“Nathan the Wise, beneath an appearance of pleading for religious tolerance, depicts a secret, universal religion shared by a world-wide fraternity, a freemasonry, so to speak, of rational men, regardless of their overt cultural and political loyalties, and among Lessing’s last published works were some dialogues on the true nature of Freemasonry itself. Throughout Europe the last two decades before the French Revolution saw a marked growth in the activities of secret soceities devoted to ideals of equality and fraternity, perhaps in response to the restrictions in absolutist states on any general and public participation in political discussion and descision-making, and in Germany the Masonic movement proved particularly attractive to literary intellectuals. Wieland and Herder were both members of the Weimar lodge, named ‘Amalia’, of which the Prime Minister, von Fritsch, was Grand Master, and in 1780 Goethe also applied for membership. Did he expect to find in Masonry a secret company of noble individuals, a broader world than that of the Weimar court, but an alternative to the public mind from which he had turned away? If so, he was soon disapointed. He passed rapidly through the usual grades to become a Master Mason in 1782 and he joined the order within the order, the Illuminists, in February 1783, but within a few weeks he was writing:
They say you can best get to know a man when he is at play… and I too have found that in the little world of the brethren all is as it is in the great one … I was already saying this in the forecourt, and now I have reached the ark of the covenant I have nothing to add. To the wise all things are wise, to the fool foolish.
These were difficult times for German Masonry, as yet not fifty years old. In 1782 a General Assembly in Wilhelmsbad had failed to resolve the complicated internal quarrels of the movement, which was, in essence, divided between those, notably the Rosicrucians, to whom the mythology and ritual of the movement, and its claim to occult knowledge, were more important, and those, notably the Illuminati, who were more concerned with its ethical universalism and social egalitarianism. Goethe, as usual, was steering a middle course, seeing merits in both currents. But in 1784 the Bavarian government discovered, or believed it had discovered, that at the heart of the Illuminist movement lay a radical republican conspiracy, decreed the death penalty for recruiting to it, and warned other German rulers accordingly. In the campaign that followed, and the effectively obliterated German Masonry for twenty years, the Weimar lodge, which Carl August himself had joined in 1782, was one of the first to close. Goethe felt that his knowledge of human behaviour had been extended by his involvement with Freemasonry, and his experiences had an important effect on his later assessment of the causes of the French Revolution, but their immediate contribution to his literary achievment was slight – some forty-eight stanzas of a projected Rosicrucian epic, The Mysteries. Even these were writen, not for the brethren, but for his minimal public of the years 1784-6: Charlotte von Stein, the Herders, and Knebel. Unlike Wieland, or Countess Bernstorff’s secretary, Bode, or the actor-producer Schroder, Goethe does not at any time after his admission seem to have thought the lodge a uniquely important medium through which to communicate with or assist his fellow men. On the contrary, his Masonic comedy of 1790, The Grand Kophta (Der Gross-Cophta), suggests that his original expectations may have been considerably higher, and his disappointment correspondingly more intense, than his cool and tactful assessment of 1783, writen of course to a fellow Mason, might seem to imply.
In that play a young knight expresses the bitterest disilluison when what he has taken to be a brotherhood dedictaed to missionary altruism proves, or seems to prove, to be a cynical deception. What is to become now, he asks, of the unattached idealism of the disapointed friend of humanity? ‘Fortunate he, if it is still possible for him to find a wife or a friend, on whom he can bestow indvidually what was intended for the whole human race.’ These words, almost a prose paraphrase of the last verses of ‘To the Moon’, may be Goethe’s true epitaph on his brief venture into Freemasonry: certainly they tell us something of the nature, as well as the strength, of the emotions with which he turned to Frau von Stein.”
wow having have read so much, am just atricious about the new music industry. I mean people have different opinions and stuff, bt at the end o the day, whats written in the bible is coming to pass. i mean this is really nothin compared to the real deal. Devils on the loose,he knows his time isreally too short. I mean i was a big jay fan, not so much becoz he really said anythng positive in my life through his music, but because he sipmly was cool.he had swag for me then, and when you a big fan, u agree with almost everthiing he does or say to a verge of refusing to even see when things can become harmful. this stuff is so real. for a fact thres good(Jesus) and evil(lucifer). the big part is where do u belong in the picture when Jesus Christ returns? Or when u die? times runnin out man. thanking VC for the cautions(tyhough too,curious about ur religion and beliefs).People gotta wke up. some are too deep asleep. music is a very strong instrument through which human emotion bieng depicted in song and spirit (whether gud/evi) feed too ones soul is passed from,to. so we really really gutta watch what we listen too. music says alot. this guys are lureing everybody to satanic practices without concious alert, to possess peoples soul without u even knowing. However want to ask what VCs real motive behind the website,which am really greatful for, but why do you care? whats it to you if people are mislead?
1903 – The Wright Brothers finally solve the mystery of flight for human beings
Then we learned to fly in formation.
2006 – Twitter is founded.
Between 1903 and 2006 is a century during which apes aspired to become birds, a hybridization that goes back to our mythology.
If we take the name of Twitter literally, we see it has the communication of a flock, announcing their location, status, territory, thoughts, somewhat arbitrarily. Like sparrows in a tree, communicating to the networked host.
In other words, one of the great projects of Western humanity over the past one hundred years was to become birdlike, rather than apelike. For whatever reason.
22 January 2009 – "To the location of this new earthquake weapons test the United States is preparing for these reports further warn the entire Western coastal areas of the Americans are in danger and could ‘very well’ expect to see a catastrophic event within the fortnight."
Because 'a fortnight' isn't common parlance in North America (weez stoopid), I remind you that it means 'forteen nights' or, two weeks.
4 February 2009 – "Northern California Earthquake: Magnitude 6.0 Quake Rattles Coast
Residents of Northern California's Humboldt County were rocked by a magnitude-5.9 earthquake Thursday, but officials said there were no immediate reports of major injury or damage from the second large temblor to hit the area within a month.
The U.S. Geological Survey reported the quake struck at 12:20 p.m. about 35 miles northwest of the community of Petrolia and nearly 50 miles west of Eureka. The shaking was felt within a 150-mile radius, as far north as southern Oregon and as far south as Sonoma County, according to the USGS Web site."
Apple’s secrecy produced another big open secret: they were developing a tablet, and they made it official yesterday. Steve Jobs acknowledged the hype (which one presumes wasn’t supposed to exist at all) when he showed The Wall St Journal quote. However, the resulting massive buildup of hype produced an anticlimactic ‘meh, tell us something we didn’t already know’.
The device will only be available in two months, which in turn means this press conference was little more than a means of stemming the flow of leaks – yes, we’re working on a device, but no, it’s not ready yet, and yes, we’re building on what we’ve already done with the iPhone, but no, it doesn’t use facial recogniation software to control different accounts for family members, nor does it have a tactile interface.
In a sense (and this is written in fairness to the meh) what Steve Jobs did yesterday was travel back in time and present Shakespeare with a Bic rollerball: a rather useful technological achievement, but something that in the future we won’t be too wowed over. We aren’t that wowed over it now, and that is my point.
Because we’ve been exposed to tablets in film and television for over twenty years, part of the excitement prior to the announcement came from the fact that these things were finally real. In fact, the devices in the Star Trek shows between 1987-2005 were called ‘padds’ (an acronym) and I wouldn’t be surprised at all to learn the iPad was named in recognition of this. In Greg Bear’s Queen of Angels series (set between the 2040s and the 2170s) they were called ‘slates’ and ‘pads’ alternatively. They are high tech devices, but they are like 20th Century rollerball pens. They are meant to facilitate our use of our networked high technology, and be so ubiquitous in the future that they are taken for granted.
So when Steve Jobs says this is the best thing he’s ever done, and when Jonathan Ive is on video saying ‘it’s magical’, this is where they’re coming from. The iPad would have lived up to its hype and then some were this the year 2000, but no. The iPhone announcement was a big deal in 2007 because nothing operated like it at the time, and it hinted at where the technology was going. Three years later, they’ve managed to produce extra large versions with a ten hour battery life.
Other companies will also be producing electronic tablets, but one imagines that Apple’s will be superior in ease of use and aesthetics – and these reasons are why the hype was so great. Apple makes beautiful objects. (What most people skipped was that they are now making their own chips, which is a big deal).
Jobs ended his presentation by telling us that the company seeks to exist at the intersection between technology and the liberal arts.
This was a great reminder of the importance of the liberal arts, and the statement came with embedded snarkiness. Businesses like Microsoft, in the words of Jobs, ‘have no taste’. Most businesses, for that matter, put little stock in the value of the arts. Further, most politicians put little value in the arts, and those students who wish to study the liberal arts at a post-secondary level are told they are jeopardizing their future. We have a very arts-unfriendly society, and a resulting population of imaginatively im
poverished citizens. Citizens, in turn, whose imaginations are so blighted that they seem mystified by Apple’s success. They’re all like, ‘Apple, wow, how do they keep coming up with hit products?’ In producing attractive things, Apple has both ignored the academic post-modern attacks on the idea of beauty, and wowed the business world by becoming a fifty-billion dollar company.
While Jobs was introducing the iPad, Margaret Atwood was at the annual Davos conference to accept another award, and planed to deliver a speech, which was cut for time. As introduced by Jane Taber at The Globe and Mail: “Margaret Atwood was poised to tell the world’s business and political elite today that politicians have ‘done their best to finish’ off art.”
I am thankful that Apple’s example exists to counter the tasteless lack of imagination of our ruling elites.
From here, Apple now has to bring us electronic data sheets, as represented in the new series Caprica. The iPad is a twenty-five year old idea for which the technology has finally been developed. The Caprica data sheets appear to be where we go from here.
Last week I uploaded the newest version of my website, and promptly ran into a problem I didn't understand. Had I been able to find this solution through the searches I initiated, I would have saved myself both some time and some undeserved annoyance with my webhost.
My site uses .htaccess redirects to make the url's clean and predictable, as well as transferable from previous versions. In the past, the redirects were done using the following:
That is 'home' is an alias for the full url that follows.
This didn't work with my new host; rather, inputing 'timothycomeau.com/home' rewrote the url as the full url I was trying to hide (http://timothycomeau.com/?page=home). With the help of my host's tech support, I was told that the use of the full url was the problem. Rather, I needed to write my RewriteRules this way:
RewriteRule ^home/$ /?page=home.
When I did this, the url's behaved as I expected and wanted them too.
Vancouver, not known for a place of a lot of snow, was awarded the 2010 Olympics in 2003, probabby for places like Whistler, which are known to be ski resorts. Seven years and global-warming denial later, there’s concern there might not be enough snow. Meanwhile, protesting the Olympics is forbidden, and the Prime Minister shuts down Parliament using them as an excuse.
The Olympics seem to be a diaster in the making. What was supposed to be Canada’s pride will instead be its embrassement. Remember the last Canadian winter olympics, Calgary ’88? The Jamacian bob-sled team? Vancouver seems a little Jamacian bob-sled at this point. The whole thing will be one day summed up with, ‘what were they thinking?’
~
A massive Earthquake destroyed Haiti. That’s not hyperbole. A country has been blank-slated. One thinks of Kobe, and Iran, the Tsunami, other places which suffered devasting earthquakes in recent years. Yet those places had an infrastructure that could absorb the devastation. Haiti, it was well known, was already a sociological diaster before this. The tsunami this earthquake has unleashed is that of North American white guilt. Pat Robertson says something dumb (as usual) and people get all self-righteous about it, which is kind of beside the point considering 100,000 people have died. That number is too large to make sense of.
I’m not sure if Haiti has just become the defining event of the decade (ala a day in September 2001), or just another tradgedy that will be off the radar in six months. It is especially reminiscent of the Tsunami, coming three weeks after its fifth aniversary. For televsisual North America, it’s another go on the tradgedy-o-round, and people for whom budgets are already tight due to the economic situation (brought on by overpaid, ignorant fools) are now expected to donate out of survivor’s guilt.
~
Jay Leno, an overpaid throwback to the 20th Century (television and a car collection?) is given back his late night television show because the only people watching tv are those who were already adult in the late 20th Century. Conan O’Brien, who makes the Internet Generation laugh, is shafted in the process. I just hope this means Conan goes to HBO or something and can start using swears in his humor.
~
Some girl from Los Angeles who’s name means Monday in German had plastic surgery, which is too bad because she was quite attractive. Now she’s just generic. Why do hot girls always seek to erase the very unique qualities that make them hot? That, of course, is a rhetorical question, because we all know the answer is they’re spoiled idiots.
Actually, to answer that rhetoric: I always feel like the answer is better schooling, actually. I imagine a soceity where education means enabling talent and predisposition, teaching the accumulated wisdom and knowledge of human history (that includes things like mathematics, meditation, exercise …). The goal of education should be to stretch the minds and imaginations of children as far as they can be stretched, to borrow the phrasing of someone I read once.
Instead we have a dehumanizing education system which enables and encourages mediocrity. So potentially beautiful people are ruined, their superficiality becoming something they cling to, and develop their identities around their physique instead of growing mentally (and changing thus). Through surgery they change their appearance, thereby supposedly changing their personality. Everyone an Easter Egg, an empty shell, and everyone changing the decoration, every few years.
Jan 13, 2009 — Remember Katrina and Rita? Those hurricanes that prompted a government response which made most of us ashamed to be American? I am certain that the global response to a devastation far worse, as a result of the Port Au Prince quake, will make Bush's Follies look like a well-oiled machine. Not only is the situation on the ground worse; the governments that might send massive aid are financial and economic basket cases. With the death toll already circling 200,000, and almost all critical infrastructure destroyed, the effort needed would have broken most governments before the collapse. It would take a Marshall Plan. So fuggedboudit. The UN can't help much either. No one can. There will be so many stories of courage, heroism, sacrifice and love to arise from this tragedy. At some point I can just see good souls all over the Gulf with private boats trying to do what they can. Take some fresh water and medical supplies in. Maybe pull a few out before anarchy and disease consume everything. It reminds me of a line Jeff Bridges once spoke: "You human beings are at your best when things are worst." — That is exactly what must change in us.
We will see lots of footage of aid flights and stories about how other nations are rushing to assist. But it will not be possible to hide the fact for long that Haiti is becoming — or has become — a mass grave. Haiti is a stark, cold, and unforgiving metaphor for what we all face… all to soon. We need to listen to and acknowledge the suffering of the Haitian people so that someone might acknowledge ours when the time comes. What happens in Haiti needs to be watched cosely and learned from by those with the stomach for it. The journalist in me wants to be there, right in it.
Our message is spreading quickly. Every day I receive maybe 10 to 15 friend requests on Facebook from all over the world from people who have just seen "Collapse". Almost all say something like, "I thought I was the only one who felt this way." — almost all are in their twenties. I spend as much time as I can with many to share a few words and bond across a cyberspace that now hums with a lonely echo. An awakening is taking place. Collapse has been invited to the Berlin International Film Festival and I've heard that it is going to be mentioned in one of the largest U.S. weekly news mags this week. Collapse has announced many new theatrical openings around the country and finally in some foreign cities. The awakening has started before the panic that will come… if not over Haiti then over what's coming this year. The faster we reach people, the less damage will be caused by the panic. It is my prayer that the panic can be averted, even if loss of life cannot. There is still time.
MCR
As Leonardo Maugeri, a senior executive at Italian oil major ENI (E), puts it: “There will be enough oil for at least 100 years.” Many analysts and industry executives have little doubt that there’s plenty of oil in the ground. “Only about 32% of the oil [in reserves] is produced,” says Val Brock, Shell’s head of business development for enhanced oil recovery. Shell estimates 300 billion barrels and maybe more might be squeezed out of existing fields, much of it once thought beyond retrieval. Peter Jackson, IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates’ London-based senior director for oil industry activity, has reviewed data from the world’s biggest fields. His conclusion: 60% of their reserves remain available. […] The price spike of 2008 may lead to similar results. Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute in Washington, an environmental group, notes that the U.S. car fleet shrank by 4 million in 2009, thanks to scrapping and reduced sales. He expects that shrinkage to continue, reducing the U.S. fleet by 25 million cars by 2020. He also sees a cultural change occurring in which more people, especially the young, don’t see owning a car as a necessity. “We are now looking at something new, a shift in the way people think about automobiles,” he says. “That means less oil use.”
U.S. oil consumption dropped by 9% over the last two years. The recession certainly hurt demand, but many analysts think oil use in the West has peaked and will not rebound to previous levels. The Energy Dept. sees the consumption of oil-based fuel in the U.S. flattening out in the coming decades. “Are people going to use energy differently in the next [growth] phase?” asks Goran Trapp, head of global oil trading at Morgan Stanley in London. “If so, the people forecasting [strong] demand increases are going to be surprised.”
// Contrast this with a report by Terry Macalister, from 9 November 2009:
The world is much closer to running out of oil than official estimates admit, according to a whistleblower at the International Energy Agency who claims it has been deliberately underplaying a looming shortage for fear of triggering panic buying. […] But as far back as 2004 there have been people making similar warnings. Colin Campbell, a former executive with Total of France told a conference: “If the real [oil reserve] figures were to come out there would be panic on the stock markets … in the end that would suit no one.”
I mean, I read the dust-jacket blurb today and understood it instantly, which is kind of bad for a 688 page book. Nevertheless, I feel like it's probably a must-read, and it would be nice if this was what everyone was talking about at the beginning of this decade, rather than all that world-is-flat and we're-all-going-to-die-for-xx-reason shit we've subjected to for the past ten years.
To quote myself, from December 2008, during the first prorogation, with added emphasis today. With The Economist weighing in, (ici et ici) it's clear that our international reputation has begun to be damaged.
There's also a joke which seems apt, considering the circumstances. "Did you hear about the Canadians who won gold medals at the Olympics? They had them bronzed."
The reason the Conservatives are currently dominant despite the weakness of their official numbers is because they don’t give a fuck about anyone’s feelings, and one can hope that this works out to our collective advantage when they draw the knives for Harper’s back. If not, as Adam Radwanski pointed out, we’re in even bigger trouble than we thought, writing: “If Conservatives are not at least seriously discussing the replacement of Stephen Harper before Parliament returns on Jan 26, he truly has succeeded in creating a cult of personality’. The last thing we need is a Maurice Duplessis holding this country back from the wonder of the 21st Century, as that dictator of Quebec did in the 1950s. However once he died the resulting Quiet Revolution rushed the province from the 19th into the 20th Century within a decade, and tried to follow-through by upgrading itself into a nation-state.
If Harper manages to enforce a nightmare of feel-good 20C Reagan-Thatcher bullshit on us while the US resurrects itself from its social catastrophe, and Europe continues to set an example for what a mostly enlightened society could be, the end result will probably be a dramatic national révolution tranquille in twenty years, by which time the rest of the world will be used to thinking of us as just another one of those third world countries of squandered potential ruled by an idiot. The talent of this country will continue to apply for US-work visas to escape the ignorance of this place. Eventually, Canada could come to resemble the southern United States, too ignorant and stupid to understand the hell we exemplify to others.
I'm guessing that johnnyblog is a Conservative operative. A series of comments on Rick Mercer's piece reprinted in the Globe & Mail, which appeared originally on his blog.
This is how the Conservatives operate … try to dominate and set the agenda of the conversation by belittling the opposing view through being the loudest assholes in the room. Out of politeness we keep our mouth shut and let them bluster like fools when we should be telling them to fuck right off, or openly mocking them.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper will prorogue Parliament Wednesday for a two-month break.
The House of Commons and the Senate will come back in March, after the Vancouver Olympics, for a Speech from the Throne and a budget. The move will have the effect of stalling all bills currently in Parliament, including crime bills that the government had said were being delayed by the opposition.
A post-Olympic return would also shut down government committees, which would stop MPs from pursuing the Afghan detainee controversy until Parliament returned.
Question: In what other democracy is it permissible for the government of the day to hide from the legislature for months at a time? To ignore explicit parliamentary votes demanding the production of documents? To stonewall independent inquiries? Perhaps the rules allow it elsewhere, but is it the practice? Does convention not still forbid it? Is it not viewed in other countries as dictatorial behaviour, and therefore, you know … not done?
So, rather than submit himself to the inquiries of elected parliamentarians, the King will dismiss Parliament, in the grand tradition of kings past. The question is: what will Parliament do now? If historical precedent is any guide, it should meet anyway. Let those MPs who wish to do the people’s business convene on the usual timetable, and let those with other loyalties disport themselves as they may.
If MPs are barred at the doors to Parliament — and wouldn’t that be an interesting scene — let them meet somewhere else. A tennis court would do nicely.
"Gambetta and Hertog write about a particular mindset among engineers that disdains ambiguity and compromise. They might be more passionate about bringing order to their society, and see the rigid, religious law put forward in radical Islam as the best way of achieving those goals. In online postings, Abdulmutallab expressed concern over the conflict between his secular lifestyle and more extreme religious views. "How should one put the balance right?" he wrote."
"Expect to hear a lot about the fact that America's Transportation Security Administration is currently leaderless. Talking Points Memo says that's because Sen. Jim DeMint, a conservative Republican from South Carolina, has blocked the confirmation of a prospective head for the agency. Mr DeMint says he's blocking the confirmation because the nominee won't say whether or not he will support TSA screeners' attempts to form a union. In any case, Democrats plan to force a vote on the issue when members of Congress return to Washington next month."
"For the last thirty years, in much of the English-speaking world (though less so in continental Europe and elsewhere), when asking ourselves whether we support a proposal or initiative, we have not asked, is it good or bad? Instead we inquire: Is it efficient? Is it productive? Would it benefit gross domestic product? Will it contribute to growth? This propensity to avoid moral considerations, to restrict ourselves to issues of profit and loss—economic questions in the narrowest sense—is not an instinctive human condition. It is an acquired taste. Consider the 1996 'Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act' (a more Orwellian title would be hard to conceive), the Clinton-era legislation that sought to gut welfare provision here in the US. The terms of this act should put us in mind of another act, passed in England nearly two centuries ago: the New Poor Law of 1834. The provisions of the New Poor Law are familiar to us, thanks to Charles Dickens's depiction of its workings in Oliver Twist. When Noah Claypole famously sneers at little Oliver, calling him 'Work'us' ('Workhouse'), he is implying, for 1838, precisely what we convey today when we speak disparagingly of 'welfare queens.' The New Poor Law was an outrage, forcing the indigent and the unemployed to choose between work at any wage, however low, and the humiliation of the workhouse. Here and in most other forms of nineteenth-century public assistance (still thought of and described as "charity"), the level of aid and support was calibrated so as to be less appealing than the worst available alternative. This system drew on classical economic theories that denied the very possibility of unemployment in an efficient market: if wages fell low enough and there was no attractive alternative to work, everyone would find a job. For the next 150 years, reformers strove to replace such demeaning practices. In due course, the New Poor Law and its foreign analogues were succeeded by the public provision of assistance as a matter of right. Workless citizens were no longer deemed any the less deserving for that; they were not penalized for their condition nor were implicit aspersions cast upon their good standing as members of society. More than anything else, the welfare states of the mid-twentieth century established the profound impropriety of defining civic status as a function of economic participation. In the contemporary United States, at a time of growing unemployment, a jobless man or woman is not a full member of the community. In order to receive even the exiguous welfare payments available, they must first have sought and, where applicable, accepted employment at whatever wage is on offer, however low the pay and distasteful the work. Only then are they entitled to the consideration and assistance of their fellow citizens. […] Conversely, it is not humiliating to be on the receiving end of a right. If you are entitled to unemployment payments, pension, disability, municipal housing, or any other publicly furnished assistance as of right—without anyone investigating to determine whether you have sunk low enough to 'deserve' help—then you will not be embarrassed to accept it. However, such universal rights and entitlements are expensive. But what if we treated humiliation itself as a cost, a charge to society? What if we decided to 'quantify' the harm done when people are shamed by their fellow citizens before receiving the mere necessities of life? In other words, what if we factored into our estimates of productivity, efficiency, or well-being the difference between a humiliating handout and a benefit as of right? We might conclude that the provision of universal social services, public health insurance, or subsidized public transportation was actually a cost-effective way to achieve our common objectives. Such an exercise is inherently contentious: How do we quantify 'humiliation'? What is the measurable cost of depriving isolated citizens of access to metropolitan resources? How much are we willing to pay for a good society? Unclear. But unless we ask such questions, how can we hope to devise answers? […] The left, to be quite blunt about it, has something to conserve. It is the right that has inherited the ambitious modernist urge to destroy and innovate in the name of a universal project. Social democrats, characteristically modest in style and ambition, need to speak more assertively of past gains. The rise of the social service state, the century-long construction of a public sector whose goods and services illustrate and promote our collective identity and common purposes, the institution of welfare as a matter of right and its provision as a social duty: these were no mean accomplishments."
"Today, U.S. colleges and universities have increasingly become places where young people are merely acquiring degree credentials — badges of compliance for corporate employers — in exchange for learning to accept bureaucratic domination and enslaving debt. […] Today, increasing numbers of people in the U.S. who do not comply with authority are being diagnosed with mental illnesses and medicated with psychiatric drugs that make them less pained about their boredom, resentments, and other negative emotions, thus rendering them more compliant and manageable. Oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) is an increasingly popular diagnosis for children and teenagers. The official symptoms of ODD include, 'often actively defies or refuses to comply with adult requests or rules," and "often argues with adults.' An even more common reaction to oppressive authorities than the overt defiance of ODD is some type of passive defiance — for example, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Studies show that virtually all children diagnosed with ADHD will pay attention to activities that they actually enjoy or that they have chosen. In other words, when ADHD-labeled kids are having a good time and in control, the 'disease' goes away. When human beings feel too terrified and broken to actively protest, they may stage a 'passive-aggressive revolution' by simply getting depressed, staying drunk, and not doing anything — this is one reason why the Soviet empire crumbled. However, the diseasing/medicalizing of rebellion and drug "treatments" have weakened the power of even this passive-aggressive revolution. Television: In his book Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (1978), Jerry Mander (after reviewing totalitarian critics such as George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Jacques Ellul, and Ivan Illich) compiled a list of the 'Eight Ideal Conditions for the Flowering of Autocracy'. Mander claimed that television helps create all eight conditions for breaking a population. Television, he explained, (1) occupies people so that they don't know themselves — and what a human being is; (2) separates people from one another; (3) creates sensory deprivation; (4) occupies the mind and fills the brain with prearranged experience and thought; (5) encourages drug use to dampen dissatisfaction (while TV itself produces a drug-like effect, this was compounded in 1997 the U.S. Food and Drug Administration relaxing the rules of prescription-drug advertising); (6) centralizes knowledge and information; (7) eliminates or "museumize" other cultures to eliminate comparisons; and (8) redefines happiness and the meaning of life.
“In a world filled with overwhelming selfishness, schadenfreude and cruelty, why is there still empathy, sympathy and kindness? There must be some evolutionary advantage, otherwise those traits would have long since vanished. And yet we are so often squeamish when faced with acts of kindness, as if they were soft-headed embarrassments and signs of weakness. Or worse: mere narcissism and self-interest masquerading as something else.”
WTF? What has been written here is psychopathic. The implication being that it is advantageous to be ‘selfish & cruel’, especially ‘genetically speaking’ – which is another way of saying the best way to reproduce is through rape. The author (Kenneth Kidd) seems oblivious to the fact that humans are social creatures, and that we appreciate those who show us kindness. I mean, reproduction does mostly occur between people who like each other at the time, does it not? I’ll grant his position is merely one of argument, and that he’s not actually as psychopathic as all this is. However ….
He uses the cat (quoted below), and the quoted above, as a build up to stating that humans are social creatures. But he doesn’t take that as a given, rather, he quotes sources. In other words, ‘research suggests’ that humans are social creatures, but not movie nights, dating, pub rounds with friends, etc.
There’s no reason at all for the traits of kindness and empathy to have vanished, and every reason for them to have coexisted. What should make us squeamish is that such thoughts could be expressed at all in such a manner. It takes for granted that our society is cruel, as if this is a norm, rather than the aberration. A society of ‘overwhelming selfishness, schadenfreude and cruelty’ is a failed society, and it used to be termed barbaric.
Nowadays we tend to look more kindly on barbarism, obviously.
Further on in the article, he states:
“Are we naturally kind or selfish egoists at heart?
Much flows from how you answer that question, how, on balance, you view human nature.
Consider, for instance, the Christian tale of the Good Samaritan who helps out an injured Israelite, someone he doesn’t know, even though Samaritans and Israelites are long-standing enemies.
This is arguably the pre-eminent tale of Christian kindness. It seems to imply that empathy, compassion and caritas, or brotherly love, are natural human dispositions. But then, as Phillips and Taylor note, St. Augustine happened along with a profoundly different view. Rather than being native to humans, caritas was deemed to be divine, bestowed by God.
Without God, there could be no kindness or other virtue, because we’d lost the possibility of being naturally good with the expulsion from Eden.”
This to me seems entirely idiotic. (An aside dear reader: I hope you and I see eye to eye, and that you are as dumbfounded as I am. If not, I am left to explain, as I am, why this is shite. But I also feel the need to explain regardless, so that there’s some documentation in future databases that not all hearts had been so eclipsed in our time).
It is true that the Romans were cruel; and that there was much cruelty in the past. This suggests the so called ‘genetic’ line of thought which equates optimal reproduction with rape. It was an accomplishment of Christianity (which may have its roots in Buddhism) and a legacy which we used to take for granted (before we once again became blasé about torture) that Western society became more self-consciously gentle, in its abandonment of slavery, torture, and tyrannical government.
Christian civilization, remembering the torture of the forums, wrote their history to make the Romans cruel and inhumane. However, Christ’s story of a stranger helping anoher did not need academic analysis to be made clear to its first hearers; it was in a challenge to hardened hearts, one that Palestinian supporters aim toward Israelis today – treat everyone as you would like to be treated and expand your notion of family to include all, as we are all children of God. Though the Samaritan and Israeli were traditionally enemies, they transcended their tribalism to be brothers of a species. This was clear two thousand years ago and was written down for that reason: It was a call for early Christians to recognize one another as members of a family of God.
The soul hungers to be treated with respect and kindness, and as such this is quenching a thirst that has gotten used to the dryness of stone hearts. Augustine, a repentant sinner, found his source of kindness in the Church, and he did not know what we know about the history of humanity: that it did not begin 4000 years ago in a garden. Augustine layered that story with a lot of metaphoric meaning, but he also was incredulous to the idea that salvation could happen without God because he himself had been a great sinner and could not understand his transformation into an asexual hermit without projecting that into this myth. Which is to say that Augustine universalized his biography and considered his early years of sinfulness to be an example of normal human life without God.
With that clear, let’s leave Augustine out of 21st Century discussions shall we?
Kidd’s rhetorical question appropriately answered would tell us that humans are complicated, not simple, and that we have the capacity to be both kind and cruel. That we are naturally both kind and egotists, but that we are taught to exagerate our egotism. O
ur education system – our society – encourages the later; it rewards us when we are cruel. This talk of ‘squeamishness’ is an example of how it discourages kindness. We could have a society of beautiful gentle people, but we’d have to treat our children better and forgo all this bullshit with regard to grades, sports and celebrity, and really come down hard on them when they mock fat & ugly people. An example of the season: we might stop purposefully decieving them about Santa Claus, only to chalk up their later disapointment in learning the truth as a rite of passage.
Instead we have a society that values ignorance and hatred, that glorifies militaristic discipline as honourable, assigns undue virtue to the symmetrical, and that sorts its citizens into “winners” and “losers”.
The examples Kidd uses to argue for kindness as an achievement of civilization (rather than a repression) come from the rise of the militaristic nation state: after Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (the need to police the encouraged cruelty of a cruel society) he writes “Francis Hutcheson, David Hume and Adam Smith — were all fighting to restore kindness and compassion as something natural to the species.” Notice that he used the word fighting to describe their work.
To summarize my point here: people are both kind and cruel: crueler with strangers than they are with family. Throughout the West’s recorded history, there was a tendency toward authoritarian governance which encouraged a dog-eat-dog model. Christianity was revolutionary in that it encouraged the kinder side of human nature (until it too became authoritarian). The Western model of the nation-state is militaristic, further encouraging the unkind, and now we’ve had four hundred years of that nonsense, so that it seems “natural” that the unkind is the norm, whereas the empathic is the un-evolutionary aberration. In a “world filled with overwhelming selfishness, schadenfreude and cruelty” there’s not enough discouragement of this behaviour in favor of more gentle minds.
“[Oscar the cat] makes regular rounds, entering each room to smell and look over the patients. If all is more or less well, the white-breasted tabby moves on to the next room. If he instead snuggles up to a patient, purring and nuzzling, the nurses immediately start calling relatives. Oscar won’t leave until the patient has breathed his or her last.
Now, the intriguing question is not so much how Oscar can make such accurate prognoses, but why he lingers, holds this vigil. Is Oscar comforting himself or the patient? If he were upset, sensing a bad situation, wouldn’t Oscar be better off elsewhere, getting petted? And if he’s not upset, why is Oscar so generous, receiving nothing in return? Oscar not only appears to feel empathy, but to act on it, to show kindness.”
It doesn’t surprise me at all that a cat would behave in the way described. What I find surprising is that one feels the need to explain it at all, and to seek a selfish explanation for it at that.
Apple's concept video projecting how computers might be in twenty years: our time. To illustrate a professor at work, they imagined he was studying the greenhouse effect.
I also love this video for the way it documents the late '80s idea of academics: old dark wood and smarmy arrogance.
Having done temp work for three years, I can tell you that jobs are usually only about learning a set of actions. That is, they teach you the role and the routine, and if you stay long enough, eventually you might become conscious of what exactly it is you’re doing. Permanent staff with positions of authority have that consciousness – they understand what they are doing, but for many others it’s very much about following the routine.
In this manner, work is separated from achievement, and form is separated from content. The form is what you’re taught in your first day or week. The content is optional. In fact you may actually be discouraged from asking why you are doing such-and-such, that is, seeking out the content of your actions.
John Ralston Saul, writing in his 2008 book A Fair Country states
Increasingly our elites attempt to slip into the vacuum behind other people’s actions. Worse still, they attempt to imitate the surface appearance, not the reality, or other people’s actions. (p226)
This echoes his dissection of the separation of form from content in 1994’s Doubters Companion (‘White Bread’):
White Bread Post-modern urban individuals, who spend their days in offices, have taken to insisting that she or he is primarily a physical being equipped with the muscles of a work-horse and the clothes of a cowboy. The rejection of white bread in favor of loaves compacted with the sort of coarse, scarcely ground grains once consumed solely by the poor follows quite naturally.
White bread is the sophisticated product of a civilization taken to its ideological conclusion: essential goods originally limited by their use in daily life have been continually refined until all utility has been removed. Utility is vulgar. In this particular case, nutrition and fibre were the principal enemies of progress. With the disappearance of utility what remains is form, the highest quality of high civilizations.
And whenever form presides, it replaces ordinary content with logic and artifice. The North American loaf may be tasteless but remains eternally fresh thanks to the efficient use of chemicals. The French baguette turns into solidified sawdust within two hours of being baked, which creates the social excitement of having to eat it the moment it comes out of the oven. The Italians have introduced an intriguing mixture of tastes – hands towels on the inside and cardboard in the crust. The Spanish managed to give the impression of having replaced natural fibre with baked sand. There are dozens of other variations. The Greek. The Dutch. Even the world of international hotels has developed its own white roll.
In each case, to refine flour beyond utility is to become refined. This phenomenon is by no means limited to bread or even food. Our society is filled with success stories of high culture, from men’s ties to women’s shoes.
In his entry on Property Development, the last two definitions contain the same theme:
6. The managers who run the large deposit banks have a taste for big buildings. They have wasted large amounts of capital by constructing remarkable headquarter buildings and imitative towers in every financial centre around the world. The only function of these palaces is to warehouse a non-productive managerial class.
7.Every society needs housing and work space. A civilization mindful of its future makes sure that everyone has a bit of property. An evolved civilization attempt to ensure that both private and public buildings are of the highest possible quality. Architecture at this level is an ethical expression of the society at large. The sign today we are merely involved in speculation is that our buildings relate less and less to any primary use or need.
Inasmuch that postmodernism began as an architectural concept, I find Fredric Jameson’s suggestion (in his 1992 Postmodernism architecture chapter) that the architecture of the period seemed to be designed to be photographed relevant. Along with film, this enabled the conceptualization of form away from content. In short, we all began to perceive ourselves as actors within the movie of our lives. So Shakespeare’s ‘all the world’s a stage’ became for us an article of secular faith.
And from this follows the idea that we enact roles, and thus only need to be taught how to act the role. How to act the role of consumer, office worker, smoker, drinker, seducer … all lessons learned from the role-modeling provided by actors enacting roles with fashionable haircuts and fashionable clothes in movies and television. So, after almost sixty years of television, we all know how to embody stereotypes if we so chose. This is most remarkable in terms of music – the folksy crooner who dresses according to what Bob Dylan wore in the 1960s, the punk dressing according to late 1970s photographs, and of course the vast plaid marketing campaign that was Grunge.
Today’s Huffington Post links to a Nypost article on “the creepy painting” of Michael Jackson in Michelangelo’s David pose, surrounded by cherubs. We are told that it was commissioned in 1999 from the artist David Nordahl.
This painting was glimpsed in the 2003 documentary by Martin Bashir, and from which I took the screencaps to compose the piece (below) I had in Zsa Zsa Gallery’sThe Michael Jackson Show show in Toronto, and which closed on Michael Jackson’s 45th birthday.
As I stated in that peice, he had delusions of godlihood. I do not know if the Nordahl work has a title, but I’d imagine it acquiring the name ‘The Apotheosis of Michael Jackson’, and considering the default longevity of oil and canvas, it may become a type of Mona Lisa image of the 26th Century – something most people are familar with, but it will be few who will have actually looked up the surviving electronic documents to see the videos.
CNBC has a slide show of work from his collection. This dates from last March, when Jackson was planning an auction to gain some cash for his troubled finances. As I’ve known about the apotheosis painting for almost seven years (Bashir’s documentary aired in January of that year) it doesn’t surprise me that Jackson’s taste was so bad. What I was surprised by were the other paintings wherein he’s a king, or a knight. I find this one (also by David Nordahl) most alarming:
And this robotic head reminds me of the end of William Gibson’s Neuromancer.
I found the slide show through a search for “David Nordahl”. The thumbnail for the following made me think he was a Mormon artist responsible for the type of images of white-Jesus amidst tanned-white-people Indians as seen in their texts. On clicking I see that instead it’s a very Socialist Realism depiction of Jackson that wouldn’t stand out from a collection of Maoist images from the Cultural Revolution. I would like to think that Nordahl is savy enough to have put Jackson in a red shirt for this reason – consider this painting “The Nordahl Code”. Herein lies coded images depicting truths about his interaction with this disturbed man, but I’ll leave that to the thriller novelists of the future.
Frank Herbert, in his last novel Chapterhouse Dune, wrote of a Van Gogh painting which had survived the millenia and was a reminder to that cohort of humanity of an element of wildness in the human imagination. It is an eloquent passage about the importance and lasting effects of artwork. Jackson in turn stands as a testament to the WTF? element in the human, but this message speaks most clearly to us, the present living who shared the world with the living figure, but a century from now, these paintings, stripped of the context that we take for granted, will be a mess of mixed messages. By this I mean that we know that Jackson’s thing for being depicted as a king comes from his marketing as ‘the king of pop’. And that the associated art is tasteless and ignorant.
Jackson as a knight, or as a king … a schoolgirl of 2110 will have no reason to think that the man depicted there was not those things. Also, these works are a reminder that while painting we call ‘contemporary’ has become a blotchy mess of shapes, colour and tube turds, there remains this underground of figurative realism that ‘tasteless’ celebrities hire for their own personal propaganda. The tradition of Queen Elizabeth I, Louis XIV, Napoleon (ancient figures from a pre-photographic world shaping their image for the present and future generations) continues for the celebrity-royalty of today. The truly wealthy and powerful (billionaires) just support the museums and keep the industrial scale works they purchase in secret storage somewhere.
What is fortunate is that Jackson’s megalomania was somewhat harmlessly channeled into a career as a song & dance man. In the history of celebrity, Jackson is perhaps unique in the use of the cult of personality, and someone attached to his organization must have studied its long history, from Rome through to Stalinist Russia. Had he been a political figure, it seems certain he would have been the worst kind of monster, a Caligula with a harem of boys. Consider how this video depicts (part of the 1997 History campaign) some kind of Roman Emperor Soviet Russia fantasy:
Michael Jackson was not a healthy man in any sense of the word. Those of us who take art seriously can see in it just how ill he was, and we can also recognize the depth of ignorance amidst his fans. That people have gotten tatoos ‘in memoriam’, that people leave glowing comments on his YouTube archive, is just another example and evidence of a failed education system. The art will echo down the centuries as a reminder that in the late 20th Century, Western soceity was totally fucked up.
Science-fiction has been the avant garde of industrial design since the 1939 World’s Fair, if not earlier. It has been a medium to market strange ideas (aliens from outer space, our minds being computer generated delusions), to forewarn of us of potential dangers (the computers take over, the robots nuke us), but through the pragmatics of using experimental design ideas to build unfamiliar worlds, it serves as both a promotional vehicle and fertilizer of new markets. Science fiction envisioned how computers might be used, which in turn taught us how we might be able to use them, which in turn inspired engineers to make them that way, which led to us using them the way we do. A video-phone in late 20th Century science-fiction television and movies becomes early 21st Century Skype.
While the idea of a ‘videophone’ is both old-fashioned and going nowhere as a device, ‘Skyping’ is alive and well. We are living with ‘videophone’ technology but it is just is not being mediated by landline telephones that sit on our desks; instead it is being mediated by our computers. Further, the ubiquity of cellphones means that there’s currently no market for ‘video phone booths’ as depicted in 1968’s 2001:A Space Odyssey when Dr. Haywood calls his daughter from the space station.
Or the scene in Blade Runner, when Deckard called Rachel at the bar. This scene defines the concept of the ‘videophone’ that I grew up with. In the context of 1982, this is a video-phone call.
In 1989’s Back to the Future II, Marty gets an AT&T mediated video-call from his colleague Needles (played by Red Hot Chilli Pepper’s bassist Flea) on his flat-screen television. Interestingly, the flat screen tv seems the only thing that came true from that projection twenty years ago. (Since 1989, we have not developed flying cars nor a highway system for them, nor are we using fusion reactors for our vehicles, and hoverboards still aren’t happening. Nor do we have holographic cinema billboards.)
Back to the Future II was set in 2015, and imagined the fax machine would have much more prominence that it attained, replaced by computers and heldhelds with their killer-app, email. Blade Runner was set it a post-ecocidal (if not post-apocalyptic) Los Angeles of 2019, where no one had cellphones and CRT televisions printed out Polaroids of their screen-capture.
One thing of note is that all video-phone scenes filmed in the 20th Century included ‘end credits’:
2001
Blade Runner
Back to the Future
(AT&T of course is the network that runs the (20th Century futuristic) iPhone in the United States.)
With regard to video-phones, it is not inconceivable to me now that by 2019, (that is, within ten years) you could have novelty Skype booths set up in bar, and for a few coins (“$1.25”) or a credit card swipe, make video-calls to girls you just met and invite them out for a drink. Deckard’s phone call may not being as unrealistic as it still seems.
In the meantime, we are already carrying video-phones in our pocket, allowing us such activities as described in this song by Beyonce:
"The teens are destined to be the decade in which we'll finally stop wearing jeans. It'll be a slow sputtering process, but why wait? Ban the jean from your wardrobe starting January 1st by this simple rule: each time you find yourself reaching for jeans, reach for hose instead". – Momus
This resonated for me since it's been a couple of years now that I've seen girls forgoing pants in favor of tights only. And given how tight skinny-jeans are, they could be replaced by leggings without being that noticeable.
From the 20-26 November issue of The Guardian Weekly:
UN meets homeless victims of American property dream | Chris McGreal "Deanne Weakly was among the first to the microphone. The 51-year-old estate agent told how a couple of years ago she was pulling in $80,000 (£48,000) a year from commissions selling homes in LA's booming property market. When the bottom fell out of the business with the foreclosure crisis, she lost her own house and ended up living on the streets in a city with more homeless than any other in America. She was sexually assaulted, harassed by the police and in despair. She turned to the city and California state governments for help. "No one wanted to listen. They blame you for being homeless in the first place," she said. […] Rolnik had waited more than a year to tour cities across the US to prepare a report for the UN's human rights council on America's deepening housing crisis following the subprime mortgage debacle. UN special rapporteurs are more often found investigating human rights in Sudan and Burundi or abuses of the Israeli occupation than exposing the underbelly of the American dream. George Bush's administration blocked her visit, finding itself in the company of Cuba, Burma and North Korea in blocking a special rapporteur. [emp. mine] "I was asking for almost a year before I as allowed in," Rolnik said. When Barack Obama came to power she was welcomed to range across America talking to those who have lived on the streets for years and the newly homeless forced out by the foreclosure crisis. Rolnik, a Brazilian urban planner and architect, said administration officials were genuinely interested in what she might find, if not embracing of her raison d'etre that everyone is entitled to a decent home. […] A Spanish-speaking veteran of the Korean war steps up. He is the angriest of the lot. He is not a communist, he says, but in Cuba nobody goes homeless. He fought for America and now he is left to live on the streets.
Furore over Prix Goncourt winner shows French could use more egalite | Lizzy Davies [Marie Ndiaye moved to Berlin in 2007 "largely because of Sarkozy"…] "…she said that France under the current president was languishing in a 'hateful' atmosphere of tough security and 'vulgarity'. 'I find this France monstrous,' she told culture magazine Les Inrockuptibles. […] Is the president, who was elected after a campaign in which he urged people to 'love or leave' the country, guilty of pursuing an agenda that is “monstrous” to perceived “outsiders”? Or is Ndiaye merely, as Sarkozy’s supporters claim, conforming to a “Pavlovian” form of opposition that has become the norm among leftwing French intellectuals? Ever since his days as interior minister, Sarkozy has made his name through an uncompromising stance on immigration and integration. He provoked uproar in 2005 by referring to youths in the neglected, multiracial suburbs as “scum”, and has zealously imposed a strategy of expulsion quotas. It is this side of present day France – its sans papiers, or undocumented workers, its forced returns to war-torn Afghanistan, its reluctance to tackle the discrimination endemic in society – that is the basis of many people’s dislike of Sarkozy.
Can Niner generation do the right thing now? | Matthew Ryder "Those impressionable twentysomethings are today's influential fortysomethings and they carry the legacy with them. No Logo author Naomi Klein credits those years as the period that turned her student interests towards global issues. Current UK politicians, such as David Miliband and David Cameron, fresh out of university, opted not for the yuppie jobs that the 80s had offered, preferring to enter the loftier world of political research. Across the Atlantic, Sergey Brin claims that it was a trip to the dissolving Soviet Union that "awakened his childhood fear of authority" and influenced the culture of the famously informal company he started eight years later – Google. And it was at this time that a half-Kenyan African-American made history by becoming an editor of Harvard Law Reviewand decided to write a book. That summer, he took Michelle Robinson on their first date to see a quintessentially Niner movie – Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing. Last year, Jeff Gordinier published X Saves the World. According to him, the great achievement of the post baby-boomer generation was that it "stopped the world from sucking". Maybe so. But if Niners are really going to make the difference that they believed they would, they will have to do more. And they will be challenged on the very things that once made them different. This is already happening with regard to violence and conflict. At the key moment of their development, Niners witnessed dramatic political change occurring without bloodshed. Television pictures had become a more effective revolutionary tool than an AK-47. That influenced the Niner outlook in a way that was a genuine break from the past. Previously, baby-boomers from George Bush to Osama bin Laden seemed to believe that you had to fight for what you wanted – and kill or be killed if necessary. But Niners questioned the need to pay that price."
Yesterday at the bookstore I browsed through Avatar: An activist survival guide, and saw some screencaps depicting the future Earth. The idea is that by that time, Earth had become used up and was decaying. There's a pic of an overflowing dumpster to convey this.
So, when I go see Avatar next month, I'l be there not only for the 3-D & hovering mountains, but to glimpse the mid-22nd Century.
Let’s address your famous “Blood in the streets” comment to The Globe and Mail last February. Still feel that way?
I wasn’t saying there would be blood in the streets of Toronto, remember. My first point was that the crisis would likely destabilize about a dozen relatively weak states and that this ‘axis of upheaval’ would become more violent. That’s happening already – just look at the escalation of violence in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the signs of a deterioration of security in Iraq, not to mention Somalia.
The other point I had in mind was that, after previous big financial crises, insecure governments have been tempted to rattle sabres for the sake of promoting their own domestic legitimacy. My prime suspect here is Russia, which of all the big powers stands to gain the most from geopolitical instability, since [for example] a major attack on Iranian nuclear installations would double the price of oil and greatly enrich the denizens of the Kremlin. The probability of such a war is currently being underestimated by many people.
Context: By the late 22nd Century (2170s) the 21st Century is of course a well understood historical epoch. Cassia Mujamadar, in an interview with the Thinker Alice, is required to narrate this history.
I cautiously threaded my way through a brief history, conscious of Alice’s immense memory, and my necessarily simple-appraisal of a complex subject.
By the end of the 20th Century, international corporations had as much influence in Earth’s affairs as governments. Earth was undergoing its first dataflow revolution; information had become as important as raw materials and manufacturing potential. By mid-21, nanotechnology factories were inexpensive; nano recyclers could provide raw materials from garbage; data and design reigned supreme.
The fiction of separate nations and government control was maintained, but increasingly, political decisions were made on the basis of economic benefit, not national pride. Wars declined, the labour market fluctuated widely as developing countries joined in – exacerbated by nano and other forms of automation – and through most of the dataflow world a class of therapied, superfit workers arose, highly skilled and self-confident professionals who demanded an equal say with corporate boards.
In the early teens of twenty-one, new
techniques of effective psychological therapy began to transform Earth culture and politics. Therapied individuals, as a new mental rather than economic class, behaved differently. Beyond the expected reduction in extreme and destructive behaviors, the therapied proved more facile and adaptable, effectively more intelligent and therefore more skeptical. They evaluated political, philosophical, and religious claims according to their own standards of evidence. They were not “true believers.” Nevertheless, they worked with others – even the untherapied – easily and efficiently. The slogan of those who advocated therapy was, “A sane society is a polite society”.
With the economic unification of most nations by 2070, pressure on the untherapied to remove the kinks and dysfunctions of nature and nurture became almost unbearable. Those with inadequate psychological profiles found full employment more and more elusive.
By the end of twenty-one, the underclass of untherapied made up about half of he human race, yet created less than a tenth of the world economic product.
Nations, cultures, political groups, had to accommodate the therapied to survive. The changes were drastic, even cruel for some, but far less cruel than previous tides in history. As Alice reminded me, the result was not the death of political or religious organization, as some had anticipated – it was a rebirth of sorts. New, higher standards, philosophies, and religions developed.
As individuals changed, so did group behaviour change. At the same time, in a feedback relationship, the character of world commerce changed. At first, nations and major corporations tried to keep their old, separate privileges and independence. But by the last decades of twenty-one, international corporations, owned and directed by therapied labour and closely allied managers, controlled the world economy beneath a veneer of national democratic governments. Out of tradition – the accumulated mass of cultural wishful thinking – certain masques were maintained; but clear-seeing individuals and groups had no difficulty recognizing the obvious.
The worker-owned corporations recognized common economic spheres. Trade and taxation were regulated across borders, currencies standardized, credit nets extended worldwide. Economics became politics. The new reality was formalized in the supra-national alliances.
GEWA – the Greater East-West Alliance – encompassed North America, most of Asia and Southeast Asia, India, and Pakistan. The Greater Southern Hemisphere Alliance, or GSHA – pronounced Jee-shah -absorbed Australia, South America, New Zealand, and most of Africa. Eurocon grew out of the European Economic Community, with the addition of the Baltic and Balkan States, Russia, and the Turkic Union.
Non-aligned countries were found mostly in the Middle East and North Africa, in nations that had slipped past both the industrial and dataflow revolutions.
By the beginning of the 22nd Century, many Earth governments forbade the untherapied to work in sensitive jobs, unless they qualified as high naturals – people who did not require therapy to meet the new standards. And the definition of a sensitive job became more and more inclusive.
There were only rudimentary Lunar and Martian settlements then, with stringent requirements for settlers; no places for misfits to hide. The romance of settling Mars proved so attractive that organizers could be extremely selective, rejecting even the therapied in favour of high naturals. They made up the bulk of settlers.
All settlements in the young Triple accepted therapy; most rejected mandatory therapy, the new tyranny of Earth. […]
I wondered what it had been like to live in a world of kinks and mental dust. I asked Alice how she visualized such a world.
“Very interesting, and far more dangerous,” she answered. “In a way there was a greater variety in human nature. Unfortunately, much of the variety was ineffective or destructive”.
“Have you been therapied?” I asked.
She laughed. “Many times. It is a routine function of a thinker to undergo analysis and therapy. Have you?” […] [p.121-124]
***
Alice described in words and graphic projection an Earth rapidly approaching 90% agreement in spot plebiscites – the integration of most individual goals. Dataflow would give individuals equal access to key information. Humans would be redefined as units within a greater thinking organism, the individuals being at once integrated -reaching agreement rapidly on solutions to common problems – but autonomous, accepting diversity of opinion and outlook.
I wanted to ask, What diversity? Everybody agrees! but Alice clearly had higher, mathematical definitions for which these words were mere approximations. The freedom to disagree would be strongly defended, on the grounds that even an integrated and informed society could make mistakes. However, rational people were more likely to choose direct and unclut
tered pathways to solutions. My Martian outlook cried out in protest. “Sounds like beehive political oppression,” I said.
“Perhaps, but remember, we are modeling a dataflow culture. Diversity and autonomy within political unity”.
“Smaller governments respond to individuals more efficiently. If everybody is unified, and you disagree with the status quo, but can’t escape to another system of government – is that really freedom?”
“In the world-wide culture of Earth, dataflow allows even large governments to respond quickly to the wishes of individuals. Communication between tiers of the organization is nearly instantaneous, and constant”.
I said that seemed a bit optimistic.
“Still, plebiscites are rapid. Dataflow encourages humans to be informed and to discuss problems. Augmented by their own enhancements, which will soon be as powerful as thinkers, every tier of the human organization acts as a massive processor for evaluating and determining world policy. Dataflow links individuals in parallel, so to speak. Eventually, human groups and thinkers could be so integrated as to be indistinguishable.
“At that point, such a society exceeds my modeling ability,” Alice concluded.
“Group mind,” I said sardonically. “I don’t want to be there when that happens.”
“It would be intriguing,” Alice said. “There would always remain the choice to simulate isolation as an individual.” [p.125-126]
***
2173-76 As we climbed through the cylinder, from the observation deck to the forward boom control walkway, Orianna told me about Earth fashions in clothes. “I’ve been out of it fro two years of course, ” she said, “But I like to think I’m still tuned. And I keep up with the vids”.
“So what are they wearing?” I asked.
“Formal and frilly. Greens and lace. Masks are out this year, except for floaters – projected masks with personal icons. Everybody’s off pattern projection, though. I liked pattern projection. You could wear almost nothing and still be discreet.”
“I can redo my wardrobe. I’ve brought enough raw cloth”.
Orianna made a face. “This year, expect fixed outfits, not nano-shaped. Old fabric is best. Tattered is wonderful. We’ll dig through the recycle shops. The shredbare look is very pos. Nano fake is beyond deviance.”
“Do I have to be in fashion?”
“Abso not! It’s drive to ignore. I switch from loner to slave every few months when I’m at home”.
“Terries will expect a red rabbit to be trop retro, no?”
Orianna smiled in friendly pity. “With that speech, you’re fulfilled already. Just listen to me, and you’ll slim the current.”
[…] “You still say ‘trop shink’ on Mars. That’s asbo neg, mid twenty-one. Sounds like Chaucer to Terries. If you don’t drive multilingual, and you’d better not try unless you wear an enhancement, best to speak straight-up early twenty-two. Everyone understands early twenty-two, unless you’re glued to French or German, or Dutch. They ridge on anything about twenty years old fro drive standard. Chinese love about eight kinds of Europidgin, but hit them in patrie, and they revert to twentyPutonghua. Russian – ”
“I’ll stick with English.”
“Still safe,” she said. [p. 155-156]
***
My Earth studies and conversations with Alice had left me with the impression of a flawless society, cool and efficient. But what I head in conversation with Orianna seemed to contradict this. There were great disagreements between Terries; nations within GEWA and its southern equivalent, GSHA, arguing endlessly, clashing morality systems as populations from one country traded places with others – a popular activity in late [21]70s. Some populations – Islam Fatimites, Green Idaho Christians, Mormons, Wahabi Saudis, and others – maintained stances that would be conservative even on Mars, clinging stubbornly to their cultural identities in the face of Earth-wide criticism.
Paleo-Christians in Green Idaho, practically a nation unto itself within the United States, had declared the rights of women to be less than those of men. Women fought to have their legal powers and rights reduced, despite opposition from all other states. On the reverse, in Fatamite Morocco and Egypt, men sought to glorify the image of women, whom they regarded as Chalices of Mohammad. In Greater Albion, formerly the United Kingdom, adult transforms who had regressed in apparent age to children were forbidden to hold political office, creating a furor I could hardly begin to untangle. And in Florida, defying regulations, some humans transformed themselves into shapes similar to marin mammals … And to pay for it, organized Sex in the Sea exhibits for tourists.
In language, the greatest craze of the [21]60s and [21]70s was invented language. Mixing old tongues, inventing new, mixing music and words electronically so that one could not tell where tones left off and phonemes began, creating visual languages that wrapped speakers in projected, complex symbols, all seemed designed to separate and not bring together. Yet enhancements were available that were tuned to the New Lingua Nets or NLN. Installing the NLN enhancements through nano surgery, one could understand virtually any language, natural or invented, and even think in their vernacular.
The visual languages seemed especially drive in the [21]70s. In GEWA alone, seventy visual languages had been created. The most popular was used by more than four and a half billion people.
I saw the picture on the cover of this morning’s National Post and recognized it as the so-called Leonardo drawing, since this was first reported last year.
The ‘news’ today is that the fingerprint ‘proves’ it is by Leonardo. I’ve studied and copied Leonardo drawings for half of my life, and I’m inclined to agree.
For that matter, I once saw a sculpted terra-cotta angel-head at the ROM and I thought that was probably by Leonardo too.
Hank Paulson (written by Craig Warner): “The West is fucked. We fucked it up. Oh, not just you and me [addressing John Mack, CEO of Morgan Stanley]. All of us. The West. It’s done, it’s over. You wanna call it a game? This is the game. You want your great-grandchildren speaking Chinese? The dollar is going to go. We had Rome, than Europe, than this. Us. This thing with cars and stereos and hoola hoops, and we screwed it all up. We ran through it all, this stuff. And we’ve come out on the other side where it’s …? I don’t know. Where is this place? Oh yeah. We have this one weekend, where maybe we can come up with something to hold it all together a little while longer.”
Ken Lewis, speaking with John Thain (wrtn by Craig Warner): “You see those pictures? They’re what I call real art. They would form the kind of exhibitions Bank of America might once have bankrolled. But now we find ourselves funding modern art as well. Art that can insult everything you and I have worked our whole lives to make sacred. Some of it to me looks like a road accident or a human being turned inside out. But those that matter, culturally I mean, like to stand back, arms folded, brows furrowed in just the right way, assessing the disturbed minds of psychopaths and getting from this a grim kind of satisfaction I freely admit remains unavailable to my own sensibilities. [Referring to the painting] The Judas Kiss. Exquisite isn’t it? But time has moved on Mr. Thain. The brand has to move on. The world is different now. We are currently financing an exhibition of paintings by Francis Bacon at the Tate Museum in London. Starts today. Do you know what his paintings look like?”
Thain: “I leave that sort of thing to my wife.”
Lewis: “Our name, Bank of America, is on that exhibition. History is happening Mr. Thain. Right here, this weekend. No one is going to blame you for keeping up with it.”
James Cromwell (l) plays Hank Paulson (r)
John Thain (l) played by Ben Daniels (r)
John Thain (l) and Ken Lewis (James Bolam) share a drink in fake life
John Thain (l) and Ken Lewis (r) shake hands in real life
Found in the notebook of ten years ago, dated 21 September 1999. Very much a draft, it was nonetheless written with potential publication in mind. I’ve reproduced some the draft-editing with the cross outs.
I recently watched an NFB film during the Atlantic Film Festival held in Halifax last September. And because it was the NFB, they had a two minute long (five minutes?) montage/ad showing various clips from their archives, to pat themselves on the back with the motto, ‘the images of our lives: NFB/ONF 1939-1999. Sixty years … etc. It reminded me of that the NFB is one of the few cultural products that Canada produces which is more obviously cultural. We are the country that claims to have a culture around shopping merchandise outlets (Eatons, The Bay) and a bunch of grown men chasing a rubber disk around on an artificially frozen slab of ice. (are Canadian examples of Can culture. This is not something to be proud of. It is just pathetic). My point is that what Canada claims to call its culture is really the experience of games and corporations. Anthropologically, there is a case for this, but it’s convoluted.
Now the Americans have a culture, there is no denying that. They have important painters and writers and musicians. And they have their Hollywood which claims to produce a cultural product (but in reality seem to produces 2 hour long for commercials they are commercials for the actors and the directors and the toy companies and in the at the turn of the century, the digital effects magicians).
Of course, the technically minded will remind us that the century doesn’t start until 2001, which illustrates why the technically minded’s reason and logic have never been too popular, because they ignore psychological realities. You have to reason it out, it’s not obvious, that the century starts in 2001. And the really stupid will say the same about the millennium, but it’s obvious that millennium are periods of a thousand years. I learned that three zeroes males a thousand. We didn’t call 999 two years before the millennium. Nineteen will change to twenty, ninety-nine will change to a thousand. One thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine will become two thousand. Roman numerals will be succinctly MM. And that doesn’t stand for Much Music – mille mille, a thousand thousand.
The NFB montage reminded me that film has been the dominant art form of this century. I would rather watch a movie based on a book than read the book, and I’m sure I’m not alone in this. Purists might think I’m lazy, that I’m some aesthetic chump, but why should I be embarrassed or ashamed to prefer a succint version of literature that I can enjoy visually?
Film images are so important to our turn of the century culture the NFB, Canada that they belong to everybody. Sure it says the NFB, it says Canada but it belongs to the world.
[This written as a callout]: Canada is an important source of important films that contribute to the world’s culture.
[Then this gets personal/reflective]: It occurred to me and then slipped from my grasp. What art was all about. It’s endlessly annoying to hear how art has been categorized, fit into a conceptual framework so that when an educated, supposedly sophisticated art person can give an answer when challenged by the question of certain exhibitions or curious crowd/patrons.
To me, the ability to give an answer to the question of what is art is means you in some ways missed the mark. I don’t think art is about questions and answers. I don’t think art is about meanings. I’ve come to appreciate that is which is [sic] dumbfounding, that which is wordless. An experience that is felt and not explained. It is a zen like think for me.
So, it is the information age / the space age / the computer age / etc etc. The multitude of names for a period in which we are living, exemplifies one of the stupidities of our post modern age times. “Agh, its too much! Too much …” etc etc. I suppose that type of condition, much cliched now, is the appeal of a dumbfounding art. Perhaps there are many of you that wish to understand, to grasp, who have believed that to know s the goal. But why? A painting is just another picture, a sculpture is just another lump to navigate around. I doubt that there have been such a large number of talentless hacks, that we, as audience members, and the witless appreciative hacks.
To make something that is different, to put something which engages the mind and the senses.
The importance of artistic things in our lives is numerous – the importance of being dressed, the TV shows we must watch, the song we must dance too.
The broad view is the existential one, that we will all die, and so who cares about anything. But death is not a reality for the majority of us. Most of us will not die tomorrow. And while we are young we are infused with the impossibility of death. We can afford to be bored. Art for us can be meaningless. Our young women can afford to listen to Celine Dion and Mariah Carey.
Art appears to be the biggest side show of all. Here in colonial North America, haunted by a past that as Canadians we are ignorant of, and haunted by the American history and the American culture, culture is a terrible thing, something to avoid by going shopping at Eaton’s, or by watching a hockey game. Psychological Realities
If art has value it is in teaching the dominance of psychological reality over the land of logic and reason. I certainly am not advocating stupidity, but to be conscious and balanced historically what has been called “a well rounded person”. We must balance the basic stupidity of reason with the knowledge of experience. Art is one of the best, if not the best and the if not the only appropriate medium/vehicle for the communication of experience.
I like my art to be fantastic and fanciful. Full of make believe. Fairy tales. I don’t like my art to be political and the pretentious. I don’t like people who judge and make enemies based on style. [The following is dated 22 September. Here I anticipate some of what I’ve encountered studying Christopher Alexander’s ideas about ‘centres’ and ‘wholeness’]
? Art is a manifestation of being. Art objects exist, but they are object or concepts that are dependent on other objects and concepts. They are structured from pre-existing structures. Art are a posteriori objects/concepts.
? Art objects contain souls. That is, there is within them an element that excites the subtleties sense of the subtle. Art objects, because they are fabricated from pre-existing structures, like life forms, carry within them elements of the auras of meaning from their ancestors. A collage is just not a coll glue and fragments, it’s a little bit of this magazine and this it’s sources.
[More personal/reflective]
What is the need to vocalize, to write this down? If I want an art that is free from conceptual frameworks and labels, why do I find myself penning an essay on art? Won’t the readers use this to formulate new soundbites on art?
An attempt to understand using the tools of understanding: that is an effect on language. The constructed object is a creature of being more eloquent and noble than a drop of sweat of a pile of excrement.
The sufferings today caused by a lack of dignity. To create if to dignify o
bjects and surfaces.
Human dreams in concrete form Wonders of the imagination Achievements of the imagination The Image nation
2001 – "That's the whole idea, you know. 150 years from today is not very far. [Yesterday on the set,] we were talking about what companies are going to be around. We were on location, and LeVar Burton's directing this week. He had on this Eddie Bauer get-up from head to toe, and we were talking, 'You know what? Eddie Bauer will be around in 150 years.' You can get your mind around 150 years from today. And there's some things you can say: 'Oh, no! Definitely will not be here in 150 years.'" – Scott Bakula, August 2001
The Holy Grail of the Unconscious By SARA CORBETT This is a story about a nearly 100-year-old book, bound in red leather, which has spent the last quarter century secreted away in a bank vault in Switzerland. The book is big and heavy and its spine is etched with gold letters that say “Liber Novus,” which is Latin for “New Book.” Its pages are made from thick cream-colored parchment and filled with paintings of otherworldly creatures and handwritten dialogues with gods and devils. If you didn’t know the book’s vintage, you might confuse it for a lost medieval tome.
Mad Men debuted in 2007, and corresponds to a fin-de-decade zeitgeist which may in turn provoke the next decade (2010-2020) to look more Modernist. Will Mad Men inspire people to begin dressing in similar ways? Already in the summer of 2009, Banana Republic had partnered with the show to sell similar fashion.
Correspondingly, when the Drake Hotel opened in Toronto in 2003, they adopted a Modernist design format (to reflect the owner’s idea that the Hotel should be a bohemian place that would inspire present day Beatniks), but by 2008, the Hotel was being depicted as if it existed on a lonely New York St during the 1950s and 60s.
Battlestar Galactica ran from 2003-2009, and depicted an essentially contemporary society (albeit one without spaceships and jump-drives). A spin-off series, Caprica, has been developed (it’s pilot premiered on DVD in 2009, the series itself in 2010), but set fifty years prior to the ‘contemporary’ Galactica series, uses costume design and other aspects to depict a retro-society; thus in effect matching the actual zeitgeist of the 2010s: a neomodernist highly technological society: Mad Men with Blackberries.
(A interesting note: one of the first reviews of the Caprica DVD pilot stated, “I love the possibilities of retro/futuristic style and wish it had been more consistently applied across costumes and set dec. What they achieved is pretty generic, mid-twenty first century Canadian.” )
Generic mid-21st Century Canadian
Subsequently, in twenty years, when both Caprica and Mad Men are downloadable retro shows from the 2010s, will people understand the contrivance of Caprica‘s Modernism, or see it only as reflection of the times in which it was created? In other words, by 2019, will our fashion and everything-design make it seem like we’re living in Caprican society? Does the popularity of Mad Men reflect a yearning for an elegance and style lost during the Postmodern period? Will we see a return to that, and in so doing become Mad Men with Blackberries & iPhones?
I started this Posterous account over the summer, in abandonment of both my Goodreads project and the blog on my website. I was trying something new. I also understand that Posterous has the ability to multi-post, so eventually I’ll set it up to sync with my /blog. However, over the summer I was working on a new site design, and while that’s pending I’m in no rush to set up that functionality yet.
As for Goodreads, that project is pretty much over. I plan on leaving it alone, and maintaining its archive. I just need to do some digital reorganizing. In the meantime, I’ve been trying to think of a new domain name, because I want to move on from GR into something else. I anticipate moving a lot of the GR content to this new thing, whenever that comes together.
“The historical role of modernism, in the sense of a phenomenon arising with the domain of art, resides in its ability to jolt us out of tradition […] Art today needs to reinvent itself, and on a planetary scale. And this new modernism, for the first time, will have resulted from global dialogue. Postmodernism, thanks to the post-colonial criticism of Western pretensions to determine the world’s direction and the speed of its development, has allowed the historical counters to be reset to zero; today temporalities intersect and weave a complex network stripped of a centre. Numerous contemporary artistic practices indicate, however, that we are on the verge of leap, out of the postmodern period and the (essentialist) multicultural model from which it is indivisible, a leap that would give rise to a synthesis between modernism and post-colonialism. Let us call this synthesis altermodernism'”.-Nicolas Bourriaud, Altermodernism catalogue essay.
Looking at the Andy Warhol ‘Giant’ book last night at Dan’s (Phaidon press, Dan’s friend’s book) impressed by the layout, comprehensiveness. The images, ticket stubs, newspapers, and really great photographs. Especially liked the picture of Warhol shopping (buying Campbell’s soup etc). I’ve never bought into the hype of Warhol, but I don’t doubt his relevance. Part of the problem of his legacy is how much popular culture adopted the forms he made permissible. It’s hard to look at the 1980s portraits made from Polaroids and rendered as silkscreens and not think of a cheap Photoshop filter. There are some who judge the quality of an artist by the level of subsequent adoption – Jackson Pollock, for example, made a drip-painted look for a table top something decorators could take seriously. Similarly, Apple encodes the ‘Ken Burns’ effect into it’s image software.
What was also apparent in the Warhol books is how much it was a documented party-scene. New York’s hipsters, looking like the hipsters of today (who are emulating their model) are preserved in their beautiful baby-fat youth for the rest of time. Thirty years later now their hair is grey, their bodies thick, their stamina not what it was then, and such is the way of things. But in New York moment in historical time, they were partying under the paternal patronage of Uncle Andy who took their photos and made pictures of them.
I was also struck by the absence of politics. There was the Warhol silkscreen of Nixon, ‘vote McGovern’ and it’s comprehensible if you know something of American politics of the early 1970s. But we are now living in the 21st Century, and it is a cultural artefact – highlighting the transience of American Presidencies. Nixon from here on and for the rest of time will merely be a collection of images (videos & photos) recorded audio tracks (the Tapes) and documents. In a hundred years, internet-conspiracy theorists will probably claim that he was a fictional character developed in 2002, just as they claim that 9/11 was an inside job and that the Moon landings never happened.
Of history, we should always remember the thousand years of memory outweighs the minutes of its creation; that is to say, murdering Julius Caesar probably took all of five minutes, but it has been remembered for over two thousand years. Such things exist in a much grander context than their initial inception. And they become the possession of a greater population of people than those who lived through them. (A greater number of people have been alive in the past two thousand years than the population of Rome in 44BC who lived through the actual event).
How we access and understand the context comes through the artefacts. Shakespeare’s imagining of Caesar’s death is renewed it’s memory in our civilization. The Frost/Nixon film last year renewed the memory of Nixon’s presidency. And today of course is a day of the renewal of memories of the terrorist attacks of eight years ago.
We may understand the history of Nixon, and of supermarkets, and of canned food. But how a particular human being reacted to them is what is documented in the art: Warhol got his peers to ask questions about and consider the packaging of popular culture. His works was also there as a reference during the development of machines that could render an image in millions of pixels and have each and every pixel subject to manipulation.
I was also looking at the book a day after Obama’s presentation to Congress on the importance of American Health Care Reform. Undoubtedly, Americans will eventually correct the imbalances of their health care system. Twenty years from now, no one will care. But on the coffee table of somebody’s home will be a book of some artist’s work that we presently have either never heard of, or just had a beer with at an opening. It is culture than always transcends the pettiness of politics. Politicians like to think their laws and policies are contracts and set in stone, and are some form of realized Platonic entity. They’re nothing of the sort. They can be repealed and amended. Politics is a game of making our lives easier to live. But once we have an easy life, the needs of our imagination become paramount, which is why cultural history wins.
Of the book, this seems the ultimate legacy. We may see Warhol paintings in any museum in any city on Earth. But very few of us will actually be able to go through the Warhol archives and see the collection of stuff accumulated in his lifetime. The book then functions as a curated display of celebrity relics, and allows us to conceptualize the totality of the oeuvre. The message, “This is the accomplishment of one man’s life in historical time”.
That Warhol and the New York rockstars photographed by him led cultural lives is a given. And it created a model for a society which would put a phone in everybody’s pocket, and a camera in each phone. Party blogs are responding to the idea that documentation is what one does, incase anyone becomes famous later. But not only do you trap someone’s pre-fame, you also believe that this is how one lives a cultural life – by dressing like they did thirty years ago, photographing everything, and ultimately perhaps publishing your youth in a book when your body is thick and your hair is gray. Good times, good times.
“Paying for things is our way of compensating all the people who have been inconvenienced by our consumption. (Next time you buy a cup of coffee at Starbucks, imagine yourself saying to the barista, ‘I’m sorry that you had to serve me coffee when you could have been doing other things. And please communicate my apologies to the others as well: the owner, the landlord, the shipping company, the Columbian peasants. Here’s $1.75 for all the trouble. Please divide it among yourselves.’)” – Joseph Heath, Filthy Lucre (2009) p. 160
From the Wikipedia article on ‘The Holocene Calendar‘: Cesare Emilian’s proposal published in Nature in 1993:
Calendar reform
SIR – Jews reckon time from the biblical creation of the world (set at 3761 BC); the Romans from the founding of Rome; and the Moslems since the Hegira (AD 622). In AD 526, the Emperor Justinian introduced the current system of reckoning time from the birth of Christ, set at 753 AUC (ab urbe condita, “since the founding of Rome”) by the monk Dionysius Exiguus.
In the BC/AD system that Justinian introduced, the numbering of years is ordinal, not cardinal; there is no year zero; and the numbers increase in opposite directions (whereas time flows in the same direction). As a result, time intervals across the BC/AD boundary cannot be calculated algebraically – the time interval between 1.5 BC and AD 1.5 is one year, not three years. As well as being inconvenient to those who deal with history and ancient human events, the BC/AD way of reckoning years singles out an event – the birth of Christ – that has no significance to many civilizations.
I propose that the beginning of calendrical time could be set at the beginning of the current Julian cycle (12.00 noon Greenwhich mean time, 4713 BC), established in 1582 by Joseph Scaliger and still used by astronomers. A constant – 4,713 years – would then have to be added to the AD dates and the BC dates would have to be subtracted from 4714 (the Scaliger year equivalent to AD 1). (To simplify the arithmetic, a round unit such as 10,000 years could be added to the AD dates instead).
Setting the birth of Christ at 25 December of the year 10,000 from the beginning of what could be appropriately called the “human era”, would make the year AD 1 into the year 10,001 and the year 1 BC into the year 10,000. All BC dates would thus be subtracted from 10,001.
Setting the beginning of the human era at 10,000 BC would date the first year of Scaliger’s Julian period at the year 5288; the beginning of the Egyptian calendar (4241 BC) at the year 5760; the foundings of Rome at 9248; the birth of Christ at 10,000, the fall of the Roman Empire at 10,476, the French Revolution at 11,789 and the present year (1993) at 11,993. I suggest that the new calendar is adopted in the year 2000 (new year 12,000).
Cesare Emiliani Department of Geological Sciences,
University of Miami,
Coral Gables,
Florida 33124, USA
Madonna regrets breaking up with Guy Ritchie, supposedly. Also, the novelty of dating her A-Rod proxy, Jesus Luz, has worn off, sources say, which is besides all of her Kabbalah friends being like, OY, A GOYIM NAMED JESUS?! Madge, babbeleh, step off it. Anyway, now that Madonna’s learning the whole Big Yellow Taxi Theory firsthand, maybe she will stop tearing down trees/divorcing husbands who are probably good for her in the long run and shtupping men who’re half her age. Also, getting to write about Madonna and Kabbalah reminds me of this 1998 MTV VMA performance where she did this ridiculous Shanti chant that segued into “Ray of Light.” Two things: (1) in retrospect, this moment makes so much sense on the Timeline of Madonna Being Ridiculous as it was clearly kind of an important one and (2) the VMAs, man: they just don’t make them like they used to. Watch Lenny Kravtiz get on stage with Madge for “Ray of Light” and come to terms with the fact that you just don’t have it in you to be as ridiculous as Madonna. [Showbiz Spy]
My latest post includes the thought, “The game is rigged so that the stupid win everytime”. This is referencing how my feed-listing today is full of shit. And these are the trending topics.
Town Hall: Demystifying the Creative City: Tired of all the creativity blah blah blah?
Organized by Fuse Magazine and Creative Class Struggle
The Town Hall will be followed with DJ Triple-X, Dancing and the Launch Party for Fuse Magazine’s summer issue, Goliath vs Goliath
Toronto Free Gallery
1277 Bloor Street West
Thursday June 18, 2009
Doors Open at 6:30 pm
Panel Begins at 7pm to 8:30
Party from 9pm to 1am
For press inquiries contact: Heather McLean hmclean@yorku.ca or Izida Zorde Izida@fusemagazine.org
Fuse Magazine and activists collective Creative Class Struggle are holding a Town Hall to talk about the real effects of the Creative City model currently produced in planning trends in communities across the city and globally. This conversation is intended to demystify this celebration and use of ‘creativity’ in economic development, land use planning, arts programming and community development. We are responding to these recent trends, popularized by urban researchers like Richard Florida.
The Creative City logic, advertises places of innovation, style and interactivity as places that will attract both business and the ‘creative class’ urban professionals and culture workers. This perspective, critiqued by some academics and policy makers for its vagueness and others for privileging certain types of jobs, neighborhoods and lifestyles at the expense of others is increasingly controversial. In this Town Hall, artists, activist, community workers, teachers and professors will be brought together to examine the realities of living under this policy paradigm. We will ask: what are the effects of these policies on the livelihoods of ordinary people? Who benefits from creative city planning that is meant to build money making cities in a time of cuts to vital services such as schools and important social spaces for ‘ordinary’ people such as community centres, and pools. What happens to the ‘non-creative’ workers in this script?
The panel’s goal is to address topics of race, class and gender, within the framework of the ‘creative class’, exploring how these policies celebrate a select group of glorified yet precarious professions and how cities are being re-structured and re-branded as money-makers, rather than places that offer secure livelihoods for their residents.
After the panel, we will bring together activists, academics, artists and workers for a Town Hall to discuss the increasing dominance of creative city ideas and policies. Through discussion we aim to demystify the politics concealed in the Creative Class ideology.
We have invited groups from across the city to contribute critiques and concerns based on their political organizing and/or personal experience. We plan to record this discussion and create a document that is intended to provide a thoughtful critique of the creative class script.
The panel includes the following speakers: Liette Gilbert – associate Professor, Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University. Her work focuses on policies, practices and ideologies of immigration, multiculturalism and citizenship.
Uzma Shakir – community-based researcher, advocate, activist and
the past Executive Director of Council of Agencies Serving South Asians
(CASSA) and the South Asian Legal Clinic of Ontario (SALCO). Her work focuses on issues of race, erosion of civil liberties and critical multiculturalism.
Pamila Matharu – a Toronto-based artist, activist, educator and cultural organizer/ producer. An activist for over 15 years, currently focusing on youth, contemporary art, pedagogy and the “inner-city experience” in Parkdale.
Moderated by Heather McLean: Heather McLean is a PhD student in the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University. Her research explores the relationships between relational aesthetics and performance and neo-liberal, competitive urban planning policies.
Fuse Magazine is proud to acknowledge the support of Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, Toronto Arts Council and Heritage Canada.
FORUM – OPENING WEEKEND / THE LAWFUL UNIVERSE?
Sunday, 14 June / 3 PM / $4 Members, $6 Non-Members
Studio Theatre, Harbourfront Centre
Historically physics was based on the idea that all the beauty and complexity of the universe can ultimately be reduced to laws. But recently that foundation has started to crumble as theoretical physicists question whether a single ‘theory of everything’ can really determine the cosmos and our place within it. In this engaging discussion, physicists and artists consider contemporary thinking about the nature of time. Sean Gryb, a PhD candidate at the Perimeter Institute for theoretical Physics in Waterloo, lays the groundwork for the panel. A discussion follows between Lee Smolin, a founding member of the Perimeter Institute whose pioneering work in quantum gravity applies Darwinian methods to cosmology, and Katie Paterson, a British artist included in ‘Universal Code’ whose projects include mapping all the dead stars in the universe and bouncing ‘Moonlight Sonata’ off the moon. Moderated by Misha Glouberman, an artist, performer and facilitator who hosts many things including the Trampoline Hall lecture series.
Input your birthday into Wolfram Alpha along with search-term ‘life expectancy’ and it will give you an answer rounded to two decimal places. My life expectancy is 81.58 years. You can take that number and add it to your date of birth, and Wolfram Alpha will return the appropriate date. According to the databases, I can expect to live at least until 6:43:12am on Wednesday August 30 2056, which is 47 years, 3 months, 12 days from now.
Forty-seven years left, meaning the days ahead are still greater than those behind.
Interestingly, the results skew with dates going further back in time. My grandmother, for example, is 96. Born in 1913, if I do the search query with her birthdate, I get a life expectancy of 99.31 years. She has an 83.3% chance of living past 97. Adding 99.31 years to her birthdate gives us an exact date of Sunday 29 April 2012 11:02:24am.
However, the life expectancy stats in 1913 did not project at 99.31 year lifespan. I searched for this info on Alpha, and got a ‘no data available’ message. A simple search ‘what was the life expectancy in 1913?’ gave me an answer for Canadian life expectancy in 1921 (presumably this is the earliest year for which the data is available). That result is 57.02 years.
Presuming then you were born on July 1st 1921. What is July 1 1921+57.02 years? Saturday July 8 1978. What does ‘life expectancy July 1 1921’ give us? 93.32 years.
birthdate: 1921-07-01
expected in that year: 57.02
expected today: 93.32
Thus the statistical life expectancy in 1921 of someone born in that year was 57 years. Alpha is clearly interpreting these queries as coming from living persons, and thus is saying, ‘if you birthdate was July 1st 1921’ then you can expect to live to be 93. You have a 76.1% chance of living past 90 and a 69.8% chance of dying before age 95.
Thus the data in 1921 has skewed forward by 36.3 years, representative of the 20th Century’s extension of the lifespan.
Another sample: search-terms: ‘life expectancy july 1 1930’; ‘life expectancy july 1 1940′; life expectancy july 1 1950’ etc.
birthdate
age expct (current)
age expct (in year-of-birth)
diference
1900-07-01
110.4
data not available
n/a
1910-07-01
101.4
data not available
n/a
1920-07-01
93.94
data not available
n/a
1930-07-01
88.81
58.96
29.86
1940-07-01
85.54
64.01
21.53
1950-07-01
83.54
68.28
15.26
1960-07-01
82.38
71.04
11.34
1970-07-01
81.76
72.65
9.11
1980-07-01
81.4
75.14
6.26
1990-07-01
81.06
77.51
3.55
2000-07-01
80.89
79.42
1.47
2010-07-01
80.80
80.36
-0.44
2020-07-01
80.90
80.36
-0.54
2030-07-01
81.13
no results
n/a
What this shows us is that those born in the 1930 and the 1940 currently have skewed data: in the case of the 1930s, they’ve already lived thirty years more than expected when they were born, and those of the 1940s by 20 years. My own cohort (1970s) has already increased by 9 years.
If we apply the difference already for those born in the 1930s to those born in the 1970s, (and specifically for myself): 73.49+29:86 = 103.35.
In that case, I can expect to live to exactly 6:00:00pm, Tuesday June 7 2078, which is 69 years from now.
Big Ideas, September 26, 2009: A Crisis in Leadership
Intellectual heavyweights John Ralston Saul, Naomi Klein, Margaret MacMillan and Adam Gopnik discuss ‘A Crisis in Leadership’ at the Globe and Mail Open House Festival. The panelists reflect on what constitutes a good leader and why some leaders fail while others thrive. Journalist Carol Off is the moderator.
For more information on this episode, including information on the guests and various other resources and links, visit the episode webpage
—–
Note: This is an iPod video podcast that is available for free download from the website. Quality is good. Audio podcast (mp3 format) is also available for free download.
Pages Books & Magazines presents This Is Not A Reading Series
Visit: www.pagesbooks.ca
Was the recent collapse of the multinational banking system in the cards? Will the current economic downturn ultimately be seen as a positive turn of events? To celebrate the launch of his latest book, Filthy Lucre: Economics For People Who Hate Capitalism (HarperCollins Canada), acclaimed author and academic Joseph Heath will discuss such hot button topics with noted business columnist David Olive.
A This Is Not A Reading Series event presented by Pages Books & Magazines, HarperCollins Canada, Gladstone Hotel, NOW Magazine, and Take Five On CIUT. Gladstone Hotel Ballroom, 1214 Queen St West, Toronto Tues May 5; 7:30pm (Doors 7pm) $5 (Free with Book Purchase)
FILTHY LUCRE A dozen times every day, individuals and organizations use economic claims to support social and political points of view. Those on the left tend to distrust economists, seeing them as friends of the right. There is something to this skepticism, since professional economists are almost all keen supporters of the free market. Yet while factions on the right naturally embrace economists, they also tend to overestimate the effect of their support on free-market policies. The result is widespread confusion. In fact, virtually all commonly held beliefs about economics–whether espoused by political activists, politicians, journalists or taxpayers–are just plain wrong.
Joseph Heath, co-author of the international bestseller The Rebel Sell, wants to improve our economic literacy and empower us with new ideas. In Filthy Lucre, he draws on everyday examples to skewer the six favourite economic fallacies of the right, before impaling the six favourite fallacies of the left. Heath leaves no sacred cows untipped as he breaks down complex arguments and shows how the monetary world really works. The popularity of such books as Freakonomics and Predictably Irrational demonstrates that people want a better understanding of the financial forces that affect them. Highly readable, flawlessly argued and certain to raise ire along all points of the socio-political spectrum, Filthy Lucre is a must-read for anyone wanting to engage in clear debate on social and political issues.
JOSEPH HEATH is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto. He is the author of two books: The Efficient Society–a national bestseller and a Globe and Mail Best Book of 2001–and Communicative Action and Rational Choice. Heath co-authored the widely acclaimed worldwide bestseller, Rebel Sell: Why The Culture Can’t Be Jammed, with Andrew Potter. He lives in Toronto.
DAVID OLIVE is a business and current affairs columnist at the Toronto Star, where he also writes a blog called The Great Recession. He has been a staff writer at the Globe and Mail, the Financial Post and the National Post. He is a former editor-in-chief of the Globe’s Report on Business Magazine. He has written eleven books, the most recent of which is An American Story: The Speeches of Barack Obama, A Primer.
MEDIA CONTACTS
Joseph Heath: Emma Ingram, Emma.Ingram@HarperCollins.com, (416) 975-9334
This Is Not A Reading Series: Chris Reed, tinars@pagesbooks.ca, (416) 598-1447, ext 221
Michael Ignatieff listening to Isaiah Berlin tell a story about Ludwig Wittgenstein, from his 1995 interview broadcast on BBC in 1998. (YouTube)
Taking the Go Train home on Saturday 26 February 2005 (I had been at that afternoon’s panel discussion put on by the Canadian Art Foundation which I reviewed for BlogTo) I picked up that day’s National Post lying on the seat in front of me. I came across Peter C. Newman’s article on Michael Ignatieff regarding his keynote speech at the upcoming Liberal convention. The article suggested that Ignatieff’s long-term goal was to become the party’s leader and by extension a potential Prime Minister.
The following Thursday (3 March 2005) I saw Darren O’Donnell’s A Suicide-Site Guide to the City , and afterward went to a C Magazine launch on College St. That afternoon, four RCMP had been killed in Mayerthorpe Alberta. The day was already full of Canadian content, and so perhaps I was already primed to appreciate Ignatieff’s speech & vision for the country. I had a midnight snack with CPAC on and the speech mid-way through, I later shifted to the couch to finish watching it. Before retiring I put a tape in the VCR to let it run overnight, to catch the repeat.
With that in hand, I ripped the audio and made the transcription that I posted on Goodreads. Ignatieff had first come prominently to my attention in 2000 when he delivered that year’s Massey Lectures (I remember listening to one as I drove in the November rain) but even at that time I was already vaguely aware of him, having read the Globe & Mail review of his 1998 biography on Isaiah Berlin. Through the speech and the background I thought Prime Minister Ignatieff would be a good thing.
As I’ve written previously, part of this was the idea that ‘Canada deserves to have a Massey Lecturer as Prime Minister’. But that’s just my bias for intellectual public figures asserting itself. Privately, I share the reservations of many: that he’s an expat who left only to return when it suited his ambition. That he advocated for the Iraq war (writing in The New York Times using the ‘we’ implying he was an American citizen) and that he’s been an Imperial apologist through his ‘lesser evil‘ arguments. However, it would still be nice to have a Prime Minister who thinks out loud, rather than those who do not seem to think at all, yes?
So, at some point in early 2006, I went on the Ignatieff website and sent them a note, offering to volunteer toward his campaign. I got no response whatsoever, not even a email list auto-responder message. However, on 5 September 2006, while I was browsing in Ten Editions bookstore on Spadina, my cell phone rang with a number I didn’t recognize. My hesitant hello was matched with a female voice asking me to be a delegate for Ignatieff in Montreal’s November convention. I was like, uh, ok. What does that mean?
I was told that it wouldn’t cost me a dime, and at that point they merely wanted to put my name on the ballot in my riding. The Liberals would be voting for delegates, and elected delegates would then go on to Montreal. There was some paperwork. I was like, ok, cool, whatever.
My walk to the train station that evening was filled with thoughts of destiny by way of the weirdness of out of the blue phone calls that can change your life. I had literally be called to join to Liberal party and have politics become part of my experience. I kind of wanted that happen. I had thought about joining the party the previous June in order to vote for Iggy. I’d decided against it, but now it was back as a request.
Because I had a September 13th deadline, I joined the party via the Liberal website on Monday 11 September. (What I has always seemed odd to me was that I never received any form of official documentation stating that I was a member of the Liberal party. I think my membership expired the following year, but I’m not sure). There were forms I was asked to fax. I told my contact that I could easily drop them off at the headquarters.
I did the paperwork and dropped off the forms on Wednesday the 13th at the Ignatieff campaign headquarters on Bloor St. While walking down the street I saw the poster for The Fountain against a building, put there for the film festival, and sparking my interest in seeing it when it was released later that November.
At the headquarters, the girl who I’d dealt with over the phone was pretty and polished and this further gave me thoughts that maybe my life was changing for the better – I’d start to meet really interesting people who are involved with politics rather than the cultural scene. The prospect of going to the convention seemed exciting; I’d have a chance to participate in a small moment of the country’s history, like being at the convention which elected Trudeau.
The delegate election was set for September 30th. I’d emailed my contact at the campaign headquarters asking if I needed to attend, because I had a scheduling conflict – this being that weekend’s Copy Camp at the Ryerson University Campus. I was told it wasn’t necessary.
Personal monetary issues where also on my mind. At the end of September I began what would turn out to be a year-long temp-assignment with TD Bank. With my email-list background, and with a list of Liberals in my riding provided by the campaign, I drafted a letter to them on a notepad during my first day at the bank, while waiting to get settled. I set up the email list on my server but never sent the message, realizing that it really wasn’t worth my time.
Also, I had gotten a phone call from another Ignatieff candidate in my riding who seemed a social-austic. We had a nice chat, and I told him why I was supporting Ignatieff, and when I asked him for his last name, he asked me why I wanted to know. Uh, I don’t know, because it’s polite? (This is what Ignatieff’s is attracting?!) In the end, Gerrard Kennedy’s delegates won, but I didn’t find this out for two weeks. (Professional communication, FTW).
On October 18th, I wrote a friend:
And did I mention before that I was running in the Ignatieff Liberal Leadership campaign as a delegate? The process was the Liberal party members elect delegates to go to Montreal for the convention – the election was Sept 30 and I only found out on Monday [October 16th] that I lost. I was hoping to get 0 votes but I don’t know the tally. I’m just glad I can sort of ignore the Liberal email stuff from now on. My taste of it was not impressive. I thought going to Montreal would be awesome, and was led to believe the whole thing could have been subsidized, but it turns out that wasn’t entirely true. Attending the convention alone cost $1000, and to ’subsidize it’ they suggested hosting a fundraising dinner, where you could get ‘family & friends’ to donate $500 to $25 and have Mr. Ignatieff talk to them afterward. Like any of my family & friends care! And I’d hate to hit them up that way. I got a good impression of how disorganized and unprofessional they were, which was at the same time, not a good impression.
Here it becomes easy to acknowledge the inherent corruption within the democratic process that party politics represents. It is very much a pay-to-play system than in the end cannot truly represent the citizens who do not want or cannot pay to be a part of it.
At some point between mid-October and late-November, I got another phone call from the campaign, asking if I’d still like to go to the convention. I returned the call in the lobby of my building at the TD Centre. Biopic: the scene consists of I pacing while framed by Mies Van Der Rohe’s windows with my Nokia at my right ear; my dialogue: ‘I cannot make the time nor can I afford it, so no, I am not interested in being a delegate in Montreal’. Sound of regret, (and I must say, the evident desperation that I was even being asked) on their end.
Skip now to the first days of December 2006: I watched the convention on CBC that weekend. I remember seeing Bob Rae look amazed when one of the drop-outs came over to his side. I remember seeing the two-channel shot of Ignatieff vs Dion while they awaited the final count, this shot also projected in the convention centre, and thus keeping both men pinned to their chairs while the count was being officiated; the voice-over commentary saying it was cruel. The cruelty being that Stephane Dion had won but they were awaiting the count to be formalized and the announcement prepared. It was known because it word-of-mouthed on the convention floor during the interim. I believe it was Susan Bonar who reported that Jean Chriten was seen checking his Blackberry and showing his wife, who mouthed ‘Stephane!?’
From my Journal, 2 December 2006:
5.17pm, awaiting the announcement of the fourth ballot results. The feeling seems to be that Stephane Dion has won the leadership, but we have to wait and see. I’ve had an underlying anxiety all day, I want Ignatieff to win, but at the same time recognize that he’s too much of a rookie. Dion as Liberal Leader? As a Prime Minister? I’m looking forward to this being over so that I can relax. In September I had such a sense of certainty that Ignatieff would become leader.
Back in September, after I dropped off my papers on Bloor St, I met with a friend and we had lunch. During our talk, I said to him, ‘Ignatieff is going to be the leader. I’ve seen it in my crystal ball’. My crystal ball was off by two years, but it’s evident to me that a hundred years of movies have embedded scripts into our thinking to such an extant that once you get the narrative going, it takes on a life of its own. Michael Ignatieff will be Prime Minister of Canada one day. That was decided in 2004, and the media was seeded with this idea by Peter C. Newman’s National Post piece, and an interview in April 2006 in MacLeans (also by Newman), and a profile in the Globe & Mail (which was reprinted last December).
Gerrard Kennedy and his supporters threw sand into the gears of the story when they backed Stephane Dion. Theirs was an attempt to say that democracy should work on merit and occasionally on surprise, not through elites and backroom deals. I, as a newly minted Liberal under dubious circumstances shrugged. Whatever. We have to live with it, not so bad.
6:32pm – Stephane Dion did win. They dragged out the process so that it was announced at about 6pm; Dion is giving his speech but I have the TV on mute and the left-ear bud in since I’m back to working on the transcription. I’m disappointed that the Liberals didn’t see the potential of Ignatieff but there’s nothing one can do.
Maybe it did turn out so bad. So be it, bygones being what they are. However, my crystal ball did not anticipate a Parliamentary insurrection due to the bastard-politicking of Mr. Harper. Stephane Dion, having “lost” (he did not lose, his party simply didn’t get as many members elected to Parliament as the Conservatives) the election, and bungled a coalition attempt, was forced out, and Ignatieff appointed in his place. Thus, my 2006 vision became a reality. Through a back room deal.
A lifetime of Star Trek (and this is written also in light of the release of the latest movie, which was supposed to be released last December) makes me want to speak of alternative time lines here. The Kennedy-Dion alliance in November 2006 seems to have altered history, postponing Ignatieff’s Prime Ministership by a number of years. And so, as part of this fucked-up time line, we have another election won by Conservatives (which wasn’t supposed to happen in 2008), the attempt at coalition (which is never supposed to happen because politics is so cut-throat to forgo cooperation), and the shut-down of Parliament ahead of schedule last December. That whole ‘crisis’ was a series of avoiding should-have-beens.
Which is to say: had Ignatieff become leader in 2006, I doubt Harper would have ‘won’ another election. But Harper did so in October 2008, and then played the scene wrong and brought down the wrath of Parliamentary procedure. Dion is disgraced, and Ignatieff (who should have been just another candidate this weekend, a replay of the Montreal game) is appointed by the party hierarchy. Dion was supposed to remain leader during this time. Bob Rae and Dominic LeBlanc were supposed to be candidates for the leadership. All this is swept aside. The scripts of a year ago are now trivia in light of the extensive rewrites.
And so, one evening last January while I walked down Yonge St, on my way to catch the streetcar after work, my phone rang with an unrecognized number. It was the Ignateiff campaign calling asking if I’d like to stand as a delegate in Vancouver. By this time I’d already ignored three messages left by them, calling to see if I would be interested (messages which had begun in late December). So, on this call, I told them no. When asked why, I said, because I can’t afford it, I can’t make the time, and it’s just going to be a coronation anyway, so I didn’t see the point.
For a while now I’ve been thinking of something I read when I was following Babylon 5 back in the mid-90s. JMS had written of how formality arises in a post war period. Spent the early afternoon trying to track this down, and came up with the following messages. I think this one from 2 July 1996 is probably what I’m thinking about:
From: J. Michael Straczynski (71016.1644@compuserve.com)
Subject: Don’t wanna hear that!
To: CIS
Date: 7/2/1996 7:07:00 PM
(original post unavailable)
My sense is that these things tend to go in cycles; if you were around in the Roaring Twenties, with flappers, jazz, and (to say the least) a lapse in morals that went into the first part of the 1930s, you’d extrapolate from that to say that the 1950s, by virtue of being 20 years down the road, would be even MORE loose, more immoral, wilder. But, in fact, the 50s were extremely conservative. And most of the SF of the time looked to a future that was as button-down as the present of their writers. Then the looser 60s and 70s, and a rebirth of some extent of conservatism in the Reagan 80s and for health reasons.
The day someone perfects, and distributes, a guaranteed Aids vaccine, I think you’re going to see another sexual revolution that’ll make the 60s look like a dinner party.
So by the time of B5, we’re in a bit of a conservative swing again, in terms of sexual matters (which often tends to come about post-war).
jms
Which is two years after he posted this on 12 January 1995
From: jmsatb5@aol.com (Jms at B5)
Subject: Re: Attn: JMS. counterculture
To: rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.moderated
Date: 1/12/1995 2:51:00 PM
This to Katherine Teague…you’re among the first to pick up on a deliberate writer’s choice in the writing of the series. In looking toward the period of B5, I tried to construct a society that had to come together on a planetary scale to fight a war for simple survival. My thinking was, “Okay, let’s assume that formality has come back into vogue; clothes tend not to be revealing, lines are more streamlined or severe, people address each other or refer to each other formally (”Mr. Isogi,” “Ms. Winters,” and so on).
I suppose a conservative could derive some satisfaction from this choice…though to quote Mephistophilis in “Faustus”……”Aye, think so still, ’till experience change thy mind.”
jms
which was because Teague commented on this, posted a day earlier
From: jmsatb5@aol.com (Jms at B5)
Subject: Attn: JMS. counterculture on B
To: rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.moderated
Date: 1/11/1995 5:34:00 PM
By 2259 the “counterculture” as we understand it is absolutely old fashioned and retrograde. Seems like everybody’s working to get In, not be Out. Sort of an extreme gingrichification effect….
jms
There was also this, which seems closer to my memory
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.moderated
From: Jacob Corbin (cor…@swbell.net)
Date: Nov 14 1998, 4:00 am
Subject: Re: Civil Rights in B5? WAS: River of Souls ( *Spoilers* )
Reply to Author | Forward | Print | Individual Message | Show original | Report Abuse
And as JMS has pointed out from time to time when people have asked why everyone in B5 wears heavy clothing and listens to old-style swing, populations generally tend to become more conservative after a major war (the 20’s and the 50’s are both good examples of this). I’m still not sure if denizens of the 23rd century would be jazzhounds or not, but it’s a fun extrapolation and one of the things that initially attracted me to B5–along with neckties.
Jacob
And there was this, from September 25 1996
[…]
(I’ve also made the mental assumption of a return to a newformality in 2260, since styles go in and out of fashion. People use the word Mr. and Ms. more often, there’s a more formal stance with people you often get when a culture comes out of a major war, as we did after WW2.) […]
And I like this from 27 October 1995:
From: jmsatb5@aol.com (Jms at B5)
Subject: ATTN JMS: Influences?
To: rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.moderated
Date: 10/27/1995 9:00:00 AM
[…]It saddens me a bit now that anybody who sounds too literate is often put down as showy or being theatrical. Listen to the speeches of Kennedy and Churchill and FDR, look to the great orators of our long history of a nation, from Lincoln to Jefferson. Their use of language, of an idea well formed and delivered, propelled this nation toward its current destiny, forged one country out of dozens of squabbling states. I listen now to politicians, hoping and waiting for the one who understands that the words have to dig into our souls and take root, must have power and the purity of language well-used. And I just don’t hear it anymore…which is perhaps why we have consensus takers and not leaders these days.
It saddens me that literacy has become suspect, and degraded, given how many millions of years of evolution spent developing the ability to create language. The quality of our thoughts is bordered on all sides by our facility with language. The less precise the useage, the less clear the process of language, the less you can achieve what you want to achieve when you open you mouth to say something. We have slowly bastardized and degraded and weakened the language, abetted and abided by a growing cultural disdain for literacy, a cyclical trend toward anti-intellectualism.
So I write my characters as sharp, and as witty, and as intelligent, and as literate as I wish I would be under those sorts of circumstances, which of course I never am. Maybe to remind people of the power of language…mainly because I just love the sound of words carefully stitched together. My dramatic conceit is that in 2259, we have had a moderate rebirth of formality, and the kind of literacy you would often see in letters from the turn of the century, and the 1930s. Because it allows me to write it the way I want.
This especially makes me think of a scene in the first season, when Sinclair is listening to the room’s computer recite ‘Ulysses’ by Tennyson in ‘The Parliament of Dreams’ (1994-02-23).
Now, the question I ask – is this happening? If you look at the Conservatism of the 1980s (which Bush II & Co seem to be echoing) this follows ten years after Vietnam. So it would seem to say that the next decade will be even more conservative then this one? (Oy vey). And yet, JMS talking about needing an Aids vaccine before another sexual revolution – this was written ten years before amateur internet porn, and there’s still no vaccine (although in ‘96, antiretroviral treatments which keep people alive today were only then beginning to become available). Anyway, I guess I have my eye out for a developing conservatism.
I found a paper from Grade 11 History yesterday. This evening I typed it up. I’ve just finished reading Tom Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia and I’d seen his Travesties last month, so this was a nice coincidental find and refresher. If you had asked me on Saturday about the Irish Revolution I described 17 years ago, I wouldn’t have known what you were talking about.
When I couldn’t remember the title of My Life and Times I did a search for Helen Hunt. I also remember her from her two episodes of Highway to Heaven in 1985 when her character was dying of cancer.
Then she got famous on a sitcom and disappeared. But in My Life and Times she played the lead character’s wife. In an episode set in the late 1990s, during an economic depression, they huddled together on a bed, holding each other, providing comfort amid the dismal. The scene was depicted in a gray colour scheme, in order to highlight the dreariness.
Harold Innis, the first and still the most piercing philosophyer of communications wrote a great deal about the problem of the written or what George Steiner calls “the decay into writing”.
The deeper we go into the written, the deeper we go into mistaking the snake for the apple – the messenger for the message. I’ve said before that one of the signs of a healthy civilization is the existence of a relatively clear language in which everyone can participate in their own way. The sign of a sick civilization in the growth of an obscure, closed language that seeks to prevent communication.
[
•blogging vs. academics & mainstream media journalism & the language of a press release;
•participatory vs. dictatorial
]
This was increasingly the case with those medieval scholars know as teh schoolmen. This is the case today with those who wield the thousands of impenetrable specialist dialects. They plead complexity, given this century’s [20th] great advances, particularly our technological breakthroughs. But the problem is not one of complexity. Not many outsiders actually want to know the nuts and bolts of building jumbo jets or writing post-modern novels. It is the intent that is in question – teh intent to use language to communicate, or alternately, through control of it, to use language as a weapon of power.
Unconsciousness – even hysterical unconsciousness – is not a surprising characteristic in a corporatist society where the language attached to power is designed to prevent communication.
“A life without this sort of examination is not worth living,” Socrates said in the most famous sentence of his trial defense. He was referring to the ongoing self-examination that public philosophy involved. And philosophy is a matter of public debate or it is nothing. Philosophy as just another specialist corporation is a flagrant return to medieval scholasticism.
Of course, misinterpretation or inadvertent interpretation is the great fear of writers who have any sense of the real world into which their language flows. Perhaps that is why so many of the key thinkers – let me call them the conscious thinkers – have feared the written word and expressed themselves through the oral. Socrates, Christ, Francis of Assisi are obvious examples. Shakespeare’s plays were almost oral, written down in bits and pieces, changed repeatedly on stage. Even many who wrote – Dante, for example, or the great figures of the Enlightenment – consciously sought to use a language polished into a simple clarity that could both evoke and be used as if it were oral.
Harold Innis, the first and still the most piercing philosopher of communications wrote a great deal about the problem of the written or what George Steiner calls “the decay into writing”.
[…; p. 62]
Socrates, on the other hand, had reached 70, and his trial, full of ironic humour, questions and a terrifying consciousness. He was a force of doubt and thus of disorder from the utopians’ point of view.
Live 5: Art Since 1960 (According to the Internet)
Hanne Mugaas & Cory Arcangel
How is the internet changing our perception of art? In its indiscriminate cataloguing and non-hegemonic participation, the internet presents an idiosyncratic account of art since 1960. The democratic and self-regulating mechanisms of the internet make artworks and art world information easily accessible for reinterpretation by its users.
Hosted by Pleasure Dome and the Images Festival, Art Since 1960 (According to the Internet) is an informal multimedia lecture presented by Hanne Mugaas and Cory Arcangel that examines the alternate discourse on contemporary art that is unfolding on the world wide web. “The control systems that normally govern the systematization of art are dismantled by the search algorithms and whims of home users,” states Mugaas. The academic discipline of art history is bypassed and the curatorial rigour of the museum is rejected by internet users posting on art. Certainly institutions have their websites, but they are overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of posts by users who ignore their methodologies. What are the results when this level of discourse is lost? Are the long established theories of art merely fusty conceits; irrelevant and elitist notions?
Gathering together art images, video and audio, Mugaas and Arcangel survey the internet’s art collections and how they are contextualized by its users. They offer their view on how this open sourcing of art and ideas has resulted in a variety of contiguities, conflations and collisions.
Cory Arcangel is an internationally renowned digital hacker known for his conceptual art projects. Check out and try out his reprogramming works at www.beigerecords.com/cory/tags/artwork/
Hanne Mugaas is a curator of art ephemera as well as a thought provoking art and culture pundit. View her collection of audiovisual postings at http://hanne-mugaas.com/artblog/
“Excuse me,” Lisa Durnau said. “Can I say something here? I think you’re wrong.” Then she told them about the idea that made life, mind, and intelligence emerge from the underlying properties of the universe as mechanically as physical forces and matter. That CyberEarth was a model of another universe that could exist in the polyverse, a universe where mind was not an emergent phenomenon but a fundamental like the Fine Structure constant, like Omega, like dimensionality. A universe that thought. Like God, she said and as she said those words she saw the gaps and the flaws and the bits she hadn’t thought through and she knew that every face around the table saw them too. She could hear her own voice, hectoring, so so certain, so sure she had all the answers at twenty-four. She tailed off into an apologetic mumble. (p.108-109, River of the Gods, Ian McDonald)
And it’s been there, encoded in ink formed as symbols, themselves representing sounds, mirrored in soundless electric thought in minds. Been there printed on a page, folded into a book, sitting on a shelf since 2004, before that cast into the light of a screen, tapped out through the buttons at the end of the author’s fingertips, resolved out of the thought-realm of the author’s mind space. From fog to fog, via light and ink, and back again round round round.
“Come on, man.” The Bengali might as well have said Jesus or James Bond of Lal Darfan. Chakraborty turns to Vishram.
“What is it about my answer that you do no believe?”
“Generation Three aeis, that’s science fiction.”
“I assure you my employer is quite actual. Odeco is indeed a venture capital holding company, it just happens that the venture capitalist is an artificial intelligence.”
“The Hamilton Acts, the Krishna Cops…”
“There are spaces where an aeai may live. Especially in something like the international financial markets which demand loose regulation to exploit their so-called market freedoms. These aeais are not like our kind of intelligence at all; they are distributed, in many places at once.”
“You’re telling me that this … Brahma … is the stock market, come to life?”
“The international financial markets have used low-level aeais to buy and sell since the last century. As the complexity of the financial transactions spiraled, so did that of the aeais.”
“But who would design something like that?”
“Brahma is not designed, no more than you, Mr. Ray. It evolved”.
[…]
“Brahma?” he says weakly.
“A name. A title. It means nothing. Identity is a much larger and looser construct in CyberEarth. Brahma is a geographically dispersed entity across many nodes and many subcomponents, lower-level aeais, that may not realize they are part of a larger sentience.”
“And this … Generation Three … is more than happy to give me one hundred million US dollars.”
“Or more. You must understand, Mr. Ray, to an entity such as Brahma, making money is the easiest thing there is. It is no harder than breathing is for you.”
-Ian McDonald River of the Gods p.385. (Set in 2047).
A third idea: An infinite range of behavior can be generated by finite combinatorial programs in the mind. […] The clearest example is the Chomskyan revolution in language. (15) Language is the epitome of creative and variable behavior. Most utterances are brand-new combinations of words, never before uttered in the history of humankind. We are nothing like Tickle Me Elmo dolls who have a fixed list of verbal responses hard-wired in. But, Chomsky pointed out, for all its openendedness language is not a free-for-all; it obeys rules and patterns. An English speaker can utter unprecedented strings of words such as Every day new universes come into existence, or He likes his toast with cream cheese and ketchup, or My car has been eaten by wolverines. But no one would say Car my been eaten has wolverines by or most of the other possible orderings of English words. Something in the head must be capable of generating not just any combination of words but highly systematic ones.
That something is a kind of software, a generative grammar that can crank out new arrangements of words. A battery of rules such as “An English sentence contains a subject and a predicate,” “A predicate contains a verb, an object, and complement,” and “The subject of eat is the eater,” can explain the boundless creativity of a human talker. With a few thousand nouns that can fill the subjective slot and a few thousand verbs that can fill the predicate slot, one already has several million ways to open a sentence. The possible combinations quickly multiply out to unimaginable large numbers. Indeed, the repertoire of sentences is theoretically infinite, because the rules of language use a trick called recursion. A recursive rule allows a phrase to contain an example of itself, as in She thinks that he think that they thinki that he knows and so on, ad infinitum. And if the number of sentences is infinite, the number of possible thoughts and intentions is infinite too, because virtually every sentence expresses a different thought or intention. The combinatorial grammar for language meshes with other combinatorial programs in the head for thoughts and intentions. A fixed collection of machinery in the mind can generate an infinite range of behavior by the muscles.
-Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate pages 36-37
JIM RILEY: COMMUTE
January 10 – February 15, 2009
Reception and artist talk: Sunday, January 11, 2009 2 p.m.
Burlington Arts Centre
In our age, the idea of commuting raises certain societal issues. How a person commutes to work is now being questioned more and more for a variety of environmental, psychological and economical reasons.
This installation consists of a looping video projection and four video paintings examining the daily routine life of the commuter. Jim Riley documented the view seen through the train window by a commuter travelling between Burlington and Union Station, Toronto over a three year time period. He used these images to illustrate the commuter’s dilemma. Riley’s aesthetic investigation examines the connection between time and perceptual memory. With this installation, he continues his exploration of the relationship between painting and video. Riley uses both media as perceptual, philosophical instruments for questioning reality and the way we relate with the world.
“The effect of Riley’s stated emotive rather than linear narrative is that at some point the trans-like monotonous routine of the commuter overtakes the viewer. In the vicious loop of getting to the train and getting off the train, going to work and home again, on again, off again, home again, day after day, season after season, we have removed the final particle of mystery. In compensation for the perpetual neurosis of post-industrial commodification, we sympathize with the anonymous and generic commuter who is both a victim and a perpetrator of the surburban distopia.” — Ingrid Mayrhofer-exhibition publication essay
Jim Riley is a video artist and curator based in Burlington, ON. He has exhibited in Canada and the United States. The artist wishes to acknowledge the support of the Ontario Arts Council and Paul Rak & Rhona Tai of Veriform Inc., Cambridge.
Contact: George Wale, Director of Programs at 905-632-7796 or info@jimriley.ca
Burlington Arts Centre, 1333 Lakeshore Rd (at Brock Rd.) Burlington, ON, L7S 1A9
Hours: Monday – Thursday 9:00am – 10:00pm, Friday – Saturday 9:00am- 5:00pm, Sunday 12noon – 5:00pm
Linda Heffernan Ordinary People January 10 – February 1, 2009 Reception: Saturday, January 10th, 2009, 2 – 5 pm Loop Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition by Loop Gallery member Linda Heffernan entitled Ordinary People.
Linda Heffernan’s current body of work is a tongue in cheek response to politics, the media and ordinary people. It speaks to the manner in which corporate America, government officials and ordinary people interact with the media during coverage of both global and local events in a constant play of bait and banter.
Painted photos of ordinary people combine with titles inspired by a Toronto Star meme of the week, or a quote from Saturday Night Live or Canada A.M., to demonstrate the disconnect between the politically astute and those who simply want off the current economic roller coaster to put their head between their knees and take a deep breath.
The semi abstract backgrounds stand in for the snow and ice of backyard rinks, melting glaciers and the extended political snow day invoked by our prorogued parliament. The surreal nature of these paintings is both a comment on the current state of Canadian political affairs and a portal for momentary escape.
Linda Heffernan is a Whitby-based artist exploring themes of consumer capitalism and bureaucracy in an ever more interconnected global economy. She recently obtained her BFA from Ontario College of Art and Design where she was named to the Dean’s Honour List in the Faculty of Art. She has exhibited her work in a number of galleries in Toronto’s Queen West district as well as Whitby’s Station Gallery.
Please join the artist in celebrating the opening on Saturday, January 10th from 2-5 pm.
Hans Gindlesberger and Nicholas Knight January 9 – February 14 @ Gallery 44, Toronto
Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography
401 Richmond St West, Suite 120
Toronto, Ontario
Right Frame, Wrong Film
Hans Gindlesberger and Nicholas Knight
January 9 – February 14, 2009 Opening: Friday January 9, 6-9pm
Artist talk: Friday January 9, 6-7pm
Gallery 44’s first exhibition of 2009, Right Frame, Wrong Film, challenges the viewer’s expectations about photography and seeing. Premiering in Canada, Hans Gindlesberger’s I’m in the Wrong Film explores the story of a character lost in suburbia, through cinematic photographs. Nicholas Knight, a New York based photographer, has created site-specific trompe-l’oeil installations that question the ways that photography frames its subjects. James D. Campbell, the exhibition brochure writer, states: “Gindlesberger and Knight are seasoned archaeologists of the seeing and the seen. Knight excavates the conventions of photographic practice in pursuit of a fully decoded aesthetic; Gindlesberger unearths potent psychological artifacts and tropes that imply much about place, non-place, belonging and alienation.” The full text is available on our website and exhibition brochure.
Exhibition programming
Artist talk: Friday January 9, 6-7pm
Join the artists for a walk-through of the exhibition and a discussion of the artist’s practices. A reception will follow.
Biographies
Hans Gindlesberger, originally from Toledo, Ohio, is interested in exploring issues of locality and displacement in theatre, silent film, and photography. His work has been exhibited and published in North America and abroad. He is currently based in Buffalo, New York, and Huntington, West Virginia, where he is Visiting Assistant Professor of Photography at Marshall University.
Nicholas Knight lives and works in New York City. He attended Indiana University, where he studied painting and the history and philosophy of science. He has exhibited his work throughout North America, including solo exhibitions in Chicago, San Francisco, and Marfa, Texas. He was artist-in-residence in 2007 at the Domaine de Kerguéhennec in Bignan, France.
Image Credit: Hans Gindlesberger, Untitled, from the series I’m in the Wrong Film, archival inkjet print, 55.88 x 101.60 cm, 2006
Media contact:
Melissa Bennett, Exhibition Coordinator
Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography melissa@gallery44.org
(416) 979-3941
Gallery 44 is open Tuesday to Saturday 11am to 5pm
Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography
401 Richmond Street West, Suite 120
Toronto, Ontario M5V 3A8 www.gallery44.org
…Google’s Chrome browser being available for the Mac. (~January 2009) [sometime by June I understand] …seeing Obama’s inauguration and hearing his speech (Jan 20 2009) …seeing the last episodes of Battlestar Galactica. (Jan-March 2009)
…seeing the new Star Trekmovie (May 2009) …getting an iPhone (Jan-Jun 2009)
…seeing the Caprica series (Jan 2010) [DVD of pilot to be released on April 21st]
Via Can Media Layoffs Twitter feed, I learned that CanWest is ‘in serious trouble’. I posted my own Twitter/Facebook thought on this: “Fuck CanWest. Their failure just means Canadians have taste’. All based on this article in the Globe and Mail, CanWest seeks financial saviour amid credit crisis.
Let’s review CanWest’s crappiness shall we? Via their Wikipedia entry; complete list of CanWest assets here.
CSI franchise (via their Alliance Altantis holdings)
Crap
Food Network Canada
Crap
History Television
Crap (not as good as it could be)
HGTV
Crap
Showcase
Crap. So edgy it bores me.
Showcase Action
Crap
Showcase Diva
Crap
Slice
Crap. Home of the masterpieces, The Biggest Loser, Average Joe, At the End of My Leash, Brat Camp, Nanny 911, Project Runway, Superstar Hair Challenge (full list)
Score Media Inc
Because every society needs an outlet for sports-loving douches. Crap.
I read this, which reminds me of this, so I post this, and I get this comment, which makes me think this: “Every time I think I’ve had some brilliant insight and I try to share it, I run into the brick walls of compartmentalized, literal thinking.” And then I get this other comment which makes me write this.
From Wikipedia’s article on Hipsters: (found via a search for how to type the heart symbol; the Wikipedia article noted: “The widespread use of this expression has inspired many parodies. Originally pronounced “I love”, hipsters have taken to facetiously verbalizing it as ‘I heart’, in expressions such as ‘I heart you!’.”)
In the past week I’ve noticed the keffiyeh wearing, and recognized it as both an act of solidarity and bad fashion sense.
Posted here as rare document of Wikipedia getting it totally right:
In the late 1990s, the term became a blanket description for middle class young people associated with alternative culture, particularly alternative music, independent rock, independent film and a lifestyle revolving around thrift store shopping, eating organic, locally grown, vegetarian, and/or vegan food, drinking local beer (or even brewing their own), listening to public radio, riding fixed-gear bicycles, and reading magazines like Vice and Clash and websites like Pitchfork vogue .[1]Robert Lanham‘s satirical The Hipster Handbook described hipsters as young people with “… mop-top haircuts, swinging retro pocketbooks, talking on cell phones, smoking European cigarettes,… strutting in platform shoes with a biography of Che Guevara sticking out of their bags.”[5] Hipsters are considered apathetic, pretentious, and self-entitled by other, often marginalized sectors of society they live amongst, including previous generations of bohemian and/or “counter-culture” artists and thinkers as well as poor neighborhoods of color.[1]
In 2005, Slate writer Brandon Stosuy noted that “Heavy metal has recently conquered a new frontier, making an unexpected crossover into the realm of hipsterdom.” He argues that the “current revival seems to be a natural mutation from the hipster fascination with post-punk, noise, and no wave,” which allowed even the “nerdiest indie kids to dip their toes into jagged, autistic sounds.” He argues that a “byproduct” of this development was an “… investigation of a musical culture that many had previously feared or fetishized from afar.”[6]
In 2008, Utne Reader magazine writer Jake Mohan described “hipster rap,” “as loosely defined by the Chicago Reader, consists of the most recent crop of MCs and DJs who flout conventional hip-hop fashions, eschewing baggy clothes and gold chains for tight jeans, big sunglasses, the occasional keffiyeh, and other trappings of the hipster lifestyle.” He notes that the “old-school hip-hop website Unkut, and Jersey City rapper Mazzi” have criticized mainstream rappers who they deem to be poseurs or “… fags for copping the metrosexual appearances of hipster fashion.”[7]Prefix Mag writer Ethan Stanislawski argues that there are racial elements to the rise of hipster rap. He claims that there “…have been a slew of angry retorts to the rise of hipster rap,” which he says can be summed up as “white kids want the funky otherness of hip-hop… without all the scary black people.”[8]
The hipster aesthetic of irony extends to the appropriation of elements of lowbrow or working class identity in an ironic fashion, such as Pabst Blue Ribbon beer. As well, hipsters wear the multicoloured keffiyeh scarf “initially sported by Jewish students and Western protesters to express solidarity with Palestinians”; however, with hipsters, the “…keffiyeh has become a completely meaningless hipster cliché fashion accessory”.[1]
A 38 year old male reports that on January 23, 2009 at approximately 0030 hours, he was in the area of Bloor Street West and Brock Avenue when he was approached by six male suspects. One suspect grabbed the victim in a headlock while the remaining suspects kicked and punched the victim about the body. The suspects made a demand for the victim’s wallet and gloves. The victim complied and the suspects fled the scene eastbound towards Dufferin subway station. The victim sustained minor injuries and will seek his own medical attention. Police are requesting the assistance of the public in identifying the following described persons in connection with this offence.
Description of Suspect #1-#6: Male, 18-20 years, 5’8”-6’.
———————————————
Let’s hope the police catch these six generic men soon.
At a grocery store the other day, my friend decided to get some cake mix. I told him it was a piece of cake to bake a pretty cake. Someone with a big stupid grin walked by us and said “But you gotta do the cooking by the book.” An employee nearby shouted (and this was just coincidence) WHAT?! I died laughing. My friend had no idea what was going on.
For some reason this damn video intrigues me. That little squeak in her voice, the cheery tone to it all and the syllabic wordplay is a perfect storm of stuck in my head.
I’ve done a little research on this in the past few minutes. Her name is Julianna Rose Mauriello. I believe I’ve narrowed down which episode the cake spoof is from: “Swiped Sweets”. It’s the only one that mentions anything about cake. This episode aired on August 20, 2004, which would make Julianna, in fact, 13 at the time the episode aired.
…Google’s Chrome browser being available for the Mac. (~January 2009)
…seeing Obama’s inauguration and hearing his speech (Jan 20 2009)
…seeing the last episodes of Battlestar Galactica. (Jan-March 2009)
…seeing the new Star Trekmovie (May 2009)
…getting an iPhone (Jan-Jun 2009)
…seeing the Caprica series (Jan 2010)
Wednesday, December 3 2008
Hart House (Great Hall), 7 Hart House Circle
7:30pm
Tickets $12. Limited seating.
For tickets call: (416) 640-5836, buy online or visit the Refund’s desk at 214 College St.
A lecture.
In this startlingly original vision of Canada, thinker John Ralston Saul unveils 3 founding myths. Saul argues that the famous “peace, order, and good government” that supposedly defines Canada is a distortion of the country’s true nature. Every single document before the BNA Act, he points out, used the phrase “peace, welfare, and good government,” demonstrating that the well-being of its citizenry was paramount. He also argues that Canada is a Métis nation, heavily influenced and shaped by aboriginal ideas: egalitarianism, a proper balance between individual and group, and a penchant for negotiation over violence are all aboriginal values that Canada absorbed. Another obstacle to progress, Saul argues, is that Canada has an increasingly ineffective elite, a colonial non-intellectual business elite that doesn’t believe in Canada. It is critical that we recognize these aspects of the country in order to rethink its future.
John Ralston Saul’s philosophical trilogy— Voltaire’s Bastards, The Doubter’s Companion andThe Unconscious Civilization—has had a growing impact on political thought in many countries. The conclusion to this trilogy, On Equilibrium—an exploration of the six qualities of the new humanism—is a persuasive and groundbreaking exploration of the human struggle for personal and social balance.
Mr. Saul has written five novels, including The Birds of Prey and The Field Trilogy. These works deal with the crisis of modern power and its clash with the individual. Like his non-fiction, his novels have been translated into many languages.
He has received many national and international awards for his work. The Unconscious Civilization won the 1996 Governor General’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction, as well as the Gordon Montador Award for Best Canadian Book on Social Issues. His reinterpretation of the nature of Canada, Reflections of a Siamese Twin, also won a Montador Award and was chosen by Maclean’s magazine as one of the ten best non-fiction books of the twentieth century. His novel The Paradise Eater won the Premio Lettarario Internazionale in Italy. Most recently he received the Pablo Neruda Medal in celebration of the hundredth anniversary of Neruda’s birth.
Mr. Saul was born in Ottawa and studied at McGill University and the University of London, where he obtained his Ph.D. in 1972.
Monday December 8th 2008 Anticipated: The Fall of the Harper Government Actual: Nothing
… well, as I’m writing this on Saturday the 6th, it may be too soon to tell.
It was too soon. Dion resigned today. Mr. Leblanc quits. On Don Newman’s Politics he says, “I concluded that I shouldn’t allow my personal ambition to stand in the way of the party coming together around a new leader as quickly as possible”. (9:52; below)
The comment thread on the Globe and Mail’s story about a recording of Trudeau and Nixon contains this funny eye popper:
Salem Shaworski from Ottawa, Canada writes: In 30 years a tape will be released of Harper’s first meeting with Bush.
A brief few minutes of Harper’s sycophantic praise will be heard followed by the sound of a belt being unbuckled, trousers being doffed and eager slurping sounds as Harper expends a few quarts of saliva.
Mentioned amidst some of the commentary was that the House was meant to be closed six days later anyway. Checking Parliament’s website, we see that the sitting days were to continue to December 12th, before breaking for the holidays. So the heavy-handed tactic of shutting down the House rather than face a vote he knew he would lose had the effect of teaching Canadians a new word and giving the politicians some new propaganda to play with for Christmas.
Let us imagine the scenario, had things happened the way they could have.
All comment seems to agree that the Conservative party is being run as a Harper dictatorship. Party members dare not speak out against policy, for fear of the wrath of the dear leader. To say that the maligned Economic Update was ‘Harper’s economic update’ may not be inaccurate. Harper’s Economic Update was delivered on Thursday November 27th. It was to be voted on Monday December 1st. Already by Friday afternoon of the 28th, the talk of Coalition was underway, so that on the evening of that Friday, Harper said he’d push the vote back a week, ‘to give Canadians time to contact their MPs’ and to give everyone a cooling off period. Presumably, Harper was hoping that the extra time was all that was needed to diffuse the growing threat of a Coalition.
Monday December 1st 2008 Anticipated: The Fall of the Harper Government Actual: The news conference presided over by the Liberals, NDP, and the Bloc.
The Coalition talk began to pick up steam. Conservatives had posted a website dictating talking-points to their supporters for call-in radio shows (a Macleanspost on this). The week then is marked by mediocre commentary in the national press, and the dim witted web-comments by Conservative supporters who are typing ’separatists!!!’ and ‘the three stooges’, and other variations of belittlement. Up until the previous week, I used to enjoy checking out Bourque.com for a round-up of Canadian news. This past week, that site devolved into the worst of yellow journalism as it denigrated into an essentially Conservative position.
So, by Wednesday December 3rd, we’re going to be addressed by the Prime Minister. I don’t have a television and was out at the scheduled time at 7pm, so I watched it when I got home from a website. Harper came across as an abusive husband looking to be let back into the house. His see-through charm and television makeup did nothing to convince me that he’s trustworthy. Further, he blatantly tried to exploit the ignorance of the Canadian people, by implying that the Coalition did not have the right to take power, when in fact they do. The response by Dion I have not yet seen. I clicked on it and the video never launched. This was probably because it was late in being delivered. Further, I heard that it’s quality was awful, evident from the screencaps posted on accompanying stories.
All of this only to set the stage for the dramatic visit to the Governor General’s house, where she would either let Harper’s government fall, or suspend Parliament. By noon, the news had come that Parliament was being prorogued.
Monday December 8th 2008 Anticipated: The Fall of the Harper Government Actual: Nothing
… well, as I’m writing this on Saturday the 6th, it may be too soon to tell. But Dec 8th was to be the day of the vote. So let us imagine it had gone ahead. The Harper government falls. Hipsters party on Monday night. But then what? The Coalition would take power only after Harper’s formal visit to the Governor General. He would have had to say to the Speaker that the loss of the vote demonstrates the loss of confidence in the government and he’s therefore be visiting her to ask her to dissolve Parliament and call an election. So, what happened on Thursday the 4th would have happened on the 9th. And then again, the question would have been, does the GG call for new elections, or does she allows the Coalition a chance?
The Coalition attempted to show through its documents and press conferences that it was positioned to lead the government for at least 18 months. This was in order to influence the GG into deciding to give them the chance. So, let’s imagine that she did. Somewhere around Tues December 9th or Wednesday the 10th, the breaking news is the establishment of a Coalition government. Because the hipsters had already partied on Monday, they don’t see the need to do it again.
And so … Parliament shuts down two days later, on Friday the 12th, as was scheduled. Christmastime is now all mixed up with the reality that the Conservatives are mighty pissed off to have been subject to ‘a coup’ and promise to make this special time of year toxic with their blue-branded hatred. Tidings of comfort and joy. Meanwhile, Dion is smiling everywhere and Layton is probably giving good speeches about how great things will be when they get back to Ottawa in January and deliver their throne speech.
All of this speculation is merely to say that the prorogation has probably kept the worst of this process from coming to pass before its time. But that’s not to say I wasn’t angry about it on Thursday.
I’m on record as supporting the attempts at a Coalition. I read somewhere yesterday that the prorogation allows us to test the validity of the coalition. If it falls apart by the end of January, than it was never meant to be in the first place. The events of the past week however suggest that given time, this strength of this grows rather then diffuses. I take comfort in the fact that regardless, Harper’s days as leader of the Conservative party are probably numbered.
Harper must go
My position as a citizen is this: I understand how our democracy usually works, and therefore am as prepared now as I was a month ago to live with a Minority Conservative Government. The only reason this is usually the case is because the Opposition parties always rule out working together. Even on Election night, it was clear that the NDP and the Liberals do not have enough seats by themselves to form a Coalition, and thus need the support of the Bloc.
As for the threat of the Bloc, this remains ridiculous. The Bloc do not scare me at all, I do not think of them as treasonous, and I find all call-outs to National Unity and the subsequent concept of the nation-state to be merely romantic delusion. Especially when they are promoted in web-comments by Conservative idiots quoting their dear leaders, apparently too ignorant not only to think for themselves, but to understand how our system functions.
This country is interesting because of its varied regional interests, not in spite of them. For that matter, the Bloc isn’t like other parties because Quebec isn’t like other provinces. As adults we should be able to live with that. And I think we have for the most part over the past fifteen years.
Let’s review the politics of the past decade and a half shall we? Throughout the 1990s, the Reform/Alliance party essentially was the Bloc’s Anglo equivelant, answering Western interests to the Bloc’s Eastern ones. This Western chauvinism swallowed the Progressive Conservative party ruined by the politics of Mulroney, bought new suits at Moore’s and called itself Conservative. It should be noted here that whatever genuine concerns and progressive ideas were to be found in the Reform/Alliance or the Progressive Conservatives were suddenly negated merely through the use of the Conservative label, as if to say that everyone west of Winnipeg who votes Conservative Party is incapable of believing in a progressive Canada and are born being against gay-marriage.
We should remember that this transformation was facilitated by Belinda Stronach who subsequently ran for them, was elected, but jumped ship when the pie of a Ministership was held under her nose by Paul Martin’s Liberal government. The Liberals then went on to lose an election, and Ms. Stronach found herself offering commentary at the Liberal convention in the fall of 2006. As we have seen, Canadian politics regularly delivers such WTF? moments. She subsequently quit politics, having been exposed as a power hungry go-getter who didn’t really care who was in charge as long as she had a place at the table. That’s not something I blame her for since why play the game just to be a back-bencher?
But it is to say that this game has been insidious, nepotistic, and opportunistic for a while now. Whatever Harper’s saying this week to demonize his opponents, they all understand the sport and their integrity as individuals and as a party is always subject to the hierarchy. If this country was being properly run, Dion wouldn’t be around. Someone would have had the balls by now to put him out to pasture so-to-speak, rather than let him linger on to discredit their position. Hurt feelings on Mr. Dion’s part aren’t supposed to a factor in the equation. That’s how power is exercised. The fact that Bob Rae is now stepping up to talk over Dion shows not only his ambition to lead the party, but also his qualification. Ignatieff’s fence-sitting is casting doubts on his measure as Prime Minister material.
The reason the Conservatives are currently dominant despite the weakness of their official numbers is because they don’t give a fuck about anyone’s feelings, and one can hope that this works out to our collective advantage when they draw the knives for Harper’s back. If not, as Adam Radwanski pointed out, we’re in even bigger trouble than we thought, writing: “If Conservatives are not at least seriously discussing the replacement of Stephen Harper before Parliament returns on Jan 26, he truly has succeeded in creating a cult of personality’. The last thing we need is a Maurice Duplessis holding this country back from the wonder of the 21st Century, as that dictator of Quebec did in the 1950s. However once he died the resulting Quiet Revolution rushed the province from the 19th into the 20th Century within a decade, and tried to follow-through by upgrading itself into a nation-state.
If Harper manages to enforce a nightmare of feel-good 20C Reagan-Thatcher bullshit on us while the US resurrects itself from its social catastrophe, and Europe continues to set an example for what a mostly enlightened society could be, the end result will probably be a dramatic national révolution tranquille in twenty years, by which time the rest of the world will be used to thinking of us as just another one of those third world countries of squandered potential ruled by an idiot. The talent of this country will continue to apply for US-work visas to escape the ignorance of this place. Eventually, Canada could come to resemble the southern United States, too ignorant and stupid to understand the hell we exemplify to others.
In the past I’ve said in conversations that I respected Harper as someone who didn’t seem all that bad. Sure, he’s always come across as a bit of dick, but that was personal rather than professional. After the borderline buffoonery of Chretien and the stammering incompetence of Paul Martin, he brought dignity back to the office on his election in 2006. He seemed genuinely humble and honored by the position. He had respect for the office and it was through that respect that he dignified it. Now, it could be said, the power has gone to his head, and he’s lost perspective. He now feels entitled to be Prime Minister, and fuck all of us who don’t see things his way. I’ll be no longer saying in conversations that he’s not all that bad. To that point, I want to state that I don’t regret defending him against the hyperbole of hipsters, and may continue to downplay their predictably alarmist rhetoric. This country is run best through sobriety, John A’s example notwithstanding.
Harper thoroughly failed at being a Prime Minister this past week. Yes, he failed politically by provoking the opposition parties to rebel. But even more importantly, he failed by exploiting the ignorance of the citizens. This is simply unforgivable. Harper is on record as saying that Canadians know nothing of their country, which isn’t something I’m that inclined to disagree with. The fact that he’s used this to suggest that the Coalition lacked validity, to play up the idea that his government ‘won’ the October election makes him despicable. It’s not scandalous to say that the Canadian population is largely ignorant of their history and of how their democracy functions. It is scandalous that the Prime Minister would seek to use that to his advantage rather than attempt to correct it.
The zeitgeist makes it impossible not to compare his performance with that President-Elect Obama. In February, his speech on race was described as a ‘teaching moment’, a description that rose from his approach to the situation, and from Obama’s background as a law professor. He saw an opportunity to educate and he seized it.
Harper’s opportunity to educate the population was squandered. It’s probably fair to say that he doesn’t care. The talking-points prepared for the minions to call into radio-stations proves that the Conservatives have a vested interest in keeping us mostly stupid. Yet, I don’t feel particularly alone in the country in my awareness that Harper’s a failure, and the talking points website referenced has mostly been presented with a humour suggesting some people can see it for what it is. (I don’t listen to talk radio anyway, so the propaganda effort is wasted on the like of me). The propagation of ignorance includes:
• This is what bothers me the most. The Conservatives won the election. The Opposition keeps saying that the Conservatives have to respect the will of the voters that this is a minority and so on.
…how about Liberals, NDP and Bloc respecting the will of the voters when they said “YOU LOSE”.
• And what’s this going to do to the economy. I’m sorry, I don’t care how desperate the Liberals are – giving socialists (Jack Layton) and separatists (Gilles Duceppe) a veto over every decision in government – that is a recipe for total economic disaster.
• No – do you know what set this off. When Flaherty said he was going to take taxpayer-funded subsidies away from the opposition. Now there is a reason to try and overturn an election– because the Conservatives the audacity to say “Hey, it’s a recession, maybe you should take your nose out of the trough.”
• I don’t want another election. But what I want even less is a surprise backroom Prime Minister whom I never even had the opportunity to vote for or against. What an insult to democracy
The true insult to our democracy is that such a website even exists.
On November 27th, Jim Flaherty (who should be balancing the books of a corner store in Whitby as far as I’m concerned, not the books of the Federal government) stood up to deliver an ‘economic update’. The Opposition parties were looking for an economic stimulus plan. Instead we were warned that he was removing funding from all parties, and in the weeks leading up to this, there were rumours he was considering selling-off Federal government assets in order to raise short-term cash. Again, Obama gives us some insight on what an economic stimulus package might look like. He’s calling for infrastructure investment and retrofitting of government buildings and schools. Things that would actually provide jobs. Our Minority Government is considering selling the CN Tower and wanting to fuck over their opponents.
There is no question why Harper has lost the confidence of the house. The question remains as to who our Prime Minister will be in February. – Timothy
As an American who lives in Canada, I find the whole thing utterly fascinating. Also, I think it’s brilliantly efficient. Look at how much waste is generated by a single political campaign in the US, where there are only two parties, which are really essentially just one party anyway. I love this multi-party system and I love the whole concept of a Parliament. I am watching this spectacle unfold with the same sort of jaw-drop amazement that I felt when I saw Star Wars for the first time in the movie theater a million years ago.
On the weekend I downloaded the results available at Elections Canada and did some number crunching. Thanks to the miracle of the spreadsheet, this was something that only took about a half-hour to do. The numbers remind us that the Conservatives only got 10.4 million votes, while the Liberals, NDP and the Bloc combined got 15 million. Thus Stephen Harper is full of shit, which is pretty much nothing new, as far as many are concerned.
As for talk of an alliance with Separatists, I too think this is bullshit. Since when as the Bloc been a threat? Since 1995, thirteen years ago. Now they are a Quebec chauvinist party who represent Quebec self-interest in the federal government. Given that a lack of representation and fair dealing throughout the 20th Century is what led Quebec to believe they needed to separate, perhaps the Bloc’s place in the House over the past fifteen years has been sufficient to defuse that threat. Yes, on paper, they’re Separatists. Also, on paper, the Pope believes in Jesus. But the Bloc is not a threat, and like the Pope, probably enjoy their political power and influence more than they do their ideology.
Which is exactly where Harper as gone so wrong – trying to mix his power with his noxious ideology. Seventeen million people did not vote for the Conservatives. Seventeen million Canadians rejected their ideals. Yet, with ten million votes, we found them in power. And what a Chomskyian fall – by that meaning their undoing followed Chomsky’s usual analysis that governments get into trouble when they fuck with powerful interests. All through the pre-election Parliament, the Liberals refused to challenge Harper’s regime. This is what earned my disgust with Stephen Dion, not the Carbon Tax. Now that they’ve finally stood up for themselves and for their representatives, I look forward to Dion as a Prime Minister. And yet, it was the threat to remove their public funding which became the straw that broke this camel’s back. Well, whatever. Lets bygones be bygones – the Separatists are not a threat, nor are they treasonous etc. Dion is no longer being pusillanimous. Harper is no longer appearing reasonable and respectable. Bring on the future.
One constitutional lawyer (also a University of Toronto professor), was on Don Newman’s Politics last evening (Mon Dec 1; begins at 11:19). The talk was a lack of historical precedence, in terms of giving this legitimacy. So what? Why does that even need to be a concern? Can’t this Parliament set a precedent? Indeed, this whole scenario is a heartwarming reminder that there are stop-gaps in place to prevent dictatorships and tyrannies. Mind you, that take on it might not be valid if the governing party was in the Majority. Nevertheless, what I saw when watching Layton, Dion and Duceppe’s news conference last evening was history, an historic handshake like similar foundational handshakes in national histories. John Ralston Saul likes to talk about the agreement between Robert Baldwin and Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine, and how this arrangement laid the foundations for Confederation. A coalition government at this time could be the foundation of collaborative government which would be appropriate to the networked 21st Century. For all we know, this type of thing could lead to a revised Constitution in fifty years.
Repeated accusations of the parties playing partisan politics, and using the Bloc as a denigration, is entirely missing this point. Big picture, long term, we should have a government where the parties work together, where they represent a multitude of voices and different ideas, and this could free us from rule by one-party ideologues the likes of Harper, or for that matter, the likes of Chretien. Further, the Reform party (from which Harper sprang) found its first members among those who were angry with the Trudeau-era Liberals (who, granted, worked with the NDP during one of their terms). The point here being that breaking one-party majority rules who just piss off a lot of people off is probably a good thing for all. Historians may look at this as an evolution of politics which began with the return to Minority Parliaments after the Chretien years. Minorities which lead to Coalitions which lead to fairer representation at the Federal level. If anything, (and if they can get this right), this may enable future under-represented voices to be heard. And one can hope that amidst the economic stimuli, they find the time to bring in Proportional Representation, since it’s now to their mutual advantage.
In my excitement last night, I posted on as my Facebook status: ‘I am so proud of my parliament right now. This is Canada’s Obama moment. Wow.’ What I meant was that a bold, change-oriented, imaginative thing was underway, which put into contrast the status-quo we are used to. The election of Barack Obama was a result of a majority of Americans consciously choosing a different path, one that lead them into the 21st Century. Obama promises a government of transparency and of networked sophistication.
As Canadians, we aren’t there yet. But a majority of Canadians consciously chose to vote for parties other than the Conservatives, who would never lead us there to begin with. The five million more who voted past the Conservatives ten million will now feel like they’ve gotten the government they were asking for. They (and we, as I was one of them) deserve to be represented, and for our common desire to see a better country given a chance to be implemented.
People who voted for the Conservatives: 10,493,047
People who voted for the Liberals: 7,349,977
People who voted for the NDP: 5,065,144
People who voted for the Liberals & NDP combined: 12,415,121
People who voted for the Bloc Quebecois: 2,778,758
Combined, the Liberals, NDP, and Bloc represent 15,193,879.
Total votes for the smaller parties (Christian Heritage, Communist, Greens, Independents etc):
2,213,995
Total votes that weren’t for the Conservatives:
17,407,874
A Coalition Government therefore would be democratically representative, despite what Stephen Harper has said.
Note: An earlier posting that you may have seen had methodological errors which I’ve since corrected.
Source: Elections Canada results. Some numbers are still listed as preliminary. My downloaded spreadsheet from Elections Canada; and my modified spreadsheet listing only the parties and the votes.
Bob Dylan explains globalization and postmodernism as it was experienced in the mid 1980s:
“Nah, none of that matters. I heard somebody on the radio talkin’ about what’s happenin’ in Haiti, you know? “We must be concerned about what’s happening in Haiti. We’re global people now.” And they’re gettin’ everybody in that frame of mind – like, we’re not just the United States anymore, we’re global. We’re thinkin’ in terms of the whole world because communications come right into your house. […]
Isn’t man supposed to progress, to forge ahead?
Well…but not there. I mean, what’s the purpose of going to the moon? To me, it doesn’t make any sense. Now they’re gonna put a space station up there, and it’s gonna cost, what — $600 billion, $700 billion? And who’s gonna benefit from it? Drug companies who are gonna be able to make better drugs. Does that make sense? Is that supposed to be something that a person is supposed to get excited about? Is that progress? I don’t think they’re gonna get better drugs. I think they’re gonna get more expensive drugs.
Everything is computerized now, it’s all computers. I see that as the beginning of the end. You can see everything going global. There’s no nationality anymore, no I’m this or I’m that: “We’re all the ‘same, all workin’ for one peaceful world, blah, blah, blah.”
Somebody’s gonna have to come along and figure out what’s happening with the United States. Is this just an island that’s going to be blown out of the ocean, or does it really figure into things? I really don’t know. At this point right now, it seems that it figures into things. But later on, it will have to be a country that’s self-sufficient, that can make it by itself without that many imports.
Right now, it seems like in the States, and most other countries, too, there’s a big push on to make a big global country — one big country — where you can get all the materials from one place and assemble them someplace else and sell ’em in another place, and the whole world is just all one, controlled by the same people, you know? And if it’s not there already, that’s the point it’s tryin’ to get to.”
– Bob Dylan, interview with Kurt Loder, 21 June 1984 issue of Rolling Stone
John Ralston Saul’s philosophical trilogy— Voltaire’s Bastards, The Doubter’s Companion andThe Unconscious Civilization—has had a growing impact on political thought in many countries. The conclusion to this trilogy, On Equilibrium—an exploration of the six qualities of the new humanism—is a persuasive and groundbreaking exploration of the human struggle for personal and social balance.
At a grocery store the other day, my friend decided to get some cake mix. I told him it was a piece of cake to bake a pretty cake. Someone with a big stupid grin walked by us and said “But you gotta do the cooking by the book.” An employee nearby shouted (and this was just coincidence) WHAT?! I died laughing. My friend had no idea what was going on.