Once you have done this you need to “Restore” the phone from the backup.

Here’s the great part.  When restoring the phone from the backup you will be prompted to enter a password, but there was no password.  One had never been created.  The phone had a PIN code, but that didn’t work.  The phone was asking for a password that wasn’t created and didn’t exist.  When backing up an iPhone, the software in iTunes  does not ask you to create a password.  Apparently you are expected, without any guidance, to select the  “encrypted” option when creating the backup so that you CAN create one.  Once again, there is no prompt or info that points this out.  It is a trial and error kind of thing, like most digital crap out there.  The age of “connectivity” is well upon us and while one would like to think that this connectivity relates, in a positive way, to humans connecting to each other, it does not.  It actually means connectivity to a network and networks that seem to be there to isolate us as much as possible and capitalize on our time by creating frustrating connectivity paradigms that we will inevitably spend money on more apps and services trying to correct.

I go on about his a lot.  But enough about my point of view.  This next video pretty much says it all and I will be pasting it every where I go as I prepare to distance myself, and my child, from  the dysfunctional reality of the digital paradigm and the people who allow it’s superficiality to wash over their lives.

Going Off Grid

Sure I will continue to use the internet, but increasingly on my terms.  I no longer use FB to do recreational things.  I read articles but only from sites that I know aren’t loading massive numbers of cookies into my system. I will begin to develop a more stealth like approach which will probably involve pro VPN and really just turning the stuff off or leaving it at home when I travel.  Customs can’t check my phone if I don’t have one. Facebook and Twitter aren’t returning the increase in audience and the “sales” of my products that I was hoping for with out shovelling large quantities of cash at them, so I might turn them off too.  Maybe it’s time to change direction, return to analogue, go rural.

I got hundreds of tapes and DVD’s I collected over the years I could watch in my isolation.   I’ll pay to go see a new movie, just to stay up to date and get out of the sanctuary I may find for myself and my family one day. But the truth is that I have become bored of sitting around watching, even if it is only for an hour or two a day.  I’d rather be doing.  I’ve always considered myself a trendsetter. Maybe being a luddite with a hammer is the next trend.

Simple truth.  You can’t be tracked by GPS if you are not carrying one.  I never wear a watch but I always know what time it is.  Does anybody actually need Twitter, except for Twitler?

Speaking of  Twitter, here is a video about Twitter’s new “rules”.  Trigger warning for those who don’t like bad language, personally, I think he’s hilarious.

The Destruction of Real Time Connectivity

The last four years we have been living in Vancouver have been an expansive exercise in connectivity, both real time and virtual. Of all the cities I have lived in around the world, this city proves to be the most challenging when trying to make social connections in the local community.  At least for an active guy my age.

Never before have I encountered such resistance to collective gatherings in public spaces that aren’t controlled by some authority or other. In addition, increasing the volume of friends in the social network real time is like fumbling with the tumbler of a combination lock.

**As a matter of note I am dictating to my phone and spellcheck decided to re-spell the word ‘tumbler’ with the product name “Tumblr” which is not a word but a website. That is not what I was referring to. The word is ‘tumbler’, defined as the mechanism that drives a combination lock.  I find it disconcerting that a corporate social communications tool seems to believe it’s okay to replace proper words with corporate logos and identifiers.  Algorithm specialists will argue that people today use the brand-name Tumblr more often than the word tumbler and so it comes up as a matter of convenience for people ho are using those things AND LOVE IT. I get that.  But I do not want my articles to be peppered with misspellings and misuse of language through spellcheck because of some corporate agenda.  I know I will lose this fight, because we live in The Dumb Ages and there is a huge backlash against intelligence, knowledge and facts, but at least I am aware of the fight.

And there in lies the definition of the problem at hand. Our lexicon is being changed by the Internet and the corporations that dominate it.  We are being forced to use new vernacular in an attempt to re-define what it is to be social and connected in your activity.  While a very few benefit from it, I see alot of social carnage.  Two moms that I know have decided to stop using digital media and have reverted to using the telephone with the curly cable on it.

It is positively Orwellian.  Oh wait. I’ve said that before and it’s all over the internet too.  So people know.

But I want to know who is deciding what the new words will be? Someone has to write the algorithm that makes the decision. Will we eventually use the term “double plus good?” To describe a reduction as a perceived increase. To make the increase a negative and to make the decrease a positive.

We all want to be positive and it follows that if you defy or question the negative you are being, well, negative.  Or….never mind.

If decreasing things is good then we become self deleting and are thankful for the opportunity to be that way.  That seems wrong to me.

In this “Age of Connectivity” I yearn for the interpersonal contact I used to have.  Recently I had a rare chance to sit with some other parents and just talk about all the stuff coming out of America and how we are a all concerned about in what manner it will impact our children.  We all felt better afterwards for being able to get it off our chests.  We discovered that we all have the same concerns.

It is most interesting to note that this meeting happened at the home of one of the people who had decided to give up their mobile phone.  We still find each other when ever we need to.  Connectivity in real time is out there if you want it. Having a phone in your hand all the time is not actually necessary at all. Unless, of course, your are using it to read my blog, watch my videos and order custom songs from me.

Then it is imperative to have one.

The Media Jungle

This weeks song was an epic creation.  More so than any of the others, We used the green screen in my garage studio and pretty much decided it was all going to be single takes. Only one chance to get each shot right  There ended up being 14 shots.  As usual, the song was written this morning around 9 am.  Audio recording from 10 until 4, camera from 5 until 8 and then editing from 8 until 3.  Outputting the video and uploading to YouTube takes about an hour and it is in that time that I finalize the blog and hope that nothing goes wrong, like titles getting misspelled, because at hour 16, fatigue starts to get to you and you stop seeing everything.

I just felt that I needed to tell you that.  I don’t get to sleep until 5 am on production day, so the whole thing takes about 20 hours. And so, with out further delay, i present this week’s musical news recap titled “Media Jungle”.  Brian got a haircut for this video and, of course, I fed him a sandwich for his incredible bass playing skills.

There are 6 songs in this playlist now…listen to them all!

OK., I’m going to say it, it has to be said

The Dumpster, whether intentionally or not,  stumbled upon the perfect formula for the perfect reality TV show. By seizing the White House and the presidency of the United States, he has managed to put himself in the next logical place for anybody who pursues a career in the entertainment industry.

What better place to launch your next show then from the White House of the government of the United States?

Since his arrival, Artists all over the world have answered to the call. He has made it so inexorably impossible to deny the creation of the messages that must be sent to counter his reckless acts.  Every day provides new inspiration, comics can’t help but feel a misplaced gratitude for the audaciousness of this period in history.  There is a lot of shitty stuff going on.  For me, the only way to deal with it is through comedy.  It’s kind of like therapy.

Saturday Night Live has a bigger viewership than ever before. The blogosphere has erupted in a frenzy of activity, satirizing, analyzing, commenting, condemning or commending his very actions. Musicians, Cartoonists, Animators, Film Makers and creators of every sort have all taken to speaking their minds through their art. Even the Republicans have joined the show by claiming to be offended by The Duminator’s actions.  We all know it’s a set up for the next President to replace him, Vice President ProPensity.  It is every writer’s dream.  A story that writes itself.

I am certain that many artists ask themselves, “How can I create a show that dominates the world stage?”

“I want the top players in my show, people at the top of their game. People who other people respect and want to listen to or hate with every ounce of their being.”

The Biggest Show on Earth

Princess Dumpolina has, whether we want to believe it or not, activated the artistic integrity of every artist on the planet.  Maybe, just maybe, he’s not as stupid as we think. Perhaps this was his plan all along?  Of course, none of us would ever want to admit that. Is his crass, seemingl uneducted exterior merely a cover?

It is here where I disappear into the ether as a puff of smoke. But not before saying this.

I’m a writer  and creator and am always looking for my next big break. I want to believe that the collection of stories and projects that I have accumulated will help me to realize that end. Of course I don’t have the money that old Dumpy has to buy the advertising. But if I did, would I not try to attempt the same thing, just for the sheer audacity of it?

What a cool thing to talk about with your friends at the bar while you knock back beers and say “Yep I opened my biggest show from the White House to a global audience”. I don’t really know how much bigger you can get in the entertainment industry.

But the question will always remain, is this how we are now going to govern?

God, I hope not. Entertainment is not and never will be a guide to good governance. Well… maybe it is… in a dystopian novel about the de-evolution of humanity.  If it really has to be this way, can we at least have Jon Stewart as President?

Handcrusher

It’s been a month since I started blogging.  I decided this week to stay away from news, but, despite my efforts, I still had some things get in my face.  My favourite event of the week was the handshake showdown between The Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, and that thing down in the States that they are calling POTUS.  This week’s song is called “Hand Crusher” and once again features Brian Knox McGugan on bass.

So today’s blog is a follow on from my first blog of four weeks ago, “My Digital Future” where I talked about “the paradox of progress”.  In the month that has elapsed I have, of course, had to use computers and devices because, whether we want it or not, these infernal machines and the industry attached to them, foist their will upon us.  It is increasingly difficult to exist without one.  I can’t make songs and videos or write this blog without one, so I am self flagellating in that regard.  If I had the cash,  would probably drop out in a heartbeat to live in a little solar powered cabin in the forest some where.

This week WordPress decided to update it’s interface and once again I have spent hours trying to find out where everything is.  My iPhone constantly asks me if I want to upgrade to the latest version.  The only options are “Yes” and  “Later”.  If you click on “Later” it brings up another window asking for your phone’s password so that it can update, later, while you are sleeping.  “No thanks” is not an option.  Push notifications always cover something I am working on.  If I don’t get the swipe right, it takes me away from what I am doing and forces me to look at it.  But enough of that.  Let’s just get on with some good old time solutions, shall we?

The Dungeon in my Mind

As I wrestle yet again with another wave of upgrades, website and software failures I discover that my subconscious has started to build a room.  It is a dark, dank room deep inside the basement of my mind.  It is lined with ancient bricks and has an iron maiden hanging in the corner. There is a table or workbench that contains a whole host of 9th century torture tools.

As I encounter each new electronic incursion into my life, I imagine having a dungeon full of shackled app and software programmers, each waiting to be introduced to Dave’s Digital Inquisition. My questions are simple and freedom is imminent if the answers prove truthful or helpful. Else wise I seek to change their approach by subjecting them to the very frustrations I have, 10 fold.  It’s my imagination, I can do what ever I want in there.

I ready the fire and place the pokers neat to the embers so that they can’t actually get hot.  I don’t actually want to hurt anybody, I just want to know if these people feel anything.  Do they think of the ramifications of the paradox they are building?  How do you make them think about it?  How do you make them feel even just a tiny bit guilty and make them care?  And then it dawns on me…well torture, of course.

We know that torture doesn’t actually work. When subjected to agony anybody will say anything just to get out of the chamber. But still, there is something satisfying about watching a good revenge movie that I think everybody likes.  So before you start freaking out, understand that there is worse stuff on Netflix than is presented in my little foray into darkness here.  I watched the first episode of “Santa Clarita Diet” with my wife last week and it ended with images that put her off the show completely, so we won’t be watching that again.  But hey, I guess you gotta sell that kind of gore to get viewers in the 21st century and so…

I bring my first digital transgressor to the table.  I have readied “bamboo shoots in the finger nails” for this guy.  He’s the one who decided it would be acceptable to make gifs and movies go full screen in Facebook on a second tap instead of stopping, which is what we all want to happen.  The button choice to stop the playback is a smaller button and harder to hit.  Every time I want to stop the playback I am required to add 2 extra taps to my task.  With each unwanted full screen playback the desire to plunge my steel pokers into the fire and actually make them hot, increases.

I ask my question; “Why?  Why do you make me do all those clicks?  My wrists hurt and the additional clicks are exacerbating my shoulder injury from when I was using  a mouse too much”.  I need an intuitive interface, not a forced compliance interface.

The reedy bespectacled techno dweeb just looks at me with a blank stare while he soils himself, not because he is afraid, but because I haven’t let him use the bathroom yet. The place stinks, but its my own fault, I should have been a more compassionate torture chamber master.  With a smarmy grin on his face he says,  “We need YOU to use all of your data bundle on your cell so the phone company can charge you for extra data AND we must somehow force you to watch the ads.  Even if you don’t see the whole ad it still registers as a click through and a view.  The advertiser is happy and then I get paid”.

His answer leaves me empty.   I think to myself, “How much of my data bundle is sucked up by ads?  Am I paying to watch these ads?  How twisted is that?”.  I continue my interview. “Do you love your job?”  I ask.

“Yes, I love it”, he spurts, a little bit of spittle hanging off of his chin.  Seized by an uncontrollable reflex, I gouge out his eyes with my thumbs. For some reason he doesn’t scream but just laughs at me, so  I cut off his thumbs, knowing how important they are to his use of a digital device.

He sniggers at me and, in between maniacal screams, blurts out “Siri”.  My phone answers him “How can I help?”   With that, I become completely numb and cut out his tongue. For some reason there is no blood and he just continues to snigger and chortle.   In my frustration, I blurt out more questions to my imaginary tongueless, thumbless, eyeless computer dweeb.  “Who gave you the right to do that, or was this a unilateral decision?  Is that your thing? Subjugation?  Is that the kind of person you are? ”

I ask him “do you have any understanding of ‘elegant degradation’?”  To which he responds with undecipherable gobbledygook gook because I have, after all, removed his tongue. And so I give him back all of his body parts and release him knowing that he will tell probably the police and my days of freedom will come to an end.

I snap out of my dream state and take stock of what this reality is doing to me. I wonder if I am alone in this or if others experience the same ennui.  This constant, ever shifting library ladder of life that only seems to move sideways.  I want to go straight up, not sideways.

I want spend less time on machines.

The Path of Least Resistance

All those years ago, I had an objective in mind and I plotted a path on how to get there.  I never expected that I would encounter so many forced deviations that would derail my chosen path and force me to select a new one that is no where near the objective I had in mind.   It feels like cultural appropriation at the hands of programmers.

You see, I want human connectivity to be free because, before the internet came along, it was.  The internet and the people who run it, are intent on making us all miserable for their personal gain.  Connectivity is what keeps us all sane and healthy. As this video explains, addiction in our society (to drugs, to phones, to sex, to whatever you use to fill the gap) is caused by a general lack of connectivity.

I don’t want my audience to grow because some click farm in The Phillipines has given me 250,000 likes for a price.  I want to develop my audience old skool, person to person, but the internet won’t let me, it’s profit model is constructed around isolating people under the illusion of connectivity.  My accessibility to a public is completely dictated by how much money I spend on any one of a number of advertising services. Today you have to pay an admission fee to get social connectivity and that fee is not only paid in cash but time as well.  Those who can’t afford the price of admission are more than likely going to become addicted to something. So my imaginary torture of the aforementioned dweeb programmer was really in the best interests of humanity because the programmer is the pusher in our school yard.  It’s time to stop the programmers from destroying our world while they proclaim that they are actually saving it.

When I was young, I used to hand out flyers and mail parcels to people to get them to come to my shows or book me on tour in far off lands.  There was something real about a piece of mail and a phone call.  But today, every way I turn, it’s all, “You don’t want to do it that way, you want to do it this way”.

But I don’t want to do it their way.  In the creative world, forced compliance is not an option, it stifles innovation.  I will not be assimilated.  Of course, i haven’t worked out my alternate plan just yet, but I become increasingly more motivated to do so with each day that passes and every upgrade I must endure.

If anyone has ideas about this, I am all ears.

In the Lie of the Beholder

 

When confronting things that challenge me I often turn to song because the words flow out pretty quickly when I latch on to an idea.   Put on your headphones, turn up the bass!

Lyrics also help to keep things compact, useless words get dumped to meet a rhythmic need.  Syncopation is everything.  So, without further delay, here is my song for this week.  20 minutes to write it, one topic.  I asked my friend Brian Knox McGugan to come over to my micro studio and play bass. He’s a really great bass player and it was a great pleasure to have him on this.  McGoog, I still owe you a sandwich.

 

Meanwhile, in Canada…

I have been going on about American politics in these last couple of blogs because, well, some things just can’t be avoided.  The Dumptard dominates the news cycle no matter how much I try to adjust my algorithm by searching for pictures of cats and sour mash recipes.  The behaviour that takes place in the American political arena often goes on to be emulated in other nations.  It’s been going on for decades, but this recent shit show, which started with Brexit, is now trying to make a guest appearance in France, Germany and Holland, and a few other countries like some sort of idiocratic infection.  Is this the zombie apocalypse?!

Even here in polite, easy going Canada we have people who are eager to cash in on the new fear of chaos craze.   I don’t mention their names because I choose not to give them and their ideas any publicity what so ever.  It’s as if some stranger is standing in the middle of the street, yelling, “Let’s replace one group of rich liars with another, different, group of rich liars because the first batch of liars can’t be trusted to lie correctly anymore”. And the crowd is going “what?  Yea? Yeah!”.  People on that side if things believe it to be a working class revolution, but I think it is just a transition of power from the political class to the financial class, if there even is a difference beyond the lack of manners the latter seems to celebrate jubilantly.

Which brings me to the recent actions of our Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, to whom I would speak directly should he ever read my blog.  I have been a big fan of Justin because, in the beginning days, he made good on a lot of the things he promised.  I’m a Dad, so I wanted to believe. His behaviour filled me with hope and joy that my kid would have a chance at growing up in a tolerant and responsible Canada that celebrates it’s diversity.   Many good things happened in the wake of the election, the most relevant of which was his promise to bring 25, 000 Syrian refugees to our shores before a specified date.  He missed the date, but still managed to get that, and many other seemingly cosmetic things, done swiftly.  There were great photo ops of him greeting the refugees at the airport and we cheered him on.  They were great days because we all felt that our national identity as a peaceful and loving nation had been rebooted after the decimation wrought by Sinister Stephen The Dark.  But there is always a huge difference between the small short term stuff and the big long term stuff.  Justin is tripping over the big stuff.

First Past the Post

Justin decided, last week, to say no to electoral reform even though it was central to his being elected.  Here is a video from last October of him declaring he will end first-past-the-post over and over again during the election cycle.  The thing to observe is how sincere he sounds and how nice his clothing is.  All very convincing.  However, despite the media image, sometimes Justin’s speaking ability sounds a little stilted and rehearsed, as if coached.   When juxtaposed to his current position, he just sounds like a big fat liar, albeit a nicely groomed one who is getting better at convincing people that his pants aren’t actually on fire.

Yes, we all hated the Mad King Harper and wanted him gone, so Trudeau could have said almost anything and gotten elected.  As Canadians we had a mission to dethrone a destructive despot, have decency reinstalled as our central virtue and unity as our collective objective. Even though I am an NDP supporter, I gave Justin my vote, strategically, along with many of my fellow Canadians, so that he and The Libersls could put an end to The Harper Scorched Earth Regime.

But, for most of us, who are to Liberals, electoral reform was top of the list and I believe we have consensus here, on this. Electoral reform was the most important promise because it was about changing the system that allowed our previous tinpot dictator to stay in power for so long, repeatedly proroguing parliament with a minority of votes and wrecking our country like some spoiled child.  Ejecting Harper, his cronyism and the system that put him in power remains at the top of our countries priorities.  The challenge is that, now Justin is in power, he seems bent on taking up the same dishonest position as Harper in order to hold onto power.  Don’t they all?  Have we been here before? Duh?!

What is Leadership?

My question will always be; is this the kind of leadership our children should be exposed to?  Is it, in fact, a statement by the current government that lying to get what you want is okay?  The American Trumpocaplyse is a direct result of people being fed up with the limited selection of creatures crawling out of their two party swamp.  The election of the Dumpomaniac has exposed the core of America’s soul.  That lying is not only necessary, but expected.  The ongoing cries of disgust and protest seem to me to be ill founded when it is, and always has been, in America’s nature to lie and deceive.

As Canadians, we have constantly suffered from the cultural onslaught created by  “American Exceptionalism”.  When I was a kid, American television programming was so successful that when I was 16 years old, I once asked my Dad when Canada would finally become one of the United States.  Only when I was 20 did I begin to understand how manipulated I had been.  It has been said that whatever happens in America happens in Canada 10 years later. The same is true of Australia, although it takes longer there, probably because of the heat.  I’m not interested in following America on its current path.  People are getting hurt and having their rights taken away.  Whatever it is that they have incubated down there is not, in any way Canadian, and should be kept contained.

Justin has argued briefly, in this video, as to why he is now against pursing Proportional Representation (PR), every Canadian’s preferred system. He went  into it more in-depth here when speaking at a town hall in Yellowknife earlier today, but I remain unconvinced.

He speaks of a three party system being the strongest way to represent individual Canadian voices, but his reasoning doesn’t make sense to me.  It would suggest that you must join one of the three parties even if none of the parties offer policies that you can get behind or disagree with, like the ongoing violation of indigenous land rights.  He says this system allows our individual voices to be heard, but as long as oil and the private interests of millionaires continue to dominate our political system, those of us who have reached real consensus about how  our country should be governed will NOT be heard.

Canada has 18 registered political parties.  I favour the idea of rule by coalition governments because those kinds of governments, made up of smaller groups of people, MUST cooperate in order to advance.  There is a simple truth that Absolute power corrupts absolutely.  Once in power, people like to stay in power and then they begin to make it harder for the people they serve to remove them from power.   21 of 28 countries in Western Europe use Proportional Representation, including Germany, which, last i looked, was the most powerful nation in Europe with the most prosperous economy.  There is no reason to be afraid of this transition, it has been proven to work.  And they have accepted over a million refugees.  If anything PR brings us closer to unity because so many of our allies use it.  The only reasons to deny it would be opportunistic.

Confront Anxiety, Deal With Root Causes

Finally, like all politicians, Justin has decided to use fear to justify the reversal of his promise.  He is now suggesting that it will fragment our democracy, giving rise to ultra right parties that may well pursue Trumpian Policies.

I don’t buy tickets on the fear train.  As Canadians, I think we are better than that.  I am disappointed that Justin has decided to turn to fear as a motivator.   When he spoke to the UN for the first time last September, he warned repeatedly about politicians exploiting anxiety for personal gain,  He said, speaking of initiatives his government had taken, “We have done all of this…because we believe we should confront anxiety with a clear plan to deal with its root causes”.  And yet, fear and anxiety is what he cultivates now to explain why he changed his mind.  The root cause is directly in front of us and I’d like to know what Justin thinks the clear plan to deal with this is.

We are supposed to teach our kids to be good people and to tell the truth. Maybe we need to reassess that outlook.  Perhaps we should explain to our children that if you are rich and come from a privileged background, lying is okay because you can afford nice clothes and buy your way out of trouble.  Should we explain that only people who are NOT millionaires must always tell the truth?  I want a system where every vote counts.

That is the only real democracy.

 

Welcome to the Trumpocalypse!

I managed to write a musical news recap about an hour ago and decided, for the second week in a row to open my blog with it.  So here goes…

Woo Hoo, week 2 of President Trumpocalypse’s America has passed and we have ever so much more to talk about! If you are up for talking that is… my discovery this week is that many out there are angry, but nobody wants to talk. All they want to do is rant and rave and belittle people who don’t agree with them instead of engage in some sort of constructive dialogue that might see us coming up with some sort of solution.

What is ‘Agent Provacateur’, for 500 points?

Robert Reich, Former United States Secretary of Labor, has told us that he believes the violent demonstrators at the Berkeley protest on Wednesday were in fact, right wingers who had infiltrated the left.

Dario Fo wrote about it in his 1969 play “The Accidental Death of an Anarchist”. A great play to read because it has two endings and you have to decide for yourself which one is more effective. Synopsis and Spoilers are here. There are several film versions on line, this one seems quite good.

It is a standard tactic of the right to use the ‘agent provocateur’ to create circumstances where the state can demand greater repressive power. I have no doubt that this is one of those situations and that we will see more of them. We must always see violent acts like these for what they are, an attempt to destroy the credibility of the left by right wingers passing themselves off as left wingers.

My Encounter with Sean

“Sean” is an angry guy. His profile picture says “Fuck Donald Trump”. Apparently he is left wing and believes that we need to be as violent as the forces we are fighting. He believes that you have to attack in the same manner as your adversary.

If you are a left winger who believes that there are other more effective ways to fight this battle, Sean won’t listen to any of it. He’s made up his mind and his catch phrase is “We disagree. We should agree to disagree”. He said “I dont know you. Your point of view is yours and mine is mine. I’m not hear to change your mind”. Such a position is a complete denial of what it is to be defined as progressive left. He also said “I’m too sick to do this with you today” which led me to ask him why he was here, ding this. I mused to myself that he was getting paid to enter conversations and disrupt them, which is a tactic straight out of the CIA’s 1940 manual on “Simple Field Sabotage”. He gave me the laugh emoticon and said “I’m still waiting for that cheque.”

To me, Sean is a strategic instrument put in play by my adversary, whether Sean realizes it or not. In order to win the day, I need to neutralize his effectiveness at disruption through an alternative, more covert means. Of course his presence needs to be scrutinized so that we may discover, once and for all, if he is a member of the Black Bloc, that mysterious group of hoodlums that show up at every protest to make sure it turns into a riot that gets blamed on the Left.

I asked the host of the thread if she knew this guy, which she did.  In the world of social media we can only trust that our friends are real friends, vetting their own friends so we know who we are dealing with. Which reminds me, mental note…*go back, look at friends list, cull where necessary*. I have many known right wingers in my feed. I keep them there to keep my news feed balanced and provide me points of views I would not normally have exposure to.  It is very educational and gives an understanding of what is actually going on out there. On occassion, I jetison a few of them because there is only so much engagement you can endure before it becomes counter productive.  I’ll do it as long as it is fun.

I believe that debate is what makes us stronger, particularily with strangers.  The ability to stay open minded is the challenge, you have to do it all the time.

I’ve said it before, it is my mantra, “my mind can be changed if you present an irrefutable argument”.  Not knowing someone and having an exchange gives me greater insight into the challenges we face as a species.  If Sean “doesn’t have time for it” and is incapable of changing his mind, then perhaps Sean should change his profile picture to say  “Fuck Sean” because he behaves exactly as Donald Trump does and, in the end he ends up being no better than the person he is condemning.

True or False?

Fear as a Motivator

We all know that Fear is the single most destructive tool by which to try and sway public opinion.  We know it can be effective.  Students of history have countless examples of how despots manipulate populations. Chile, Argentina, The Phillipines, and 33 other countries have had their governments overthrown by the USA.  It seemed inevitable that the American government would one day be overthrown, what goes around comes around, I guess.

I myself have witnessed numerous points in history where some sort of calamity has been thrust upon the public consciousness, finance plunged into chaos and long term personal objectives decimated. Naomi Klein tells us in “The Shock Doctrine” that these “shocks” to the system always generate emotional reactions that lead to a change of power. By design, these shocks allow government to introduce unpopular legislation that people don’t notice because they are too busy picking themselves up and rebuilding.

There is even a list you can reference. My first shock came at 26 in 1987 with Black Monday, in 1992 with Black Wednesday, 9/11 in 2001 , The Financial Crisis of 2008 , and, in 2016, The Election of a Dumpster. It is interesting to note that all of these events occur between 6 and 8 years apart as if to subjugate any new optimistic 25 year old that may be around at the time..

I’m a comedian, so I’m always looking for a reaction. My approach, during times like these, is to call out anyone I know who feeds the cycle of fear and question the rationale behind their actions.  Why create an echo chamber for information that is designed to incite fear?

My Friend Steve

My Friend “Steve” recently re posted an article published by the Independent that had the headline “China says War is a practical reality.”  I commented on his post and asked him, “What are we supposed to do now? Crawl under our beds? Huddle together under blankets? Fret, Lament? What good could that possibly do anyone? What do you hope to achieve by reposting this headline?”

He responded “fear has always been a good motivator, knowledge may help us. Awareness is necessary”. I agreed with him on the last two points but the fear thing, well, I’ve never been sold on the fear thing. I told him what i think in a short play:

Steve: “The world is going to shit”
Me: “Is that what you want?
Steve: “No, of course not”
Me: “Then why give that idea publicity? You only publicize something when you are trying to sell it.”

Just like the Agent Provocatuer, The Fear Monger is operating using the same skill set as the adversary, which, once again, puts them in the same category as the person or people they are supposed to be against.

Maybe we shouldn’t define people as right or left any more because these are old 20th century terms. I don’t think Conservative or Liberal work any more either, because both sides of that coin provide similar results; profit at the expense of the human condition.

I think it would be better to  refer to people Harmonists or Exploitationists.  It’s a far more revealling definiton and much easier to identify who is who simply based on behaviour.  Up until this point in history the more you defied nature, the more money you made.

If you are have a closed mind and choose to use violence in any form to push forward your ideas, you’re an exploitationist and that puts you in the same league as the people you’re fighting. The Exploitationists should open a club and call it “You’re hitting yourself, You’re hitting yourself”.

Brighter Futures

On the brighter side of life, I saw many moments where humanity celebrated itself despite all efforts of the dark side to rain on the parade. Christians and Jews formed protective rings around Mosques.   A friend of mine recounted an inspirational story on FB about how young students at the school he teaches at rallied to assist a young Syrian boy who had just arrived and couldn’t speak english yet. And then there this was this ad from Danish Television, which chokes me up every time I watch it.

My advice, when engaging anybody in a potential debate, is to frame the investigation of controversy as a question.  It lets the other person create an argument and is less likely to result in pointless ad hominem attacks and potential de- friending (is that even a word?).  Ask questions and listen.  Too many people are members of the knee jerk reaction club, waiting to speak but not hearing what is being said.  We need to unify if we are going to make any progress.  Remember, it’s time to stand up and fight, in a peaceful, non violent, don’t get arrested kind of way.

See you next week!

 

 

Losing my Patience

This week, to take the pressure off, I will start with a song.

Like many of you, I have been reading too much news lately and decided the best way to channel all the exasperation was to write it into a song. It spilled out of me this morning, so I decided to record it and put it here with my blog. It’s a one day video from start to finish. It is my hope to keep it up and report other news too. This week, though, was dominated by the Orange one and his onslaught of change and carnage. There were the women’s marches around the globe, a few cat gifs, nostalgia and some random slapstick. I managed to get myself into a few sticky situations with some of my posts, but i was properly schooled and have remedied things where I can. I’m just a guy, but my mind can be changed if you got enough substantiated facts.

Wow, it’s only been one week since The Dumpster became America’s new president. In the space of seven days, The Dumpinator signed numerous executive orders, including; pushing thru the Dakota Access and Keystone XL pipelines, defunding the Endowment for the Arts and the Endowment for The Humanities, and, perhaps his most demented and destructive act, issuing a “gag order” against any and all international organizations that receive funding from the American government for sex education and birth control should they mention the word abortion.

Yeah, punish those countries by allowing their birth rate to soar and plunge millions into poverty. Good plan…not.

He has decided to enter into a trade war with Australia and I’m sure there will be many more trade wars on his agenda.

To top it off he expressed a desire to withdraw from the United Nations, the very organization that has kept us  as a planet away from each others throats for over 70 years.

There have been federal arrests of media personnel covering the unrest surrounding the inauguration to send a message to the press; Princess Dumpolina is not to be trifled with.

There is a strategy afoot, being put in play by his Press Secretary, to provide as much disinformation as possible so that the American public, and the rest of the global population, become so confused and overwhelmed by the volume of misinformation, that they become exhausted and just decide to withdraw from the political arena altogether to go huddle together under a blanket with a flashlight.

And, of course, he is redirecting federal funds to begin building his wall.  No surprise there. Of course it will have to be a 30,000 foot wall, border to border, coast to coast, to stop all of the legal visitors to America that may overstay their visas.  Which apparently he did yesterday, in one day, by knocking back visa and green card holders who arrive in the USA by air.

Oh yeah, and he turned off the Spanish part of the White House website which Alienates 13% of the population that speaks Spanish and 50% of the population that find their roots in Latin American countries

Ok.  A bunch of dark, fact checked news, in a quick, superficial recap. Not very funny, but I’m working on that.

Despite all this, for some reason, I can not bring myself to become depressed about it. If anything, it has activated my spirit and set in motion my will to overcome.   I want my family to grow up in an environment where decency is the order of the day.

Human beings, and artists in particular, are at their best when faced with obstacles that confront the human condition.  The recent sequence of unfortunate events will transform us and, as a group, working through social circles, we shall move forward to be the change we want to see. We shall exist outside government, because it would appear that government is no longer in the best interests of the people. The people it was created to serve.

We have entered another renaissance and, with it, a chance to move forward to think and live outside of the paradigm we are being presented by the mainstream media. I’ve said it before and I will say it again, the press is not our friend. While it is important to support the press and maintain freedom of speech we must also understand that they too have been guilty of disseminating disinformation to service other agendas that are equally distasteful to our current circumstances.

I think it can be said that if you know and understand your adversary’s strategy, it is possible to formulate and implement a counterstrategy.  I think it is safe to say that most people of reasonable intellect believe unity is the glue that holds our world together.  I also believe that the majority of the worlds population want peace and stability.

The men in The Dumpaholic’s cabinet are from an era which is experiencing it’s last death pangs. Men who still remember, or have connections with people who remember, the Second World War and the industrialization that followed. They are the leftovers of a dying 20th century psychology where “to the victor go the spoils”.

When these men have shuffled off this mortal coil, there will be a new generation of leaders. Who those leaders are and where they come from begins today.

But that’s enough of that.  It’s time to wrap this up.

Two days ago, I posted a video of a comedy routine by Steve Hughes. It showed up in my feed.  I know his name from comedy circles, so I watched, laughed and shared.  Some people started to discuss Hughes point of view, pro and con.   After a day or so, a friend then told me that the meme I had shared had been posted by a known White Supremacist who had recently been banned by Twitter.  Several excellent conversations had started on the thread, attached to the meme, that dealt with political correctness. In my haste, I deleted the post, not wanting to echo his name and give his cause a voice.  But I lost the conversations and some great points were made.  Lesson learned?  Always check to see who posted what your reposting.

Oh, yeah, and Facebook reminded me that I did this ad 16 years ago.
See you next week!

Actors Making Statements

 

This meme was floating around the internet in reaction to Meryl Streep’s fantastic acceptance speech at the Golden Golden Globe awards.  It is a great  example of just how out of touch some people actually are.

Recently I had a conversation with someone who was quite upset about Meryl Streep’s acceptance speech at the 2017 Golden Globe Awards. He said that celebrities, artists and actors had no place making political statements. He explained that he was a Trump supporter and that now that Trump was president everybody should fall in line.

I couldn’t help but disagree with him because, as much as he’s entitled to his opinion, his opinion was wrong. His opinion was wrong because Donald Trump is a reality TV star and celebrity, and that places him in the dubious position of being in the same category and subject to the same criticism as Meryl Streep.  Maybe that is what he and his supporters want?  No,  “The Dumpster” is trying to silence the media because it hurts his feelings.  But let’s not go there.

Oh… okay… YES, let’s!

Culture vs Entertainment

The difference between the Dumpster and Meryl Streep is best defined by establishing what an artist is to culture and what an entertainer is to entertainment. We live in a pluralistic society and the Yin and Yang of our lives is best represented by this comparison. I, like many people, live on that edge between the two hoping to find a respectable balance.  Call me “middle class”, even if it is only in the modern definition of the word, which, to me, is someone who is trying to be respectable and happy while working and existing in increasingly shrinking domestic circumstances.

I remember Canada back during the free trade negotiations of the early 80s. At the time I was an artistic director of a small theatre company and I found myself arguing, as many artists of the day did, about what the free trade agreement actually meant to the future of Canada’s cultural fabric.

Up until that point in history, Canada’s cultural infrastructure, like that in many western nations, contained socially responsible objectives. In order to get grants, a project had to enrich the community on some level and provide for better collective understanding. That word “collective” of course, is loaded because it suggests group thinking which is, in America, uncomfortably associated with Socialism.  But, I covered that mine field in my last post.

Proponents of the free trade agreement argued that funding the arts was an unfair barrier to trade. It became apparent to many of us that the American idea of culture had been perverted to become entertainment sometime around the mid 70s when the American government started dismantling it’s arts funding infrastructure.

Whereas culture stimulates debate in the community around socially relevant issues, entertainment acts as a diversion, mostly to sell products, but also to instill a specific consumer ideology through immersive propaganda and isolationism. It is not in the interests of the free market to allow artists to present creations that may question the wisdom of materialism, greed, self aggrandizement and consumerism in general.  The business world argues that government should not stand int he way of commerce because it is through commerce that jobs are created.

 
The Dubious Shrinkage of Government

The biggest shift to come out of the 80’s  was a change in what government actually represented. I have always believed that government was there to provide a buffer between the general public and unbridled corporate advancement. Protecting the people from unfair business practices while investing in industry that could create more prosperity.  As Reaganomics and Thatcherism took hold, anything that might impede the growth of capitalism was systematically ridiculed.  The role of government was reduced, unionization vilified and education made less accessible.

After 40 years of Neo liberal attitudes and unregulated free market activity, we now live in an age of “symbolic annihilation”, where the issues we should be aware of, we are not aware of because the media chooses not to focus on those issues.

To acknowledge very real and potentially unmanageable problems goes against everything that the entertainment media represents. In order for the media to operate it must sell advertising to anyone who wishes to buy it, no matter how environmentally destructive or socially debilitating the product is.

The era of privatization and the shrinkage of government meant that corporations were given the right to be self regulating. We were told that the responsibility rested in the hands of the businesses creating the product to make certain that it was not detrimental to the physical or psychological welfare of the population at large.

As governments deregulated the marketplace and reduced the amount of oversight by independent organizations to maintain some degree of social responsibility, we discovered,on many occasions, that some of these corporations were simply not capable of making business decisions that were in the public interest. If anything, a good business plan is about making as much money as you can by convincing people that the product they are buying is a good one whether it is or not.

The result of this was an increase in manipulative advertising, additives to foods to make them taste better, and psychological manipulation that seemed to indicate if you didn’t have the latest and the greatest thing you were out of touch.

I was so proud of Meryl Streep for the statement that she made. An actress born in another era who maintained, with grace, dignity and determination, the values that artists stand for. I expect it is why she won that lifetime achievement award.

If I Had A Million Dollars

As to the idea that rich people shouldn’t pass comment, I offer this. As an actor I know that if I had $10 million I would do what I could to make the lives of people better, (except buy you a real green dress, because that’s cruel). Making life  better for everyone around me is something I have always strived to do and, while I do what i can without money, having money would certainly go a long way to realizing some of my long term social ambitions.

Of course, I would make my own life better and provide a larger house to my family and some conveniences that we’ve never had and hope that my friends and fans could see the reason behind this. We are not excessive people and have found happiness in simplicity, mostly because we have been forced into reduction by the business society that functions around us. Business operators have incrementally removed value for labour from the market place so as to increase profits.  The result is that we eat less food, live in extremely small houses, travel less and can’t really plan any further than the next day.

Actors become rich because their fans buy tickets. The fans buy tickets because they like the work. Meryl Streeps performance in “Sophie’s Choice” won her the Best Female Actor Award in 1982.  When it comes to the political content of a film such as this, the artist must be on board to undertake such portrayal.  To suggest an artist should just act and sing and shut up seems to defy the very nature of art itself, which is what artists pursue, by the way.

Unless you are an entertainer,  then I guess staying product neutral is essential to your livelihood. It becomes okay to endorse something with your presence, directly or indirectly, that may have negative implications on society  because, hey, at least YOU are getting paid, and that’s the most important thing, right?  If you don’t want to listen to what the artist has to say, stop buying the tickets, stop watching the shows.

To me, art has always been the expression of the pursuit of the human condition. Life is never easy, even when you have money.  I believe that the artists are here to help us try and make some sense of this mad world that surrounds us.

We are here to put things in perspective so I don’t have any intention of shutting up about what I believe any time soon.

Watch my video “Confusion” to better understand how this issue make me feel.

My Digital Future

We live in a “Paradox of Progress” where the things that were supposed to make our lives easier have actually made them harder.

The Paradox of Progress…

I sit at my desk with three computers in front of me. All Macs, all laptops. The first one, on the right in the picture, is a G4 purchased in 2004 and contains most of the software that I used during those years, about $35,000 worth, all purchased and registered. It was refitted in 2007 with a new hard drive from a cloned computer after a friend of mine sat on it while on a trip to Australia. Don’t ask how that happened. The operating system on that computer can no longer be upgraded so I treat it with kid gloves. I know I have the original discs around somewhere should I ever need to reload it. It lives in the twilight of the computing age and I love that machine mostly because it actually works pretty fast.

My next computer, in the middle, is a MacBook Pro, purchased in 2009 containing some of the software I could afford to upgrade when I decided to upgrade to the new operating system. It contains about $7,000 of software and effects and, big sigh, gets used on the internet.

Somethings will update. Others will not. I expected, based on my last experience, that I would have until 2014 to make the next shift, but I am elated to discover that this machine is still doing it’s work 2 years past it’s predicted lifespan.

My latest MacBook Pro, on the left, was purchased in 2015. It has limited software loaded on it that allows me to do video editing and audio development only. It is a sleek machine, lighter, faster and smooth to the touch, sometimes I take it to bed to watch movies. I love the way she feels in my hands.

But enough of all that. This post is supposed to be a grumpy post, not an erotic one.

I use my middle computer for going online and I leave my newest computer off-line as much as possible so that it can remain in mint condition. I still use the G4 for many creative tasks but only turn it on when I have a major project that needs something done in software that I can’t afford a modern version of. It is a great visual art machine and I use it to manipulate photos, stills, and animation.  I am a manual kind of guy and enjoy using the G4 to create great things because it let’s me do it on my terms. A hammer is really only a hammer, after all.

When sitting in front of the three computers it’s fascinating to see how each one is slowly dropping off of the Internet to become less functional even though they are in perfect working order. The G4 used to play YouTube videos fine, for years, and surfed all the websites but as the Internet changed and delivery methods evolved, the G4 could go to less and less websites until it became impossible to surf the Internet on that perfectly functioning computer without the pinwheel of death forever taunting you while obese file sizes load.  I was trained in Flash and the idea of  cramming everything into a 16kb file for optimum efficiency.  Today’s internet is making us digitally lazy.

My first generation MacBook Pro is now starting to exhibit the signs of the same kind of detachment from the Internet. It is becoming harder to surf the websites, things take longer to load, and, perhaps most troubling, the amount of advertising that is loading cookies into my processor has become almost unmanageable.  I have cleaned those caches soooooo many times. And email trash, gotta dump the trash else wise trojans could run. And do. Ergggggg.

It is because of cookies and online advertising that I keep my state of the art computer off the Internet as much as possible, surfing only to sites that I really trust.  This is the most concrete advice I can give you if you want to keep your machine lean and mean.  Don’t use the internet with it.

I should also point out that I have put tape over the lens of all my laptop cameras owing to the things I hear about cameras being remotely turned on without my knowledge. I’m one of those “I have nothing to hide” people, but know too well how things can be taken out of context and reinvented to create bad press. So I’ll just hang on to my privacy as best as I can, for the time being, thank you very much.

Today it appears that we live in a “paradox of progress”, where the things we have been told should improve our lives, actually makes them harder.  None of this matters if you are 20 years old, living at home and buying your first computer.  But if you have been around awhile (30 years), the amount of work needed to stay up to date can be pretty daunting.

The first Mac in our theatre was a gift from a patron in 1987.

In the Beginning

I’ve been involved with computing since the birth of the desktop computer. My first desktop was a Mac Classic that had been gifted to my theatre company in 1987. It sat in the office for months before someone decided we could use it to print a newsletter and mail it to potential audience members by printing a batch of sticky mailing labels, envelopes and paper with our logo on it. Our first Mac was used to create the first versions of snail mail SPAM.  We spent money on postage.  Lots of it.

I followed Apple from its infancy, one of those dedicated hard core artistic Mac heads who was always trying to convert the spreadsheet wielding PC tribe to our platform, because it was, supposedly, computing with a creative approach. Ahhh, naive youth.

I think I invested in a new mac every 3 to 5 years back then.  My devotion was expressed through my pocket book.

By 1999, my workstation had 6 computers, spanning a period of 10 years between the current digital model and the almost obsolete analogue model.  This is a video grab.  There were no digital cameras then with any kind of HD resolution.  Things were too busy to even think about taking a photo with the old film based SLR camera. I’m such an idiot.

In 1999, I cut my first digital films on the inaugural Final Cut Pro, installed on the first digital macs with firewire and shot everything on the newly released digital film cameras. I bought a $35,000 Avid Media Suite Pro, integrated into an Apple Desktop computer with two HUGE VGA monitors, because i wanted to enter the video editing marketplace and needed a state of the art digital cutting desk. My ambition was huge and I spared no expense in hiring “professional consultants” to advise me on how the future of computing was going to unfold.

What a disaster.

I traversed the changing of three buss systems in 18 months. My mega computer was at the front end of that debacle and I was awash with peripheral adapters and upgrades from the get go. But that’s another story.

Eventually I replaced everything with the state of the art, again, and started a multimedia company called Sticky Planet. I started blazing the digital trail, working for clients all over the world. As the internet opened up, my business started to blossom because the public’s mind was on fire and I was helping people to make their appearance on the stage of the world wide web while doing my best to promote my own on line profile. I was still doing a lot of real time theatre back then. standing in front of hundred, sometimes thousands, wondering how many I could get to see my on line stuff. They were mad, busy times.

But, things were simpler back then, of course they were, it was all new! Things were just getting started. As designers, we were trained to develop new software applications with “elegant degradation” in mind, allowing people who could not afford to upgrade their computers to still participate in the Internet revolution. I always considered myself bleeding edge back then. I wanted to introduce the latest technologies and hope everybody else would jump on board, install the plug-in, upgrade their browser, buy a new modem, upgrade their internet speed and (phew) watch my stuff. Before too long, I had many clients who wanted what I had developed for myself and, for a decade, it was good.

The FS Command

My multi media company in Australia was in its heyday during that point in time before Facebook and YouTube existed. I was working with a small decentralized group of international programmers, via email and file transfer, trying to figure out how to make a flash movie launch an FS command, (full screen command). I wanted people to be able to watch our movies, full screen, IMMEDIATELY and WITHOUT DELAY, in the year 2000 on their 56 K modems and computers, hopefully giving us the advantage in a constantly evolving marketplace. Shortly after we figured it out, mainstream internet corporations released the feature as a standard browser option and I was gutted. 3 years of development for something that had been figured out long ago by some people in a room on a spaceship and would only be released when a bunch of regular folks figured it out at earth level.

I believe we are being guided by alien creatures. From time to time they give us biscuits to chew on.

I, and my company, designed numerous hi end websites for international clients using the highly sought after new Flash engines to create fluid interfaces, programmable frames, translation modules and, the big ticket item, streaming video. I worked closely with the 3ivx (became DivX) team as they helped me make my hand crafted movies deliverable on the internet in countries that introduced respectable speeds from inception, like Japan.

I ended up working alot in Japan because they could see the demo videos of my live shows owing to the fact that they opened the internet at full speed from day one. Not like Australia, which had decided to roll out the speed over several years, if not a decade, for profit purposes, of course.

In 2006 I realized that running my company in a country that was light years behind other countries regarding the roll out of internet speed meant international failure, so I shut it down and left for a country where I could get the speed I needed as standard issue.

That turned out to be Belgium, where the smallest, fastest internet codec was being developed by a small company that had snatched a young Australian programmer called “Captian Stux” to give Belgium the bleeding edge in video codec technology.

Silly Australians. They had they guy, he was a young Australian, fresh out of high school, and they let him, and his revolutionary programming skills, be taken away by another country, fast tracking Belgium’s global superiority in Internet technologies instead of their own.

Bugger me mate!

I continued to study interactive film making and learned how to program the frames of a movie so as to enhance the viewers experience beyond the passivity of television on high speed internet connections using programs like Macromedia Director, Flash and Live Stage Pro.  At one point the Apple player could read over 200 file types, you could put anything on it and it would open. Even a spreadsheet!

Not any more. I and my colleagues had a vision for the Internet that was going to revolutionize the screen experience and turn it into a truly Open Source interactive immersion.  But all good ideas, ideas that service humanity, get sidetracked in the pursuit of profit.

We were so optimistic and energized!  We were helping to make the world a better, easier, less complicated place and our education was all free!  You could learn anything online back then, no cost.

Roadkill on the Information Superhighway

Software development is, undeniably, the most competitive industry in the world. When running a company that specializes in Internet applications, it is important to remember that there is always a new crop of young motivated geniuses who want to join in and get their share of the market. To do this, they will work harder, longer and faster, mostly because they are young, ambitious, single, geniuses and, mostly, irresponsible.

To survive in that milieux is to find a niche to which you can gain the intellectual property. As the Internet has developed we have discovered that proprietary issues find their way into the overall retardation of the development process by refusing to allow different methodologies to merge swiftly.  There has to be a profit motive and two things that belong together will be denied if the price isn’t right. An advancement that could have taken weeks by cooperating, may take years, if at all, when pursued independently.

My generation dreamed of an Open Source internet where we would all work together to make the one greatest thing that everybody would use.  It would probably take the form of a box with some buttons on it and the ability to speak to the whole world just by pressing those buttons.

However, the free market is not about developing the best and we don’t often end up with the best product possible because of “proprietary issues”.  Instead, we end up with a product developed by someone who has the intellectual property rights and is servicing a business model that requires incremental restricted releases, isolationism, protectionism and a lot of anti social behaviours, which is just plain weird when talking about the evolution of social networks.

That person, or group of persons, may not actually be the best minds suited to the realization of such an idea. Planned obsolescence is at the centre of the computing paradigm, the entire business model is driven by upgrades. It was The Henry Ford Motor Company that realized it had to make the Model T with inferior materials back in 1908 when it was discovered that the original car was made of mostly indestructible parts. The only way to make more money was to make it so that parts would break or wear out and the customer would have to come back to get it fixed.

When creating a sound business idea it is always best to pursue projects that provide a solution. It follows that, in order to provide an “integrated solution”, you must first define a problem. If the problem doesn’t exist, then you must create the problem.

This is the very concept that destroyed what the internet could have been through Open Source.  Instead of the best, we got a long, extrapolated, unnecessary pathway through an alternate, dark, haunted digital forest to help prop up an already doomed Capitalism. The back end of the computer revolution has really just been a fire sale before money becomes obsolete and people don’t need to spend money on plastic crap, upgrades and things they don’t need any more.

Planned Obsolescence

In my view, the telecommunications revolution was implemented so that a new industry could be ushered in.  It is a time honoured business model.  Create confusion, provide a solution.  The privatization of the  industry was bent on keeping us in the same place while creating the illusion that we were advancing.

Still operating until the late 80s and early 90s, telephone companies were owned by the government. Our governments rolled out the first fibre optic cables. Telephony was considered to be an essential service similar to electricity, water, heat, schools. It was infrastructure by and for the community to enhance our lives and make the essential things that needed to be done easier and faster.

In order for a society to function effectively communications need to be accessible by everyone. The telephone simplified this, the answering machine made it faster and easier. When looking for revenue, where is the first place to look but where people gather to do the things they need to do, which is, primarily, communicate and be social.

But of course, being social means that people get together to commune, and, through communication, develop better communities.  These three words, central to the health of populations everywhere, sit too close to the next word with the root word “commune” in it, which is, of course, communism. Which all Americans have been programmed to hate, even the liberal ones.

Being that Americans are at the centre of the universe of commerce, any words that contain the root word “Commune” are to be extinguished at all costs because, well, Communism, in any form, is bad.  Socialism also gets crapped on because, being social means communing and… well you get the idea.  Guilt by association.

With the privatization of the telephone companies came a whole new set of problems. Problems that could only be solved by a variety of private telephone companies who were, and remain, in direct competition with each other. The best problem to create for this business paradigm is to fracture the communications sphere and create confusion so that people can be manipulated into buying solutions that will, theoretically, return them to a similar efficiency as before the big shift. Customers may have to switch companies numerous times and never get a solution that works, paying dramatically higher costs for  services.  Things will move quickly and lots of money will be spent digging ourselves out of the communications quagmire for decades.

It’s much the same as taking a perfectly functioning wheel, smashing it into bits, rebuilding it into a square and telling people that we have to make the wheel rounder in order for it to function better. It goes through several phases of development from 4 sides to 6 sides to 8 sides to 16 sides to 32 sides and then 64 sides until, finally, the number of sides has been increased exponentially to create a circle. Which is where the whole thing began. A perfect pointless trip right back to where you started to service a profit motive and nothing else! WooHoo I’m having fun now!

We have been told that privatization was going to stimulate job growth, stimulate innovation and, generally, make the lives of people better. My question always remains, what kind of jobs were we creating? Were they good jobs or just jobs people could do to help them find a way into a pine box after drinking some brews and partying hearty for a lifetime. Has this society been so brain washed to be beholden to money that we wasted our lives running in circles? The petroleum industry did that, refusing to acknowledge new sustainable energy sources and doing everything it could to retard the process of conversion so that it could assist the profit margins of the shareholders and not the general well being of all the plant’s inhabitants.  The very people who drive the consumer marketplace from where they draw their fortunes.  Killing their customers.  Hell, human reproduce at a ridiculous rate.  There will always be more to exlpoitn.

“Hey what’s your job” says Bill

“Oh I sit in an office and figure out ways to get people to creatively chase their existential tails and always turn right. They always need to turn right as they do it.”

The majority of jobs that are created today are based inside of the idea that we need to engineer dysfunction so that companies can sell us more solutions for the dysfunction they have engineered. When communicating with my friends and colleagues I have a vast array of tools in my arsenal; Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, SMS, iMessage, FBmessenger, WhatsApp, Skype, YouTube, Snapchat, Bing, zing, ding. The number of telecommunications applications that are available today is staggering. Of course it made sense, in this hamster wheel of a world, that someone created a single device that you can speak into and press one button to get everything you need.  After all that, the word Telephone was replaced by Siri.

EU Regulation Against Planned Obsolesence

Recently the French government criminalized the engineering of planned obsolescence through new legislation that is sweeping Europe. Owing to environmental concerns, the Europeans will start imposing fines on manufacturers should they continue to design their products to fail for profit.  It is my hope and desire that this new legislation will find its way into the computing paradigm for it is surely the biggest violator of this very environmentally unfriendly practice.

Back in the early days we had a singular place where we could undertake all communications, just by picking up the handset and pushing a few buttons..

A Box on the Wall

Where as my telephone had 12 buttons, that I could use to blue box my way around touch tone code access, I now have a bevy of preferences panels for upwards of 50 apps on my handheld device. I can spend hours turning things off that arrived turned on. Sometimes one is in conflict with another and I find I am no longer using the app I wanted to use but I am being forced to use the new app which has hijacked my function. iMessage did that. Made it so anybody who wanted to send me a text message via the SMS system had to be on iMessage or I couldn’t get their SMS text messages, further fracturing my ability to integrate and simplify my communicate needs. Some people use this, some people use that, upgrades are always being shoved at us and nobody answers their phone anymore.  We are told we will get a response faster if we send a written message.  If you ask me, things have NOT gotten easier.  20 years old with their heads buried in a handheld phone have no idea how elegant life was back then and the vast expanses of leisure time we had. I wanted my computer to increase my leisure time, not force me to be upgrading all the time.

I don’t know about anyone else but, today, I have never been more isolated in my life.  Sure, I stay in contact with old friends using Facebook. But new developments in the privacy rules department makes this less and less of a desirable option as going on the FB site and sharing my views results in more advertising being shoved in front of me for things I have no intention of buying and an algorithm being built that threatens to deafen me, if not completely crush me, with a feedback loop of self reflexive things in the past I have no interest in seeing in my future.

Recently I was having a private conversation on Facebook and my colleague mentioned an organization he thought I should research. Within a matter of seconds of him typing the message and Ad came up for the website he was speaking of. Some would say ‘cool’ because the information is so readily available to you after it is been recommended, but I just found it creepy. From that point on I’ve had markedly less conversations using Facebook’s messenger system and find myself drifting away from certain internet processes I used to enjoy.

I’m a good netizen. I make and post videos and songs, try to increase my views, get my likes and create buzz around my creations.  I still offer digital services and try not to stay on my computer too long.  By this point in time I was expecting to be spending almost no time on my computer.

I go outside and try to meet people but that has become harder too.  I used to make eye contact with people a lot in the olden days.  I made a lot of friends around the world just by being ole, charming me.  Not any more.  Eyes are fastidiously fixed to glowing screens and a friendly greeting is just met as potentially very weird by anyone 10 years younger than me.

Submissive and Dominate Behaviours

Perhaps the biggest difference between my three computers is that my early G4 allows me to use my computer as a tool that services my needs.  I am the dominant one!

My state-of-the-art MacBook Pro works very hard at telling me how I am supposed to use my computer, forcing me to change the method that I have always used, to make me submit.  My methods, in my opinion, are simpler because they are manual.  I like the way I put my fork in my mouth, i don’t need my computer telling me six new ways to put a fork in my mouth while telling me the way I currently put my fork into my mouth is redundant.

I work swiftly. I like having my folders on my desk top with all the things in them that I need just like when I had a paper desk. New applications take my documents and often put them into folders that are hidden inside of application bundles with out giving me the choice i=of where I want to store them. Yes of course there are probably options in the preferences panel that I can switch so I can change where my data goes.  But when I get a commuter, I just want to access it on MY terms.  The amount of time that it takes to set these preferences to my desired behaviours becomes a task that is daunting, my day is long enough already. It is as if, almost by design, I am being forced to change from dominant to submissive behaviour through bombardment and shear exhaustion.  Some would call it torture.  20 years later, I have less leisure time, not more.

Of course, for all of my quibbling, yes, there have been undisputed great advantages and parts of our lives has been improved with the evolution of computing technology. Duh.  I just wish I didn’t have to sacrifice a lifetime to get those conveniences so that the free market could benefit.  I wanted Open Source, I wanted an early end to the pursuit of money.

Moore’s law of computing tells us that the processing speed of computers increases two fold every 18 months whilst the chips becomes exponentially smaller . This law suggests that the first computers will be smarter than humans in about ten years. It will be about that time, I predict, that we will have returned to a small box on the wall with a speaker and a transmitter into which we communicate by simply requesting  a phone book, looking up a number and making a call.

I hope I get to see it in my lifetime, because the phone on the wall was a great thing when I was a kid and I was a lot more socially connected then, in real time, than I am now.

Paying to get a job so you can pay off the debt of getting the job.

I saw an article in the Globe and Mail today.

Mulcair poised for clear shot at becoming prime minister as NDP surges in polls

In the article it states, “the NDP Leader will pitch himself Thursday as a salesman-in-chief, willing to travel overseas to personally nail down major contracts that promote jobs in manufacturing.”

Now that property is up and wages are down, the NDP can use this leverage to create jobs in a global market place where labour is willing to compete using the lowest cost for service.

I call it the WLCD equation and I think it may look something like;

(W-L)/C=D

W minus L, the sum of which is divided by C, which equals D.

…wherein W is wages, L is rent, C is the cost of living and D is the debt accrued in order to stay alive.

Essentially, the more a person is willing to pay to have a job, the more likely that they will get a job. This is the leverage that a working class person has.
I know people who spend 75% of their earnings on rent or mortgage. The remaining 25% of their wages is applied to the other standard non luxury stuff, which actually costs more than they earn. No boats, holidays or new shoes. No lattes, or frivolous Sunday sandwiches. No American Netflix, pirated via VPN.
My current job leaves me 30% short every month. Even if I work 16 hours a day, I need a loan to pay for health, transport, power, and my daughters future. We live in the lowest priced 1 bedroom apartment in our city. It happens to be central, and on top of a hill, so hooray for us!

Working harder means getting sick more and sick days mean less money, so working while sick is the result.

Working while sick means generating a risk of spreading infection and making others sick. The current government embarks on a war against terror, telling it is protecting us. But by dismantling national health care, the government defies it words. It is not interested in really protecting us. Consider this;

When a country has 1 billion workers, the labour pool is expendable, when you have a work force of 30 million it is not.

So the NDP need to address the long term effects of sub standard wages in a property driven marketplace that will, most definitely, result in a lower, non competitive form of mental and physical health.

Happy workers produce better products and are more likely to innovate and increase productivity when their lives have value. When lives don’t have value and people are pushed to their breaking point, they get angry, behave irrationally and do something that immediately classifies them as a terrorist.

And then the police state restores order, and private prisons get more slave labour. And everybody works on computers because that is the best place to keep an eye on you and make sure you aren’t complaining.

Something a major cola company calls “Open Happiness”.

Repeal bill C51, #‎rejectfear
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