Surly Valentine

Card Carrying Member of 'Unloved Anonymous'

A single friend of mine, and card carrying member of the unloved, had a great Valentine quote a few years ago: "I hate Valentine's Day", he once said," it only drives home the fact that nobody loves or cares about me". Faced with this stark reality, outsiders like me, at this time of year, will often turn our gaze to other more 'philosophical' horizons, in attempt to provide some meaning to our wretched little lives.

Alternative Enquiry

Our culture's willful ignorance, dismissal, and even knee-jerk rejection of alternative research (usually painted with the depoliticizing meme of 'conspiracy theories'), is rooted in the same fear that has driven it to set up these highly secretive and compartmentalized external authoritarian systems in the first place. Which is specifically designed to surrender our personal moral responsibilities to a paternal governance for the purpose of abdicating certain duties and thoughts which may run counter to our insatiable attempts to acquire our personal grail, which is the fulfillment of our every whim and worldly desire. The catastrophic result of this unconscious historical decision has sentenced mankind to live in an arrested state of perpetual spiritual childhood…now what time do the Simpsons come on?

Ghost in the Machine, The Economy and The Financial Elite

Presidents John F Kennedy and Dwight D Eisenhower both warned their countrymen of the entropic forces of systemic corruption. What has ensued over the last fifty years has been nothing short of the erosion of fundamental human principles for the immediate gratification of speculative riches, leveraged buy-outs and debt based 'prosperity'. Claims are made from pundits that the economy is turning around, and that happy days will soon be here again. Yet the debt to GDP ratios of industrialized nations continues to grow to levels not seen in human history. The result of this, as you may have noticed, is the failure of smaller nations to generate the wealth necessary to service their debt. Banker's have been all too happy to impose their austere solutions in exchange for yet more loans designed for these little nations to 'kick the can down the road' just a little further.

When the financial collapse happened in 2008, the very top heavy 'too big to fails' responsible for inflating the bubble, asked governments to socialize their losses. This was the greatest funnelling of wealth upward in history, and an apparent reward for their malfeasance.

People are now waking up to the horrific consequences of this recklessness, and in the US, most notably in 'Occupy Wall Street and 'The Tea Party'. Those who've abnegated their personal responsibility and are thoroughly satified by their own unfettered capacity for consumption pretend there is no problem, even to the point where they now resent those who possess the vision to foresee the negative consequences of this recklessness, and have chosen to vocalize their discontent. "Hey, Teacher, leave those kids alone!"

Law and Order

Police and Military serve the function of maintaining the social order at any cost, they do not put themselves in the position to make value judgements until the negative consequences of their given orders can no longer be denied or debated, and the negative effects become painfully obvious. At that point, these institutions can fracture, divide, and form new allegiances with those political entities they view will be on the 'winning end' of any major social upheaval. For those serving in the line of duty, the Twilight Zone's episode 'Death's Head Revisited' should be required and mandatory viewing.

Personal Responsibility 

The consequences of turning a blind eye to our moral duties allows for the proliferation of epistemologies easily corrupted by an allegiance to money. At that point, arguments suggesting a nation's or individual's immediate economic best interest becomes seductively appealing. Critics of this 'prosperity' are then viewed with derision, and often marginalized…but don't forget,  NOBODY puts 'baby' in the corner!

Computer Revolution

Few would argue against the overall benefit of current computer technology, it's positive applications are immeasurable, but it's dark side must never be forgotten, for the simple reason we have psychopaths in all levels of society who have the will to apply it. 

Computers can be instant gratification machines, much as the rat pulls the lever to gain access to the pellet, so too does man click the mouse to gain access to digital rewards. Repetition of this daily activity is unprecedented in our evolution, and therefore we have no idea what odysseys of behavioural transformation this revolutionary activity will embark us on… now open the pod-bay door, Hal!

War on Terra

Wars are exercises in the appeasement of elites. who set the conditions for conflict by historically funding violent psychopaths for economic gain. Once our former 'allies' outlive their usefulness, Elites employ experts to promote propaganda designed to bully adversaries and coerce the population into aligning their moral convictions with the interests of their masters. Once this is achieved,  the emotional manipulation of altruistic volunteers under the banner of 'Patriotism' is employed to justify and promote the use of aggression, once again for economic gain. The elites will fund leaders who promise the population justice, security and social reform, and after they crash and burn, will in turn fund those new leaders who will promise to deliver us from all the negative and 'unforeseen consequences' of the ill-conceived idealism of the former.

Now the drums of war are being beaten by well funded political opportunists, who use 'fear of the other' as a 'Sword of Damocles' to coerce the voters to make concessions to these candidates political and economic objectives. This is being done with great intensity now, as the simple arithmetic of inevitable financial implosion puts them in the position of needing to obfuscate this fact by escalating the rhetoric and stoking the fires of global conflict. (by the way, the song is called 'Barbara Ann', not 'Bomb Iran!')

Atheism and the State

It can be tempting to incorporate non-belief systems to fill the vacuum left by previous belief based control mechanisms. Left brained eviscerations of theist beliefs are in my opinion a 'philosophical fool's gold' as they fail to properly incorporate the contextual right-brained holistic approach to the role of experience and meaning. I don't think that an atheistic state has any chance of mitigating the negative effects of cultural dysfunction any better than a Theocracy can. The politicization of belief or non-belief systems has no place in human affairs, and is best left to the discretion of the individual.  Smarty-pants intellectuals take note and piss-off!

Gender Warz

Men and Women have been encouraged for millennia to treat one another as commodities, and this dysfunctional worldview has accelerated in recent years. True liberation of a member of any gender lies in it's ability to not only cast away the yoke of it's own cultural expectations, but also their programmed expectations of the opposite sex. (Oh, and women have got to get off Facebook, throw away their laptops, and start grabbing some crotch!)

Pro-Sports

Everybody loves to feel they belong, and our ancestral necessity for belonging is best demonstrated in the proliferation of the ubiquitous professional sports franchises. I love sports, don't get me wrong, but nagging in the back (and front) of my mind is the awareness that wealthy people are exploiting this tribal need for entertainment purposes, to the point where healthy competition becomes corrupted by the relentless forces of personal profit and status. Through the use of skillful marketing, professional sports franchises have put their loyal devotees in the position of purchasing this year's version of their team's jersey, year after bloody year, just to keep up with the rapid financial imperatives spearheading this money grab.

Canada's hope of qualifying for the World Cup in Brazil 2014

Not so much, it seems each incarnation of our Men's National Team, ever since we stumbled into Mexico '86, has performed exponentially weaker with each successive World Cup Qualifying campaign. Now that our finest young talent are all content to roll the dice with more competitive national sides, Canada's hopes of ever returning to the world's greatest sporting event, is about as likely a prospect as Don Cherry choking to his death on a stale 'Timbit'.

This Year, 2012

This is the year, so get with the program!  Nobody, and I mean NOBODY, is predicting the end of the world, but this is going to be a year of great change, as the many socio-political and environmental factors in our world begin to converge ever more rapidly. We could be in the process of redefining ourselves as a species (hyperbolae, why not?), and when extrapolations of calcified and archaic ways of thinking collide with new and self-evident realities, the friction from this resistance is liable to send shockwaves down through the annals of time…now go and eat some heart-shaped chocolate!

Dirty CT   February 2012