More depressing discussion about the end of the world. The beautiful people of Tik Tok. Boostagrams. Premptive Strikes. Abortion. Building love into robots. Deep talk about the consciousness of biological beings. Trying to simulate life on earth. The impossibility of humans to think in terms of deep time. Retirement. Overnight Chia.
Today I have another conversation with Madge Weinstein of Yeast Radio. The conversation will be cross-posted there. And will be slightly different so listen there too.
Birds Nest Fungi in Our Rock Garden at Summer’s End
Things don’t start well for me. I have numerous technical problems despite the fact that I tested my setup before the show was to begin. The problems started when I noticed that the battery was drained on the crappy computer I was going to use. Actually the computer isn’t that crappy. But the power cable is flaky. The laptop rebooted when I reconnected the power, delaying me further. I had to swap laptops and cables, and reset all my inputs, outputs and levels. But that’s amateur podcasting for you. Raw and real. You know like Prince coughing in his Raspberry Beret video or Lucy misting up when Desi kisses her on air. Even so, you might thank god for the fast forward button. There are a few other minor glitches you’ll hear, but we soldier on.
Also. Trigger warning. Our sometimes stream of consciousness conversation is guaranteed to offend everyone in some way. We mispronounce some names and we swear. I also get the bomb that is dropped on England, in the movie Threads wrong. The bomb goes off 20 miles from Sheffield, not in the South China Sea. The South China Sea one goes off in the TV series Years and Years.
Madge asks me to explain Andrew Gallimore’s concept of the Hypergrid which I fail at miserably. I think I need to have Gallimore on the show so he can explain it himself. Also we wonder how the plural of fungus is pronounced. I love the English language. Do you know it has the largest vocabulary of any language in the world. Why? I think because English speakers have absolutely no shame when it comes to just making up words as they go along. It’s a long tradition You know like quark and smog and snog and laser and google and irregardless. (Sorry about that last one. Speakers of a certain age will not accept irregardless as a word and will view you with much disdain if you use it around them). English speakers proudly steal from every other language, (French and German are favourites), and such words are promptly incorporated it into the lexicon. Other words can crop up without warning ,and suddenly, crowdfunding, deplatforming and whataboutism are things. Don’t even get me started on English spelling.
Madge and I cover a lot of ground. Listen to the show right here:
In this episode it’s Sunday June 27, 2020. In the absence of a 2020 Pride celebration, some of our neighbours organized our very own pandemic Pride street party. Several streets were invited. Complete with floats, music, face painting, and a poem by Zoe Leonard. Voices in our heads. Angry drivers. Supportive drivers. Abba. Children. Dogs. We are family. You make me feel mighty real.
Small Float for a Small Parade
Just for fun, here is my hardware and software: Zoom H4, Roland CS-10EM Binaural Microphones, Windows 10, Audacity 2.3.2, Hauwei P30 (for photos).
Today, I have a conversation with one of the bravest people I know. Buck Angel is a transman who began his transition from a woman to a man twenty-five years ago amid personal turmoil, against the tide of social convention, and during a time when little was understood about how to medically transition from female to male. He was a trailblazer in the pornography industry and became famous for his work in that space. He was then and still is an activist. Today, he considers himself the Tranpa and an elder of the transsexual/transgender community. He spends his energy working with the LGBTQ+ community, with youth, the homeless, and others. He has developed sexual and other wellness products exclusively for the transman community and has a cannabis business in California.
We talk about how he feels about this time in American history, possible ways to heal the divide, and what his fears and hopes are for the country and for the transgender community.
In this episode I talk with long-time friend and pod-colleague Madge Weinstein, of Yeast Radio, who happens to be my cousin about 30 times removed. After all, we are both descended from the same 350 people that may have originated from the middle east and settled in eastern Europe around the fourteenth century.
Keeping roses in cold water. Trump. Biden. Pence. Harris. Authoritarianism. Ancestry. Eudaimonia. The end of democracy. Lack of critical thinking skills. Yuval Noah Harari. Global Warming. Marvin the Depressed Android. 23 and Me. Being kicked out of the middle east because we ate with our mouths open. Shtetls. Audio tech. Genderqueerness. Stonewall. The fly on Pence’s head. Political theatrics. The narrative is what it is. Nonbinary should extend beyond gender. Don’t stay in your ideological bubble. Health Care Terrorism. Canadian Health Care that we pay for with our taxes which I completely omitted to say – so sorry to mislead. ObamaCare. Money talks. Activism. Direct action. The end of democracy. The Green New Deal. Did I say, the end of democracy?
Shelter In Place, Physical Distance, and Wash your Hands Unless Otherwise Instructed
Last week a friend sent me a link to a removed YouTube video and the question, “Censorship?” That sent me on a search for the video by Drs. Erickson and Massihi, two Californian physicians who want sheltering-in-place ended in their state. The doctors provide unsubstantiated claims about the virus SARS-COV-2 and one even goes as far as suggesting that there will be gun violence about this issue. This video is full of misinformation, pseudoscience, false hopes and fear-mongering. You are free to watch it, do your own research and make up your own mind, but I give you this rant in any case on a sunny cool spring day during my lockdown. Let me know what you think. (Have I ever said how much I love spring in Canada?)
On Friday, September 27, 2019, Special K and I participated in the Climate Strike. We headed down to Queen’s Park, home of the Ontario legislature, to take part in the rally and march. I spoke to a number of interesting people about their thoughts on the Climate Crisis. Jagmeet Singh, leader of the nation’s New Democratic Party (NDP), calls it the Climate Crisis and I think it is apt. If we don’t take action, I am not sure what the future holds. In this episode we debrief on the strike and I share audio of the people I interviewed or otherwise talked with. Enjoy.
November 11, 2018 was the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I, the war dubbed as the war to end all wars. In honour of the Armistice, Special K and I went down to what we, in Toronto, call the old city hall, where the Cenotaph, one of our war memorials, was erected in 1925. In this country, more than two generations have lived in a time of peace and have no first hand knowledge of the realities and horrors of war. What would another world war look like? In the face of some 14, 000 nuclear weapons spread over nine countries, one deployed bomb would almost certainly result in the deployment of many others, decimating the world population and ending civilization as we know it today. Sobering. So I think it is important to reflect on the sacrifices made by others and past generations to mitgate the ravages of military confrontation.
During breakast at a local cafe, Special K and I had a chance meeting with a woman who was from Sweden. We struck up a conversation with her and found out she had never experienced a Remembrance day event. We invited her to join us and I think we may have overwhelmed her with our non-stop anecdotes of Canadian history and military efforts.
This Sunday November 11, at the Cenotaph, we observed the customary two minutes of silence at 11:00am followed by poem recited in English, Oji-Cree, and French, a thought provoking address by our Mayor, and a reading of the poem In Flanders Fields, written by Canadian physician Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae in 1915.
Have a listen to my sound scene audio of an historic remembrance day.
Part of the program is reproduced here:
Committment to Remember (read in English, Obi-Cree, and French)
They were young, as we were young,
They served, giving freely of themselves.
To them we pledge, amid the winds of time,
To carry their torch and never forget.
We will remember them.
Address by Mayor John Tory
Hymn to Freedom
When every heart joins every heart and
Together years for liberty,
That’s when we’ll all be free.
When every hand joins every hand and
Together moulds our destiny,
That’s when we’ll all be free.
Any hour any day, the time soon will come
When men will live in dignity,
That’s when we’ll all be free.
When every man joins in our song and
Together singing harmony,
That’s when we’ll all be free.
In Flanders Fields
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
In 2008 Rebecca Belmore created piece of art called Fringe. It’s a photograph of a woman, reclining, her back to us. Sown into her back are fringes, hanging down, some red, some white. You might see these on the bottom of a skirt for instance. The scar running the length of her back is obvious and disturbing. She says of this work:
As an Indigenous woman, my female body speaks for itself. Some people interpret the image of this reclining figure as a cadaver. However, to me it is a wound that is on the mend. It wasn’t self-inflicted, but nonetheless, it is bearable. She can sustain it. So it is a very simple scenario: she will get up and go on, but she will carry that mark with her. She will turn her back on the atrocities inflicted upon her body and find resilience in the future. The Indigenous female body is the politicized body, the historical body. It’s the body that doesn’t disappear.
The Canadian Encylopedia says this about her:
Increasingly recognized as one of the most important artists of her generation, Rebecca Belmore’s performances, videos, sculptures, and photographs starkly confront the ongoing history of oppression of Indigenous peoples in Canada…
Rebecca Belmore was raised in a large Anishinabe family in Upsala, Ontario. She left her small hometown to attend high school in neighbouring Thunder Bay. During the summer, Belmore migrated northwest to spend time with her maternal grandmother — who maintained a traditional lifestyle of trapping and fishing and spoke only her native Ojibwa — in the Anishinabe district of Sioux Lookout.
Ostracized as an Indigenous woman in a largely white high school, Belmore dropped out in her midteens to work a number of odd jobs before deciding to complete her secondary education. Upon returning for her final year, she befriended the high school art teacher who encouraged her to submit a drawing to a local competition where she won first prize. Buoyed by the positive response, the following year Belmore enrolled at the Ontario College of Art (OCA) to pursue a degree in Experimental Arts; she remained in the program from 1984 to 1987…
In 2005, Belmore was chosen as the first Indigenous woman to represent Canada at the Venice Biennale. The piece she produced for the show — a two-and-a-half-minute video loop back-projected on a curtain of flowing water in the darkened room of the Canada pavilion [called Fountain] — took her over a year and half to complete. The video depicts the artist frantically filling buckets of water from the Strait of Georgia and throwing its contents…at the screen.
And she said this about her art in 2008:
Part of my interest in making art is to provoke a viewer to think about certain issues. And I do that through creating images that may, on first sight appear to be – hopefully!- beautiful. But when you look closer you may see something that’s a little out of sync with that beauty. That’s where I hope to get people to think about the image they’re looking at.
At Pelican Falls 2017 – Rebecca Belmore
I saw Facing the Monumental, which featured these and more pieces by Rebecca Belmore on Aug 5, 2018 at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Here is the audio of my experience with her works.
There are so many things happening in the news every day, that I can’t keep up. I’m not even going to try. But what I can do is explore how the big picture is shaping up, because it will unfold regardless of the rapidity of the day to day events that are confounding, confusing and unrelenting. I hope that my podcast today will be an historical record of a failed prediction.
In the opinion of some journalists, historians and philosophers, America is headed towards authoritarianism and dictatorship. As Timothy Snyder points out in his book On Tyranny,“…no doubt the Russians that voted in 1990, did not think that this would be the last free and fair election in their country’s history which thus far it has been.” The situation unfolding is not about this president. He is merely a symbol of what has been percolating for decades in the United States. Snyder’s book On Tyranny provides twenty lessons designed to help us cope with this time. These lessons draw on the historical record of the twentieth century. With the book, he is attempting to prevent dictatorship and all that goes with it, the suppression of the media and free speech, control of the judicial systems, control of policing, control of education, suppression of the arts, a crackdown on dissent, oppression and violence directed against targeted minorities and other scapegoats.
Dictatorship happens in small steps, so that each step along the way becomes normalized. As freedoms, rights and privileges are removed, we become acclimatized and complacent, until we are taking part, colluding, and consenting. It’s happened before many times. There is no reason to assume that it will not happen again. Snyder is not alone in his thinking. Critics such as the educational theorist Henry Giroux, journalist Chauncey DeVega, and retired American naval Chief Petty Officer Malcolm Nance have similar views. And their views are informed by many others who have written about the loss of freedoms and the dangers of authoritarianism. These others include the political theorist Hannah Arendt, psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, sociologist philosopher Zygmunt Bauman, and activist poet Abdulmajeed K. Nunez just to name a scant few.
We must stop focusing on only the president as the enemy of freedom. We must also stop discounting him as a buffoon. Now is the time and it is more important than ever to keep these things in mind. The president is the noise. His tweets and missteps are the shiny pennies we keep turning our attention to while forces around him, including Russia, attempt to dismantle American democracy. He may be signing bills and executive orders, but he is not drafting them. And, everything we know about him tells me he is not even reading them. He is, however, as Malcolm Nance said, “[P]art of a wrecking crew that appears to be designed to destroy the government for a foreign power and for his own personal gain.” It is that wrecking crew against whom we must resist. Our vigilance must not wane regardless of the fate of the president himself. Maybe he will be impeached. More probably he will not, but should he be brought to account for his behavior, actions and irresponsibility, it still won’t be time to breathe a sigh of relief. At that point, the fight may only be starting in earnest. There are those in his circle, flying at and under our radar, who are harboring ways to turn America into a one-party, totalitarian state that suits the purposes of homophobia, misogyny, racism, antisemitism, anti-intellectualism, anti-truth, climate change denial, and oligarchy. They would continue to be a threat we don’t recognize until it is too late.
Snyder reminds us that the founding fathers of America installed the checks and balances not as a one-time, fait accompli prevention measure, but to ensure that Americans are ever vigilant against the destruction of democracy, freedom of the press, equality, and free speech. The current regime wants to dismantle those checks and balances one by one until what is left bears little resemblance to the protections Americans are used to having. We each must defend the freedoms we enjoy. Each can be taken away in the blink of an eye.
Snyder hopes that he is wrong, that his book will have been cautionary advice. I hope so too.
There are three podcasts I urge you to listen to: First, listen to episode 127 of The Chauncey DeVega Show. In it, DeVega talks with retired naval officer Malcolm Nance. Nance is a cryptography expert. He has written extensively on terrorism and ISIS. Next listen to episode 133 where the educational theorist and cultural critic Henry Giroux looks at the current situation in America and frames it culturally and educationally. For him, how we teach our children, the language we use, and the culture we create can all contribute to effective acts of resistance. Also listen to episode 79 of the Waking Uppodcast hosted by Sam Harris in an interview with historian Timothy Snyder. Chauncey DeVega also speaks with Timothy Snyder is episode 134 of his own show.
All these men and the scholars and experts they refer to warn against what they think will be inevitable if we don’t keep resisting, reacting, writing and talking. To do my part, I am going to tell you what I found most compelling about what I heard and how it resonated with me. Henry Giroux in episode 133 says a lot of things. Halfway into the interview, he invokes Zygmunt Bauman and says, “There is no society that is just enough.” He is not suggesting that there is a perfect solution – just that there are solutions and we are obligated to work towards them. “This administration,” he says, “is about terror and terrorism.” Chauncey DeVega wants to know what we should be doing to force issues. They discuss the merits of active disruption such as general strikes and nationwide protests. What, Chauncey DeVega muses, does the future hold? Giroux is clear that he believes that “every facet of society…will be criminalized”. The state will become a punishing state. He quotes the poetry of Abdulmajeed K. Nunez from Occupy Belmopon II, when he tells that we have already “tipped over into neo fascism…” It’s just more subtle. Neo- Fascism. Neo-fascism comes in different forms. What about “mass ethic violence?” DeVega asks. Giroux tells us that “…neo Nazi and white supremacists are already in the highest reaches of government. What is the end point of that?” Will there be mass “…learned helplessness of the public?” He drops what I wonder is his favorite phrase, “public pedagogy”, “…a term he coined to describe the nature of the spectacle, the new media and the political and educational forces of global culture,” according to Wikipedia. Pedagogy, if you don’t know what it means, is the method and practice of education. DeVega says that he is “…trying to write for history.” Simply put, he wants it on record that he has tried to fight this unjust regime. He wants his descendants and future citizens to know that he did not sit by watching or implicitly collude. I’m not sure that it is true, but Giroux says that there is “no precedent for what has happened in America” now. I am confident instead that history will show that there were similarities with movements in Europe and elsewhere in the world. One thing is certain, there are danger signs and we all must face them. One of the main danger signs is that the president has never stopped saying and doing things that give the public license to express their distrust of facts and hatred of other groups, promote ignorance of economics, the current health care act, and environmental issues. Giroux says that we must face the dangers. And make peace with the consequences. Giroux reminds DeVega that “…as a public intellectual…” DeVega is “…a model for others…” He tells him “…[l]ive with dignity. Don’t turn your back on the requirement for justice, on the question of justice.” He is telling all of us this.
They talk about the media. Because media is driven by profits, Giroux suggests that we go to web sites that “…demonstrate dignity and courage.” Some websites he mentions are Salon, Truthdig, Counterpunch and Alternet. Giroux wonders what has happened to historical memory. What a great question. Snyder in his book shares an editorial that appeared in a German Jewish newspaper in 1933:
We do not subscribe to the view that Mr. Hitler and his friends, now finally in possession of the power they have so long desired, will implement the proposals circulating in [Nazi newspapers]; they will not suddenly deprive German Jews of their constitutional rights, nor enclose them in ghettos, nor subject them to the jealous and murderous impulses of the mob.”
Indeed, this is exactly what happened. The quote continues:
They cannot do this because of a number of crucial factors hold powers in check…and they clearly do not want to go down that road.
They did. The quote ends with:
When one acts as a European power, the whole atmosphere tends towards ethical reflection upon one’s better self and away from revisiting one’s earlier oppositional posture.
Ethical Reflection?! Naïve and chilling.
Giroux says we must “apply matters of the past to the present in ways that offer a new language”, a new political language that mobilizes people. For example, he believes we should not be using terms like fake news or alternative facts. Call it out for what it is: “lies”. It is very Orwellian to make up names to sanitize, negate or distract from the true meaning of what someone is saying or claiming. To call something out as a lie means that sooner or later the liar will have to defend that something. That requires work and research. According to Giroux, Paul Ryan and the rest of the cabal “…are not looking for literature that informs them. They are looking for literature that confirms them and their existing ideology.” He continues, “The new model is American Psycho. Ayn Rand’s model was Wall Street and that’s over; about celebrating heroes that moved up the ladder and didn’t care about other people. Ayn Rand was [entirely] about self-interest. Today it’s about sadism and cruelty and psychopathology. Things that only Wilhelm Reich understood.” When DeVega mentions the Purge series of movies, Giroux links it back to how we might be soon living, in a “…cage-like existence in which fear becomes the only commodity that matters and then gets translated into a kind of violence that is so spectral that it actually captures something about the soul of a society that can no longer exist, in a way, except through sadism, a kind of precarity, and an unwillingness to even remotely examine itself, in terms of its own potential for social and political responsibility.” According to Wikipedia, The Purge franchise is a series of American dystopian action horror films written and directed by James DeMonaco. There are three films in the franchise: The Purge (2013), The Purge: Anarchy (2014) and The Purge: Election Year (2016).
It may also be worth defining precarity. Precarity is a condition of one’s life that lacks predictability, job security, material or psychological welfare. According to Judith Butler, all human life is one of precarity regardless of government, economic, or historical context. All life to her is precarious, because we depend on each other from cradle to grave, on a global scale. I discuss this more extensively in my review of her Frames of War, that you can find on my site or on Goodreads, so I won’t repeat it here. Giroux continues. He mentions the movie Elle, for which Isabelle Huppert was nominated for an academy award in 2017. It is about a woman who eventually enters into a relationship with her rapist. It is, in his words, “…the ultimate expression of the assumption that the only path to intimacy is through violence… [it’s a] …celebration of sadism.” DeVega refers to another movie, Blue Demon,apparently a self-reflective B-movie about narcissism and fashion. Giroux asserts that “[w]e live in a culture of precarity.” DeVega changes the subject by musing, “Teaching is a political act.” Giroux responds that “Academy is an enemy of the Trump state.” Well that’s perhaps an understatement to be sure.
At the beginning and end of every Chauncey DeVega podcast, DeVega vents, rants and otherwise muses on whatever subject he pleases. At the beginning of podcast 133, he asks, “Trump!? Is it madness? Is it incompetence? Is it incompetent genius? He has surrounded himself with white supremacists…plutocrats…He will never be impeached. Jeff Sessions, a product of Jim Crow, enemy of the…rights of black and brown people. He’s dangerously effective. Mainstream, so called liberal, corporate news media focuses on trivialities, foolishness.“ At this point, let me give you a taste of some of the things that Malcolm Nance, retired naval officer, who I mentioned earlier, had to say in episode 127 of the Chauncey DeVega show. Nance tells us: “Moscow has a three-point strategy:
The dissolution of NATO
The breakup of the EU and the common market
The belief that Russia should be able to whatever it wants in Eastern Europe”
“Russia,” he goes on “[practices a] neo-soviet capitalism.
[they practice the] management of dissent
It is a dictatorship
[they practice] perception management” and,
“[they practice] the weaponisation of information”
He goes further. “[It’s an] uprising of the stupid…we are living the first step of [an] idiocracy… [Russia is] a mafia with atomic bombs.” We want to make note of Aleksandr Dugin, “a political philosopher, the Rasputin of Putin, [wants] to bring down democracy…Trump controls 4,000 atomic weapons. Trump is part of a wrecking crews that appears to be designed to destroy the government for a foreign power and for his own personal gain.”
I am going to cycle back now to minute 26 of Podcast 133 where Giroux continues to talk about what is wrong with America. He says, “…the left has refused to really engage this discourse in ways that embrace the comprehensive politics that get beyond the fracturing of single-issue movements and [he] began”, Giroux says, “to understand both what the underlying causes of this authoritarian movement and what it might mean to address it. This thing with Hillary Clinton that went on in the face of Trump. This Hilary bashing, [not that he supports or supported HRC]…there was something much darker on the immediate horizon that should have been addressed and that while the policies that the democrats produced, this complete blindness to that issue and to the notion of education.” What he means by education is that America has to have a pedagogy that supports critical thinking and a relationship to the truth – provable truth. Then he invokes that political theorist Hannah Arendt. She “was a German born Jewish-American political theorist…often described as a philosopher. She rejected that label on the grounds that philosophy is concerned with ‘man in the singular’ and instead described herself as a political theorist on the grounds that ‘men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world’.” That was from Wikipedia. Giroux says that Arendt said that there is, “…the notion that thoughtlessness is the precondition of fascism.” He asks us to think about the following things: “What are the forces at work in the United States around civic culture? Around celebrity culture? Around the culture of fear? Around the stoking of extremism and anger about issues? About a media that creates a culture of illusion? About the long-standing legacy of racism and terror in the United States? Around the self-interest, the unchecked individualism? How did that all come together, in a way, to produce a kind of authoritarian pedagogy that basically isolated people, made them feel lonely? As Hanna Arendt would say, ‘loneliness is the essence of fascism’. People need a movement. They need to belong to something. The debate around fake news and fake facts – that’s nonsense. The real issue here is that the populist movements like this, they don’t care about whether something is right or wrong. All they want is a coherent fictional narrative that they can belong to. So, whether it is right or wrong is irrelevant. What’s really important is all of a sudden they find themselves in a community of believers in a public sphere in which they can affirm themselves and no longer feel that they are isolated.”
DeVega intervenes, “Regardless, Trump voters voted to hurt people.”
Giroux seems to agree, “It was about racism, white supremacy, white nationalism. It was about inflicting pain on people. It’s about taking away social provision that even they would benefit from in the name of false appeal to freedom and liberty. One. What’s the form of the culture that turned these people into barbarians, in some ways? Two. They are responsible.” By this he means the voters. “Three. What would it mean to figure out what it is that drove them, so these questions can be addressed in ways in which these people are not simply dismissed as victims, but actually become capable of being mobilized in a very different way?” It seems that there is no mechanism or appetite to tackle this. Republicans and other representatives would have to agree with Giroux’s line of thought. There would have to be an answer to how to mobilize them in a very different way. What would convince them? How would the politicians get them there? I am assuming that it would have to be the politicians. But voters are not listening to educators and certainly not academics or the science community. He continues, “If they don’t become part of the script, the transformation, then we’re done. It’s not going to work.” Absolutely. “The polarization will be too great and the possibility for violence will be outstanding…how do we make the political more pedagogical while at the same time not painting the people, who in fact voted for Trump and put us into this place, simply as dupes? I want to know how agency got constructed in the name of fascism – neo-fascism. That’s really the central question. That doesn’t absolve them of responsibility, but it does place an enormous burden on all of us who are concerned about these issues, about how we address it.”
DeVega responds, “…at least at this moment in the U.S. context, the left has an inability to craft a powerful narrative in terms of the use of language. The republicans didn’t vote against [the Obamacare repeal] because it was morally objectionable and cruel. [They voted against it because] …it wasn’t cruel enough. The media failed us in not recognizing this. The media is playing checkers and the regime is playing chess. Media and liberals and progressives and democrats are no better. The media cannot win if they think they are dealing with reasonable, rational people who believe in empirical reality.” We see glimpses of it, for example, when the media recently kept saying “you mean Russian hookers”, when people interviewed insisted on calling it by the more watered-down term “salacious material.” I wonder what it would cause or look like if the media did what DeVega is suggesting. Would it be powerful and raise awareness or would they be suppressed, controlled, and threatened by the regime? Are they afraid that this would give the regime an excuse to shut them out of press briefings? The way the media has been behaving, it certainly looks that way to me. How far can they push Spicer before he just stops answering or ignores the press more than he does now?
Giroux continues to address the problem of public transformation, “We need an overriding vision. We need to talk about radical democracy. We need to name cruelty when we see it. These people are killing people. Language translates in policies that affect people in very specific ways.” America has a “crisis of civic literacy, crisis of cultural literacy, agency, civic, culture…commercial interactions are the only ones with meaning…Anti-intellectualism has taken over the country. Critical reflection becomes not just simply an object of disdain, but an object of contempt.”
“And treason!” DeVega adds.
Giroux continues, “What happened to the formative culture that offered resistance to that? In what way are the schools contributing to this? What does it mean when language succumbs to the esthetics of idiocy and vulgarity? What does it mean when celebrity culture confers more authority than higher and public education? What does it mean when happiness becomes a private right – or when people can no longer translate individual problems into larger public issues? This is a crisis of civic liberty…you’re talking about mass produced ignorance…when a formative culture disappears that makes self-reflection possible, then you get people saying and doing things that are incomprehensible with respect to the question of reason.”
DeVega finally says what almost certainly is a shared reality, “I think Donald Trump has unleashed something that has been bubbling beneath the surface.”
Giroux addresses this in terms of violence. “Violence becomes the cohesive element that brings people together. Violence becomes a sport. Violence becomes policy. It’s a spectacle. Violence is the language of disposability. We just get rid of people. Violence becomes the driving force which is one of the few forces left by which people can feel anything. Violence and idiocy – a lethal combination. Agency will be weaponized.”
DeVega feels that, “Donald Trump is the crystallization of everything that is wrong with this country.”
Giroux expands on this sentiment. “He is the distillation of an attack on democracy that has become more cruel, more virulent, more poisonous, more militarized and more violent since the 1970s. To simply view him as eccentric…as some kind of clown, who now has tapped into a certain element of culture is really to miss the point. Flawed democracy has been transformed into a new form of neo-fascism…You combine the authority that a celebrity culture confers with the utter isolation that people are feeling and the precarity that people now finds themselves – a neo-liberal culture – couple that with a culture of spectacle – of immediacy and entertainment and man there is really not a lot of wiggle room for democratic formative culture to emerge in a way that have resisted them. “The regime has people like, “…Bannon and Gorka driving policy. Trump doesn’t have the attention span to think through policies like this. [The m]ainstream press won’t call them out…in the next two years, they will attempt to destroy, with a vigorousness and aggressiveness, every major element of the social contract and every provision, policy, social relationship, public good that basically the corporate elite sees as a burden on their own resources. If the left fails to take up and develop a commanding vision, a new language about civic culture, about the possibilities of democracy and gets away from the…fractured politics that they’re involved in and be able to build a social movement, an educational movement, we may get somewhere.”
Giroux’s offers a recipe: “Liberals have to bang home that Trump is elite. There is no politics without identification. Policy goals to win over voters: National Health Care Plan. Social Wage – Guaranteed minimum income plans. Jobs programs. The commons matter.” Ok. There are two things I’d like to provide a definition of. First here is how the Oxford dictionary defines Identity Politics: “A tendency for people of a particular religion, race, social background, etc. to form exclusive political alliances, moving away from traditional party politics.” What that means is I’m gay so my political positions are informed and influenced by my interests and perspectives with respect to my identity as a gay person. I agree with Giroux that my identity is completely reflected in my politics. How can it be otherwise? What I think has importance is how we respect each other’s identities so that we can come to shared and fair public policies and visions. Second a refresher on what the commons are. According to Wikipedia it is, “the cultural and natural resources accessible to all members of a society, including natural materials such as air, water and a habitable earth.” It’s not a leap to suggest that we as a species have struggled to protect and share our commons and may be losing that battle.
Giroux continues in a passionate way, “Bernie”, he starts, “argued for progressiveness within a party that is actually reactionary. He didn’t get the power of the Democratic party to embrace the third way…third way equals neo-liberal…Democrats [are] not liberal. [They are] very conservative…party of the neo-liberal capitalism…erasure of historical memory. Historical memory does not matter…in our culture of short term gains, being the only thing that matters, culture of immediacy. Speed has overtaken the possibility for thought itself… [It’s a] very dangerous scenario…anti-intellectualism and cruelty…lapse of being able to draw any relationship between action and social cost. Our age [is characterized by t]he politics of disappearance…” He then lists all the things that have or will disappear in his opinion:
“Disappearance of memory
Disappearance of racial justice
Disappearance of immigrants
Disappearance of young people who are poor
Disappearance of people who don’t buy into the logic of capitalism
Disappearance of intellectuals
Disappearance of media who have the possibility of holding power accountable.”
And in what I think is a natural extension of these ideas is as DeVega responds, “Phil Zombardo says we can ‘other’ people. ‘Othering’ is necessary for evil.” You can find more on this by reading Judith Butler’s Frames of War and Precarious Life.
Giroux agrees, “In a criminogenic society, that society is organized for the production of death; that civil society is organized for the production of violence. We have so individualized these problems.” We act as though the president is the cause and not the system or society. “Trump as eccentric, just stupid – it’s a diversionary tactic. The press picks up on the diversion. Who’s going to die? Repealing of Healthcare, rolling back environmental protection. State violence is being produced. “
And DeVega feels that, “Our media lies to us. We have a culture of spectacle and disposability…lack of civil literacy.”
Giroux picks up on this by talking about the importance of education, his specialty. He tells DeVega, “This is where the question of education and literacy becomes crucial. We have produced a culture that is contemptuous of truth, leading to a situation where democracy cannot function. We can’t hold power accountable because there’s no such thing as the value of argument. There is no such thing as ability to know when people are being fooled, when they are being used as fodder in the interest of concentrated power, that basically will say anything to create a cohesive narrative that allows people to believe somehow that narrative benefits them when actually it’s just the opposite.” I don’t think Giroux feels that the media is necessarily complicit and without courage. Media has just been corrupted by wealth. They are driven by profits and what gets me to their media outlets be they TV, the internet, newspapers or magazine stands. Giroux continues, “Youth can’t just criticize culture. You have to be a culture producer.” Finally, Giroux tells a marvelous story of how his father taught him about appreciating diversity. “You ought to realize,” his father had said, “that different people be in the world in different ways. They have different languages and different skills. When you realize that your language is not the only language, then you’ll be able to listen to people and you’ll be able to understand where they come from.”
Are we looking at the end of democracy, at a new western dictatorship? At some dark dystopian future? I don’t know. In today’s world, I think we have a duty to be courageous and fight to protect the freedoms we have come to know.
“Imagine all the people living life in peace.” Photo taken Sunday September 21 2014.
On Sunday September 21 2014, Special K and I attended the first international People’s Climate March. It was an event held around the world with a special focus on New York City two days before the U.N. Climate Summit was set to begin. It was organized by 350.org an environmental group founded by writer and activist Bill McKibben. 350 represents the parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that scientists say we need to stay at to keep further climate change at bay. Earlier last year there was a point where the parts per million of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere was recorded at 400ppm.
Wikipedia records an estimate of 311,000 people attended the People’s Climate March. There were numerous staging areas for different groups that started at Central Park West at 59th street and went as far as 86th street. Special K and I ended up joining the designated area for the generational groups at around 66th street. Among the participants we marched with were families, the elderly, and students. It was intended to be a peaceful march and it was. I interviewed several people: One of the peacekeeper volunteers, some students, a carpenter, an urban planner and a TV film editor. Join Special K and I as we take you through the march on that humid cloudy day. Enjoy the show.
Listen up (36m45s) :
Other things discussed:
Hegemony – “…is the political, economic, or military predominance or control of one state over others.”
It took me more than two years to get through this book. I put it down after page 42 in 2012 because of its dense content and academic language. I am a fan of Judith Butler because she has some unique and thoughtful ways of looking at difficult questions. In this book of essays, (some of which she gave as lectures), she is looking at how we frame war and violence to justify it and give it meaning. She touches on how the media manipulates our emotions to reinforce or create our sentiments. This is not a new idea. Of course we all know the power of propaganda. But she has more to say about how we frame the idea of war so that we can bear its negative affects.
According to Judith Butler, each of our lives is “…always is some sense in the hands of others”. She points out that we are nothing but social creatures that depend completely on each other for everything in our lives. And she means everything. From the survival of each infant born to the food on our plates to the infrastructure that provides the food on our plates including the plates. Each of our lives is necessarily dependent on others. She makes a case that our global social entanglement shapes how we view each other as human beings. Or not. Consider that she makes this observation:
“…war [divides] populations into those who are grievable and those who are not. An ungrievable life is one that cannot be mourned because it has never lived…it has never counted as a life at all.”
In a war where the one side (say Hamas) stores armaments in schools, community centres, and houses of worship, the destruction of those armaments means that the people in those places, be they children, women, holy men or teachers do not have grievable lives. Their lives have and had no meaning because they were already dead before they were born. They are not alive and never were. We may believe that the people in those places are being used by the enemy as human shields. Therefore if the enemy does not give their own people the status of living beings worthy of being mourned, missed or valued, why should anyone else? So the bombing of these places becomes justifiable. Butler makes the entire idea of killing ludicrous when seen from this point of view. She is coming from the position that all human life, all interconnected on this planet, is grievable. Yet,we divide the world into those who are worthy of being grieved and those who are not. Otherwise we cannot justify war and violence. In one of her many brilliant statements she writes,
“…war seeks to deny the ongoing and irrefutable ways in which we are all subject to one another, vulnerable to destruction by the other, and in need of protection…[via]agreements based on the recognition of shared precariousness.”
She goes on to assert that “[w]ar is precisely an effort to minimize precariousness for some and maximize it for others.”
Apart from these ideas and some interesting discussion of the impact of media and photography, the essays for the most part left me cold and wanting. I was distressed by her use of language. For example, she uses the word alterity at one point when otherness would have made her point much more accessible. There are also statements and ideas that I found completely incomprehensible. For example, I could not make sense of this:
“The point is not to celebrate a full deregulation of affect, but to query the conditions of responsiveness by offering interpretive matrices for the understanding of war that question and oppose the dominant interpretations — interpretations that not only act upon affect, but take form and become effective as affect itself.”
If you can decipher this, I’d love to know what it means.
I was also shocked that she actually used the (non)-word irregardless (page 178 for anyone that cares). I will give her the benefit of the doubt and consider that an incompetent editor or grad student made the slip-up.
In matters of our global attitudes to war, violence, hatred, and non-tolerance, accessibility of her ideas is important for real change in my opinion. I am not sure she is interested in changing the world so much as she just wants to explore it philosophically and for the fun of it.
(note: this review, slightly edited, was cross-posted to Goodreads on Aug 31 2014)
Still from “Beekeeping for All” by Myfanwy MacLeod and Janna Levitt at the Royal Ontario Museum January 26 2014
On January 26, Special K and I were scheduled to participate in an event at the Royal Ontario Museum called Carbon 14 – A Day of Dialogue – The Changing Arctic Landscape. The Arctic government and policy makers are very concerned about the changes they anticpate in the arctic latitudes and have seen over the last several generations. As a prelude to this, I visited the exhibit Climate is Culture at the museum where I viewed installations inspired by climate change. My podcast today is a soundscape of my visit to that exhibit.
I’ve been away now for quite a few months, and I am sorry for that. Life has been busy. But today I am back with some more soundscene audio, this time from our travels in Scandinavia last spring.
As Molly Oldfield says in her new book The Secret Museum, “As a work of art, it is a masterpiece, but as a warship it was a disaster. You can see the entire distance it ever sailed from the roof of the museum.”
She is talking about the 17th century Swedish warship, the Vasa. In 1628 it sank just 1300 meters into it’s maiden voyage. The king at the time, Gustavus Adolphus, effectively overrode his designers, engineers and expert shipbuilders to have them construct a battleship that was dangerously unseaworthy. The cannons put in the gun ports may have been too heavy than was usual for that type of ship. The ship was ultimately weighted with insufficient ballast. Ballast is used to ensure that a ship can stay steady, counteract the wind and momentum of the ship and otherwise keep it upright. Sometimes ballast can be the weight of the crew and passengers. Sometimes it is objects. Sometimes it is a characteristic of the way a ship is constructed. In the case of the Vasa, it was built top heavy with no counteracting design. Or perhaps the boat was simply too big to support the king’s intent against the Polish that his men were sailing to fight. With all this, it is a magnificent construction. Here’s Vasa by the numbers: It is estimated to be about 69 metres long. That’s 226 feet or 75 yards. The width of the ship is 11.7 metres or 38 feet. The height is roughly 52.5 metres or 57 yards. It originally had ten sails of which six, in various states of disrepair, survive. It held 64 bronze cannon. Well over 26,000 artifacts of all kinds were also found. It is adorned with over 500 sculptures, designs and enormously detailed reliefs that must have been spectacular in their original colors. Those colors have been washed away by centuries in the clay bottom and currents of the harbour waters.
The technology that made it possible for the Vasa to be raised did not exist until the 20th century. It was confirmed to be 32 meters down in August 1956. In the words published on the Vasa Museum website, we know that:
“The [Swedish] navy’s heavy divers were able to cut six tunnels through the clay under the ship with special water jets. Steel cables were drawn through the tunnels and taken to two lifting pontoons on the surface, which would pull the ship free of the harbour bottom’s grip. In August 1959, it was time for the first lift. There was great uncertainty – would the old wooden ship hold together? Yes! Vasa held. She was lifted in 18 stages to shallower water, where she could be patched and reinforced in preparation for the final lift, to the surface…At 9:03 AM on the 24th of April, 1961, Vasa returned to the surface.”
In order to preserve the wood, the Vasa was sprayed with polyethylene glycol, a chemical compound that replaces the water in the wood. This was to prevent shrinkage and cracking. This process took an astounding 17 years. The ship had to be kept purposely wet in order that it not dry out and crack. More than 90% of the ship was recovered intact.
Archaeologists think that 150 people were on board, mostly mariners, and no soldiers, (300 were to board the ship eventually). When the ship sank, about 30 died. The skeletons of about 16 persons were found in and around the ship. The skeleton exhibit seemed to be the busiest with dozens of children gathered around the glass cases containing them. The museum curators have given names to the skeletons, tried to reconstruct what they may have looked like, and created stories about what their lives may have been like aboard the boat and off.
Now that you have the background, sit back and enjoy this soundscene of our visit to this amazing one of a kind museum:
“Why can’t we just do everything we can while we’re here for one another?” – Pearl Goodman, 2013
On today’s show I interview Pearl Goodman who has written Peril: From Jack Boots to Jack Benny. In 300 pages, Pearl gives us portraits and vignettes of what it was like growing up in the nineteen-sixties and seventies. This was a time when many holocaust survivors had ended up in cities like Toronto putting geographical if not psychic distance between them and the horrors of World War II. Everything about her childhood is coated, clouded and influenced by her parents’ experience during the war and after.
Her parents were survivors of the Nazi’s attempt to exterminate the European Jews. The remainder of their lives was infused with this terrible knowledge, the death, the suffering of entire family members, friends, neighbors and many others left behind. As we roll ever closer to the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II, the numbers of survivors who can still remember and tell us anything of those times are dwindling to a precious few. All the stories we can find, first-hand, must be sought out, recorded and shared. And those who can relay much of those untold stories and insights, as the survivors of World War II pass on, do so as translators, interpreters and paraphrasers of the original tellings. Ms. Goodman and other children of survivors must speak for them because they no longer can.
It is said often that we are doomed to repeat history if we do not learn from it. Indeed, genocide has been attempted and succeeded many times to greater and lesser degrees before that war and after. And Jews throughout history have been no stranger to attempts to being eradicated and removed from everywhere we have ever called home. We see the story of the holocaust repeated over and over again in small and big ways in the modern era in such places as: Cambodia, Rwanda, Sri Lanka, The Congo, and Pakistan.
In that sense, Ms. Goodman is not just telling her parents story and her own, but the story of all survivors and immigrants trying to overcome the persecution and oppression of their birth country. Join me in my conversation with the author, on a pleasant spring evening in a local restaurant on the very street that Pearl grew up on.
My neighbour, a Vietnam vet, has always watched American politics very carefully. This year he is especially interested in the upcoming American Election and wonders how the Republican party got to what he thinks is a very sorry state. He and I have a conversation about the debates, Democrats, Republicans, the Tea Party, Romney, Reagan, and Obama. We talk over coffee, in his rec-room office, amid ambient noise, on October 29 just a little over a week before voting day.
At Podcamp Toronto 2012, Heather Leson led a session called Dispatches of Disruption. The description of the session was advertised like this: “Every day someone uses the power of the Internet to change their world. What does it mean to be a disrupter? an innovator? a volunteer? What lessons can you activate at home? at work? I’ll share some examples of disruption aimed at corruption, elections, violence, potholes, agriculture, burgers, #futurewewant, and emergency response.”
She talks to us about how the world is using new media and new technology for social change, action and activism.
I’ll admit that many of the tools, techniques and ideas were new to me. Before this year’s podcamp, I had no idea what a crisis map was let alone how to use one. I hope that what you get from this audio is new to you too.
Are you a lesbian? Have you ever been a lesbian? Well Holly Near was. Singer, songwriter and activist, she was a lesbian-feminist in the heady, crazy days of early gay and women’s liberation. In the 70s she sang with the prolific and talented ladies of Olivia Records; with the likes of Cris Williamson , Meg Christian, and Teresa Trull. Olivia Records eventually stopped producing lesbian-feminist music and morphed into a cruise line and travel company. Oh and Holly Near herself morphed into a heterosexual.
Today’s show is about the Olivia Travel company. During a recent trip to Ottawa, we had the pleasure of dinner with some friends of our travel companions who live there. Talk turned to what it was like to holiday in a resort exclusively for women. Also mentioned, in case you don’t know her, is the comic Karen Williams who has worked as a comedy writer, host of In the Life, and featured in the documentary We’re Funny That Way. Marga Gomez, as part of the resort entertainment, was also on the trip. Other Musicians Mentioned: Carole Pope, Kevin Staples. Other Artists Mentioned: General Idea, A.A.Bronson. Lezebrities Mentioned: Rosie O’Donnell
At 1:20am on the morning of Saturday June 28, 1969, police entered a Mafia run gay bar called the Stonewall Inn. It is still located at 51 and 53 Christopher Street in Greenwich Village New York. The police had raided the establishment countless times before to take their payoffs. It appears that the combination of delays getting patrol wagons to the site, police mis-communications, and undoubtedly, a growing sense of frustration with the constant raids, a riot broke out on the street, amid crys of “Gay Power”, against the police. Michael Fader, quoted by David Carter in the book Stonewall: The Riots that Sparked the Gay Revolution, explained:
We all had a collective feeling like we’d had enough of this kind of shit. It wasn’t anything tangible anybody said to anyone else, it was just kind of like everything over the years had come to a head on that one particular night in the one particular place, and it was not an organized demonstration…. Everyone in the crowd felt that we were never going to go back. It was like the last straw. It was time to reclaim something that had always been taken from us…. All kinds of people, all different reasons, but mostly it was total outrage, anger, sorrow, everything combined, and everything just kind of ran its course. It was the police who were doing most of the destruction. We were really trying to get back in and break free. And we felt that we had freedom at last, or freedom to at least show that we demanded freedom. We weren’t going to be walking meekly in the night and letting them shove us around—it’s like standing your ground for the first time and in a really strong way, and that’s what caught the police by surprise. There was something in the air, freedom a long time overdue, and we’re going to fight for it. It took different forms, but the bottom line was, we weren’t going to go away. And we didn’t. (source: Wikipedia)
This period in American history also coincided with other civil and social movements of the time, including the African-American civil rights movement, the counterculture of the 1960s and the anti-war movement. The riots lasted for the next six days. It stands as a marker and pivotal moment when the gay liberation movement in North America came of age. Since that year, the last weekend of June has been a weekend of choice for Gay Pride parades, the world over. During the 1970s, Toronto had over the years various events to mark gay pride, but in 1981, after the Toronto bathhouse raids by police where 306 men were arrested, Lesbian and Gay Pride day was incorporated and Toronto’s first official celebration occurred on Sunday June 28.
This year the parade – known simply in Toronto now as “Pride” or the “Pride Parade” was held on July 3 during the Canada Day and American July 4th long weekend. The first year since 1981 that Pride Day wasn’t held on the last Sunday of June was in 2010 when the G20 summit literally closed down the Toronto core during the last week of June. Now it seems that between the city and the Pride Committee, the decision stands to hold it on the long weekend in July, a move that barely conceals the money making, tourism, and commercial nature of the week long Pride festivities.
I am not alone in feeling this way among Toronto queers, but we all don’t feel that way either as CP tells me in today’s show recorded during the pride weekend this year. I should apologize to CP because she might actually wished I referred to her as SP. So…sorry about that SP. D’oh. In today’s show I also talk to Dina Paige, a woman who has created the S.I.S. or the Sexuality Identification System. Using different categories, I can chart my level of femaleness, maleness or gender ambiguity that show where on the gender spectrum I define myself. I spend a few minutes talking to her about that. Enjoy the show.
Listen at:
I haven’t posted a show in two months. I have some good reasons for that. For one thing I’ve been working hard and enjoying my new day job. I’ve also been spending time working on another new project http://threegratitudes.ninja-radio.com/. Every day I think of three things in my life to be grateful for and share them on the site. You would think that coming up with three things to be thankful for every day would be dead easy. It’s not. There is so much tragedy and negative things happening in the world and in my life every day, that to take delight, pleasure and gratitude in small and simple things around me can be tricky. Especially on a day to day basis when much of our days also take the form of eat, work, sleep, repeat. But I am persevering in this. I have seven months to go and then I’ll end the project. Until then, you can join me if you want in the project in various ways. You can email me at hotfrm@gmail.com with your gratitudes or comment on the site. Either way your gratitudes will make it to the project.
A New Concept in Fast Food (Photo by Ninja)
This month Special K and I took our friends Dragon and Fly to New York. Fly had never been there and it had been many years since Dragon had. In today’s segment, we visit an interesting restaurant for breakfast called 4Food – the purpose of which is to de-junk fast food. We run into many French tourists. The aim that day was to visit to Ground Zero the day after Obama visited on May 5, 2011. Surprisingly we were stopped by a journalist who interviewed us for Swiss Public Radio about 9/11. Bit of a switch for Ninja. We also find out that there is a huge French community in New York. We talk about the movie Winter’s Bone and a class of humanity that are sometimes, but not often, represented in movies. Other movies discussed: Pulp Fiction, Deliverance, The Fly. Food mentioned: Pressed rice patties. Television Shows referred to: Modern Family. Broadcasters mentioned: Swiss Public Radio, The CBC.
“I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” – Albert Einstein
What do Canadians do while they are waiting for the end of the world? Watch hockey of course. But that doesn’t stop Ninja from engaging her father and nephew in a lively discussion about impending global catastrophe. But before we get to that, Ninja shares expert information about climate change, how petroleum is processed, and what is required to support life here and elsewhere in the universe. Ninja is hoping to soon make the three and half year trip to Jupiter’s moon Europa where scientists think life could exist in our solar system.
Famous people featured: Linda Hunt, Albert Einstein, Steven Hawking, Martin Gardner. Moons and planets mentioned: Earth, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, Io, Europa, Mercury. Places on earth mentioned: Stratford Ontario, China, Shanghai.
The movie ‘The King’s Speech’ is based on the book written by Mark Logue and Peter Conradi, The King’s Speech: How One Man Saved the British Monarchy. Mark Logue is the grandson of Lionel Logue, the titular man who saved that monarchy. Special K argues that in fact it was the Queen Mother, Elizabeth, wife of King George VI, known to his family and intimates as Bertie, who really saved the monarchy. Lionel Logue was the speech therapist known for enabling King George VI, a lifelong stutterer, to speak confidently, sincerely and as a leader during a time in history when the British Empire needed that leadership most: the dawn and period of World War II. Lionel Logue, in wikipedia, is described as being distinctive in his therapeutic method that emphasized humour, patience and superhuman sympathy.
And this is in great part what makes this movie enduring art in its depth and emotional complexity. Geoffry Rush’s performance completely embodies these three qualities. There is no other way, the movie, convinces us, that he could have helped the king otherwise. A normally mild-mannered man, the film portrays King George VI, played exquisitely and poignantly by Colin Firth, as someone who could erupt in frustrated rage when provoked to face the disability that could make or break royal credibility. For all the remoteness royality seems to the otherwise common man, this film attempts to show the humanity in all of us through Bertie and the heartwarming affection between him, his wife, the Queen Mother, his daughters Elizabeth and Margaret and his lifelong bond with his speech therapist.
Do you have any idea what fossil fuels provides us? Here is a rundown:
10 calories of fossil fuels are required to produce every 1 calorie of food eaten in the US
Pesticides
Commercial Fertilizers
Automobiles, Tractors, Trailers, Trucks
Airplanes
The buildings in which and the tools from which other products like appliances are made
Natural gas
Diesel Fuel
Jet Fuel
Propane
Gasoline
Microchips
Computers
The Internet
Asphalt
Concrete
Highways
Modern Cities (1 ton of cement requires 45 gallons of oil or 420 pounds of coal or 4.7 million BTUs of energy)
Discovery and extraction of copper, aluminum, uranium, and platinum. (A good sized aluminum plant uses as much power as a city of 175,000 people.) (1 ton of copper requires 17.8 barrels of oil)
In the production of Solar panels
In the production of Electricity
In the production of wind energy
In the production of nuclear energy
In the production of biofuels (soybeans and corn)
All Plastics
Paint
Astroturf
Tires (Synthetic Rubber)
Latex
Nylon, Polyester, Acrylic
Vinyl
Styrofoam
Naugahyde
Formica
Candle Wax
ASA painkiller
Cosmetics including Hand Lotion, Hair Dye, Lipstick, Blush, Eyeliner, Eyeshadow
Food Colouring (coal tar)
Soapless Detergents use a petrochemical called glycerin
Petroleum Jelly
Deoderant
Rubbing Alcohol
Heart Valves, Artificial Limbs
Polyethylene, Polypropylene, Polyurethane
Fake fur
Plexiglass
Bubble gum
I’m thinking that’s enough. One 42-gallon barrel of oil creates 19.4 gallons of gasoline (from RankinEnergy.com ). The rest is used to make items like the ones listed above.
Worker puts finishing touches to a three-metre-high security fence outside the Metro Toronto Convention Centre. (Nathan Denette/Canadian Press)
Special K’s G20 report. She gives us a first hand description of what she sees on the way to work on the first day of the G20 Summit Week as Toronto gets ready for the city’s security event of the century. She and I talk outside on the evening of the summer solstice, the longest day of the year.
Billy Bob Thorton acted like a petulant, spoiled child on April 8 during a CBC interview with Jian Ghomeshi to promote his new band and musical venture the Boxmasters. Or is that the Mixmasters? Boxmatches? Boxcutters? I don’t know. In any case, for whatever reason, Thorton seemed to be overestimating his importance and talent in the matter. I think that he fancied that he was punishing someone by checking out of the interview. It has been a long time since I have had the misfortune to witness such arrogant self-importance. If you haven’t seen or listened to this insulting train wreck of unfathomable immaturity, you can catch it on at this youtube link: Jian Ghomeshi interview with Billy Bob Thorton. Special K and I deconstruct his behaviour and then move on to discuss two movies about political figures. It’s been 30 years since the White Night Riots after the city politican and gay activist Harvey Milk was murdered by Dan White. We talk about the movie and how we feel about what happened during that time in gay history. We move on to explore our reaction to a movie very difficult to make since it focused completely and solely on a conversation and a very difficult one at that. We discuss the portrayal of David Frost and Richard Nixon in Frost/Nixon.
And finally I give you my first and original mashup of Billy Bob Thorton’s most annoying utterances from his April 8th excuse of an interview on CBC radio.
Harvey Milk - Gay Pride 1978 - Photo by Terry Schmitt
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