To thine own self be true

Now it’s coal mining in the Rockies, which he sneakily has been advancing. So much for Nature. Mountains for sale!
A corrupt, destructive tyrant after Trump’s heart of darkness.

Everything you ever wanted to know about totalitarianism, fascist dictators, media manipulation, repression of individualism, control systems for suppressing truth and facts, political propaganda, and the human capacity for corruption, abuse, torture, mind control, and societal annihilation of love, democracy, history, and autonomous thought and lifestyle.

doesn’t mean you’re not still entitled to a life and shouldn’t go on living, naturally, every day.

For myself, I find my curiosity is still way up as I continue, like most human beings, seeking out (new) information daily. One is always learning, exploring, and searching.

Likewise, there are always things to do to maintain and support oneself, family, friends, and others in the community. Charity remains essential in whatever forms.

I still have many ongoing projects and find that these continue to expand my understandings and appreciations of the past, people, life, Arts, and Nature.

And, there are, forever the built-in chores and errands on a daily basis. Things break down; natural and planned obsolescence are realities. If one doesn’t do repairs, regular maintenance, and replacements, how will order and sanity be maintained in one’s own personal world and lifestyle?

government by ignorance, and government by gut/personal whim. Having a 300 pound guy with a map of Georgia and a sharpie predicting hurricanes rather than scientific experts has predictable limits and limitations.

I must admit I feel a lot safer as of noon, yesterday, knowing the nuclear codes are not in Orange Face’s little sordid hands. Likewise, that Biden has lined up people with long, proven, credible experience, people who are authorities in their fields, and frankly, experts to run his government.

Already his establishment of a science advisor position has put dumb-assedness on the run after Trump. There is nothing wrong with authorities, experts, facts, truth (affirmed at the first Press Secretary’s conference yesterday), empirical evidence, and science.

It beats the witchy woman, superstition, fake news, and stupid crazies that Trump backed and inflicted on the the American public. His was an Age of Darkness and an Age of Insanity. Biden’s era will be an Age of Light and an Age of Sanity.

Also, globalization and international politics had been totally abandoned, denigrated, and unplugged under Trump. The U.S. (and every other country for that matter) need the Global Village, globalization, global business, and global peace and climate alliances to stave off planetary disaster. Geopolitics is simply a reality and complete necessity to accomplish the changes the whole planet and all countries need.

We can all breathe a deep breath now that the wanna-be dictator has exited and quality government and reason have returned to the White House.

Rhythms, some word play, and mostly cliched metaphors, but more (loosely) prosey in tone and style, and more cliched than great poems?
(Line divisions by themselves don’t automatically = good/great poetry.)

Is there anything editable about it, as is? (A young person’s piece, for sure: cliches.)

Would the whole piece have been more effective organized in stanzas?
Very few famous long single-stanza-ed pieces work. Even “Tintern Abbey” could have had more stanzas for changing moods and sections of thought.

*N.B. BTW/ I have no problems with the content or the context yesterday or her delivery–all fine feelings, well-timed, and speaking relevantly to the event.

She made a +ve contribution to the inauguration and represented youth, a forgotten quarter of the election and country.

Inevitable, given how much Canada and the world is bound up in what happens south of the border.

Thanks to Trump, nearly everything became very politicized the past 4 years. Much of it consisting of lies that needed to be called out. Truth Matters. Bigtime. The current conflict between lies/fake agendas and truth/fact/honesty is THE crisis of our Orwellian time (with dictators afoot and democracies threatened). Many of our current issues and much of politics today originate from this fundamental conflict.

From university onward, I have always taken seriously my old professor Dave Wangler’s saying about being “a sincere seeker of truth and wisdom”. When I check for information daily, often it is simply for the truth about something or someone. Distortions of truth and misrepresentations are usually harmful, often destructive, and sometimes widespread-deadly (writ big in Trump’s case–Clocking in at over 30, 000 lies, he’s destroyed America, its government, its institutions, its relationships with other countries, and people’s lives near and far). They need to be called out/challenged.

“Man is by nature a political animal.”—Aristotle

Re. politics, this blog never used to be so obviously about politics, but this change was inevitable, as I mentioned in an entry some time ago. Everything is/can be politicized. Who takes out the garbage. The workplace. How children are raised. Agendas in friendship. And so on. If you think politics aren’t relevant and important, then you aren’t paying attention to family, relationships, and society for starters. (You may not be fully awake/conscious.)

At present, I’m watching Ingmar Bergman’s 1973 classic series Scenes from a Marriage which makes the former very obvious. No, you can’t live under a rock. A lot of our choices are political or potentially so when there are alternate points of view, differing opinions, and individuals with varying values and backgrounds, facts and truth matter.

Alberta’s Premier deserves no respect from Biden and the U.S. after calling Michigan governor “Brain-dead”.
After cheating and lying to members of his own party.
After deregulating so much at the expense of citizens and workers.
After decimating health care and education.
After deliberately and repeatedly lying to Albertans deliberately about Covid.
After stealing teacher pension funds and those of other groups.

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He, incidentally, deserves no respect, support, or trust from Albertans for having lost $1.6 billion because his government’s accounting errors, for turning over provincial pension plans to AIMCo who lost $2.1 recently, and now for losing 1.5+ billion on the Keystone pipeline.

This crook will likely next redivert the AB pension plan monies willy-nilly and “respectfully” try to steal CPP’s AB citizen monies in order to refill his coffers in order to make himself look good and a ‘fiscally responsible manager on behalf of Albertans’. But Kenney is just a stupid loser-thug, like Trump, and, likewise, only sacred unto himself.

No tv commercials get heard here. We press Mute whenever they start which also gives an opening for conversation or getting small tasks done.

Often during the day, such as now, CNN is on so we can see what’s happening in the States up-to-date mitout sound. If something truly newsworthy is happening, we’ll be aware of it as we pass through the family room, doing other chores and personal biz, then we can stop and unmute.

Cuts out a helluva lot of noise and extraneous huckstering. Much quieter and more peaceful around the house. Less hysteria intruding during the day.

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Also, with phone caller i.d. and a recording machine, we screen all calls, only picking up or responding to what is genuinely important and relevant. Saves a lot of sidetracking from momentary focus and intrusive soliciting. Plus it likely frustrates the hell out of U.S. and global solicitors.

I would estimate sunshine to be, potentially, one half of a depressed person’s day. Without it, things can look very dark, indeed, in a prairie January.

whadidya expect? The storming of the Bastille, uh Capitol, was the destined culmination of those myriad lies and The Big Lie (a la the Holocaust) that the election was stolen and that Trump actually won it.

As Timothy Snyder (his instructive, seminal book On Tyranny) said today on the Fareed Zakaria show, “post-truth is pre-fascism” and that we live in a post-truth era where lies easily lead to Trumpian fascism.

Trump started very early in his term on his attacks on truth and facts, notably with his undermining of the U.S. science council and its documents, suggesting there was only opinion and no empirical truth as we have long known, understood, and appreciated it. We now, supposedly, just had “different views”.

Under Trump, the wanna-be dictator, the lies became violent, giving permission to white supremacists. Snyder also sees the cutbacks on local news and newspapers, as reducing the fact and truth fields, leading to people just falling back on beliefs, opening the doors to non-mainstream political agendas. Trump, simultaneously, substituted false narratives and his personality cult into the resultant vacuum.

Snyder points out the lies have led to action, especially amalgamated violence, with the ensuing result of commitment to whatever crazy conspiracy theory or cause. He says that the lies, Big Lie, and the violent offenders must assume responsibility and be held accountable (as in Trump’s impeachment trial and the accountability of GOP senators who aided and abetted the Big Lie).

He adds this is not a time for public passivity and people need to act to support responsibility and accountability and to support institutions and democracy through commitment to truth and engagement. (Already there are signs of this with the incoming Biden administration with the new president creating a science advisor position for his cabinet, signifying there will be a return to facts, truth, and empirical evidence and reasoning, something likewise needed in the Dept. of Justice.)

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I think the disheartening thing for America is how many millions (like many Germans in WWII) have come to believe in Trump’s Big Lie. Massly and massively delusional to say the least. Those Republicans, who do not support the Big Lie, will have to vote for impeachment in the Senate, and have to splinter off and create a new, separate party more based on truth and facts. All to separate themselves from the mutant crazies in their party.

There is also a forgotten educational side to all of this, as revealed by Trump’s efforts to sabotage the 1619 revisionist initiative of The New York Times; the one to tell the truth about black history and the long history of injustice toward American blacks as well as the notable contributions of blacks to American history. Something that was intended to end up in schools across the nation, but which Trump tried to thwart.

On both sides of the border, for that matter, we have seen education shift into free-fall technology and the unquestioning acceptance and adoration of machinery at the expense of individuality, individualism, and the development and fostering of independent minds and autonomous citizens.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in the abandonment of the teaching of critical thinking and its methods in different subject areas. Our time has become more Orwellian in that it is not safe to reason, rationally argue and dispute, or question things, for individuals; when government expects complacent, mindless adherence to the mini-Trumps of Canada and Alberta as well.

As Snyder correctly points out: it all comes down to facts/truths vs. lies/illusions/delusions. That is the most basic problem of our time from which everything else stems.