Category Archives: Culture

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Boston Harbor – sort of

I’ve developed this weird trend lately where I show up new to a place I’ve never been before, but somehow end up with a schedule that allows me only a few hours to initially see places before I’m on my way again.  It happened recently in Milwaukee and Detroit, and now Boston.  I’m not complaining mind you, because all it means is I have to go back.  Oh darn.

In any case, the family only had a few hours before a wedding west of Boston.  So we went down to Boston Harbor and walked around a pier or two and then toured Harpoon Brewery.  Incidentally, as much as I worship beer, this was my first brewery tour ever.  I’ll probably write about that later.  Maybe.

But whatever, here’s some random shots of Boston Fish Pier, right down the road from Harpoon.

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Boston Fish Pier is still very much operating.  All the boats there are small craft, as in not the massive trawlers that are literally raping the oceans.  You can tell from the material condition of everything that they’re owners not necessarily swimming in gold.  It all felt very classic, except that the pier itself had been renovated from it’s original creation in the early 20th Century.

 

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The Exchange Conference Center – Located at the head of the pier.  If you’ve heard me whine about the awfulness of modern architecture, here is an example of a new building I’d consider a great job of creating something that’s not a faceless glass enclosed wonder.

 

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I have discovered the fattest seagulls I’ve ever seen in all my global travels are located in Massachusetts.

 

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A lightweight anchor casually discarded on the pier.  If you look you can see why.

 

 

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the courage to insert one’s head into the clouds

I’ve gone on record in multiple forums that I consider Apple as the most overrated business entity since the East India Company.  And yet they continue to mint money faster than the planet’s drunken central bankers.  Just walk by an Apple store at any mall to observe armageddon in progress as perfectly reasonable people assault one another with tied stick bundles in an effort to acquire the next model power adapter for $134 each.

Can this Apple insanity last?  I don’t think so, but what do I know?  I spent last night filling 42 individual sandwich sized plastic bags with dog kibble in preparation for a forthcoming family wedding / vacation / work trip.  Do you have any idea what it takes to label, open, fill, and reclose 42 individual sandwich sized plastic bags?   I have no life.  On the other hand, I have now discovered the fiercest of torture techniques for use in future interrogation procedures when we need the aliens to tell us where they hid the fusion bomb.  (hint: it’s in Brussels, so we’ll laugh and just shrug at them)

So Apple did their product launch thing yesterday.  The weirdo goons of the Internets were so into this event that even reputable (in theory) sites like The Washington Post live streamed the event.  Really?  It’s that important to hear about a minor update to the iPhone?  And then this morning the decision to remove the audio jack from the new phone is more important than, well, a whole bunch of stuff.  It’s way higher on the news banners than NFL opening day, which angers me immensely.

Anyways, these product updates don’t really interest me so much.  What I get more into is what is says about where Apple is headed.  This is important because they’re the world’s largest company and have more money in the bank than all but five nations on Earth.  Tim Cook brushes his teeth with plutonium every morning, and then gets the scientists to remove the radiation immediately afterwards, just because he can, he can afford it.  In a world where the planet’s 0.01% wealthiest want to pay for experience over possessions, nobody beats Tim Cook’s dental care.

So I’ll just focus on this nugget from Apple Lord Protector, Marketer, Hi-Ali Extraordinaire, and Amateur Bridge Player Phil Schiller as he explained what’s what with turning hundreds-of-millions of existing Apple headphones into future landfill:

Some people have asked why would we remove the analog headphone jack in the iPhone. I mean, it’s been with us a really long time. I’m sure you know that the source of this mini-phono jack is over a hundred years old, used to help quickly exchange in switchboards. Well, the reason to move on … really comes down to one word: courage. Courage to move on, do something new, that betters all of us. And our team has tremendous courage.

That’s got to be about the most pretentious corporate shill I’ve ever heard.  How far up its own ass does Apple have itself?  So what Schiller is trying to say here is that Apple is taking a big risk by dumping wired headphones.  Most companies wouldn’t have the balls.  He’s right.  But who would have the gall to use the word ‘courage’ to describe it?  Nobody else.  Eh, maybe freaking Goldman Sachs, them too.

How about instead, “Apple is a company not afraid to take risks.  We’re the leading edge of society’s technological curve.  So we’re taking the leap, we’re embracing the future of sound.”  Etc, etc.

No, no, they’re courageous.  Oh, well, good for you all.  [stares wide eyed at blank cubicle wall]

Hey there was this company once upon a time.  It made elite products that it sold at an exponential markup relying on brand loyalty, reliability, and straight hype.  It was blindingly successful, had a bright future, but began to slowly lose market share because all its competitors offered similar capability for 1/5 the cost.  But this company was counting on its reputation and ability to hold the world’s attention and overpower the growing loss of sales, but simply didn’t possess the innovation it once had to capture the imagination of consumers.

That was Apple in oh, say 1995.  What saved them back then was that Steve Jobs dude who came back.  He brought this company back to life.  Who’s going to bring it back to life in 2019?

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Apple displays photograph of it shoving its own head up own ass.  [perfunctory excited clapping]

 

 

 

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Bond villains and my lack of art skill

Both my Brothers have music and/or art skills.  When I was a kid I played the piano, about average I’d say.  I gave that up as I grew older but recently I’ve been trying to get back into it with very mixed success.  It just doesn’t come naturally to me.  My older dog will come lay with me as I play and even he’s not impressed, and he thinks I walk on water.

I think it’s the same way with art.  I remember really wanting to draw well when I was a kid.  But I couldn’t.  I used have those coloring books where you could trace out a drawing that wasn’t your own.  So it looked like you could draw real well when you actually couldn’t.

I distinctly remember as a little one drawing this cool car at school and it looked really nice.  So this girl walks up and is very impressed with my art skills.  But I had to show her the trace book and admit it wasn’t my talent.  She was not impressed and walked away.  I guess I blew that one.  She probably grew up to be a supermodel.  I should have lied to her.

Anyways, I bring this up because this morning I got it in my head to write about how Mark Zuckerberg is a future Bond villain.  And I had this idea to paste Zuckerberg’s machine-engineered-cosmetic-skull atop a Bond villain frame I found online.  After about ten minutes of struggling to make this happen, I gave up and remembered that I have no art skills.  But hell, even The Onion guys struggle to make their composite shots look clean sometimes.

But hey, it didn’t actually matter because somebody online already did for me!

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Must be just pure chance that somebody else already thought of this one?

Either I have already said it on this blog, or maybe it was in person to folks, that I genuinely would be uncomfortable sharing a room alone with Zuckerberg.  I don’t sit in coffee shops.  I get my black coffee and go.  But let’s say I was alone in one early with just one employee there.  And I’m drinking my coffee and reading my paper.  Zuckerberg comes in and orders an $11 fancy cup.  He then sits down and starts playing with some kind of square screen.  Then the employee excuses himself to go to the bathroom.  So Zuckerberg and I are in there alone.  At that point, I’d have to get up.  I’d be out the door so fast.

I use this dude’s product every day.  So he puts out a quality app, that is also kind of invasive and creepy at times.  Anybody else get slightly weirded out when Facebook does that Good Morning greeting now?  Or how about when it offers to make you and your co-workers friends simply because it knows you both logged on from work via a similar IP source address?

Beyond the making of a decent product though, Zuckerberg is just a creepy guy.  Just watch the way he talks to people or does interviews.  It’s just uncomfortable to observe, but he has more power and money than Buddha so he gets away with it.

In about 30 years he’ll be a Bond villain for sure.  He’ll have kidnapped ten little urchins off the street in an attempt to harvest their power so he can live forever.  Or he creates Facebook X, his plot to use all the Like data he’s acquired over the decades to build a Moon Base (because why not).

He already has some of the tendencies required to lose his morality on the road to evil villain status.  Here’s a shot of him jogging in Tiananmen Square to suck up to the Commies.  Note the pack of cigarettes in the background that he had to smoke in the process.

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All in the vain hope that China might open its doors to Facebook so it can effectively compete for the honor of getting its clock cleaned by a more successful organic Chinese option.  Anybody ever hear of Uber China?  It’s in the library logged in the Sports Authority section.

If you follow the plot of Bond movies, Zuckerberg has to be old to play the villain right.  He’s 32 today.  So give him three decades and he’s 62.  Bond is let’s say 30 when he’s in his prime.  Which means that the future Bond who will battle Zuckerberg in the duel of the fates could be born about today.  Did you have a kid recently?  Your child could be that Bond.

So when your child drops Zuckerberg off the penthouse level of a 340 story office block or blows him out into space, you’ll know you’ve contributed your necessary offering to the betterment of all mankind.  After all, Bond wouldn’t be Bond without a good villain.  A bad guy worthy of an epic bad guy death.  So maybe it’s all for a purpose.  Zuckerberg’s just walking his appropriate path toward the airlock.  Cool, walk on dude.

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“For you see, Mr Bond, the newest version will display ads [dramatic pauses] 23 percent better on mobile devices.  Ahahahahaha!”  [Bond pounds fist into palm]

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the balance with life

For the first time this year, American deaths by drug overdose will overtake deaths by car accident.   If you loosely add in the suicides per year that can directly be traced to drug use as the primary causation, you enter an era where over 50K people a year are dying this way.  No other cause of death not related to old age or cancer (fuck cancer) even comes close.

In one of the mid-sized counties just north of mine, they have a sign on the way to the airport that logs death’s per year specifically from opioids / heroin.  It’s over 60 lives already this year.  That county is not that big, folks.

When it’s not playing psychotic referee to the sewer that is Washington politics, The Washington Post can actually output some high quality journalism.  They’ve run a multi-part series examining this issue in detail.  You should read each part, alongside a shorter but similar piece by BBC Magazine.

In many ways, I’m a freedom based lunatic.  And so for years I’ve been of the impression that the way to end the drug war is to legalize all drugs.  Let folks get high, whatever, tax it, and offer treatment.  However, I’m beginning to wonder if the growing drug lethality upends the game on this issue.

Science, reckless doctors, and pill companies have created drugs that are exponentially more powerful than what was available even 15 years ago.  Where it was once extremely difficult to get clean once you were hooked, it might now be nearly impossible to recover once you’d trained your brain to accept modern opioids.  When you add in the ultra vicious horror story drugs like fentanyl (which apparently is so lethal it can get into your blood if you even touch it), and whatever other death dealing nightmare synthetic drugs science will soon create, it seems we’re at a bit of a crossroads with all of this.

You can probably do a few lines of coke in your day, or smoke hundreds of joints, and come out mostly okay.  With this shit, you can literally die on the first hit, or after just a few months find yourself hooked for life without a way out.

When you add this to the already everpresent overmedication of anti-depressants, and whatever other societal ills you can think of, it becomes quite the balance with death.  It’s moments like this why I barely care about the presidential election.  Nobody has answers for these types of problems that are literally killing tens-of-thousands of Americans a year.  Neither political party is interested in proposing deep core type solutions to tackle these problems.  Instead, they’re chasing that sound byte.  Idiots.

I find more solace in those identified within these articles who are on the street, helping every day.  The elderly councilor aiding dozens in addiction classes, the local mayor putting his ass on the line to identify and fight the problem, a young man who lost his friend and now battles to save others.  When our national leadership is garbage, and the topic is as dark as this, it’s hopeful to know that folks are still fighting to save others with ferocity and compassion.

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Behold the potential cause of America’s downfall.

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Proxima Centauri awaits our divine rule

Great news! We’ve likely discovered the closest possible planet near our own star system that could potentially host life, even intelligent life. It’s a long shot due to Proxima being a red dwarf, and thus very different from our own yellow dwarf, but still worth getting excited about. The smart goons at The Economist lay out the details:

Proxima Centauri b, as it is known, probably weighs between 1.3 and three times as much as Earth and orbits its parent star once every 11 days. This puts its distance from Proxima Centauri itself at 7m kilometres, which is less than a twentieth of the distance between Earth and the sun. But because Proxima is a red dwarf, and thus much cooler than the sun, the newly discovered planet will experience a similar temperature to Earth’s. It is not the only Earth-sized extrasolar planet known to orbit in a star’s habitable zone. There are about a dozen others. But it is the closest to Earth—so close, at four light-years, that it is merely outrageous, not utterly absurd, to believe a spaceship (admittedly a tiny one) might actually be sent to visit it. Before this happens, though, it will be subjected to intense scrutiny from Earth itself.

So what’s going to happen over the new few decades is we’ll point various visual, radio, and spectrum telescopes at Proxima b to determine if this rock contains life as dumb as we are. But I say why wait? Why stop with just looking at Proxima b? Now that we have a known target, we can get around to the job of doing what Humanity of Earth does best: Destroying things!

You heard it here first, Proxima Centauri awaits our divine rule. They too need to experience the joys of democracy, freedom, Adele, endless religious wars, Coca-Cola, social media hatred, Netflix, genocide, The Zoo, electric guitars, and whatever else we can shove down their throats. What better way to unite humanity than by establishing the common goal of enslaving another? And we could take all their stuff too. They most assuredly have oil, rare metals, bluefin tuna, or other tasty stuff that we could take. We could strip mine the entire planet and nobody would care.

And at only four light years away, they’re well within conceivable range of starships we could build. Sure, this technological feat is a bit much seeing as how we haven’t been to the Moon in five decades, and we still have billions here in poverty, but we can still make it happen. Think of all the fun scenarios we could experience:

– We enter Proxima’s orbit bringing peace and love and yet somehow end up burning the planet using 438 fusion bombs within the first three years

– We show up bringing death and destruction and yet somehow end up getting our asses kicked by Proxima because they aren’t distracted by who said what on social media

– We land, and atop Proxima’s tallest mountain we find Jesus, King Arthur, and Dracula sitting around a campfire; and Jesus pulls on a cigarette and wryly states, “What took you so long?”

– We find a benevolent, wise race horrified by our planet’s thousands-of-years of death and mayhem, but who agree to at least “Give you stupid barbarian assholes a shot,” after we offer to teach them the art of brewing; and in an unrelated matter, they end up burning their planet using 438 fusion bombs within the first three years

– Having spent 37% of Earth’s GDP for two decades to get there, we find Proxima b is just a barren vacant rock

– The mission fails because 2/3 of our troop transports break halfway there because Lockheed Martin skimped on engine quality to increase quarterly profits in FY34 by 0.07%; and in an unrelated matter, Lockheed Martin’s CEO just bought his fifth boat

– Proxima actually holds a vicious Klingon like race that raids our ship’s computers to determine Earth’s location; but they abandon the conquest of Earth after three decades of grinding counterinsurgency, Earth being the quagmire that started the long decline of their Empire, and remarking, “What the fuck were we thinking?” as they meekly retreat to Proxima b

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Eh, maybe we stay on our side of the room, and they on theirs?

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Matt Damon and Zhang Yimou whitewash their souls

Dark days are ahead for China. There be monsters north of the wall. Winter’s probably already here, or something like that. Everybody’s scared, the army’s not ready, disaster looms. But don’t worry, Matt Damon will show up to save everybody.

 

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Remember when this guy wasn’t an action movie star?

 

Except it’s a big trick. For the monster is not some type of mythical creature that eats life. Instead, it’s the devil incarnate of bad action movies. This hideous demon spawn was born from an unhuman blending of the reproductive organs of Michael Bay’s Transformers and Zach Snyder’s Superman. China doesn’t stand a chance, even with Damon’s purchased-sculpted-boxer-physique.

 

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Just take a gander at the stereotypical bad action flick awfulness that awaits the poor Chinese theater audience.

 

The Great Wall is China’s most expensive movie production ever. It cost $160M in pure gold pressed latinum and is a massive gamble by both Hollywood and the Chinese film industry. Legendary Entertainment does the production as the now full-fledged member of China’s business community since they (sold out to) were bought out by Wanda Group.

Bankrolled by Wanda Group’s overlord, Asia’s richest man, and expert 1930’s style tap dancer Wang Jianlin, this flick’s meant to serve as a key mark on what Wang and many, many Hollywood suits hope will be a very long and lucrative alliance. If it’s not already, China will soon be the world’s largest film market. And you’d better believe Hollywood wants in on all that luscious cash.

This forthcoming epic masterpiece will hit theaters in China this December followed by a February 2017 debut in the States. This is a bit strange, as February is usually second only to January as a dumping ground for garbage films. Maybe they’re hoping a sparse market will help the film perform better? Maybe they’re hoping they can rope in the Valentine’s Day audience as 11th Century Chinese warriors are viciously beheaded by evil monsters?

 

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Eh, I’m pretty sure The Mongols. Why do I need to pay $13 to see a movie when I already know the answer to the poster’s wise quest question?

 

Anyways, in our current modern media culture, we can’t have anything without a race based controversy. And boy does The Great Wall sure have one in the entirely accurate accusation that they whitewashed the cast by adding Damon when an otherwise all Chinese cast would have made a lot more sense.

They claim Damon plays a mercenary or something. Maybe he’s there to assassinate Jason Bourne? It would have to be something specific like that. Because from what I know about the Song Dynasty, I’m pretty sure the Chinese army didn’t lack for limitless raw manpower. So there’s nothing that would require them to hire to creepy white guy from Medieval France who’s on the lam for stealing Her Ladyship’s already stolen virtue.

Whatever. This aspect of the flick doesn’t really interest me. Damon’s presence is really rather simple. Wang and his minions want to make cash worldwide. In order to do that you need a global star. Damon is a global star. There’s not a single Chinese actor that comes even close to his worldwide appeal. That’s why he’s there. There isn’t much else to it. Money!

Except to perhaps ask the question: Why isn’t there a Chinese actor as world famous as Damon? Ah, yes, now we get to the parts I actually care about. First off, let’s take a look at the director in the brilliant Zhang Yimou. I really like Zhang, the dude’s made some incredible movies and knows his craft well. In particular, To Live and Hero are quality movies. To Live even approaches the realm of masterpiece in my mind. But that was then and this is now.

Then, Zhang got himself banned from filmmaking by the Communist goons because To Live did such a great job tearing down the hypocrisy of said dictatorial state. Now, Zhang is their errand boy. So he thus produces flicks of questionable messaging and quality such as The Flowers of War, which also had a conspicuous hunk-white-dude lead in Christian Bale.

Now Zhang is working for Wang. And before he made billions in real estate, Wang was a regimental commander in the PLA. He’s also a mint condition delegate to the rubber stamp National People’s Congress. In other words, Wang’s the consummate Communist team player. Which helps to explain why Wanda Group is so successful given his connections. Although Wang is probably also a genius, so that helps too.

But if you were Zhang and you once made movies of conscience, perhaps you’d hesitate before getting into business with a guy like Wang who is so clearly tied to a Communist Party organization that censors movies like the ones you used to make. Hell, if somebody banned me and my movie, I’d be pissed. Maybe Zhang’s just more forgiving than I?

But you see, as a now Chinese owned studio, Legendary has to get The Great Wall entirely past the censors. This means that every line of dialogue, every scene of horrible computer generated action has to support the message of the Communist Party.

And therein lies the real crime of this movie, not the color of Damon’s skin. If I ran into Wang on the street (as in if I stowed away on his jetcopter) I’d like to ask him straight to his face if all of Legendary’s future movies are now going to have to be approved by the Commie censors?

I ask this because Legendary has made some damn good movies throughout the last fifteen years. I’d like to know in advance before stepping into the theater whether my movie experience got approved by some undersexed-degenerate-apparatchik-tool.

Hollywood (in theory) is supposed to be a land of consummate free speech. After all, it’s freedom of speech, freedom of the arts that enables Hollywood to function. It’s what gave birth to this pinnacle location of the film industry at the start of the movie era a century ago.

But money talks, and Hollywood (most, but not all) values money over principle. So Damon and a whole bunch of other people are perfectly happy to climb aboard a production that is essentially bankrolled by anti-free speech goons provided they get their tasty paycheck.

Seeing as how, like most celebrities, Damon does substantial humanitarian and human rights work, if I ran into Damon on the street (as in if I stowed away on his autogryo) I’d like to ask him straight to his face what he thinks about hundreds of Chinese human rights lawyers and activists being rounded up and convicted in show trials? Or that they’re being forced to read Cultural Revolution style confessions to the public like in one of the heart tearing scenes that Zhang used to put into his movies.

Did I also mention that Wanda Group owns AMC Theaters? Do you like movies? I sure do. Do you like free speech? I sure do. Well, as far as I can figure, I think these two concepts go hand in hand. But if you’re Wang, Zhang, or Damon, I guess you can respectfully disagree. Money!

Here’s the problem though. Wang and Zhang are placing a bet that you can have quality movies in a realm without free speech. It’s the same gamble that the Communist Party is taking all throughout China’s culture. For example, the Communist Party is backing efforts to dramatically enhance scientific research and development, but without the freedom of speech and academic liberty that normally comes with it.

I suspect, just as it’s awfully hard to invent cool shit when the censors are all over you, that Wang and Zhang are going to discover that without freedom of creativity that they can’t make decent movies. They might make a lot of money (see Transformers for the ability of bad movies to make billions) but not actual good art.

Until China’s film industry can make consistent, freethinking, actual good art, they’re never going to produce a true global star like Damon. I just don’t see it happening. True art requires true freedom. End of story.

Maybe The Great Wall will be fairly decent. Like I said, Zhang is a superb filmmaker. And I really do like Damon as an actor. But for the future of movies, I hope this film tanks.

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I might not watch one frame of these Olympics

I actually gave this some relatively serious thought this weekend. It was essentially my first full weekend home in two months, so I had the time. But my television is not typically hooked up to receive the necessary signal (don’t ask). Connecting the television so I could watch the Games would have required about two minutes of hardware work, plus about ten minutes of boot time. I had so little zest about watching that I decided twelve minutes wasn’t worth it. So my box remains unconnected, and I haven’t watched one second of these Olympics. We’re a few days in and I’m wondering if I’ll watch any of it.

1) NBC: I see from the online reactions that NBC is up to their usual tone deaf arrogance with this year’s go. Sadly, the usual shallow outrage trolls seem to be having the same issues with NBC (or anybody) over fake ‘…ism’ or ‘…ist’ type stuff. Whatever. Eh, my beef with NBC is more along the lines of poor pacing, incessant commercials, lack of live content, hack fraud interviews, and Bob Costas. I can’t begin to describe to you how badly I think they broadcast this event. This is what lack of competition does to quality. NBC owns the product in America, they paid handsomely for it, but without CBS or ABC/ESPN to challenge them, why should they bother to deliver a decent broadcast when they can simply count their money?

2) Supermen / Superwomen: There is something vaguely and disturbingly fascist about the basic intent that, “our Superman will beat your Superman by 0.86 seconds on this event”. These people train for four years to win some race by less than a second. Can you mentally comprehend that margin of error against the number of pushups these dudes have to crank out in four years? I can’t. It’s just weird. Unless your last name is Phelps or Ledecky, it seems it’s actually a competition not between athletes, but between National Olympic programs. As in, which National Olympic committee can machine engineer their athlete better than the other one. It’s creepy. Do you doubt this? Name me one gold medal swimmer or track & field winner from a non-rich and/or non-former Communist country.

3) Retread / Weird Sports: Some parts of the Olympics are appealing in that I don’t typically get to watch fencing or wrestling or whatever. But when golf or soccer or basketball is already everywhere, why should I care? I’ve heard the point made in the last month or two and I wholeheartedly agree that basketball already has their pinnacle of competition in the NBA. Soccer has the World Cup. So why is this stuff there? It takes broadcast time away from the more obscure but no less difficult sports that I couldn’t typically see. Then on the other end of the spectrum you’ve got questionable sports like badminton or table tennis. Games I would typically only play while drunk are not exciting to me.

4) Brazil: Normally I don’t want to go down this road of social guilt / whining. As in, well, we can’t enjoy anything because the world is total shit. But in Brazil, I somewhat make an exception as I did for Sochi with Russia. Brazil is essentially in an economic depression, the president’s under impeachment proceedings, half of Rio is a dystopian wasteland, the country while essentially bankrupt has had to hand over billions it doesn’t have, mosquitos are going around giving people the plague, half completed Olympic venues are populated by aggressive zombies, etc, etc, etc. I have a hard enough time watching a football game hosted by Chicago (ps Bears suck). Rio is just too much. Just as Sochi was too much.

5) Sacks w/ $ On It: Oh, 84% of Russia’s athletes were doping? What planet must somebody have lived on to not understand that was already happening for decades? And in any case, it’s been well documented that the International Olympic Committee has been taking sacks with a $ on it for years. And now these corrupt goons are going to judge some poor Russian automaton on what they put into their body? The IOC isn’t exactly as corrupt as FIFA, but it’s certainly not the totem of athletic morality. I think if we all lived in 584 BC, that the religious handlers would put all the IOC ruling body members to death for pollution of Zeus’ divine pure will. Then when you add in all the ongoing Brazilian corruption investigations to include Lula himself, it’s pretty clear that Brazil probably bought these games. Just like Vlad bought Sochi. It gives the Games a very mafia-like feeling, like you’re watching the proceedings of an ongoing criminal enterprise. It’s the last in a long list of straws, and I just don’t have the motivation to tune in. Maybe I will, but at least not for today.

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Not feeling that good ole spirit.

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my version is free

I’ve never played Pokemon Go.  I never will.  So this post is more an observation vice a review.  Although if actually reviewing said game as a game, instead of a piece of likely clever and ingenious technology, I’d give it negative twelve stars.

I don’t get the human race.  Sometimes I feel like a darn alien inhabited my brain.  And he’s looking around at the goings on and he’s like, “What?  Huh?”  But basically, Pokemon Go is augmented reality.  Not a true game.  Not true virtual reality.  Something in between.  I’ll spare you the details.

But basically you walk around the real world and see the real world, but Pokémon is there too.  You can see him.  He’s over there getting fries at the drive thru window and you have to go up and say hi to him.  Or whatever.

It took humanity’s greatest leaps in technology to make this happen.  And even then servers are still crashing.  So instead of using all our powers to battle cancer or go back to the Moon, we’ve got finding Pokemon down by the Sizzler.  Uh, okay.

Hey you know what, I’ve got an even better version of Pokemon Go.  And my version is free.  It’s also augmented reality.  It’s called my freaking imagination.  Instead of picturing Pokemon, I get to pretend I’m battling dragons, or passed out drunk on the curb, or exploring this thing called a forest when I hike through it after removing the battery from my smartphone first.

Put down Pokemon Go.  Pick up your imagination.  You shall not regret it.

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What I see inside my head is 1,700 times as detailed and 1,300 more fun.  I win.

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the search for identity and vision

By any historical measure the British citizen has never been safer, more prosperous, and capable of fulfilling their potential. Yet the polls predict that roughly half of voters are prepared to leap into the unknown tomorrow. This mirrors the mentality of tens-of-millions of Americans who are ready to walk a path led by Trump or Sanders. Why is this?

Part of it is the harsh cruel reality of modern quarterly report drive capitalism. If you make refrigerators in Indiana you might get fired so a worker in Mexico can do your job for a fraction of the cost thus adding 0.0034% to your company’s next earnings report. Same goes for your average British steelworker who has to lose his life’s work because China’s wise state planners couldn’t do simple math to determine basic supply and demand.

Unfortunate as these kinds of devastating situations are, they are not the majority of voters. They do not explain the society wide shifts in tone or direction. To get the total answer you need to go deeper and consider identity and vision.

Vision

Vision is where you see yourself, your family, and your country going. It’s the broader ideals and goals that propel a people. These things matter even if you’re just shilling cosmetics or sitting in a cubicle every day. It’s a natural human need to be a part of a greater whole. But a coherent society requires competent and inspirational leadership. And if the modern world is lacking in anything, it’s high caliber leadership. Of the G7 group of leading democracies, every single one is currently led by a career politician. None of them have really lived an average normal life outside the world of politics. It shows. It reflects the modern incarnations of machine politics where most major lever pullers in the executive and legislative bodies are rich, connected, and have more in common with each other than the average voter, regardless of political party.

People tend to notice when a leader cannot intellectually relate to them. They pick up on this rather quickly, whether it’s on the factory floor or the presidential podium. Cameron is a cartoon caricature of an elite aloof toff. Clinton has openly admitted she hasn’t driven a car in like two decades. None of these people have ever had real jobs. They’ve never been fired. They’ve never had to struggle with where their next meal was coming from. They’ve mostly never encountered real adversity beyond the typical mudslinging encounters of the political parlor room.

From adversity and failure a human can find themselves utterly crushed. Or, a person can use those dark times to build their character and strength. Using these fortified qualities a leader can thus better relate to the citizen whose pain at one point they might have experienced. And certainly, having undergone their own versions of hell, a leader built from adversity is better able to manage the crises of the day.

When a leader can’t relate to the voter, or when a leader appears incapable or powerless in confronting the evils of the day, then there is virtually no chance that a vision for the future can be imparted upon the minds of society as a whole. And without that, it’s thus left to any number of nutcases to fill the void.

Corbyn, Trump, Sanders, Farage, Le Pen, all these folks have some fairly decent ideas for the future, at least worth discussing. Mostly though, they seem to have a whole bunch of really terrible ideas. But they make up for their insanity by their ability to impart a vision for the future on anybody willing to listen. And people feed off of that because the traditional leaders of the day are otherwise unable or unwilling to provide any compelling vision at all.

Identity

As a subset of vision, identity is what a person feels they are a part of. In the simplest terms of Brexit, it’s does a voter feel that are British, or English, or European, or whatever. Increasingly throughout modern democracies the identity of a person is becoming more local. Scots see themselves as Scottish, Catalonians over Spanish, Texans over Americans, and so on. This is partially tied to the lack of decent leadership already discussed. When remote, aloof, national leadership seems unable to solve the problems of the day, folks are inherently going to look for answers with their local leaders. In part this isn’t necessarily a bad thing considering your local mayor has far, far more impact upon your life then the president does anyways. Are bigger problems created however, if we keep driving ourselves to the local level?

Also a factor is the almost total loss of a driving national identity in most Western democracies. Before 1945 the British identity was the Empire. Between 1945 and 1991 it was defense of liberal democracy against communism. What’s Britain’s national identity about today? Judging by the major campaign issues of the last general election, it’s NHS fees, bus fares, and tweaking the edges of welfare eligibility payments. These are not the topics that inspire a Scot to remain a fervent Brit.

The same pattern is beginning to take hold in an America that is increasingly unhappy trying to play the thankless dangerous role of world cop. After 15 years of quasi-war it’s still quite possible for the same enemies of September 11th to slay Americans and Afghans at will. If you lost your job to Mexico, or will spend 20 years paying off student loan debt, or pay every check into a Social Security account you know you’ll never see, then it becomes a bit harder to step back and give a pleasing sigh during the Star Spangled Banner. And if all of this be the case, why should you care about the American dream or what happens in Syria?

A more common response to all of this is to turn inward, to seek the answers in a far more local setting, with the people and values closest to you. With the historical roots that are essentially unshakeable no matter how you slice geography or political structure. Maybe there’s just something to be viscerally said for keeping a people together if you share the same time zone, weather, football team, and drinking water supply.

Brexit

The appeal of Brexit is the clear benefits of identity and vision. The identity is pure Britannia. The vision is a United Kingdom unshackled from an incompetent, distant leadership incapable of battling the problems of the day. It’s certainly an appealing vision. But the question at hand is can such a vision and identity actually deliver? I’m not so sure.

Leave aside the possibility if you can, that the Scots might want out of a UK not in the EU, or that the Northern Irish are going to struggle to come to grips with a full EU border to the south. Even if the UK can hold together post-Brexit, what would this new Britannia actually be? What is the UK without an Empire, without a direct tie to Europe, or without the ever-present struggle for freedom?

Without any of these things, I suspect the answer is that Great Britain (and certainly England alone) is a fourth rate nation struggling on the fringes. Britannia, whatever that is today, requires Europe. It isn’t going to magically reappear outside the handcuffs of the EU. Localism isn’t going to somehow deliver the British economy from Brussels. The British economy requires Europe to survive, and that’s a tall order for an angry EU to fulfill post-Brexit.

To which the Leave campaign’s answer seems to be the creation of a new Britannic vision, a new British Singapore, a new island nation trading post free from that old sick man of Europe. I suppose this is possible, I just don’t see how it happens unless the answer lies in totally going all in with the already active policy of sucking up to China to become their Singapore of Europe. Cameron is of course knee deep in courting China, but post-Brexit this effort would have to go into overdrive. And is this new Britannia prepared to sell its soul on human rights, democracy, and freedom in order to economically survive? I’m not sure it’d have a choice.

Take away Brussels tomorrow and the UK doesn’t automatically become a free little bird in an open sky. The dirty little secret of modern Britain is that the dark master of bureaucracy does not reside in Brussels, he resides in London. In the UK, tasks, regulation, and enforcement of major local issues that in America would be handled by local city councils and mayors, are in Britain handled by bureaucrats in London. One of the more beneficial and inspirational efforts of Cameron’s tenure has been to try and remedy this by pushing more power back to the local level, but they are a long, long way from anything approaching what most Americans would consider reasonable local government. In or out of the EU, this problem doesn’t get solved overnight.

Localism

I don’t have a cure for any of this. It’s a creepy scary dark time in our course of history and I fear nobody has any real answers. And that there aren’t any real leaders out there prepared to tackle the major issues of the day. But I’m not sure Trump or Brexit or whatever are the answers either. I just don’t think they provide the solutions that people seek.

The problem with this new localism is it tends to overlook the reality that everything we do in our modern societies depends not on the local but on the global. Whether it’s containerized shipping, call centers, cheap diapers at Walmart, or the nice reality that World War III is not coming tomorrow, our world as it stands today is defined not by Brits being Brits but by the ever increasing connections happening between people worldwide.

It’s a rather jarring situation that nobody’s really ready to handle. It’s uncomfortable for people to wrap their minds around the construct that what could happen to their pocketbook or their way of life is not really guided by them, but also perhaps not their own leadership either. A president Trump would have to wake up real quick once he realized how much of the American economy is wrapped up in China. A post-Brexit led Johnson would have a real hard time solving the economy when so much of Britain’s trade is wrapped up in the ability for Europe simply to say no to him.

Whether we like it or not, we have built a world where our vision and identity are not local but global. We can still be British or American or whatever we prefer, but what we cannot do is pull backward in time. We may not be ready for a true global identity, perhaps not ever, but the allure to reestablish our identity and vision to the local level isn’t the answer. We’re simply too connected for that.

Prediction

Tomorrow’s vote is likely to run very close but I’ll throw my guess that Remain just edges out Leave. When the undecided voter gets into the booth tomorrow, they’ll still have that ever common human trait that fears the unknown. Lots of folks are tempted to dive into the uncertainty but I suspect the small percentage that will turn the vote one way or the other is going to push for stability, for the certainty of the same. So Remain wins, but by just a hair. Then we’re left with the broader issues outlined above. It’ll be quite the long road to solve them.

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the essentials of freedom

I truly wonder whether I’m an internal alarmist who then occasionally flies off the handle in an external fashion aboard this degenerate blog.  Until I read a line like:

“The share of the world’s populace living in countries with a free press fell from 38% in 2005 to 31% in 2015;”

In other words, less than one third of our planet has the ability to live in a free society enabled by free speech.  I would have hoped for at least half, but I guess I was wrong.  Read the article.

Then read the other three articles The Economist put into their latest issue.  One.  Two.  Three.

My feelings on all this are pretty clear, but I’ll shut up now, and hope you take the time to read it all.