Tis the Season. Merry Happy Ramadan Christmas Vodun Kwanzaa Hanukaa Festivus!!! :)

Holidays are upon us.

That we, reading this, have the luxury of celebration and remembrance and family, is a blessing. Many do not.

 

And we are stuck in the middle.

Time keeps on rolling… rolling… rolling… into the future.

 

Sorry bits of archaic, near forgotten song lyrics, stuck in my head. 🙂

 

Glad for so much here at the end of this cycle of days.

Here at the end of days, glad for so much.

But also aware of so much… that I should have made better.

 

We are almost a hundred years removed from the wonders and horrors of 1920, and almost a hundred removed from the wonders and horrors of 2120.

Here is hoping that in 2020, that our wonders transcend our horrors. That the places where we aspire, transcend the places where we tear down.

Speculative.

All speculative. All we have of any real import, is our pressure on the moment.

Is our will… applied.

Do we make a better world or a worse one.

Depends on you.

It ripples outward.

Intent.

Will.

No guarantees, but we fall down going forward… it matters. The intent transcends the fall.

Rambling.

Slightly.

All this to say… embrace… better. ‘Deliberate cruelty is not forgivable.’, Blanche DuBois said in A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE. We are all at times cruel, and petty, but I try to always remember that line, and not be.. cruel, or petty.

Because Tennessee Williams was right, right in his 1947 Pulitzer prize winning play, and right in the Elia Kazan, nearly x-rated for the time, 1951 Academy Award Winning movie… deliberate cruelty is not forgivable.

But it is avoidable and it is correctable.

Here at the end of 2019 and the beginning of 2020, with change like the stuff of science fiction upon us, we must hold to that one true thing… to aspire to better. To be better. And to spend less energy trying to make things (our phones, our tablets, our tv, our refrigerator, our voice operated Alexa assistants, our drones)… human, and more time making humans… humane.

God, whatever God or Gods you bend your knee to, bless you and yours, and give you the wisdom here at the figurative ending of days and at the beginning of a new cycle of days, to judge your wrongs… right.

Be well.

 

 

 

If you enjoyed this rambling, but heartfelt, post, then like and subscribe to this blog, and click the link below and peruse some great gift ideas (ideas for 2020, it is too late to make it for the 2019 holidays). Your purchases keep the proverbial doors open, and are greatly appreciated. And you get great stuff. (ie Everyone should have an emergency bag , one in their car, and one in their house. It’s good karma to be… prepared. )

Today’s Deals of the Day.

Happy Holidays, Merry Mass of Christ and Improbable Heights

‘When you strip everything away from Batman, you are left with someone who doesn’t want to see anyone die.’ — KINGDOM COME by Alex Ross and Mark Waid

When I think of humanity in general, and the holiday season in particular it strikes me that that should be our goal. The pursuit of a world, where nobody dies in vain.

But the reality, particularly in America, this time of year is that with the eyes of the media diverted; government sponsored mass-murders actually ramp up, bombings ramp up (now of the drone and unmanned variety, machines murdering men.. what an unholy road we walk), the terrorism of the rich… ramps up.

I’ll not forget the media celebrating the death of Bin Laden. Death and Murder and Torture are never things to celebrate, no matter the justification.

While I am savage enough to know that killing may be a necessary evil, I am human and moral enough to know it is never a joy, never a victory, never a cause for celebration.

Be the murdered Bin Laden, or Hitler or insert bogieman here, bringing murder to murderers is never anything less than a soiling, and a failure, necessary though it may be, it is a failure of reason. And as such is a solemn time, not a glorious one.

Because to do otherwise, to take joy from death, and celebration from degradation and horror… is to devoid you of moral high-ground, is to make you (in ways stark and true) worse than those you would revile, worse than your Hitlers and Bin-Ladens. It makes you a lynchmob, a coward, and an opportunist of carnage.

We must strive to be better than that, otherwise your protestations of Christianity, and Holy Nights, and piety are just lies, are hypocrisy and mendacity most foul, that you use to conceal your roman desire to see people bleed and suffer and die.

You become that lowest form of life, a gibbering coward among cowards, you become nothing more than a grasping claw, a rolling eye, and a screeching mouth… in the creature we call lynchmob. And there is no lower, and ultimately, more inhuman form of life.

Our goal therefore must be to reject that, to reject the easy lies and the easy hates, and work toward this wildly improbable world where no one dies in vain.

But humanity’s very existence is an improbability, so we can bend that already fanciful existence to either improbable heights of good, or improbable depths of evil. We just have to pick a direction.

‘We do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard. ‘ — John Fitzgerald Kennedy when imploring men into space

Here, on this holiday season, more fiction than fact, ‘goodwill to all’; look into yourself and find what is hypocrisy, what is lies, and find it in yourself to make truths, and truly believe and act on this idea…. of a time of peace.

Here endeth the lesson.

Digital Revolution: Discussing the Greedy and the Ungoverned, And Entertainment as prelude to War!

I feel a rant a’ coming.

You new to the blog may want to skip this one. You old timers… jump in… the water is like you like it, deep and treacherous. 🙂 .

Or be mollified by the following disclaimer:

This is an imaginary story. The following is all fiction except for the parts that are true… I leave you to determine the one from the other…

*********

There are a lot of great things about the digital revolution, not the least of which is the ubiquitousness of content. Which makes this sense of foreboding I have about the coming bad, a bit troubling.

I think you have… to have been around before cable, before on demand, before 500 channels, before DVD or CD, before Internet household presence, before even the home computer to truly appreciate just how amazing are the strides made in many areas, not least of which is the creation and dissemination… of entertainment and information.

If you are a movie fan you can, without leaving your house, have at your viewing pleasure just about every film made in the last 100+ years of cinema. More, you can have films from multiple nations, multiple languages easily subtitled into your language.

As a film fan who was around during the age of VHS, I remember that just locating a cult or foreign film was a HUGE production. You had to find those resellers/stores often in the back of magazines, send away for the catalog, then order the film.

And with the Internet it made that search a bit easier. Allowing you to stumble across someone’s site who had a VHS movie you were looking everywhere for. And you would get the VHS tape, and it would be a third generation, copy of a copy, really not good quality, but at the time— you were just elated to have it, and be able to see this film that you couldn’t find anywhere else.

It was that way with everything: Books, records, cassettes, lps, and then Laserdiscs DVDs and CDs. The Internet being a huge way for resellers to connect with buyers. And fly by night companies came and went.

But a few questionable startups, Ebay and Amazon among them, grew legs and found themselves not just a fad, but soon a fixture of this Internet phenomenon. And all these shaky startups, these microsofts and apples …these cowboys that proliferated in a time before software patents and lawsuits to stifle competition, began to thrive.

Suddenly content in digitized formats, and the explosion of storage capacity created an age of ready access, on demand availability, of almost everything.

Great. Wonderful. Beautiful. I mean this has allowed for the rise of podcasts, one of the greatest audio revivals since the dawn of radio. And if you’re an Itunes or Hulu or Archive.org patron, it’s just opened up the history of entertainment to anyone with an Internet connection and the desire to explore. That’s the great part, That’s the wonderful part of the digital revolution.

Here’s the bad part. The digital revolution is not being driven by quality concerns or for love of the medium, it is being embraced by decision makers because of two reasons 1/cost savings and 2/control.

I understand both those things in moderation, but moderation is a word that business doesn’t really practice. Cost savings has come to mean some suspect things, two of the most disturbing is the replacement of physical media, and part and parcel of that… is the elimination of the reseller.. the middleman.

I like resellers, I like mom and pop shops, I like middlemen, and I think gearing an economy to do away with that whole part of the conversation, is to gear the economy to in essence do away with a middle class of any kind. It is gearing an economy toward those who own and those who work and pay— landowners and serfs with no middle ground.

And a lot of people think nothing of it, because it’s just book stores, or comic stores, or DVD stores closing. But let’s extend the same thing to McDonald’s.

What if automation tomorrow allowed McDonald’s to do away with the middleman, the franchises?

What if they could get the food to you the consumer without going through a middleman? Say click a button on your laptop, and the food teleports into your hands, whatever. Stay with me here. Because technology gives you the ability to do something, should you do that thing? Is that thing necessarily the best thing for your company, your customer, your economy?

That’s a heck of a question, and I don’t pretend to have the answers. But what I’m saying when it comes to the digital revolution with books, dvd, cds, and the thousands of stores and businesses and millions of employees we are making obsolete, I feel as though no one is even asking the obvious questions, among them… ‘Should we do it this way?’

I feel big business is not looking beyond their own pockets, to see see what is best for their customers and their country. And that’s a very nationalistic thing to expect of a company, to think in terms of their country. But considering our congress in its infinite wisdom allows companies to actually have a say in drafting the laws of a country, ie basically gives to companies greater rights than citizens, I think it’s not too much to ask from those companies the loyalty of citizens.

And those companies that cannot, for whatever reason of conflict or commerce, think in terms of what is best for America— should not have the right to lobby our Congress and make laws for America.

So I view these companies making these grandiose and sweeping changes to America, without regard for the good or ill it will bring… as a great danger for our nation. For any nation. To have someone who has no concern for your nation, making policy in your nation… leads us to the world outside our door.

From gas at $4 a gallon to Americans struggling to keep their homes.

And entertainment is part of it as well.

The elimination of physical media plays into this, creating a market where there is nothing to resell, and worse… nothing to really own. So no need for your favorite DVD reseller, because DVDs are being prepared for the pasture.

You want to view this film, you buy it digitally from the studio for the price they set, and in the absence of any ability to resell– their price is unmoderated by a free market. In other words they can charge whatever they think the market can bear.

While a lot of people embrace this idiocy that a company’s only priority is to generate more income for their stockholders, that’s flawed thinking that led to our recent market melt-down. It comes back to what I said, about a company working withing a nation, has the same inherent priorities as a citizen within that nation…and that is to do no harm to that nation.

And more and more, the actions of companies working within sovereign shores is to do nothing but harm, is to shatter economies, devastate populations, victimize neighborhoods. Actions that if done by someone not hiding behind the mask of incorporation… we would call… acts of terror.

I’m saying that the joys of itunes today, and Amazon kindle today, and digital comics today, and Warner on Demand today, extrapolated on their 25 year plans into tomorrow… points the way to an America completely shorn of any gradations between the few ultra rich oligarchies and the masses of struggling poor.

I’m saying a war of economies, without fail… drives far more literal and bloody wars.

I’m saying don’t be so quick to jump on the bandwagon of eliminating DVDs, eliminating CDs, eliminating physical books, eliminating middle men— because you’re going to find that in a society shorn of middle men to moderate the greed and abuses of those on the top to those on the bottom, the joys of immediate gratification today, will spell the horrors of rampant price gouging, inflation, and poverty tomorrow.

And in the absence of true ownership (digital, in reality of how it is disseminated, being something that is rented… not owned), suddenly you may find those 99cent prices give way to $99 dollar prices, when you have allowed them to destroy or outlaw all other ways of you getting that product.

And how long before some products, are deemed unacceptable to make viewable via streaming or priced out of being readily available for viewing.

Historically, ethnically diverse items are oft at risk for obsolescence through marginalization. The most politically active films of Ousmane Sembene (CEDDO, CAMP DE THIAROYE, and GUELWAAR) never received DVD releases in his lifetime, and to this day are still not available on DVD (THIAROYE had a spotty release before disappearing).

Rather than freeing films and filmmakers from the tyranny of commerce (which digital has the potential to do), under the auspices of the greedy and the ungoverned you’ll see more marginalization and more control over the ideas disseminated to the masses.

So the lesson? Not to allow these companies, Itunes/Apple, Sony, Disney, Microsoft, Netflix, Time Warner, etc… to be ungoverned.

And how much is our entertainment a smokescreen for our aggressions? How much is our entertainment, the last, best drug, or the last, best cheerleader, for the aggressions of our time?

And how much do our aggressions allowed, ignored, take out of America?

The reports of America’s decline are rampant. They are in every aspect of our everyday life, the skyrocketing inflation that has destroyed many a nation before America, is all throughout America.

But our eyes in America, are filled and dazzled and misdirected… by such false fire, that the obvious becomes… indistinct. Almost invisible.

But not quite. If you take the time to look, the signs are there.

In-fact once you are looking in the right direction, (‘got my mind right boss’) the signs are clear and present. America is well on the way to becoming a third world nation, it is being pushed to these ends.

I said pushed.

With your tax dollars, and the blood of your children… the rich have just spent the last few decades pacifying (ie invading and toppling) African/Middle Eastern nations and carving a new western acceptable pleasure nation for themselves, an entertainment nation, where all the studios are in a hurry to setup shop, and a middle East Disney World and Marvel World and all the 3D rides and luxury and cinematic excess you can want is being built there. It is called Abu Dhabi, this paradise, and it is being built over the bodies of the massacred.

Infact, a cynical man might even say it’s very similar to the way, in the wake of World War II, the allied forces led by the US and Britain, set up the Israel state, by pretty much massacring the millions of Jews and Arabs and Nomads, who already lived in that region.

And yeah I did say Jews. We weren’t just killing Arabs to setup Israel. The region was already home to Jews, who lived without issue, for generations next door to Arabs. Unfortunately most of them weren’t Western acceptable Jews, they weren’t European Jews… that is to say they were Black.

So these Jews, and Arabs, and Nomads woke up one day to find the rest of the world was calling their home Israel, and they weren’t invited to the house warming. And then the missiles came.

So similarly the Middle East we’re bombing into existence today, is being done so, over blood both ancient and irreplaceable. All so that the rich have a place to vacation… while America burns.

I’m such a cheery, glass half full guy aren’t I?

But seriously, it begins simply. As all our falls do.

It begins with a laugh.

With you laughing with them. With the ones who will eviscerate you.

It begins with us rolling over the simple rights of the many for the grandiose greed of the few.

So… don’t make it easy.

Resist.

At every step, ask of them and ask of yourself… ‘Who profits from this and who loses?’. And by your answer to that question, will you know the nature of your nation and the nature of yourself.

And by your answer to that question… be ruled.

Here endeth the lesson.

******************

Woah! Only here on this blog, can you go from digital disenfranchisement to the fall of nations. 🙂 And even crazier is— the line between the two should be ridiculous, it should feel far-fetched. It should feel… ludicrous.

But it doesn’t.

It should feel like a laugh. But it doesn’t.

It I have to be perfectly honest, it feels like…

It feels like we’re running out of time.

SHARKWATER AND MAY YOU HAVE THE STRENGTH TO DRINK

“I think the problem is that we don’t really understand what we are. In essence we’re just a conceited naked ape, but in our minds we’re some sort of divine legend and we see ourselves as some sort of God; that we can walk around the Earth deciding who will live and who will die, and what will be destroyed and what will be saved. But the fact is we’re just a bunch of primates out of control.”

“We’re now in the midst of a third World War but this time the enemy is ourselves, and the objective is to save the planet from ourselves. There’s no hope for the masses of humanity to do anything, they never have, they never will. All social change comes from the passionate intervention of individuals or small groups of individuals.”

“Slavery wasn’t ended by any government or institution, women got the right to vote not because of any government, the Civil Rights movement the same thing, India with Mahatma Gandhi, South Africa with Nelson Mandella, again it’s always individuals, you need those individuals with the passion and the energy to get involved. Infact I don’t know any government or institutions that are doing anything to solve any of the World’s [current] problems. All over the world though, I am seeing individuals and non-government organizations that are passionately involved in protecting ecosystems and species. And that’s where I see some optimism, that’s where results are happening.”
—SHARKWATER

Sharkwater

Save Sharks

Now I’m no bleeding heart (maybe just spotting), and being severely traumatized by JAWS 🙂 I have no particular love for Sharks. Though to be candid, I have no particular love for anything that could potentially take a bite out of me. Be it lions, or tigers, or bears, oh my! Or even the neighbor’s poodle.

That said I believe that everything has a right to be, and a place, a part in a design, part of the beauty, the puzzle that makes the world spin. And each species we lose, is that puzzle broken a bit more, the world spinning a bit more haphazardly, and beauty and strangeness and wonders… lost.

And while I have respect for hunting and fishing, I think to kill an animal not for food or survival is a sin. And killing hundreds of thousands of sharks simply so you can cut off their fins to feed as aphrodisiacs or curatives to people with more money than sense, doesn’t count as either food or survival. It counts as an aberration. Sin. A mortal one, if you are moved by such outmoded concepts as sin and salvation.

Part of the… flaw of industrialization, is people stopped hunting for their own needs or even the needs of their village, and began over-hunting and overfishing to meet huge corporate quotas and profit margins. And that way lies in extinction. Short term them-the animal, long term us-the man.

And that said, like most of you I have my own problems. Problems as long as my arm, and pressing, and saving sharks falls pretty low on my list of things to tackle. Way below trying to save people from dropping bombs and starving and otherwise exterminating each other. That said, for a pointedly non-religious guy I believe in some really non-scientific bs.

I believe there is a wisdom that shapes our ends. I believe God puts in front of us maybe not what we want to deal with, but what we need to deal with. I believe in no accidents. For whatever reason I, a broke writer in this day, in this time… watched this DVD, and it moved me, and I’m writing about it.

I’m not a millionaire, or a politician, or a soldier of fortune, so I’m not going to address the problem in those ways. But each according to their strengths. Maybe it was put in my path so I’ll write about it, and someone who never comes to the blog, will come to it this one day, this one time, this one moment.

And maybe he’ll be moved, to move another piece, according to his strength. Part of some chain that binds us all. And something good, will come of it.

I don’t know. But I believe there are no accidents. I believe there are only things that move us, cups that come to us, challenges, and we can either accept and drink deep or pass them by.

Whatever is on my plate, I will not pass by the cup that comes to me. Never have, never will.

And so I write this post.

And I the Shark Hater, I talk of Sharks. And the end of Sharks. A wonderful world is it not.

At the end of the day I reckon all that separates a good man from a bad, is how much beauty we take out of the world contrasted with how much we put in. A good man hopefully leaves the world more beautiful than he found it. I reckon a man whose claim to fame is helping make a species extinct, and litter the oceans with dead carcases, take wonder out of the sea… well I’d guess that’s villainy that will stain a person’s soul, and everything he touches… even onto the ending of the world.

Easier ways to make money I’d gather, at least… less damning ways.

Watch SHARKWATER. It’s worth the viewing. And if it doesn’t move you to get involved, not just in that cause, but any cause, then don’t worry about it. It just means you’re already dead. Or maybe worse, were never alive.

For the rest of you, check the site link above. Get involved. And if the cup comes to you, I wish you… the strength to drink.

Sharkwater

“Future generations are going to look back, and they’re going to think of us as barbarians. They’re going to look at us as barbarians for what we’re doing. The fact that we’re burning all the fossil fuels in a few generations, that we’ve wiped out the oceans, that we’ve driven species to extinction. And worse, this is the worst part, we know what we’re doing. The scientists know, the environmentalists know, the companies know, and the general public knows, and yet we’re allowing ourselves to do it.” —SHARKWATER