To thine own self be true

Hard to beat on a sunny Sunday morning, brunch at Chianti’s with no one else in the place and a seat by the east window looking out onto the pansy window-boxes. Best, simplest minestrone soup I’ve ever had. Quiet, friendly, unobtrusive table service. Why go anywhere else?

Now estimated: 1 in 3 kids have used a smartphone by their first birthday and 12% have used them to play videogames. So much for books, print literacy, reading, Nature, and what’s left of the Real World. Dumb, la-zy parents bigtime. Setting their kids up for low attention span, impatience, screen addiction, sedentary lifestyle, poor health, and ADHD.

The long horrible nightmare is over. The AB PC government which ran our province head-long into the ground for 20 years,which should have been kicked out 20 years ago, has finally imploded after decades of fear-mongering, unconscionable bullying, and insulting intimidation. Poof! Leaving nothing but a ghoulish miasma where all the many skeletons are buried, skeletons which will eventually be uncovered and exposed. How corrupt were the PCs really? We will all soon find out.

With the predictable cowardly flights of Klein, Hancock, Redford, and Prentice, there will be no more drunk bullying clowns, feckless do-nothing dopes, “entitled” arrogant queens, or conceited wanna-be tyrants running the show. The entitlements, cronyism, and war on ordinary and innocent Albertans are now officially ended. We will never again see such flagrant, self-serving troughism and Absolute Corruption in this province. We can all take a deep collective breath, re-begin dreaming, and move forward, rebuilding from the ashes of ground zero. Things will never be as bad as they once were for the past 20 years.

This is the happiest I’ve been, politically-speaking, for two decades. Yes, the fat, suited vampire-bullies have finally and justly been staked straight thru their cold, grinchy ‘hearts’ by real ordinary people everywhere in this province. And we need fear no more, no longer. There is new life stirring and rejoicing under the ribs of death. daylight ahead.

Making the best of “both worlds”. Reconciling flesh and blood with consciousness: integration process. Spiritual found in Sensuous Process. Finding Eternity within Time (Blake). The Essence of the Art of Life. Finding the Absolute in the Relative, Spiritual within Sense and Matter. The Whole Art of Living. Finding out how to harmonize disparate elements. Menos–divine inspiration to do the Impossible. Uprushes of supernatural powers and factors. ‘Supernatural possession’.

$2 billion US per year worth for the UK economy, to be exact, according to a retail expert. Before she turns 10, she will be worth 1.5 billion buckaroos.
Poor unsuspecting Charlotte Elizabeth Diana. She’s nothing but personified mammon and continuous fodder for the media gossips. It’s all about the money, baby.

“I had not thought death had undone so many.”
–T.S. Eliot, “The Burial of the Dead”, The Waste Land (originally in Dante’s The Divine Comedy: Inferno)

yesterday was World Naked Gardening Day.

Crazier and crazier…

For me, another day, another disaster somewhere in the world. My funds are limited (“like everyone’s”), but rather than just talk about “how awful” each disaster is while living a self-absorbed, limited/limiting screenlife, I always make a donation to the Red Cross (which is the best agency to give to–no significant admin fees). BTW/the feds are matching whatever donations.

So how much do you make and how much can you afford to send these poor fellow human beings? There is much more to real charity than “feeling sorry” for disaster victims and doing nothing tangible about the suffering, tragedy, and misery of others.

When I go to sleep at night, I wonder sometimes about all those people out there making over $40,000/yr. in Alberta and Canada. The people that say they care, but never drop a dime in the bucket for any charity or important cause.

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“As the purse is emptied the heart is full.”–Victor Hugo

“Charity begins at home, is the voice of the world.”–Thomas Browne, Religio Medici

“If you see anybody fallen by the wayside and lying in the ditch, it isn’t much good climbing into the ditch and lying by his side.”–H.R. L. Sheppard, Dick Sheppard (Carolyn Scott)

“To keep a lamp burning we have to keep putting oil in it.”–Mother Teresa, “Saints Among Us”, TIME

“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the Main”–John Donne, Devotions

Quite simply one votes for guys in suits who insult and talk down to you and refuse to change their ways of governing. Guys who are not interested in humane caring for people whether it be in education or health care. Gutless, corrupt guys who have been at the trough much too long and frequently insulted Albertans while furthering their own agendas (c.f., next blog entry).

On the other hand, the other party has no track record of 20 years of corruption, and promises to do more for Albertans in education and health care while not kowtowing to the oil industry that has long run this province into the ground.

I don’t know about you, but I am tired of being insulted, used, and put down. Change is long overdue in this province (going back to the Klein days of promoting horse racing at the expense of education and hospital closings); this government has long not cared one iota about the average citizen and let the oil industry have its way and free pass ad infinitum. Absolute power has corrupted absolutely in Alberta. Things need to be reprioritized and the privileged need their comeuppance really bad. One can only hope that the chickens will come home to roost on Monday.

We all know how the new math AB Ed introduced has screwed up kids’ understanding and application of any kind of credible math skills and how slick technology has replaced critical thinking, books, and The Word.

But while Albertans have been ‘sleeping’, the PCs have had their way with the curriculum and have moved their own agenda ahead to recruit more brainwashed kids into the world of business by making them into little entrepreneurs as early as the elementary grades. Imagine. The main thing in life is to run or work for a business. It’s all about making money and voting PC since this agenda only serves the PCs, not kids or parents necessarily.

No longer is education in AB about having a broad-based education which includes the arts and the development of critical thinking skills in a broader sense. So much for English, poetry, creative writing, critical thinking, social studies, the arts, and the cultivation of any kind of civilized sensibility. There is only 1 agenda this serves and it is the PC agenda, no one else’s. Personally, I think there is much more to kids than turning them into biz-minded automatons voting PC for life.

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further: Not everyone wants to run a virtual lemon-aid stand biz (AB high school)– 5 credits for Entrepreneurship-Lemonade!?!

Entrepreneurial Adventure, Social Entrepreneurship (AB grade 5), the Entrepreneurial Spirit (AB gr. 3) posing as the Be-all and End-all solutions in education today.

Simplistic, narrow, and very politically-agenda-ed.