Hey BingoRagers;

     I haven't posted in a long time. Needless to say, it was a long Winter, filled with illness and bouts of darkness. Thankfully, Spring has finally arrived and everyone seems buoyed by it, myself included.

     I have been housebound for ridiculous reasons, far too often in this fine weather, waiting for appointments and technicians, treatments and t-shirts, paint and money.

     I find myself bewildered by the times and environs of my life; surrounded by a present made foreign by the onrush of a future, eroding certainties and the solid ground of my assumptions about people and culture. The "right wing" has spent decades degrading public educations, ostensibly to save money, but really to punish teachers for talking about evolution, sex and the big bang. Trumpism and the #BlackMirror immediacy of a household generational gap, is only the tip of my psychological iceberg.

     I have spoken with one of my housemates, trying to explain how I was seeing the English language shift under my feet, incorporating informational packets that are unavailable to me, referencing popular memes (in both the Dawkins sense of the word and its current "pop" meaning) and private micromedia. I tried to explain how it looked like the "next mass media" that Marshall McLuhan invoked, as the parabolic rise of television heralded its own demise, was the internet, sprawling into our pockets, tv's, references, allusions and metaphor. I may have lost him at some point, around Terence McKenna's theory that language is the result of self organising information in the environment, in the very physics of matter, invading and colonising the human mind, like a symbiotic memeplex. But he's patient.

     Oh, Canada... What... are we going to do with you? I, and the world, often look to you, to buck the madness of the Behemoth to the South, but we inevitably get dragged along with their political currents. Do you really think that it's a great idea to  give everything to the corporations and the wealthy, make people stupid and sick as labour jobs disappear? Forget it. Wake up. The capitalist carrot of "your share" of the big pie available to everyone, fairly, is being withdrawn. Trickle-down economics was a bad joke when it was coined, and just gets more dirty, every time it's invoked.

     When I was a child, I made jokes about "cooks" being replaced by burger-flipping robots. Ten years ago, I made jokes about a Malaysian outfit subcontracting people in Mexico to take your order in Mississipi. Soon, the Mexican company might hire independent contractors all over the world through Mechanical Turk, to squeeze the last drops of available human skill before AI takes, makes and delivers your... whatever.

     Ontario; do you really want to push Canada towards a long struggle of the masses? Why can't we make this country equitable and prosperous? It is not true, that we have amass everybody's capital and resources and give it to the incalculably rich. That's not commmunism, that's not socialism. It's not even: "radical" wealth-redistribution, class-war invocation, ideological nonsense, fake news. In fact, just about everyone is trapped in their ideological concrete; their inner monologue, unacknowledged and darting ahead of critical appraisal.

     Conservatives: Basic facts and demonstrable principles of physics, time and biology are not an attack upon faith, just observeable reality. Intentional sabotage of the educational system, suppression of protest, hoarding resources, legislated distribution of middle-eastern deathcult mythology and iron-age moralities is no way to deal with the future, as it is actually happening.

     I don't know what to do with the world. I can barely handle food, shelter and paint... and bus fares.

Later.
:Eric