Tragedy, death, chaos. Nobody could have seen it coming or imagined that a normal midweek day in Ottawa would come to this, with MPs scattering and running from something more real than bad press. However, the unthinkable has happened. Just before 10 A.M. on October 22, a soldier standing guard at the War Memorial in Ottawa was shot by a man with a long gun - reports indicate a shotgun, and also the soldier's later death in a hospital. After an unknown number of shots the man got into a car and traveled just up the street to Parliament Hill, where he gained entry to the centre block of Canadian Parliament where he was shot dead by the sergeant-at-arms, police and security forces in a pitched and very one-sided gunfight. There is video of the event that took place inside.
Meanwhile, the surrounding city is under lockdown as two other suspects are sought. Details are rather scarce and a few false alarms have already been defused, including one at the downtown Westin hotel. A large cordon around Parliament Hill has been set up and Canada's elite counter-terrorist division, JTF2, is on scene. Police are telling people to get away, get inside, and stay away from windows. Nobody is taking any chances, and civilians have been evacuated from nearby buildings as the search continues for two other suspects.
Usually when people get shot in Ottawa, there's a clear criminal motive - it's typically violence related to the drug trade. A major political figure, D'Arcy McGee, was shot to death by an assassin in 1868, on Sparks St. (near Parliament) so there is some precedent, but an assassination is much different than a shooting spree. Terrorism has been invoked as a cause for the shooting, mostly because nobody can think of a better reason for such a senseless act of violence.
The act is contrary to what Canada stands for - the inclusiveness and openness of Parliament Hill, a place thousands of people pass through each year, where hundreds of pot smokers gather each April, could only have aided the gunman. It is tempting to say that is an effect of naivete on the part of Canadians, but it is considered rather a sign of strength and surety, a calmly rational decision to not give into fear. All that might change in the coming weeks. The attack has already sidelined a meeting between Prime Minister Stephen Harper and recent Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai.
This is the second attack on a Canadian soldier in a week (two were struck by a car in Montreal - one died) and they've been warned by officials to stay out of uniform in public. The violence is alleged to be the highly trendy 'lone wolf' attacks, committed at the urging of ISIS leaders, in response to Western aggression. My question is how the usual RCMP teams on the Hill missed the attacker, there are usually a number of cars and officers around, plus cameras - fairly good security but the sleepiness of Ottawa can lull anyone into a sense of security. The twenty-four hour news cycle will on this for the next 12 hours at least. An intensification of the security state apparatus seems almost inevitable, even at this early point in time.
The fallout from this will be interesting, and many will be watching. However the story has entered a fallow mid-life lull of repetition and speculation - the facts as known are only that one soldier was shot and later died, that at least one gunman carried out the attack and was shot dead in Centre Block of Parliament, and that downtown Ottawa is locked, and everything around Parliament cordoned off while searches are made for further suspects. One thing is certain: the official response was not lackluster.
10/21/14
Meeting Cool People in Your 20s
It's a daunting prospect because many cool people in their 20s are probably traveling between one cool place and another, or one interesting life event and the next, and your only chance to meet them – unless by some accident you're going to a cool place and you're in your 20s – is to travel with them and be more personable, good looking, and cleverer than the rest. However, when they find out you're simply traveling for life reasons and not to TRAVEL like a cool 20 something everything will fall apart as they suss out just how uninteresting you are, after they realize you're not actually an unreadable human cypher, but rather (pick one of many appellations - I'm going with 'lousy deadbeat').
You've got no stories, you've simply worked to stay alive, your academic papers won't turn undergrad heads and will fail to impress even highschool kids - both under and overachievers will probably laugh at you. They've traveled extensively and wonder about people who settle down, but they don't even know there are people who intentionally hobble themselves and live in flyover cities nobody cares about, with real friends and real intrigues that still fail to fully ameliorate the truth of a dismal reality with nothing dynamic, no progress, and no aims. You've basically shot yourself in the interesting part of your head.
Upon the moment of self-reflection and awareness, you can actually watch the interest on that cool young person's face drain away, and harken to this: they will begin to tell good stories more often than they will ask you about yourself, and when you volunteer information about yourself, they will give a nice response and continue moving the entire discussion away from a chance for you to explain yourself.
Why? Because there's no explaining to be done: you failed to take interesting risks. Instead of flying by yourself to a place where you didn't know the language and hadn't memorized the liquor prices and internalized the laws, you stayed at home and on Friday you went and got drunk with some friends. You probably complained about something. Instead of meeting a bunch of people in your hostel, hating some and really enjoying others, and having hazy chaotic heartfelt discussions with complete strangers where you disburdened yourself of existential problems that troubled you for a decade, and maybe getting laid by a righteous intelligent beauty, you washed the dishes and looked out of the shitty grimy window of your 20-something's rat shit warren and laughed humorlessly about the big mystery of why you're not happy. You realize that, in your 30s, you might make a passably good bitter comic, but the tradeoff is likely not worth it.
You done fucked up, and the only way to proceed now is to try and make as much fast money as possible and then fly to Thailand and follow the young mostly-white westerner migration unto Bali, Australia, and all the rest, maybe unto wherever the new Phi Phi is unfurling, where you will bask in good times and tough lessons. And if you fail to do that, you might just end up marrying someone a lot cooler than yourself, and the discrepancy will haunt you until you die... you will warn your children not to be diffident, not to value knowledge over experience, but they will fail to listen and instead live according to their whims, and it will haunt you then and every day, as it does now, because in truth you have nothing, less than nothing... people with nothing might have a good story, but nothing comes to your mouth when the time for a good story arrives, and you can't ace the telling anyway. Your mind is full of tedium and despair and grim stories about being poor and aimless and drunk, and it has set you apart from your peers forever. You have probably broken it.
You have turned yourself into nothing and start to doubt anyone could overcome it, but as you tell a sure to be interrupted story about your most recent uninteresting and static days, or some mild anecdote about your sterilized and irreal existence, you will realize it doesn't matter. You could even try to explain the consolations of being an anchorite in an apparently boring and lifeless city, try to get them to have a beer with you, but the idea will immediately fill you with revulsion, and you may vomit from stress and grief. Why would a normal person want to have a drink with a broken subhuman like you? Why make it totally awks by even trying? Why would anyone, anyone at all who wasn't related to you, ever give the tiniest shit? Your life achievements and goals can be summed up by the image of a late autumn puddle with a couple of dead rotting leaves in it - it might be weirdly beautiful, but mostly it's just sad. Just rewrite your resume, you boring boneheaded fuck, and try not to think of all the fun other people just like you are having, all of which goes to show, really, that a bad attitude is a real disability, and possibly the worst.
You've got no stories, you've simply worked to stay alive, your academic papers won't turn undergrad heads and will fail to impress even highschool kids - both under and overachievers will probably laugh at you. They've traveled extensively and wonder about people who settle down, but they don't even know there are people who intentionally hobble themselves and live in flyover cities nobody cares about, with real friends and real intrigues that still fail to fully ameliorate the truth of a dismal reality with nothing dynamic, no progress, and no aims. You've basically shot yourself in the interesting part of your head.
Upon the moment of self-reflection and awareness, you can actually watch the interest on that cool young person's face drain away, and harken to this: they will begin to tell good stories more often than they will ask you about yourself, and when you volunteer information about yourself, they will give a nice response and continue moving the entire discussion away from a chance for you to explain yourself.
Why? Because there's no explaining to be done: you failed to take interesting risks. Instead of flying by yourself to a place where you didn't know the language and hadn't memorized the liquor prices and internalized the laws, you stayed at home and on Friday you went and got drunk with some friends. You probably complained about something. Instead of meeting a bunch of people in your hostel, hating some and really enjoying others, and having hazy chaotic heartfelt discussions with complete strangers where you disburdened yourself of existential problems that troubled you for a decade, and maybe getting laid by a righteous intelligent beauty, you washed the dishes and looked out of the shitty grimy window of your 20-something's rat shit warren and laughed humorlessly about the big mystery of why you're not happy. You realize that, in your 30s, you might make a passably good bitter comic, but the tradeoff is likely not worth it.
You done fucked up, and the only way to proceed now is to try and make as much fast money as possible and then fly to Thailand and follow the young mostly-white westerner migration unto Bali, Australia, and all the rest, maybe unto wherever the new Phi Phi is unfurling, where you will bask in good times and tough lessons. And if you fail to do that, you might just end up marrying someone a lot cooler than yourself, and the discrepancy will haunt you until you die... you will warn your children not to be diffident, not to value knowledge over experience, but they will fail to listen and instead live according to their whims, and it will haunt you then and every day, as it does now, because in truth you have nothing, less than nothing... people with nothing might have a good story, but nothing comes to your mouth when the time for a good story arrives, and you can't ace the telling anyway. Your mind is full of tedium and despair and grim stories about being poor and aimless and drunk, and it has set you apart from your peers forever. You have probably broken it.
You have turned yourself into nothing and start to doubt anyone could overcome it, but as you tell a sure to be interrupted story about your most recent uninteresting and static days, or some mild anecdote about your sterilized and irreal existence, you will realize it doesn't matter. You could even try to explain the consolations of being an anchorite in an apparently boring and lifeless city, try to get them to have a beer with you, but the idea will immediately fill you with revulsion, and you may vomit from stress and grief. Why would a normal person want to have a drink with a broken subhuman like you? Why make it totally awks by even trying? Why would anyone, anyone at all who wasn't related to you, ever give the tiniest shit? Your life achievements and goals can be summed up by the image of a late autumn puddle with a couple of dead rotting leaves in it - it might be weirdly beautiful, but mostly it's just sad. Just rewrite your resume, you boring boneheaded fuck, and try not to think of all the fun other people just like you are having, all of which goes to show, really, that a bad attitude is a real disability, and possibly the worst.
10/6/14
What the Rich Know that You Don't
You have to be rich to 'get' rich, if you know what I'm saying, and if you don't, you're probably a poor person. Here's some tips and ideas to get you started on becoming rich, because there is definitely enough for everyone on earth to be super annoyingly wastefully wealthy, and anyone telling you otherwise is a communist or loser.
How they're different from you: They're different, in qualitative ways, from people who are not wealthy, such as the middle class. Why is this? Read the linked article and get back. I can wait... So the point is obviously that the rich are simply a different breed, not plagued by the fear and uncertainty and the mentally-sapping contretemps of poverty.
You see, the world is actually quite fair if you're rich, so you can afford to make big gambles, wake up every day feeling confident, and do things that would make lesser mortals quiver with poverty-related fear and incompetence. It's not a function of exceptionalism written by a wanker kiss-ass, the article is trying to help you understand that you're poor because you're not as good.
They're different, end of story. The naysayers are a bunch of anxious and impecunious babies who like having their hands held by oversized governments and loudmouth hippies. Some day, hopefully, private security armies will give them what-for, and they'll realize they have to work and strive to be wealthy, and not spend their money frivolously.
Join the Culture: Do your time, immerse yourself in the culture, and be prepared to fight for your profits. Before long you'll be salivating at the announcement of layoffs and mergers, certain that the money being gouged out of the wealth of your country (nationalism is an outdated concept that only the middle class poor believe in) will end up in your bank account, ready to be moved offshore as soon as Big Brother turns his back. Information is your best ally, and you want the RIGHT information.
The mentality of fear is one that belongs to the underclasses, anyway. When you've got a yacht more than 60 feet long and a helicopter, do you really think some schmuck in a Corolla is going to be able to touch you? Not unless you get your town car snared in midtown traffic, and unless a big account is at stake, you shouldn't be there to begin with.
Do Your Research: You gotta help yourself first. You gotta understand certain things that poor people just don't seem to get, even after multiple applications of crippling poverty, minimal prospects, and curative destitution. Imagining that the cards are stacked against you is a fearful response not worthy of those worthy of riches. Seriously, if people just stopped being lazy and afraid, everyone could be wealthy. It's astoundingly simple and there are lots of books about it that were not written by snake-oil salesmen.
But, hey, you'll probably just sit there on the couch feeling sorry for yourself and imagining there's a certain way the world's run where decent living conditions are magically withheld from %80+ of all of humanity. Okay there, you red marxist fuck, why don't you go post on Tumblr about the %1 being a bunch of pathological parasites. See where that gets you, while the smart get going on a fantastic journey to wealth, power, and respect.
How they're different from you: They're different, in qualitative ways, from people who are not wealthy, such as the middle class. Why is this? Read the linked article and get back. I can wait... So the point is obviously that the rich are simply a different breed, not plagued by the fear and uncertainty and the mentally-sapping contretemps of poverty.
You see, the world is actually quite fair if you're rich, so you can afford to make big gambles, wake up every day feeling confident, and do things that would make lesser mortals quiver with poverty-related fear and incompetence. It's not a function of exceptionalism written by a wanker kiss-ass, the article is trying to help you understand that you're poor because you're not as good.
They're different, end of story. The naysayers are a bunch of anxious and impecunious babies who like having their hands held by oversized governments and loudmouth hippies. Some day, hopefully, private security armies will give them what-for, and they'll realize they have to work and strive to be wealthy, and not spend their money frivolously.
Join the Culture: Do your time, immerse yourself in the culture, and be prepared to fight for your profits. Before long you'll be salivating at the announcement of layoffs and mergers, certain that the money being gouged out of the wealth of your country (nationalism is an outdated concept that only the middle class poor believe in) will end up in your bank account, ready to be moved offshore as soon as Big Brother turns his back. Information is your best ally, and you want the RIGHT information.
The mentality of fear is one that belongs to the underclasses, anyway. When you've got a yacht more than 60 feet long and a helicopter, do you really think some schmuck in a Corolla is going to be able to touch you? Not unless you get your town car snared in midtown traffic, and unless a big account is at stake, you shouldn't be there to begin with.
Do Your Research: You gotta help yourself first. You gotta understand certain things that poor people just don't seem to get, even after multiple applications of crippling poverty, minimal prospects, and curative destitution. Imagining that the cards are stacked against you is a fearful response not worthy of those worthy of riches. Seriously, if people just stopped being lazy and afraid, everyone could be wealthy. It's astoundingly simple and there are lots of books about it that were not written by snake-oil salesmen.
But, hey, you'll probably just sit there on the couch feeling sorry for yourself and imagining there's a certain way the world's run where decent living conditions are magically withheld from %80+ of all of humanity. Okay there, you red marxist fuck, why don't you go post on Tumblr about the %1 being a bunch of pathological parasites. See where that gets you, while the smart get going on a fantastic journey to wealth, power, and respect.
10/5/14
The Interstitial Garbage Dump
Download the album automatically and don't listen to it at all and chuckle at the ensuing media firestorm sinking an irrelevant brand.
Pick a new role for yourself online, let the psychosis of the internet really get to you, really inhabit its odd corners, muttering constantly about incredible things with an awesome potential to alienate others while also alienating you. Get really huffy about something like everyone else is doing!
The newest sensation is a good way to get views and followers. Yet there is a way to do it properly and it may only be to create some bot account twitter, where you are the bot, retweeting an oblivious feed via buzzy logic and reimagining news stories in the naive or Socratic mode.
You ramble about the newest sensation. There is the Rob Ford Saga, pt. 6, and many others. Or work on the themes: What the Hell, vol. 1; Wild Internet XXI; My Fat Twitter Diary; Fail-o-sphere 2.5; LOLNET... the internet possibilities are endless. If you want success, stick to the sensations and try and become as media literate as you can in the broadest sense. Make a vid or two. Don't use memes stupidly and try not to play irrelevant or annoying ones unless you're really good, memewise.
No it doesn't need to make sense. It only needs to make sense interstitially and occasionally. The savvy user reads between the lines anyway.
Whatever happened to Nerd Culture? It got really quiet and samey, growing like a benign tumor on the cultural wasteland of 2014, a cyst overfull of information and inflated by its handlers. The newest game is all design and art, game be damned. The digital grindstone. "Only moonlighting in reality these days."
The dramatic currency wars. Fading economies. The thriving era of Cannibal Orphan Globalism. Violence signalling like flares in the dark that something is still terribly wrong and broken, help is needed, and the constant fear that everything else will get dragged in again leading to some monstrous cataclysm. Orphans of the species make further orbits for a couple of hardscrabble years, looking hungrily at a succession of pure nights.
We have a responsibility to do what we can and not let it get to us, try though it might. Is it our responsibility to look into things, risking mental corrosion and flights of fancy? Who can say? This blogger certainly can't. Casual self-reflection is probably a good habit unless it leads one too far inside. Introspection is only half the story at best. What seems impossible is always categorical: do all questions lead somewhere?
The internet provides a constant potential to feel extremely negative and anxious about everything, a literal bottomless pit that only exists insofar as what exactly? Personalized algorithmic experience, digital rat maze, the netscape, first and last frontier; possibly the end is in sight.
What the wreck of news journalism reveals is a world still running amok. Things are in some ways better, but things are worse at least existentially for all and are really not that great for most in any case. In the best case a global society awakens, ignores its differences, and forces the start of a new era divorced from as many of the ignorant sins of the past as possible. But realistically a continuation and intensification of the recent past is most likely, for at least a few more decades, by which time it may truly be too late.
The net decline of genetic diversity correlates to a net decline in the value of Earth, beyond merely a pruning of the tree of life as some non-alarmists would argue. If people were as carefree about their dollars everyone would be a millionaire, economists would be philosopher kings, and there would be no world hunger. Funny how more or less pure capitalism, either way, could solve a few problems. The law of mediocrity is by definition only fair to a small percentage. If we made it, could it rule us? What does it matter when the toxic cloud is already here, and has been for dozens of years?
The realist perspective is not individualistic, but there will always be the allure of a heroic self-narrative and/or other fantasies. There is not enough realism left, as if the horrors of the 20th century exhausted our ability or willingness to see things as they are. How will we advance beyond being troops of apes? Will we? Is the criticism even valid? We cannot truly say things are purely otherwise yet. The symbolists can prove it.
It is best to ramble about things awhile. Puzzle them over over a beer or so with a friend or friends who are looking to ruin your line of thought by thrusting their own into a collision with it. Whatever, anyways, right? Whatever...
Pick a new role for yourself online, let the psychosis of the internet really get to you, really inhabit its odd corners, muttering constantly about incredible things with an awesome potential to alienate others while also alienating you. Get really huffy about something like everyone else is doing!
The newest sensation is a good way to get views and followers. Yet there is a way to do it properly and it may only be to create some bot account twitter, where you are the bot, retweeting an oblivious feed via buzzy logic and reimagining news stories in the naive or Socratic mode.
You ramble about the newest sensation. There is the Rob Ford Saga, pt. 6, and many others. Or work on the themes: What the Hell, vol. 1; Wild Internet XXI; My Fat Twitter Diary; Fail-o-sphere 2.5; LOLNET... the internet possibilities are endless. If you want success, stick to the sensations and try and become as media literate as you can in the broadest sense. Make a vid or two. Don't use memes stupidly and try not to play irrelevant or annoying ones unless you're really good, memewise.
No it doesn't need to make sense. It only needs to make sense interstitially and occasionally. The savvy user reads between the lines anyway.
Whatever happened to Nerd Culture? It got really quiet and samey, growing like a benign tumor on the cultural wasteland of 2014, a cyst overfull of information and inflated by its handlers. The newest game is all design and art, game be damned. The digital grindstone. "Only moonlighting in reality these days."
The dramatic currency wars. Fading economies. The thriving era of Cannibal Orphan Globalism. Violence signalling like flares in the dark that something is still terribly wrong and broken, help is needed, and the constant fear that everything else will get dragged in again leading to some monstrous cataclysm. Orphans of the species make further orbits for a couple of hardscrabble years, looking hungrily at a succession of pure nights.
We have a responsibility to do what we can and not let it get to us, try though it might. Is it our responsibility to look into things, risking mental corrosion and flights of fancy? Who can say? This blogger certainly can't. Casual self-reflection is probably a good habit unless it leads one too far inside. Introspection is only half the story at best. What seems impossible is always categorical: do all questions lead somewhere?
The internet provides a constant potential to feel extremely negative and anxious about everything, a literal bottomless pit that only exists insofar as what exactly? Personalized algorithmic experience, digital rat maze, the netscape, first and last frontier; possibly the end is in sight.
What the wreck of news journalism reveals is a world still running amok. Things are in some ways better, but things are worse at least existentially for all and are really not that great for most in any case. In the best case a global society awakens, ignores its differences, and forces the start of a new era divorced from as many of the ignorant sins of the past as possible. But realistically a continuation and intensification of the recent past is most likely, for at least a few more decades, by which time it may truly be too late.
The net decline of genetic diversity correlates to a net decline in the value of Earth, beyond merely a pruning of the tree of life as some non-alarmists would argue. If people were as carefree about their dollars everyone would be a millionaire, economists would be philosopher kings, and there would be no world hunger. Funny how more or less pure capitalism, either way, could solve a few problems. The law of mediocrity is by definition only fair to a small percentage. If we made it, could it rule us? What does it matter when the toxic cloud is already here, and has been for dozens of years?
The realist perspective is not individualistic, but there will always be the allure of a heroic self-narrative and/or other fantasies. There is not enough realism left, as if the horrors of the 20th century exhausted our ability or willingness to see things as they are. How will we advance beyond being troops of apes? Will we? Is the criticism even valid? We cannot truly say things are purely otherwise yet. The symbolists can prove it.
It is best to ramble about things awhile. Puzzle them over over a beer or so with a friend or friends who are looking to ruin your line of thought by thrusting their own into a collision with it. Whatever, anyways, right? Whatever...
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