Been looking back at my past lately. Starting to remember specific incidents where I was probably way too blunt for my own good.

High verbal skills plus sharp perceptions plus lack of social awareness makes for a person who strikes people with lightning bolts of truth (or at least, truth as I see it) and probably does not even notice it because to him, what he said was both a) no big deal and b) really obvious.

Like, I remember this one time when I was a kid let loose on a grand old tourist trap on Prince Edward Island called Rainbow Valley. It was a typical example of the “storybook gardens” school of theme parks, filled with whimsical little things like a giant chess board and little paths here and there and a little man-made lake where you could rent a rowboat or a paddle boat and splash around.

It even had a snack bar shaped like a UFO! How kitschy is that?

But by far my favorite thing was the barn. In there, they had animals like cows and pigs and sheep and chickens, which was quite a treat for an animal-loving city boy like me. They even had baby animals some of the time! Any time we went there, I made a beeline straight for the barn.

One time, I left the barn and found that someone was selling sno-cones outside. I had absolutely no experience with sno-cones before that so I had no idea what they were. The guy had to explain it to me.

I said something like “So the flavour is not even in the ice? You put it on after?” I knew nothing of sno-cones, but I was quite familiar with Slurpees, and this seemed like a decidedly low-rent ripoff compared to my beloved orange Slurpees.

The man patiently explained that yes, that was how it worked, and asked if I wanted one or not. It sounded pretty dubious to me, but I decided to get one anyway as this was the middle of August and I was quite hot and thirsty by then.

And it was awful. The ice was in big pebbly clumps, not the smooth shaved ice it was supposed to be, and the flavour syrup (orange, natch) tasted all metallic.

So I immediately launched into a highly vocal diatribe against the guy who sold it to me, and sno-cones in general, and at one point I was even telling passersby not to buy sno-cones.

And of course, I demanded my money back. Fifty cents is a fortune to a child in the 70’s!

Now I could have just wrinkled my nose at the flavour and tossed the thing out. No scene, no fuss, no acting like the guy was trying to kill me.

And I am not saying I did the wrong thing, exactly. Someone has to stand up to people who sell nasty crap like that and it might as well be a little kid with a mouth way too big for my age.

But I think it illustrates the problem.

A more recent and on-point example would be when I was in the Core Program at Richmond Hospital. This was sort of an intensive, immersive program for treating depressives like myself. I went every weekday morning and got out at noon. So it was a half-day kind of thing.

Mostly it was group therapy (not the best thing for me, honestly) but every morning we had to do this stretching routine first.

Looking back, it was a pretty mild form of exercise. I feel bad for complaining about it. It was meant to get us physically relaxed for group. It was even done to the strains of my very favorite version of the song I Can See Clearly Now (Sunshiny Day) (the Johnny Nash original) , so it was even good music.

But making fat people exercise makes them grumpy, and I remember one time complaining about being made to do the exercises, and being told they were for my own good.

And then I said something like “Well, I guess people with degrees in Phys Ed need jobs too”, a barb obviously intended for the lady that led the exercises.

Looking back, that seems like a pretty mean thing to say and not remotely justified. She was a sweet and harmless lady in the mid thirties and did not deserve a crack like that.

And I am sure that contributed to my being pretty unloved by the administration at the Richmond Hospital Psychiatric Outpatients ward.

So a careless remark like that not only hurt a perfectly nice person who was just doing her job, but quite possibly hurt me in some way as well.

And that’s the kind of thing that concerns me. I have probably launched dozens of such verbal grenades in my life without having the slightest idea the kind of damage I was doing.

I have acted like I thought I had the right to say whatever pops into my head, and that is not a right I would cede to anyone else.

And I have paid lip service to knowing that my verbal skills were deadly weapons that could really hurt people, but still, I have used them carelessly and with no sense of tact or diplomacy.

Sure, most of the time I have been careful and sensitive, and that’s good, but if I lance people in unguarded moments out of irritation, that still puts me in the negative.

Now that I know this, I can ponder how to change. I hope I have not zapped anyone who reads this blog, but if I have, I am sorry.

Being able to effortlessly put your thoughts into words is mostly a good thing, but sometimes that means that the distance between your thoughts and your words is far too short to allow for censoring.

Maybe that is part of what makes me “genuine”. I don’t know.

But recovery means discovering the role you play in your own problems.

It’s not pleasant, but the rewards come in the form of change.

Today, I decided to do music.

And baby animals, but that was only to give people something to watch while they listened to the music, and, of course, a blatant attempt to pander to my audience by co-opting cuteness for my own fell purposes.

Says so right in the description of the video.

I even had a plan of sorts. I reserved the hours between 3 PM and 5 PM for composing the music and the hour between 5 PM and 6 PM for turning the music into a video.

A fair chunk of my time was spent figuring out the exact amount of time to set for the pauses on the pictures so that it would sync with the music.

It was 4 minutes 50 seconds, in case you were wondering. I just had to make them sync up. I hate things that don’t sync. And, like any comedy type nerd, I am obsessed with timing.

The song itself is… meh. Good pieces but not that hot as a whole. The middle bit with all the instruments going at once is way too cacophonous. Too much going on! And I wish I had taken the time to choose the instruments more carefully instead of just grabbing the first one I came across that sounded cool. Cool ingredients do not necessary lead to a cool final product.

But what the hell, it’s my first new composition since 2008 and I was rusty as hell. I barely remembered how to use FruityLoops at first. Luckily, it all started coming back to me once I was in it.

The next one will be better. And that funky bassline is simply too awesome to waste. It will probably pop up again somewhere else some day.

Found out today that I am going to have to make my own way to therapy tomorrow. Joe is working until 4, and the appointment is at 4:15, so…. not gonna happen. He can drive me back but he can’t drive me there.

So once more, I am faced with the question : cab, or bus?

Cab is freaking expensive. It was $25+ last time. And I really don’t have it to spare. I have my leftover GST cheque money but there is no way I am going to dip into that in order to take a cab, so I guess it’s the bus for me.

I have just barely enough money left for that. The $80 of leftover GST money is going to go onto my prepaid credit card, and I will use said cash to buy myself something nice.

Something permanent and useful. Maybe some sort of computer upgrade. I don’t know.

It’s been too long without a link. Here. here’s a picture of furry band practice.

You guys need a lyricist?

So I am slowly getting together the gumption to do the bus by myself. This will be my first time taking the bus TO my therapist’s office. Theoretically, all I have to do to get there is retrace the steps I take to get home from there.

But in practice, I have a long history of getting lost in ridiculous situations where normal people would never get lost in a million years. Plus, you know, social anxiety.

I think I will attempt to freak myself out about it beforehand and see if I can get it out of my system under controlled circumstances. The experiment is not without risk, but the potential benefits are of sufficient value that I am willing to take the chance that I will just succeed in freaking myself out permanently about it.

So, you know…. caution is indicated.

It’s kind of like when people in charge of alpine safety use dynamite to deliberately cause an avalanche when they are there to redirect it away from populated areas, rather than try to deal with it when it finally decides to happen on its own.

Or when forestry people stage a controlled burn to clear out potentially dangerous dry areas and prevent out of control forest fires later on.

In both cases, there’s the real possibility of causing the thing you are trying to prevent and having the whole thing backfire.

But that’s a risk they are willing to take in order to make things safer for the future. I suppose if it did go wrong, they could tell themselves that it was going to happen anyhow so, technically, they didn’t actually make things any worse.

But I remember hearing about a case where a massive forest fire, the kind that wrecks homes and puts people’s lives in danger, that started out as a “controlled burn”, and I can only imagine that heads must have rolled over that.

And imagine the panic you would feel when your controlled burn turns into distinctly uncontrolled inferno.

I seem to recall that it came down to one dude who had made the call to do a controlled burn even though it was the height of forest fire season and so deliberately starting a fire seemed like madness.

I can only assume he thought he would be a big hero by preventing the forest fire everyone was afraid of by making the bold choice to do something nobody else would have the balls to do.

But all it took was one little ember escaping from the “controlled” area to the rest of the tinder dry forest and guess what? Fortune favours the bold, not the stupid.

So yeah. Gonna try the controlled burn method of coping with anxiety. Just lay in bed, close my eyes, and visualize the bus trip and everything that might be scary or might go wrong.

Honestly, usually these days my social anxiety is not a huge burden. I don’t feel anxious when I go to Shopper’s Drug Mart or Safeway. I don’t feel anxious at the therapist’s office, and when I first went there I was freaking the hell out.

I feel a little anxious at my GP’s office. Probably due to being around a bunch of sick people. Tends to make the atmosphere rather tense.

Well that’s enough blather for today. Seeya tomorrow folks!

I have 24 minutes to write this blog entry. Hope I make it!

First up, did you know Joan Rivers has a show on TV called Fashion Police?

And did you know that this comedy legend hired some of the brightest, funniest comedy writers in the business to write for her show?

And did you know that she didn’t really feel like paying them what they are worth?

Yeah. They’re not happy about that.

I wish I could say I was surprised. But I have heard stories of Joan behaving like this before, and it really paints her in a bad light. \

Despite being 80 years old, JC is still being a very sharp and funny lady. Sadly, though, this has not prevented her from contracting a very common disorder of the elderly where two factors combine : the fact that their ideas about what things should cost are hopelessly out of date, and the sort of paranoia and irrational fear of others that comes with getting old.

These things combine into Clutch The Purse Disorder, where the moment the subject of money comes up, the older person reacts as though you are personally trying to rob them and all rationality flies out the window. They are not merely reluctant to negotiate or mistrustful of your intentions.

It’s more like a sudden volcano of emotion that is the voice of their deep fear and mistrust of the world that comes from a dulling of the sharp edge of their mind and that feeling of insecurity that makes people feel like everyone is after their money.

You can imagine that if, deep down, you feared you could not actually tell if someone was trying to rip you off, you might start assuming everything was.

As far as I can tell, there’s no cure for this. The old person could have billions and you could just be asking for a fifty dollar a month raise, the reaction will be the same : one of primal rage and fear.

I just hope JC doesn’t lose her show because she can’t help but freak out.

And then there’s this.

That’s audio only, but it’s worth a listen because I think this man’s story says a lot about men’s struggles in the world and how outdated and frankly quite pathological attitudes about not showing weakness and being independent and never asking for help can lead to far more than personal ruin.

That man nearly killed some of the men he had worked with, had nearly become the center of a national tragedy and gone down in infamy and brought shame and horror to his family simply because he could not admit to himself that he needed help.

And his story is far from unique. I have looked into the hearts of evil and terrifying men, and nearly always there is some deep and terrible pain driving them to increasingly hostile acts because these men have been raised to never show weakness and so to them, in a deep unconscious subrational way, it is better to become a violent, out of control monster than to ever admit weakness or concede defeat.

Think about that for a moment.

Often there is not just pain but fear. Fear of an unjust and unkind world that is deadly to the weak and so you must not only be strong to be safe, you must constantly broadcast to the world that you are strong, and scary, and definitely not to be fucked with ever.

A lot of men had done a lot of terrible things just to prove how dangerous they are. Why? Because they feel that is the only way they can be safe.

So to me, anything that encourages men, especially men who are not sensitive intellectual types, to open up to others and let go of the pain and fear that drives their rage is a good thing.

Not just for the men, and not just for their poor shattered families, but for the whole damned world.

Finally, we have today’s vid.

I decided that I would try a little science commentary of the sort I usually reserve for the Friday Science Whatever today. I am not super happy with the results. I feel the piece was long on commentary and short on facts. And I was having a bad day when it came to spitting out what I wanted to say, so there are a LOT more edits than I would have preferred.

Once more, I find myself wishing I could be more concise and focused. To me, my writing, whether it’s in blog or vlog form, always seems vague and diffuse, and I always want it to be more tight and focused, but I don’t quite know how to get there.

I feel like I have this vast amount of talent and scads of creativity and genius, but I have trouble bringing it all to focus on a single thing. Everything I do feels like it is a loose handful of gravel with a number of rough semi-precious stones in it.

And I want to make diamonds, dammit. Big bright beautiful diamonds that shine for the whole world to see. And I know that I am getting there in my own strange nonlinear way. My writing is far more focused and expressive now than it was a year ago.

But I guess part of being an artist is never ever being entirely satisfied with your art. Even if others think it is great, you can always see a dozen things that could or should have been better, and if you are a healthy artist, that is what leads you to keep on trying.

It is a painful process, because it means that over and over again, you will come to the point where you hate everything you have done and hate whatever it is you are doing even more and you just want to scream in frustrated rage at the universe for denying you the beauty that seems just barely out of reach.

But with time and experience, you survive enough of those that you can always work your way out of them again, and think of another way to tackle the problem at hand, and thus work yoru way out of the mud.

Being an artist can be like being born over and over again in a single lifetime.

True art, thank goodness, is worth it. \

First I want to talk about an episode of Torchwood I just watched on Netflix.

The basic storyline is that someone is going around murdering people who were volunteers to test this miracle drug called Reset that can, as the show puts it, “reset you to your factory settings”.

In other words, it fixes absolutely everything. Infections, diseases, malformations. It cured one guy’s diabetes, that’s how thorough it is.

Of course, it turns out that it does this by infecting you with an alien parasite that gestates inside you (and fixes you in the process because it needs a healthy body to support it) and then kills you as the adult form of a fucked up kind of space wasp emerges from you.

Too good to be true, right?

The villain of the piece is Doctor Copler, the scientist in charge of a scary secret lab that is infecting volunteers (without informed consent, natch) with this drug/bug, trying to figure out how to get the good effects (making you super healthy) without the bad effects (filling you full of killer space wasps).

Of course, the Torchwood team has to swoop in and stop this evil doctor who is giving people a deadly drug in order to experiment on them, and they are all self-righteous about how horrible it all is and how Copley is abusing poor innocent space wasps and so forth and so on.

But here’s the thing. I would have let Copley continue.

In fact, I might have helped him out.

See, I’m a Utilitarian, not an absolutist. That means that to me, there is no act, no matter how heinous or horrifying, that cannot be justified under the right circumstances.

That means I would kill a thousand people to save a million. I wouldn’t feel wonderful about it and I would make sure there was not a less massacre-y way to do it, but if that was the only way to do it, I would do it, and consider it the right thing to do.

I know that sounds cold, and emotionally speaking, it is. But morality is bigger than simply what feels right. Sometimes, the right thing will feel wrong, and you have to do it anyhow, regardless of how you feel or what kind of damage it does to yourself to do it.

And so if Copley truly could make the drug that cures absolutely everything, and there is no indication that he would not do so eventually, then he is actually justified in killing a couple of dozen people in order to get there because that drug would save billions of lives over time, AND increase the human lifespan by an incalculable amount.

That is a seriously potent good. Like Copley says, surely that justifies a few sacrifices.

I totally agree with him,

They try to make him seem more villainous by having him talk about getting a Nobel Prize and being somewhat callous about the lives he’s taken, but I still think he’s fundamentally right and I would have let him keep doing it.

I would try to direct him to people who maybe the world could do without, but still. If it takes the deaths of dozens to save the lives of billions, I say go for it, and I consider those who would rather pretend that morality means only ever having to do what feels right to be the ones who are wrong.

Wrap it in as much stirring rhetoric and feel-good speeches as you want, by shutting Copler down, Captain Jack and the rest probably doomed billions of people to a painful and unnecessary death.

Tell me how that could possibly be right. The people of the future where all forms of disease are a distant memory certainly will not care if some people had to die in order for them to live.

It wouldn’t make the drug any less effective. In fact, ideally, they would never know.

We do the world no favours when we retreat from difficult questions and bury our heads in the sand by pretending there’s always an easy, pleasant alternative that feels good.

Sometimes, the right thing will be something that seems quite evil out of context.

Well, enough of that serious and depressing stuff, time for today’s vid.

Ha ha, no, it’s about the Trayvon Martin verdict.

Oh, and it’s almost 20 minutes long.

Time really flies when I am talking. I am getting used to it now, but part of learning the art of the video blog has been learning that what feels to me like five minutes when I am recording and focusing on performance will turn out to be fifteen minutes.

This must be related to that weird phenomenon I have noticed that being onstage performing and therefore “on”, it’s like everything but me and the audience ceases to exist.

And the really freaky part is that afterwards, I barely remember my time on stage. It’s like it happened to someone else. I will remember bits and pieces, flashes and sensations, but for the most part, it might as well have been a dream.

So I suppose it’s good that lately, this has been happening while I am recording myself. That way, if I forget what I said when I was speaking to the camera, I can just watch the vid!

Plus, editing video means watching parts of it over and over again, so that should help fix the thing in my memory. Isn’t externalizing information great?

As for what I talk about in the vid, I mean every word of it. I know I wandered far afield of my starting subject, but to me, it’s all connected. Only a profound moral degeneracy on the part of the American Right could possibly lead to people sticking up for a murderer who hunted down and killed a fifteen year old boy in the middle of a prosperous suburb just because he was acting some kind of action movie fantasy where he would be the hero who shot the bad guy.

What can I say. To a mind like mine, all the threads are connected.

Hooboy! Had to do the vid in even less time than last night because I had an attack of being completely lazy today and did not get a chance to do said vid till 7 pm tonight.

See, I had therapy at 4 pm today. And when I got out of bed today at around 10 am, I said “Right! I will do my vid before lunch and get it over with. ”

But as I vegged out on the Net, that became “I’ll do it right after lunch. “, and then lunch rolled around and afterwards I sat down to get to work, and just kind of…. never quite got around to it.

So then it was therapy at 4 pm, then driving back, then going to Shopper’s Drug Mart because I needed more swabs, needle tips, and insulin, and by then it was 6PM and time for supper.

And that’s how I got to 7PM with no work done. Funny how being in a good mood always shoots holes through mt self-discipline. It’s just that when I am in a good mood, I enjoy everything more (must be a break in the anhedonia) and that makes slacking off that much more tempting and doing anything serious or unfun that much more of a drag.

But I got everything done. Today’s vid at the end.

Here’s a big dose of feelgood. A man saves a 375 pound bear from drowning!

There’s video, but it’s smarmy and lame, and doesn’t show the actual rescue.

What happened was that the bear in question, a healthy 375 pound black bear, wandered into a residential area in Florida, and required relocation.

Trust me, that’s better for both the bear and the people. Violent, erratic, unpredictable, dangerous animals have to be kept under control.

As do bears.

The local wildlife folks were called out and they shot Smokey with a tranquilizer dart. Standard procedure, nothing unusual there.

But unfortunately, in between being hit by the dart and succumbing to its effects, the bear leaped into the ocean, and while black bears are excellent swimmers, not so much when they are asleep.

Enter strapping manly man biologist Adam Warwick (even his name is manly), who jumped into the water after the bear, and got it to shore.

Now that is the type of thing to put a spring in your step and sunshine in your heart. And you are going to need it, because this next thing is plenty dark.

Brilliant and beautiful, but dark dark dark. And that’s sad dark, not goth dark.

It’s a poem.

And so much more. Just as poetry that would be genius. So much pain and sorrow and feeling lost and helpless summed up in those words. The true poet, like the true comedian, knows that you can put much power in few words by working with what people already know, and never explaining.

Add that incredible spoken word performance, and genius does not begin to be adequate. So much pain and loss and fear and desperate, fragile hope in that voice. I cannot imagine how it could have been done any better, and that’s something coming from Mister Analysis here.

I can usually imagine how damned near anything could have been done better. Not being a total social moron, I usually keep it to myself.

And so if the poem is genius and the spoken word takes it way past genius and into the sublime, the only thing I can say about the film as a whole is that it’s damned near perfect.

It reminds me that poetry cam be a truly amazing things to do with language, and that I should not be so hasty to dismiss the possibility of being a poet simply because there’s not much money in it even if you are the most famous poet in the world.

Quick, name three poets currently alive and currently famous. See my point?

But I have the skills to make one heck of a poet of myself if I chose to do so. I am not quite sure where I would start, but sometimes lines of poetry just kind of appear in my mind, and I am usually too lazy to hop on the computer and type it all down.

Maybe in the future, though….

Finally, of course, here is today’s vid.

Guess what? It’s another edition of Don’t Say That!

Glad I finally got back to doing some fluffy comedy. Things had been getting pretty serious on the ol’ vlog lately, and I think we needed the break.

Or at least, I did.

Originally, I had a different idea for today’s vid (which I still plan to use, so I shan’t share it), but while loafing around and completely not getting anything done, someone mentioned baby pictures and that sent my clever gray cells off into a tizzy fit.

You have to admit, it’s a damned funny premise and not one I have seen done before, so it’s fresh too. I honestly could have come up with more, it’s just that when I looked down to see that I had been recording for ten minutes, I figured that was a good place to stop.

And all I had to do was press record and then riff. It seems almost too easy, like I am getting away with something if things are that easy.

Of course, my brain doesn’t turn off so easily, so here’s a few I thought of after I was done :

“Funny, you don’t look like cousins. ”
“I got two words for you : safety helmet.”
“I’m pretty sure this is actually the afterbirth. ”
“OK, ha ha, where’s the REAL picture of an ACTUAL baby?”
“Fire your photographer!”
“I wouldn’t show this one around until it’s…. congealed.”
“Looking at that picture makes ME spit up!”

And so forth and so on. The creativity never stops in this noggin of mine. That lets me work wonders but sometimes makes it a little hard to sleep at night.

Well, that’s why I have sleeping pills!

Seeya later folks!

Not this kind of little behind….

An eco-friendly place to poop.;

…those more or less run themselves.

No, what I mean is that once more, making today’s vid took a lot longer than I thought it would, and therefore I am writing my blog entry in a bit of a hurry because I want to be done before Felicity arrives and kicks off the evening’s low key festivities.

We’re bookish nerdy types. An evening spent quietly watching videos together and having deep conversations is our version of a ragin’ kegger.

Luckily, I have things to share. Like this extraordinary find :

Makes you wonder who got turned away, right?

That is the actual admissions list from the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in West Virginia. This was their actual list from the year 1864 to 1889. So for 25 years, that was the Bible of admissions at the old TALA.

Now I could probably do a blog entry for every item on that list. So I will!

Item 1 is in a pleasant font reminding me of…. just kidding folks.

Still, the entries boggle the mind.

Like “Imaginary Female Trouble”. I know that probably means “hysterical pregnancy” (or worse), but I like to think it’s for people having trouble with an imaginary female. (The worst kind!)

And I can’t let “Masturbation For 30 Years” go by without comment. I wouldn’t think a person who can masturbate for that long needs treatment for anything but chafing. Perhaps the TALA was where you went to pick up your medal.

And both “Political Excitement” and just plain “Politics” make the list. They might be on to something there. Politics often seems to make people crazy.

Or how about “Excessive Sexual Abuse”. Apparently back then, sexual abuse was fine… in moderation.

Or how about “Exposure And Hereditary”? What the hell does that mean? Hereditary what? Exposure? To what?

It terms of language, I think my favorite is “Menstrual Deranged”. That is dying to be the name of some drama chick’s one woman show.

The worst mental image, for me, is “Snuff Eating For 2 Years”. Look, you either chew it, snort it, or smoke it. You’re not supposed to eat the damned stuff!

Oh, and did I mention that the reason I am running late is because the first video I shot turned out to have a flawed premise? I went on a long and fascinating discourse about this story about a man who went to bed an American named Michael Boatwright and woke up a Swede named Johann Ek.

I went into the psychological theory behind such fugue states (extreme stress overwhelms identity( , as well as the physiological one (stroke forces brain to improvise with what’s left.)

All fine so far. But then I went into the question of how this man came to know fluent Swedish when he was an American. What a mystery! I postulated that maybe it is possible for our vast and powerful intuitive minds to deduce an entire language via a deep understanding of the nature of language itself.

Wow, what a theory! But then I reread the news story, and found the bit where it mentioned that amongst Boatwright’s belongings were “pictures of him as a child in Sweden”, and blam went THAT theory.

I could have salvaged the first part, but meh. I didn’t feel like it. No sense in pump air into a busted balloon. Just get a new one and move on.

So after brooding and scowling about it for a little while and disconsolately flicking through my idea file, I made tonight’s vid.

It was made in a bit of a hurry, and it’s not as coherent as I would like. I sort of repeat myself in places and ramble on a bit. I really do have trouble just talking about one thing, beginning to end.

Maybe it’s time I brought back The Deal. That was the whole point of it.

Oh well. Calm down. Find your center. Watch the cute little duckie.

Awwwwwww! Such a cute lil quacker, all fluffy and soft. And the hilarious cartoony noise his little webbed feet make on the hardwood floor is so adorable and completely unexpected that it damn near did me in.

OK, I feel better now. Time for today’s vid.

It’s around ten minutes long. Sorry.

For you music buffs, the intro featured the beginning of Ship Of Fools by World Party, and the outtro has the intro to Tramp The Dirt Down by Elvis Costello.

Both are somewhat relevant to the topic of taking down the plutocracy. I couldn’t think of anything directly on point except maybe Eat The Rich by Aerosmith, and that seemed a little too on the nose for my tastes.

Besides, I don’t want to eat the rich. Or even kill them. I just want them brought back within the rule of law. I want them to be treated just like any other citizen, which I am certain would drive them crazy, but it’s exactly what our kind of society expects of its citizens.

We accept the system because equality of power might limit our own power, but it also protects us from the power of others, and safety beats status and the lust for power any day.

Freedom and equality are inextricably linked. If we are not equally powerful (one voice and one vote each), then you can limit my freedom and make a slave of me with your power. In order to remain free, a society must limit the power of its citizens to act against one another.

This flies in the face of that immature pseudo-individualism that calls itself “libertarian” in the states. The Big Mean Ol’ Government is a big meanie when it tells you that you can’t have everything your greedy little heart desires.

I would love to ask a room full of libertarians “When, exactly, is the government justified in stopping you from doing what you want to do?”

Make it personal. That’ll fry their noodles.

Bye bye for now, folks!