Where is Captain Planet when you need him?

Imagine this; someone from the future shows up out of thin air (like they often do), and tells you a horrid story about how in the future humanity consumes itself through its nearly immeasurable hubris. This traveler shows you hours of evidence, proving beyond the shadow of a doubt the validity of his claim. Then he tells you that unless you and the rest of humanity changes its course, one thousand years from the time you occupy, humanity will be destroyed.

Do you think, "Well I've got to get on saving the human race!"

Watching House is much more fun than saving humanity.

Or perhaps you think, "One thousand years from now? Fuck it." And then you show the time traveler the door, and go back to watching House, or whatever it is you t.v viewers watch.

If you fall into the former group, good job! You are compassionate enough of a person to not only care about yourself, which is difficult for many people, but you also care about people whom you can never meet. Thumbs up! Don't let go of that.

If you fall into the latter group, well I'd like to call you a dick, but you have a point. One thousand years from now? Why give a shit? No one can give you a single logical reason to care! You'll be dead! Your children will be dead, their children will be dead, and their children will be dead. Anyone born in your gene pool who you can meet and connect with will already be dead by then. So why care? Just enjoy yourself! Toss that extra large drink container out the window! Buy the biggest, baddest, most wasteful penis enhancer of a vehicle you can afford! Hell buy it even if you can't afford it! Only buy vegetables that have been pre-cut, and packaged in three separate layers! Just enjoy yourself because you only live once.

Now I would like to speak to those of you who fell into the former group again. Stop playing fair, throw that compassion out the window on this issue. Because I can tell you for a fact, the latter group up there ^^^^^, could care less whether humanity, the planet, or the Red Boobied Jack Warbler lives or dies. They don't care, either because they will be dead, or they think they are going to be raptured long before the future even comes. You can't convince these people over to your side, because you have nothing to offer them. So play dirty, put money behind your agenda, use propaganda, just do everything and anything necessary to win.

Or you could just what I do, try to reason with people in a vain attempt to change minds without violating a strict set of moral principles.  While an unshakeable feeling of utter futility slowly seeps its way into every fiber of your being, leaving you a cynical husk of what once was a human being.

Please in this case do what I say, not what I do.

Mitt Ronmey must love Monopoly

"I love paying the taxes that I am legally required to, and you should too."

News flash! Mitt Romney is filthy rich! Wait aren't most politicians egregiously wealthy? Well yes, but old Mitt you see made twenty one point seven million dollars in 2010, and paid only 13.9% of that in taxes. How he was able to do this was through some very smooth legal maneuvers that hid a good deal of what he made from the IRS. Now before you ask, the answer is no, you may not legally dodge paying your taxes. Or at least you could if you made significantly more than you do now.

What did Mitty have to say about this, 

"I pay all the taxes that are legally required and not a dollar more... I don't think you want someone as the candidate for president who pays more taxes than he owes." 

 

Then from the ABC article we get this,

"That may be true, but some tax experts say Romney took advantage of loopholes in the system to pay a lower rate. "All these disclosures, all these complicated, expensive transactions, all aimed to reduce his tax," Wilkins said. "The overarching message is, this is the way the tax system is tilted towards the wealthy. These are advantages middle income people don't get." 

So taking this together I think I can better rewrite Mitt's previous statement,

"I pay all the taxes that are legally required, based on laws which favour people like me, who are of far greater means than you. I don't think you want someone as the candidate for president who pays more taxes than he thinks he owes."  

I agree wholeheartedly Mitt, I'm also willing to play by the rules when they are set up in my favour. 

Sticks and Stones May Break my Bones

What harm can words do? Sticks and stones right? Unfortunately this old school yard aphorism only  applies to jeers, cat calls, and to the incessant taunts of ones peers after a nasty spill off the high swings. In the world that we adults occupy however, words can hurt, they can harm, and are wielded often with the intent to do both.

Luckily, or not, for us though we have laws that limit such hurtful speech, like liable laws, and laws against hate speech. The best these laws can do for us however is punish the worst examples, examples which would fit right back in the school yard. Some of the more insidious, and potentially damaging examples of speech in our society can't be legally restricted, but non-the-less needs to be checked.

Recently a perfect example of this sinister speech popped out of the mouth of Natural Resource Minister Joe Oliver,

"Get off my lawn you dirty hippies."

"Unfortunately, there are environmental and other radical groups that would seek to block this opportunity to diversify our trade... Their goal is to stop any major project no matter what the cost to Canadian families in lost jobs and economic growth. No forestry. No mining. No oil. No gas. No more hydro-electric dams... Threaten to hijack our regulatory system to achieve their radical ideological agenda," 

Nothing in what Oliver said there was even remotely illegal. Not a thing. That doesn't mean however that what he said was ethical, or correct. In what is considered civilized discourse calling the people who disagree with you radicals, and saying they want to hijack anything is generally not acceptable. Nor is trying to manipulate your audience by incurring the specter of impeding economic down turn when you can't possibly know that is the case. To put it more broadly, claiming that your opponents are all nut job misanthropes isn't proper debate strategy, and it doesn't make for a healthy Democracy. This is how words can hurt in a broader context, they damage our ability to maintain our freedom. We  cannot have freedom of speech when those in power can simply shout down dissenting opinions, when the electorate fails to take those in power to task for such flagrant abuse of language, or worse still, when the electorate is taken in by these tactics. 

If we are unwilling to do something about these verbal violations, perpetrated by those we choose to govern us, do we even deserve the freedom we have?

High Pay? No way.

Right now as I type this the richest 100 CEOs in Canada have already made fifty thousand dollars so far this year. Yes they already made more than the average Canadian will make this entire year, and it's rising. 

Now this is not going to be a rant. I'm not going to complain about how unfair it is that someone out there is making thousands of times more than me in one day of work, when I am fairly certain that my job is many times more taxing than his. No this post is not about that, because life isn't fair, there will always be some kind of imbalance from one person to another. 

The problem I have with this disgustingly excessive phenomena is not the massive difference in compensation, but the threat this difference poses to democracy. In our world money is undoubtedly power. When you have money you can go places other people can't, be heard when others are ignored, and can garner respect even when you lack the quality of character to actually earn it. In the case of your rich and beautiful celebrities this is not so much a problem, they mostly stick to using this influence to inflate their already enormous egos to bursting. That or they try futilely to solve the world's problems by being in a bunch of gimmicky commercials, not realizing that a series of far richer people make a profit off of human misery. Right here is where we run into our problem, what these CEOs are good at is making money, and they love making money. So why wouldn't they use the money they already have to unduly influence the democratic process? Maybe use their enormous piles of money to be heard and respected by just the right people. Why wouldn't they if it meant making more money?

Ok I'll stop for second. Maybe not every one of the one hundred richest CEO's in Canada is using the influence their money can buy to derail our democracy. Maybe none of them are. The problem is though that the possibility still exists, the possibility that any one individual (Joking, any one man) can use their exorbitant wealth to override the majority's voice. 

Anyone who cares about the very foundation of democracy should see this inequality as what it is, a threat to democracy.

Lost Winter

As I walk down the dull grey streets

I see the snow flake of a lost winter descend

I look into its rough crystalline form

its jagged beauty

I float amongst its azure spearheads

sharp glistening chaos

it pierces me

fills me

it's part of me

I too am chaos

crystalline flesh and icy bone

It/I begin to melt away

I drip down the cold spikes

I flow perfectly through forming cracks

I am a torrent now

I rend apart my icy world with divine purpose

It's done

I'm back

Meat and bone again

Standing on the concrete scabs that conceal healthy earth

Fetid dead water oozes through the gutters

Black poisonous blood pouring over the scab

Polished metal lice scurry down the long scars

antennae waving, shiny metal chitin

they puff out smoke, their vaporous feces

I breath it in

Poison blood coats my shoes

It's all trying to enter me

Violate me

It wants to remove the memories

of my last lost winter

I breath out ice on my breath

to exorcise these demons

And I walk away

To look for my lost winter.

Butchers

We desperately need satirists, without them who will butcher our sacred cows?

Tailspin

We are not going to make it as a species, the way we live is driving us straight towards extinction, and we possess not the will or the patience to avoid this fate. 

This path to destruction is fueled by humanities bottomless greed, enough is never enough for anyone. We want it all and we want it right now, and there are people waiting to give it to us so long as we don't ask how they acquired it. They in turn are fueled by their own greed. There is infinite greed coming from a growing number of people, and only so much to go around. This is not a sustainable way of life, not socially, not economically, and not ecologically. 

We have seen the social results of this greed already. Not long ago empires stripped other peoples of their wealth and well being to satiate the greed of their own populace. Many of the wars and conflicts around the world are the inevitable outcome of this greed driven imperialism. This imperialism takes new forms today, large business entities exploit poorer nations today for labour or resources, and by doing so cause immeasurable harm. 

green algal bloom in the Irishtown Road Reservoir, NB

Ecologically we see what our greed and recklessness has wrought. Once clean reserves of fresh water turned into putrid algae blooms. We corrupt even the air we breath.

Economically we have lived beyond our means for too long. We stand right now on the precipice of a great shift in our world, even those living in the most powerful nations in the world are slated to feel the sting of our latest failure. Even with this reality slowly setting in, greed still prevails in every where it can be found. Whether in the imaginations of the lowest individuals, or in the actions of the groups that make up the upper echelons of society.   

This state of affairs will result in disaster one way or another. Whether it ends with us wiping each other out for a sliver of land or a glass of water, or whether it ends with the planet that we depend on stamping us out of existence, it does not matter. How things are now will end, they will end badly, and we will end with it.  

Don't worry I'm not armed.

He stole my black book

He punched her in the eye

Why can't I shake this feeling

that I want the whole world to fry?

Stupid.

The eye is backwards and upside down.
We are never happy with what we have

Intelligent Design my vestigial tail.

These truths are no longer self evident.

I don't want anyone to follow me, believe in me, or worship me.
If I wanted to lead something, I'd get a dog.

Shitting on Ayn Rand

Hello ladies and gentlemen, I have something to ask you, and I insist that you respond. Actually I'm going to give you a scenario and then a question, so here it is:

I would crap on that.

You have been hiking for hours along an unfamiliar trail, when suddenly you feel the stirrings of what is possibly the most unpleasant bowel movement you will ever experience. You continue further down the trail trying to find a comfy looking out of the way spot to relieve yourself, unfortunately you can't seem to find a spot that isn't occupied by some variety of thorny vegetation. Luckily during your desperate search, you happen to spot an outhouse in the distance. You rush as fast as you can to the outhouse, open the door and rush in. You are surprised to find that the outhouse is rather clean, unusually so for an outhouse and rather pleasant smelling, and then you spot a sign right next to the toilet paper dispenser. The sign reads, "Below you in the hole lies the cleaned and polished bones of Ayn Rand, famed author." You are surprised by what you read, but regardless of your surprise you still need to defecate. Yet you know that you have just enough time to get outside to evacuate your bowels in a nearby blackberry bush. What do you do? Take the biggest bender of your life over the Earthly remains of Ayn Rand in comfort and privacy, or jump into the black berry bush and try your luck?

I would say screw it and drop the kids off at The Ayn Rand Community Center pool.   

Appearance is Reality

In a world of dreams

everything is what it appears to be

while nothing is what it seems

Appearance is Reality

Lips and tongue set in made up faces

spewing out soothing hatred

for sewn up ears to fill up empty spaces

Appearance is Reality

A family of strangers laugh and grin

you're welcome to their table

just be a stranger and you're in

Appearance is Reality

Virtuous pride so strong and right

leads us not astray

as it takes us to the night

Appearance is Reality

Sickly children with sickly smiles

fill the coin purses full

fulfilling sick men's wiles

My Return

I missed you.

Hello, it has been awhile hasn't it? Don't worry I didn't forget about you, after all only three people are following me and it's hard to forget three people. So yes I have returned, been busy with work and a new relationship and when I took the time to write I was working on some stories, one of which is complete and will be posted soon. 

Now that I have time however and am firmly seated in my chair I'm ready to post again! Now this post is going to start off rather nerdy at first, please bear with me it won't last. 

So I love video games (confession I game more than I write), and on occasion I read about gaming news. While engaging in this ritual of mine recently I came across a story about a small developer, Mojang AB, being threatened with a lawsuit by a much larger publisher, which happens to be Zenimax Media. To those who aren't in the know, and for those who have better things to do than research useless crap, Zenimax Media is the parent company of Bethesda Softworks, who happens to be the developer behind The Elder Scrolls series. A series which happens to be a massive cash cow for Zenimax.

What are they suing Mojang for? The fact that the newest game they are developing right now is called Scrolls. Do you see it? The Elder Scrolls, and Scrolls! Do you see the blatant abuse of the law occurring right before our very eyes? Oh you don't? Well you must have at least a modicum of common sense then. 

That's the thing though, the law isn't always about what makes sense or works to promote good. In the above case for example Zenimax has to protect their intellectual property, there is an obvious similarity  between the title "The Elder Scrolls" and "Scrolls". In the eyes of the law this might actually have traction, regardless I can't help but feel that Zenimax is trying to steal from Mojang and using something as trivial as one word as an excuse. That is what it feels like to me, it feels like theft, like Zenimax is guilty of the very thing they are crying out about. Zenimax is being proactive of course about protecting their intellectual property, but really will any harm come from a small independent studio using one word out of three to name a game which bares absolutely no resemblance to The Elder Scrolls franchise?  The games don't even occupy the same market, the newest game in the Elder Scrolls franchise is probably going to make more in console sales (Xbox 360, PS3) than on PC. Not to mention that Scrolls will probably be exclusively digital download, which means you won't find it on store shelves. The chance of any harm coming to The Elder Scrolls franchise due to Scrolls is minimal given its fame. However very real harm will come to Mojang AB and its small team if this goes to court. It will hurt them by costing them a ton in legal expenses, and cause unknown amounts of stress. We also know that costly and lengthy legal battles can take a human toll as well, one that we can't measure. Zenimax and Bethesda will be insulated from this human toll by a crack legal team, but given Mojang's size they won't have that luxury. 

This is just one example of course of how the law, while it is always "just", isn't always humane. Perhaps a subject that I will go into more at a later date.         

   

Lighten up, you'll Live Longer.

Sideways Kung Fu monkey is unrelated to this post.

I got a new job recently, and my new job description is officially Spice Blending Technician. Sounds very official, of course the more accurate description would be, guy who pours a bunch of crap (crap as a catch all for stuff, not feces) into a giant blender and mixes it all together. You whack a sloth in the head a few times with a mallet and it could  still do my job. Given that my previous comments just positively oozed enthusiasm you might have guessed that I don't derive much pleasure from my job, and in that you would be correct. Though you wouldn't be at the same time, as I do find ways to make my new job very entertaining. 

Today for example I was going to drop something off at another department in the building to be picked up on the morrow by the individuals who worked there. Along with this item, which had a rather southern flare to it, I drew a charming depiction of a happy little cowboy exclaiming yehaa rather enthusiastically. I also gave him a mustache, see below.

That's one happy cowboy.

Sorry I was mistaken, it's a Happy Cowboy Mustache.

Anyway, I decided to show my happy cowboy to my supervisor (I see your mind is in the gutter), who I knew would get a kick out of it because he's even less mature than I am. Which as a side note, makes him a pretty awesome supervisor.  Well he did laugh, but then he grimaced as he realized that my happy little cowboy was going to pay a visit to someone in another department. This someone apparently was entirely without a sense of humour, or was a cowboy who would take offense to my crude rendering, I can't remember which though. Doesn't matter.

I made a few jokes about sticks being up asses, he agreed, but insisted that I keep my mustached happy cowboy to myself. I ever so reluctantly conceded. 

However given that this is my blog, I don't have to concede shit here. So I would like to say that people need to pull their sticks out of their puckered buttholes and lighten up. It would make many people much more happy, including many a cowboy.

Interview with Evil pt 2

Once again I have another exert from a story that I've been working on; which I am pleased to say is almost finished. Please enjoy and I apologize for my long absence.  

After seven grueling hours, three stopovers, an hour waiting in line at U.S customs for a cavity search that luckily never came (I'm a paranoid flier), and a tortuously hot cab ride through a Texan summer. I arrived at 2050 West Gray Street, which it turns out is a Starbucks, across from another Starbucks. Perhaps it was the stress that the ordeal of my hasty travel had brought on, or maybe it was the unbearable heat, but I felt like I had arrived at a place of power. Like a Ley Line ran right under my feet and straight through these two coffee shops that were separated by nothing more than four lanes of traffic.

     "It's nothing that fancy you know." A familiar ragged voice rang from behind me. "It's just two Starbucks across from one another."

     I turned quickly to be greeted by a visage of filth, a man as ragged as his voice sat before me, his clothes were tatters and a large dirty beard framed his greasy face. I struggled to speak but stumbled on my words, the unkempt man wasted no time interjecting,

     "Go on inside and get yourself something cold to drink, you'll get your interview." I hesitated trying to push out a response, "Go on now." The unkempt man gave me an order and despite his appearance and bearing I decided it best to listen.

     Only once I was inside the Starbucks ordering my iced venti Chai Tea Latte with an extra pump of Chai did it hit me that I was entirely insane for coming all the way from British Columbia to talk to a homeless man with dirty facial hair. I decided to leave quickly once I had my drink and put the Starbucks on 2050 West Gray Street, Houston, and the whole state of Texas behind me as soon as possible.

     This of course would never happen, that wouldn't make for a good story after all. Instead of making a quick get away I ended up being stopped by a familiar, sinister voice.

     "Going so soon? Didn't you want that interview?" The voice felt like it grabbed me by the collar and yanked me right around. Right around to face a grinning man shaved clean, only his raven black eyebrows were intact. His jutting chin shot out at me, and his sharp cheek bones made him look more skeleton than meat. He was wearing what appeared to be a suit of black and blood red worth more than I made last month, and his eyes were hidden behind a pair of dark rounded sun glasses. I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand up as I stared at him dumbly.

     "Go on outside, it's a beautiful day and I'd rather be out enjoying it during our little pow wow." The only response I could think up was a half hearted affirmation. We sat down outside, I felt the confusion scrawled across my face while I stared at the stranger sipping what appeared to be a steaming cup of coffee. I broke the silence.

     "What happened to-"

     "The disgusting homeless man who never heard of a comb?" I shook my head in response, "Gone."

     "Gone?"

     "Gone, I didn't need him anymore, so he's gone." The stranger spoke coldly.

     "Gone where? Did you do someth-"

     "Are we going to do this interview? You're not getting any younger after all. And you do have bills to pay; I'm also not the patient type, so it's in both our interests to get going." Something in the pit of my stomach churned and I knew that pursuing further into the fate of the bearded man was not wise. I quickly fumbled through my satchel and dug out my note book and pen.

     "First who are you? I mean the call I received-" The stranger interjected again.

     "I'm the devil." My stomach churning sense of fear made way for a brain tickling sense of disbelieve.