Went to cash my tax return check and put it on my secured visa, and just could not stop myself from coming to White Spot.

I can’t really afford it, but what the hell. Live a little. There has to be place where prudence and sensibility end and freedom begins. Where the soul flies free, and yoi trade the cold and childish pleasure of being tthe kind of who is “ttoo smart for such nonsense” for the life enriching idea that maybe, just maybe, those “sstupid” people that you feel so superior to know something you don’t.

After all, they seem pretty happy. Can’t argue with results.

It is hard for the overbearing intellect to admit that anything good can vome of going with you gut. The intellect wants to be able to understand, verify, and appove every single action. It treats anything that it does not understand and cannot verify as noise at best and pure unadulterated evil at worst.

And the world does not lack examples of instinct leading to evil. In the Western worlD,higher morality is considered to be a product of the triumph of reason over evil. And thus, we are very good at looking at an evil and finding the instinct to blame.

But this is a narrow and simplistic point of view that tars all instincts eith the same brush. Racism is an instict. But so is kindness. The desire for war is an instinct. So is the quest for peace.

Morality itself is an instinct. The intellect alone cannot provide a reason to prefer life over death, pleasure over pain, paradise over holocausT. Aol morality presupposes that it matters what happens to people and that we are all looking for the “right” thing to do.

Neither of these presuppositions is logically supportable. We care what happens to people because we, as humans, have strong communal instincts that tell us to look after one another and to, in a sense, to treat another’s fate as we would our own.

And we only seek the right thing to do because our strong communal instincts drive us figure out how to be a good person both in the eyes of our community and before our own conscience, which is also an instinct.

Once we step away from the Western model of reason oriented morality, we begin to see ourselves as more human. And that makes it easier to accept the humanity in others. The anti-instinct rationalist dynamic puts people in the untenable position of ignoring many good and helpful instincts that reach deep into our emotional well-being. Instincts that, when ignored and suppressed by the overbearing superego’s tight grip on the conscious mind, simply find other ways of expressing themselves outside of any possibility of conscious control.

Thus, they turn into compulsions, aversions, blind spots, depression, or even psychosis, and all because of the rational mind’s refusal to listen to instinct and, at least some of the time, do what it says.

Somewhere between the people who always go with their gut and the people that never do lies the land of true human happiness, where the intellect ceases to be at war with emotion and the mind functions as one.

From what I can gather, that is what a lot of Eastern mysticism is about. Their approach may not seem rational or even comprehensible to the Western mind, but by refusing to demand an impossible bifurcation of the mind by saying reason is good and instinct is bad, their practices avoid much of the convolutions and complications of the Western approach.

A house, and a mind, divided against itself cannot stand.

Once we realize and accept that both good and evil are the products of instinct and that rejecting instinct wholesale is just as wrongheaded as rejecting reason wholesale, it opens the door to a fuller and more nuanced understanding of what it means to be human and live a human life.

This is not an easy path for those of us raised in the Western school of thought. It requires us to question the deepest layers of how we see the world. Our deep investment in the reason good/ instinct bad dynamic is part of the very bedrock of our culture. Our storytelling almost always revolves, in one way or another, the triumph of our morality over a more savage and primitive one. Even the barbarian heroes of yesteryear were heroes only in the sense that they saved maidens from sacrifice by savage peoples or fought cruel barbaric tyrants in the name of freedom.

Even out anarchic heroes fight for the Western way of life.

To step away from that model and try to examine things from a greater perspective is to take a step into the black of night for us Western types. Especially those of us of an intellectual point of view who are even more alienated from the world of the id than the average citizen.

We embrace reason not simply as a means but as an end unto itself. We retreat into fortresses of thought and cut ourselves off from both the positive and the negative aspects of our deeper and more intuitive selves, and often finding ourselves living and thinking as though the conscious mind is all there is, or all that counts, anyhow.

That’s like pretending the interface is the whole machine, like thinking that all there is to your car is a steering wheel and a stick shift. And then we wonder why things stop working when we run out of gas.

Only when we remove this artificial and destructive barrier between the rational mind and the realms of emotion and instinct can we stop the war inside and become whole.

We became human without ceasing to be animals. Our deep selves know things our rational minds could never deduce. The answers to our most pressing questions about ourselves and how we can be happy lie far deeper than the light of reason can ever reach.

And the id is not a mistake.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Okay, so I have now seen the entirety of The Breakfast Club, and I feel compelled to talk about it.

Why? Because I loved it, essentially. I have no problem AT ALL seeing why it is considered a classic film and an iconic film of the 80’s. It does the ensemble drama thing extremely well. The characters are all recognizable types, and yet they don’t feel stereotypical. They feel like real people, people who know, maybe even people you’ve been.

And of course, they are of my era. They seem exactly like the sort of people I knew at the time. They dress like people of my era, they talk like people of my era. They all seems so…. normal to me.

And that makes the drama penetrate all the deeper. I almost feel like I went to school with the characters.

My favorite scene was the one where Molly Ringwald (Claire) tells the brutal truth about how they will all go back to their regular lives and have nothing to do with one another once their group detention ends.

That’s the truth laid bare. And yeah, that’s a really shitty thing to do, especially to Brian the nerd. He is the one who would suffer the most from everybody just going back to their lives like none of it had ever happened. He’s the lowest status member of the club… even the basket case with no friends ranks higher than a nerd… and also the most vulnerable and sensitive. He wants to keep the cool friends he thinks he has made.

And the thing is, we don’t really know what happens after the movie ends. Maybe they do stay in touch. Maybe they don’t.

But I would understand if they didn’t. They all have their roles in their peer group. That is the context of their lives. Everything they know about who they are and where they fit in comes from their peer groups. Expecting someone to leave that and risk not ever being able to go back is asking one hell of a lot of a human animal.

And while Brian says that he would never reject the other four if they met in the school halls, I am not sure that would be true. If all his nerdy friends were there, I think he would be just as prone to wanting to preserve his position in his peer group and would feel compelled to say something about how he and the others aren’t friends, they just “know each other”.

Even us low status types have our status and our role.

The one most likely to be able to stay friends with the others is Allison, described by the film as “the basket case”. I think that’s a tad harsh. She’s definitely kinda nuts and has a deep need to be dramatic and mysterious and dangerous. But I don’t think she is a “basket case”.

It’s just that goth and emo didn’t really exist in 1984. So they didn’t know what to call her.

Speaking of Allison, boy did I ever hate it when she got the preppy makeover from Clair. It’s like Clair took a really interesting, unique girl and put her through the conformity meat grinder and out popped some boring chick who looks like a million other girls.

Yuck, yuck, yuck. Give me back the interesting version of her! Sure, she’s nuts, but at least she’s an individual.

Moving on, the movie’s villain (inasmuch as it has one) is clearly the “criminal”, John Bender (no relation). He is the one who acts as the agent of chaos that adds the energy to the system to enable change. Of course, he does it by being an abusive asshole with an entire lumberyard’s worth of chips on his shoulder and attacking everything and everyone in sight, so he is not in any sense a good person, but he ends up being the one who pushes people’s limits and thus getting the truth out of them.

There is also their hardass teacher, Richard Vernon. Mister Vernon. Hard to believe that there were ever teachers that could get away with being that aggressive. I can’t imagine any of my teachers acting like that. I have seen enough references to that sort of teacher in things to believe that there were really guys like that out there, but I never met them.

It’s just so un-Canadian.

And counterproductive. If I had met that kind of teacher when I was a teen with a head full of testosterone, I would have made it my full time occupation to destroy him. He would have been my nemesis, and I would have done whatever I could to fuck with him in every way possible.

I am not saying that would be justified. He’s a man trying to do a very tough job and I respect that, even if I think he is going about it the entirely wrong way.

But I know what I was like as a teen and I am positive that the only reason I didn’t have any behavioural issues is that nobody was messing with me. I had no such convenient a lightning rod for all that anger as a Mister Vernon.

Instead I had…. nothing. In high school, I was a ghost. No friends, no peer group, wandering around the edges of what was happening but never truly being a part of any of it. I went to class, did the work, went home. Lather, rinse, repeat.

I wasn’t completely invisible. In class, I sat at the front and asked (and answered)questions. The typical ghost sits in the back and avoids attracted attention. I… did not.

Like I have said before, I am a strange blend of extroversion and introversion. In many ways, I am incredibly shy. But in the right contexts, I have total self-confidence bordering on arrogance, although of course, I don’t see it that way.

I have total faith in my intelligence and creativity.

It’s everything else that I have a problem with….

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Guess what movie I watched today?

You guessed it,,,, Barbie Goes Hawaii!

Seriously though, it was Dredd, the 2012 movie based on the Judge Dredd comics.

And yes, it’s a lot better than the 1995 Judge Dredd movie starring Sylvester Stallone. It would have to be. It says a lot about a movie when Rob Scneider is the best thing in it.

Dredd takes place in a post-apocalyptic world of the nuclear war kind. How out of date is that? Well, technically, they just say that everything outside the mega-cities is “irradiated” desert. Whatever.

In this future, humanity is crowded into mega-cities and forced to live in squalid apartment buildings two hundred stories tall. Crime runs rampant and the only people between the innocent masses and the violent criminals is the Department of Justice and its agents, the Judges. (So it’s also a 1970’s social decay and/or Malthusean apocalypse too. Even MORE dated.)

These Judges are the entire justice system rolled into one person. Cop, lawyer, jury, and judge, and if needed, executioner as well. They have seriously hardcore uniforms, excellent motorcycles, and a super nifty keen gun that shoots different kinds of ammo (like high explosive, armor piercing, and incendiary) and explodes if the wrong person tries to use it.

At the beginning of the movie, the titular Dredd is (surprise, surprise) saddled with a new partner, a petite blonde woman who failed the entrance exam to be a Judge by 3 points. The Department of Justice had decided to make an exception for her, though, because she has psychic powers.

Not kidding about that. She’s telepathic. Which comes in handy for a cop, you know?

Anyhow, that is just the preamble to the actual plot of a movie, which involves a mega-block called the Peach Treets, which is essentially a vertical ghetto. It’s run by a crazy psycho bitch from hell who goes by the name Ma Ma (short for Marian Madrigal), a former sex worker whose pimp carved up her face, so she castrated him with her teeth and killed him, and took over his criminal operations and became known for her penchant for viciousness and brutality.

She’s the best part of the film. All action movies need a good villain and she is top notch. She is a restless snake that oozes malice and a total disregard for human life. I found Leno Headey’s performance really enhanced what could have been a cut and dried action flick with her highly believable villainy.

Don’t know why the made her look like a young Sandra Bernhardt though. Well, maybe I do. (Love you, Sandra!)

The Judges are called to the Peach Trees after a triple homicide is reported, and they take Ma Ma’s right hand man, Kay, prisoner. Kay knows Ma Ma’s secret, that she’s the one behind the latest designer drug, Slo Mo, and so there is no way that she can let the Judges take Kay downtown to beat the truth out of him. So she locks the doors to the Peach Trees and declares that the Judges must die.

So basically, the vast majority of the movie takes place in the Peach Trees as Dredd and the psychic rookie fight to stay alive and, of course, eventually kill Ma Ma, who really really deserves it.

My first observation is that this totally did not need to be a Judge Dredd movie. You could have taken out all the science fiction bits and had this take place in present day, in a present day slum, and almost nothing would have changed.

So it is, more or less, just a straight ahead action film with some cool, gritty science fiction-y highlighting. Nothing wrong with that. Not every movie has to make you think. Some movies just make you say “Whoa!” and “Awesome!” and “Yee-ha, motherfuckers!” and stuff like that.

This Judge Dredd doesn’t have the testosterone menace of a Stallone, but he doesn’t speak like he’s got a mouth full of half-frozen Jello, either.

(Sorry, Sly. I know you were going through some serious physical shit and that movie was hell to make, but just a friendly reminder, the phrase “I am the law” has consonants. )

They wisely chose to make this Dredd more of the cold hard steel hardass kind of hero rather than Captain Steroids. He executes his duties as Judge without prejudice, without hesitation, and without mercy. This actor can fill those Tom of Finland boots.

It’s especially impressive that he conveys all this without us ever seeing his face.

And they keep things brisk without descending into the seizure inducing twitch chaos that so many modern action films contain.

Overall, it was a fun ride. The action scenes were inventive and well conveyed. The plot was thin, but not too thin. It had enough surprises in it to keep me interested. Plus, as seems to be the norm lately, the visual look of the thing was compelling. All through the movie, I was deeply invested in finding out what happened next. I cared about Dredd and the psychic rookie, and wanted them to triumph over the forces of casually sadistic brutality and corruption.

It’s hardly high art and I don’t think anyone with the majority of their brain intact could go away from it with a lot to think about. But it’s a solid action movie with tons of cool gadgets and eye popping slow motion scenes (the drug called Slo-Mo does exactly that to the movie) and other bits of action-y goodness.

So if I was giving out letter grades, this movie would get a solid B minus. It’s not a great movie and there are a few gaping plot holes left just dangling, but I was hooked throughout the flick, and I am all jaded and cynical and ironic and such.

In conclusion, if you are looking for a slightly less than mindless action flick with all the trimmings, I recommend finding Dress on your VOD service and giving it a try. It’s a lot of fun to watch.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I watched an extremely good documentary called Web Junkie today, and I want to talk about it.

It takes place in a military school style Internet addiction treatment center. The patients are all young males whose parents have tricked them (and in some cases, drugged them) into coming here, because as we all know, addicts don’t think they are addicts. They always think they have it under control.

Unsurprisingly, it turns out that a lot of these kids have bigger issues than Internet addiction. All addictions are escapes, and so you always have to ask, escape from what?

In some cases, it’s just middle class malaise combined with an introverted personality. But in a lot of cases, the real issue is a terribly broken family dynamic or just plain extremely bad parenting.

It is a great documentary if, like you, you enjoy the occasional trip into the brutally raw heart of real world pain and suffering. I find such trips, harrowing as they can be, are often quite cathartic for me. Like their darkness and my darkness combine and heal one another.

Now of course, all of this has me thinking about my own life. I don’t consider myself addicted to the Internet per se, although I spend most of my waking hours either interacting with it directly or via video games. I have always assumed that, if something better came along, I could just walk away from it and never really miss it.

But how can something better come along if I spend all day online? Food for thought.

So I don’t consider myself addicted to the Internet, but I am not far from it. It’s next door. I am addiction adjacent. I don’t consider myself addicted because I don’t miss it when I am not using it. And I have gone as much as two weeks without it without going stark raving bonkers or knocking over an Internet cafe to get my fix.

But watching these young guys (18-25, I think) made me realize something : if the Internet had been around when I was a teenager like it is today, I would have become just like the kids in the documentary.

I was depressed, withdrawn teen, especially in high school. I had no friends, no social life. My life had a kind of eerie calm to it, in that nothing much happened to me and things didn’t change much, but I was miserable on the inside without even being fully consciously aware of it.

But I felt so very, very alone.

The Internet would have given me everything I needed. Friend, a social circle, group activities, maybe even romance (sticky legal issues aside). When I was that young and energetic and impulsive, I would have dived into the Internet with both feet and never come up for air.

And anyone who tried to come between me and what I undoubtedly would have thought of as my “real life”. the one on the Internet where everything was better, would have become the enemy. That’s the kind of unilateral thinking that addiction engenders. I no doubt would have elaborate and lofty arguments in defense of my right to live my life as I please and blah blah whatever, but it would really boil down to “don’t get between me and my addiction”.

So I sympathize with the subjects of the documentary. There but for the grace of God and being born too early go I. I would have been just like them if I had been born in 1983 instead of 1973.

That brings me to the nature of their enrollment in the program. I understand how desperate dealing with a teenager or young adult can be for parents, and I have no problem imagining why they think their children are headed to wrack and ruin and therefore very extreme measures are justified. I totally get that.

But if that had been me being tricked or drugged into going to this program, all my trust in my parents would have died. To abandon me to some stupid fucking touchy-feelie military school would be the ultimate betrayal.

And I would make both them AND the facility regret it. It’s not come up much in my life because, honestly, nobody has ever really tried to control me (they’d have to care first), but I have a very deep rebellious streak and I would resist the institution to a level to which they had never seen before.

Nobody controls me.

I have no inherent desire to obey. No matter how angry or forceful someone is, I will still take their orders as suggestions and obey or disobey as I see fit. This alone makes me a disruptive influence to any authority figure, because I learned at an early age that authority requires your cooperation.

With my intelligence, my insight, and my deep down refusal to be confined, controlled, contained, or conscripted, I would have sewn merry havok from the first time some jarhead came in and barked an order at my and I replied “No thank you. ”

That’s the power of the secret of authority. So much of how people try to control you simply disappears like smoke.

I suppose they would punish me, or try to. A lot of punishment also relies on authority. “Drop and give me twenty” is only a punishment if you actually do it.

Is all this making me sound bad? I can’t really tell.

Anyhow, I am not saying that my rebellion would have been a good thing. Honestly, I could have used some structure and discipline when I was that age. There’s something to be said for growing wild in the dark, and none of it is printable.

But I got good grades, so nobody cared whether I was happy or not.

And I wonder, why didn’t I ever act out? But I was taught to keep it all to myself and not attract attention to myself, and I would have had to leave the comfort of being part of the wallpaper to act out.

And now, well, it’s far, far too late.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’ve been going through the two year-end review articles on my ersatz home, Cracked.com, and I thought I would share some links and thoughts that they bring up.

Obviously, being a fan, I had read all the articles and seen most of the videos before. But it’s nice to revisit.

Like this article about 4 well loved TV shows that were hell behind the scenes. It’s a bit of a harsh read, but I have an insatiable desire to know everything about how television is actually made, so I enjoy the read nonetheless.

They bring up Gene Roddenberry’s bizarre insistence that in the Star Trek : The Next Generation universe, there was no longer any interpersonal conflict. And that, Great Bird, is literally impossible.

I can imagine no conception of the human animal that does not include interpersonal conflict. Sexual reproduction alone drives us towards it as we compete for mates. The fact that we are a pair-bonding species ups the ante considerably. Add in differences of personality, communication styles, and the vital necessity of establishing a unique identity via differentiation, and the fact that some people are just born cranky, and interpersonal conflict is inevitable.

The only way to prevent it would be to either drug or lobotomize everyone, which sounds suspiciously like the sort of system that Kirk would destroy if given half the chance.

But as the article points out. Gene was, well, circling the bowl at the time. He was pretty much broken down everywhere, including the brain, so his fanatical insistence on this unsupportable ideal is understandable. This was, presumably, the one thing he could remember and hold onto while everything else turned into chaos and misery.

Then there’s the 5 Facts Everyone Gets Wrong About Depression, which hits rather close to home.

They talk about how depression does not mean you are always miserable and alone. Take my case. Someone who was not an it-getter about depression might see me out with my friends and think “That guy doesn’t look depressed to me!”

But depression is a much more long term illness than that. Like the article says, the rest of the time, when I am alone with myself, the forces of my overactive superego come in and make me hate myself and all that comes with that.

They also mention that people think depression is just sadness, and that is so far from the truth. I would welcome being merely sad. In fact, there are times when I have found myself feeling melancholy and it has been a blessed relief, something I actually treasure, because sadness is so much less corrosive and destructive than depression.

Sadness is rain. Depression is acid rain in a hurricane of fear and pain.

Then there’s this whole idea that antidepressants don’t work. Uh, bullshit. Paxil saved my sanity and my life. If it hadn’t been for Paxil, I would have walked into traffic by now. And the idea that they don’t work, like the article said, could actually lead to people dying. So I am quite vehement when the subject comes up.

Then there is the people with depression who don’t want to take the meds because it will “change who they are”. Well duh, that’s the whole point. They change you from a depressed person to one who is not so depressed. There is no such thing as change without change. The mere act of getting better will change you.

But it won’t change your true self. In fact, it will uncover it.

Then there’s that whole “snap out of it” thing. People who say that depressed people need to snap out of it are not necessarily being cruel or willfully ignorant. They might be just tell you what works for them. It is very difficult, if not impossible, for people who have never suffered from depression to even imagine what it is like. And so they offer the best advice they know.

Sure, their ignorance is painful to us and that’s not something they or we can help. But they mean well.

The harshest one that made the list, though, is 6 Shocking Realities of the Secret Troubled Teen Industry.

The fact that there is anywhere in the civilized world where that kind of shit is legal just plain boggles my mind. It’s the sort of thing I thought went out with the lobotomy. The pockets of utter barbarity in the USA never cease to amaze me.

I was a “troubled teen”. I was very depressed and I missed a ton of school. If my parents had been that psycho, they could easily have arranged that kind of shit for me. And if that had happened, I would have gone completely insane.

That’s not hyperbole. I know it doesn’t seem like it, but I have very strong opinions about my personal autonomy and expression of self, and anyone who tried to suppress me would find themselves dealing with a side of me that I, thankfully, have never really had to express very much.

And who knows, maybe if I had not been bullied so harshly that I had to learn to fight just to establish my right to exist, this side wouldn’t be there. As it is, I am positive that if they tried that shit on me, I would go positively feral. They would not have an easy time with my capture, and even once they had me, I have a dangerous combination of intelligence, imagination, and savagery that would make me very difficult to contain.

And there’s really only one way that would have ended : me in a home for the criminally insane. I would fight like a bear every step of the way, they would have more than enough evidence to convince the authorities that I was a danger to others (even if I was only fighting for my own freedom), and I would end up convicted of assault and put into the asylum system.

And what would happen there? More people trying to control me who would not understand that I am perfectly sane and well behaved as long as people are not trying to control me or lock me up.

I would never get out.

That’s why I am so afraid of mental health hospitals/wards. I feel like if I got into one, a downward spiral of reaction to attempts to control me that would lead to me in a straitjacket in a rubber room.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Normally I shy away from talking about current events on this blog. It’s not that I don’t have opinions I could share about whatever the latest thing to grab the gnat-like attention span of the media happens to be. I have very strong opinions about government, politics, and the directions nations take, and I could fill my blog with them no problem.

But for the most part, this is not that kind of blog. I don’t comment on current events very often because I want to address things deeper than that. Personal things, philosophical things, political things. Stuff like that.

But every now and then, something happens that compels me to address it. So it is with the recent shootings in the Parliament building that houses the House of Commons here in Canada.

For my American friends, that’s the seat of government. A lone mentally unstable homeless crackhead got loose in there and ended up shooting some people and Canada is, quite understandably, in somewhat of an uproar about it. It is an event which resonates deep for every single Canadian, and as a Canadian, I feel I must share my feelings about it.

I express some of my feelings about it here.

That gives you the gist of it. As with similar tragedies in the USA, there is nothing really to be learned from it and nothing we can really do to keep this sort of thing from happening again.

It is the nature of the human beast to want to assign meaning to emotionally potent events, especially negative ones. We always want to think things are as important as they are upsetting. If something very frightening like this happens, then it must mean that someone didn’t do their job right and someone should be changed and something has to be done about it.

Otherwise, we would have nothing to do with all the strong emotions that have been aroused that are telling us we have to DO something and we would have to face the fact that sometimes we are helpless before the cruel and unfeeling hand of fate.

So whenever something like this happens, Something Must Be Done. The idea that something very upsetting could happen and there is nothing we could have done about it is unthinkable. Our emotions are screaming at us to act, and so We Can’t Just Sit Here And Do Nothing, even if that is exactly what we should be doing.

And politicians and pundits are swift in providing that Something, and that Something just happens to be the thing that advances their particular agenda or grinds their particular axe. What a coincidence! They take advantage of people’s emotional state to get people to sign away their permanent freedoms under the influence of a temporary fear.

Witness all the freedom-eroding things that the government of the USA got away with in the name of 9/11.

They will even try to convince you that signing away your freedoms is your patriotic duty, but nothing could be further from the truth. Your patriotic duty is to remember that you are just as safe today as you were before the shootings and that nothing has really changed and thus refuse to led the fearmongers and sowers of distrust stampede you into doing something stupid or supporting something you never would have supported before.

Sometimes, nothing can be done. Sometimes, the most patriotic thing to do is nothing at all. I consider it the duty of all Canadians in this time of crisis to stand up for their country by refusing to support any changes to Canadian society based on what was nothing more than a freak occurrence that, in all probably, will never happen again no matter what we do.

So why do anything?

This isn’t a warning sign. It’s not the beginning of a trend. It’s not a symptom of a terrible disease that has taken hold in Canada. It’s not just the tip of any icebergs. And it’s not confirmation that there is anything wrong with anyone’s religion.

I can’t stress that enough. Religion was not a factor in this event. The shooter was a mentally unstable homeless crackhead. This says as much about the shooter’s religion as does the lunatic rantings about Jesus from the homeless guy on your corner. When people go crazy, seriously crazy, then whatever happens to be in their head ends up part of their insanity. Jesus, Buddha, their family, their pets, anything can be part of the psychosis of someone who has seriously gone off the deep end.

That is why I refuse to even mention his religion. Anyone who does so, even just in passing, is participating in bigotry, in the same way that mentioning someone’s race means you are participating in racism. The shooter’s crimes would be exactly the same were he Jewish, Christian, or worshiped Thor.

We have to push back against the fearmongering of the politicians and the pundits and make it clear that we, as a people, as a nation, are strong enough to decide for ourselves what if anything needs to be done, courageous enough to resist their attempts to panic us, and smart enough to see through their pathetic tricks and tell them, in no uncertain terms, that we will not ever again let ourselves be swayed by fear and terror.

Take a firm stance against panic thinking and for the rights and freedoms that make Canada a great nation. You are safe, Canada. Never forget that. No matter how scary the news gets, no matter how much easier (and fun) it is to just let yourself be swept up in the stampede, we will only retain our identities as free, compassionate, tolerant Canadians if we stand on our own for the true north strong and free.

You are safe. Make that your new motto. YOU ARE SAFE. Your children are safe. Your parents are safe. Your neighbours are safe. If you live in a modern democratic nation, you are the safest any human being has ever been in the history of the world.

Don’t let anyone tell you different.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

The man I think of as “The Godfather of New Wave”, David Byrne, wrote a very interesting and thought-provoking op ed piece for The Guardian’s website that delved deep into the topic of the future of the music (and other creative) businesses in the era where everyone gets everything by streaming it over the Internet.

He makes a lot of good points about how the music business has once more figured out a way to keep most of the money themselves and stiff the artists by paying them a tiny fraction of the dough. A world where Daft Punk can have a massive hit with Get Lucky^[1] and only make around $26K from it from Spotify just plain does not make sense to most people. We inherently assume that Spotify made one hell of a lot more money than that from the song.

But the thing is, we don’t actually know that. With any subscription-based streaming service, whether it’s Netflix or Spotify or even satellite radio, it is impossible to determine exactly how much money the parent company is making off of any one piece of streaming media. They make their money by convincing people to subscribe. Certainly, having all the latest and greatest stuff helps with that. But did a lot of people sign up to Spotify solely to hear Get Lucky? Probably not, considering you could listen to it free on YouTube any time you like.

It’s kind of like a supermarket. Most of the time, people shop at a supermarket because it has everything they want, not because it has one product they really like.

So it’s impossible to know how much money Spotify made from Get Lucky, or any other song. The fact that they pay artists based on how many times the song is streamed is actually sort of a leap of faith on their part. They know that paying per stream is the only way to properly incentivize the artists. But from their point of view, their business is based on having everything, not any one thing.

As for the fact that a massive amount goes to the rights holders (otherwise known as the record labels), that was sadly inevitable. Copyright law being what it is today, the only way to have a legitimate business of any scale that had the music people wanted was to give the rights holders their cut. Otherwise, the big dogs would have crushed Spotify with lawsuits and nobody would be getting the service in the first place.

This will end soon, though. The new hotness of today does not need a record label for nearly anything. A brash young band can find an audience directly through the Internet, and as time goes by, the value of what the record companies own will diminish as new music replaces the old, and the majority of music will be solely in the hands of those who actually made it.

This leads me to my next point, which is that while being a struggling young band or artist pays, at best, no more than it always has, the costs of that band or artist have never been lower. What used to take the kind of money that only big record labels had is now virtually free. People record albums on their MacBook that sound as good or better than albums that required millions of dollars and an army of technicians. Merchandise that used to require a significant up front investment can now be made available for nothing or next to nothing via sites like Cafe Press. Promotion that used to required posters, media reps, massive ad buys, and fleets of Fleet street brown-nosers now can be had for the zero cost of putting up a Tumblr. And distribution? Well, that’s what services like Spotify are for.

So sure, no artist(s) will make a living off Spotify any time soon. But there are plenty of other ways to make money from your music, and while it may be that no one of them pays all that much, if you combine enough of them together, you are actually making a lot more than indie bands used to make, and with virtually no overhead and no need to even tour.

This leads me to my last point, which is : just exactly how important to art is it that people be able to make a living at it? Sure, we all dream of devoting our lives to our art and not having to subject ourselves to the rough and tumble callous world of dead end day jobs any more, but do we really think that if there was no money, there would be no art?

Of course not. Lots of wonderful art has been made by people who were working day jobs or even not working at all and just starving in a garret somewhere. These people had no idea if their art would ever pay them one red dime, and yet they kept making it because the making of art is something artists simply feel compelled to do.

The money comes later, if at all.

So even if the towering financial edifice of the music industry came tumbling down and it became nearly impossible to make a living as a musician, people would still make music and share it with others online and the art would, if anything, become a lot more pure because nobody would be compelled to turn out whatever commercial crap sells just to pay the bills.

If no art can pay the bills, then we are all free to do whatever the hell we want with out art.

I don’t think that is what is going to happen. I have faith that the combination of art and capitalism will prove creative enough to find ways to make money off of whatever it is people like and will be forced, eventually, to give artists a larger share of the action in the process.

After all, right now, someone could set up a competitor to Spotify that pays artists twice and much, and there would be a trong incentive to upload yourself there too.

So relax, folks. The music industry, as well as all other creative industries, might contract for now but there is no danger of them disappearing. The dinosaurs of the previous era know their time on Earth is limited and that is why they cling to the assets they have so fiercely. They know that their roles as gate-keepers and risk-takers will soon be written out of the script, and the future will belong to the smaller, fleeter, hardier mammals of the direct connection between art consumers and art producers.

I, personally, can’t wait.

That’s all from me for today, folks. I will talk to all you nice people again tomorrow.

I have talked about this subject before, but I feel like taking another swing at it tonight.

Rationality is extremely powerful. It is one of the most powerful factors in the extraordinary and unparalleled success of the human species. Our prefrontal cortexes not only allow us to inhibit our instinctual emotional responses and thus give ourselves a chance to choose our actions instead of merely reacting to stimuli, but they also allow us to recognize patterns in our knowledge of the world and make predictions based on that knowledge. This lets us pursue complex non-immediate goals and opens a world of possibilities unavailable to other animals who cannot “think ahead”.

Because of this extraordinary power, there has historically always been the danger of slipping into believing that rational reasoning is all you need and that you can, in a sense, abdicate your humanity in favour of living in the comfort of the understandable, predictable, and sensible world of rationality.

As far back as the ancient Greek philosophers, there was a feeling that one could deduce absolutely everything about the world and the universe via pure logic alone. This, we can assume, was a great comfort for philosophers, who overwhelmingly tend to be the sort who would rather stay home and think than go out there and actually find things out.

But this sort of rationalist escapism is a terrible trap. It is all too easy to be so dazzled by the wizardry of rational inquiry that one forgets that one is still a living, breathing, incarnate human being who has needs, desires, and fears which have nothing to do with rationality and which cannot simply be wished away or eternally suppressed by force of will.

Clearly, a course of action which involves ignoring all the variables that we don’t like to think about cannot be considered rational, and any human being who attempts to walk around with their head entirely in the clouds should not be surprised to find themselves bumping into things and in general doing very poorly at life.

But still, the siren song of rationalist escapism calls. Throughout the ages, thousands of mystics, monks, scholars, and philosophers have sought to escape the messy, petty details of reality and move into the clouds on a permanent basis. This is, in fact, the entire basis of all forms of asceticism. The idea of trying to “purge” yourself of worldly concerns and attain some sort of state of holy purity via self-denial is solely based on rationalist escapism, whether you’re a Babylonian mystic traveling through the desert in search of wisdom, a self-flagellating monk in a cell praying to God, or a hyper-rationalist philosopher looking for a “higher Truth” that supposedly will set you free.

Free of what? Free of humanity, of course. The rational parts of our mind, quite irrationally, think they can escape the ugliness and messiness of things like emotions and bodily needs. This is an illusion created by the fact that pursuing certain lines of reasoning makes us feel as though we are distancing ourselves from “worldly” concerns, and this makes us feel that it must be possible to complete the process and detach entirely.

But what would that even look like? Without emotion, there is no motivation, and without motivation, there is no action. Even the desire to escape via reasoning is, in itself, an emotion. Without the rest of our mental apparatus, the rational parts of our mind are nothing but computers without operators, gathering dust, waiting for someone to turn them back on.

And no matter how certain lines of logical reasoning make you feel (another emotion), you are still the same limited irrational mysterious human being you were before your flight into rationality. There is no true transcendence, no way to overcome all the non-rational parts of your mind and move entirely to some hypothetical “higher plane” that clearly cannot exist. Transcendentalism lies. You cannot escape the game by playing the game.

The only real transcendence is in self-acceptance, not denial. Spiritual wellbeing requires us to recognize, embrace, accept, and integrate all aspects of ourselves into our conception of ourselves. Only then can we feel whole and complete. Only then can we forgive ourselves for being human and move on in life as strong, confident, happy individuals.

Rationalist escapism keeps this from happening. It blocks the necessary growth. It keeps you pursuing its impossible dream of a purely rational existence and denies you the kind of deep, intuitive, subrational truth about yourself that leads to greater happiness and fulfillment in life.

You can analyze yourself all you like, You can come up with all the plausible sounding explanations for your troubles in the world. You can impress as many people with how bright and insightful you are as you want to. But until you are willing to take a hard look at yourself without the protection of rational make-work and comfortable detachment, you will never understand who you truly are under all that rationalist razzle-dazzle and if you don’t know who you really are, you stand absolutely no chance of becoming who you really want to be.

So ignore the siren song of rationalist escapism. Accept that you are a messy, flawed, imperfect human being with petty desires and self instincts, and learn to love yourself for who you really are instead of hating yourself for not being someone you can never, ever be.

Someone who is no longer human. Someone who never makes mistakes, who never does anything stupid, who is only motivated by the highest and noblest of emotions and who never feels confused, vulnerable, lost, embarrassed, un-confident, or lonely.

Nobody escapes being human. If it seems to you like someone has, then you are merely letting your impression of them overwhelm you. They are as human as you or I or that homeless guy down the street who smells like pee.

We all have tiny areas of competency in the vast sea of human endevour. None of us are anywhere close to perfect and there is no amount of thinking that will make it so.

Now put down that rationalist kaleidoscope, and go out there and have fun.

I will talk to all of you nice people again tomorrow.