After a week of schizophrenic weather (it’s hot! it’s cold! it’s raining! it’s snowing!) and even more schizophrenic babblings from the Whiner in Chief to the South of Sanity, it was an enormous relief to make the long drive out past the airport to the cozy home of friends Candice and Eli, for the New Orleans themed Fam-Damily Music Jam Fest. Within minutes of arrival I was draped in Carnival beads and being pulled on stage for some musical improv. 
It was exactly what I needed. For more than a month, most of us have been following the antics of President Evil, and it’s enough to bring on a nervous tic, if not an ulcer and heart palpitations. I can’t speak for anybody else, but for me, singing clears out all of the cobwebs and leaves me feeling cleansed and refreshed. Maybe it’s having to either remember lyrics or to make them up as you go, or maybe it’s my natural competitiveness and need to ‘play’ with other musical children.
Regardless, it sure took the edge off, in the best way. For those of you who are bored of the political antics of the Golden Wrecking Ball and his band of Merry Incompetents, you can’t possibly understand how tightly wound all these machinations have made those of us who are following this race to the Reichfest. It’s all too much, it’s never-ending, and we cannot relax at any hour of the day or night. We are guitar strings tuned too tight. Something’s gotta give, or we will snap.
I am normally a peaceable, happy person, but lately I’ve discovered just how much rage I have for the blandly evil, those who nonchalantly throw the lives of innocents into turmoil and pain for no more reason than a belief in their own superiority. How angry am I? The next person who shrugs off ANY thing to do with the Orange-Tufted Twitter Flitterer with a casual ‘fake news’ gets it right in the kisser.
And I’m not the only person discovering their inner pugilist …. there’s an entire movement, of politically active liberal men engaged in power lifting, in order to “defend themselves against attacks by far-right extremists, and to intervene in potential hate crimes.”
The #SwoleLeft was started by 26 year old New Yorker, Poncho Martinez, who says: “Trump’s election made it clear that the Democrats are incompetent—that their power machinations are useless when confronted with a different fighting style, and that regular people need to get involved with politics on an individual level and on a daily basis.”
He’s right. Anyone who thinks they can out logic the Prima Donald‘s administration is bringing a knife to a gun fight. There is NO logic in President Pants On Fire‘s team, who grow increasingly more bloated from feeding on the tears and misery of the people of America. There is only a verbal tank rolling forward and crushing everyone in it’s path.
Carefully prepared arguments, complete with annotations, 8 by 10 colour glossies, painstakingly checked and double checked, will be met with the response of ‘fake news.’ And that makes us as helpless as the sword fighter who Indy shot rather than confront.
And here’s a tip for those of you who don’t realize that you’re actually a Hair Gropenfuhrer apologist, despite continually telling your more liberal friends that you can’t stand the guy … if you’re calling an investigation into a confirmed Russian intervention in the last election ‘fake news’ … you’re in Trump’s Reeking Wrecking Crew.
The Orange-Tufted Shit Gibbon and his King of the Whoppers staff coast through all reporting on their misdeeds by repeatedly calling it all ‘fake news.’ Here’s a newsflash, Comrade Trumputin; you may not want to believe in science or facts, and you may not want to hear that people disagree with you, and you may not have noticed that the majority of the world believes you’re a compulsive liar and a malignant narcissistic, but all of those things are TRUE .. which, if it hasn’t been properly explained to you .. is the opposite of FALSE and FAKE.
“Calling something “fake news”, Mr. President, doesn’t make it so, no matter how loud the applause is amongst your acolytes. You seem to believe that the American public can’t see that you are protesting the truth getting out, while not really denying the specifics of the reporting in any convincing way.
Attacking the messenger while not being able to counter the firehose of leaks that suggest very worrisome developments, will not cause the press to blink. Quite the contrary. Reporters are instinctual, and the louder and more vehement your protests, the more we will be inclined to dig.” (Dan Rather)
However, if The Trump of Doom is correct that fake news is the enemy of the people, then he has made himself Public Enemy Number One, through his dedication to the spreading of complete fabrications and outright lies, while offering no evidence to back up his take on what he’s seen on FOX or what he’s heard from some German golfer who knows a guy who knows a guy. We are, in the words of KellyAnne “WrongWay” Conway, to take his tirades and rants, not as mere prose, like ordinary people use, but as some sort of special messages he is delivering from his heart. You know, like that other guy, the North Korean Dear Leader, that is so misunderstood outside of his own country.
No one with any integrity whatsoever will tell you with a straight face that the media is always right. There are facts, and then there is spin, and whether you blow left or right, the same reportage can put the butcher’s thumb down on your side or the other side’s scale. 
There is misinformation, and there is propaganda; there is a ‘sex sells’ slant, and ‘if it bleeds it leads.” And then there is the $2 billion worth of media attention, about twice the all-in price of the most expensive presidential campaigns in history, that was given to Mr. So-Called-President gratis during the last campaign, allowing him to outline his plans to Make America Great Again.
Tell me, Truthophobic Trump, was that ‘fake news’ as well?
What Hair Hitler and his Bushel Basket of Deplorables call ‘fake news’ is anything with which they disagree, or anything that interferes with their versions of ‘alternative facts,’ or ‘post-facts, ‘ in their post-truth bubble. They’re putting the ‘fun’ back into ‘dysfunctional’ … but only if you’re on the Trump Trolley of Doom.
Dire Abbey has his own personal vision of America, which is apparently a place of carnage, a dumpster fire of cataclysmic proportions, where the citizens flee in terror of one another and certainly from anyone of any sort of colour that is not orange. Which is odd, because it would seem that he has seen very little of the country he represents, beyond the golden toilets of his suites in Mar A Lago or New York city, or as seen through the tinted windows of his private jet. Is this ‘dumpster fire’ visible from his unfriendly skies when he can tear his eyes away from Bill O’Reilly?
His dystopic vision was nurtured on the ramblings of alt-right ‘celebrities,’ and misspelled internet memes, which does, in some horrific way, make him representative of half of the American people. And it is the internet that must bear responsibility for the care and nurturing of trolls and hackers who gleefully terrorize social media like the bullies at a Nerd Prom.
And the bad news is – it’s gonna get worse. Actual ‘fake news,’ disseminated to con consumers into giving up their money to crooks, is now propagated through Twitter bots, and the massaging of demo-and psychographics to find the most vulnerable. Just wait until AI (Artificial Intelligence) gets a hold of advertising! If you think it’s hard to find the truth about products or services now, you’re really not going to like the future.
No, you cannot just call anything you fear or disbelieve ‘fake news.’ That stupid and ignorant slam of all media is nothing but a cheap form of censorship, which full stop puts an end to discussion or questioning in the name of some holier than thou moral positioning.
I won’t have it. I won’t have it from anyone, up to and including Trumplethinskin. I am on a crusade to eradicate the term, and yes, I will defend our right to decide for ourselves, based on careful study and reflection, on what is true and what is false. We cannot and must not normalize the censorship and removal of viewpoints that conflict with specialized, personal interests.
You have been warned. Next time … POW!
” A lie is a non-fact deliberately told as fact. Lies are told in order to reassure oneself, or to fool, or scare, or manipulate others. Santa Claus is a fiction. He’s harmless. Lies are seldom completely harmless, and often very dangerous. In most times, most places, by most people, liars are considered contemptible.” Ursula K. Le Guin, Northwest Portland
Now, I’m not gonna go off on a rant here, about global warming, and whether or not it’s caused by human activity. For one thing, it’s too nice a day to argue. It was 11 degrees yesterday, and it’s nearly 10 degrees today already; seriously, not wasting my time on deniers. Mama wants to gambol where flowers will soon be.
It’s exhausting. It’s truly exhausting and it’s designed to keep the nation and the world off kilter. In the biz – the biz of demoralizing a nation prior to establishing a dictatorship, that is – a shock event is an order that has been designed to throw society into chaos. Any student of war and destabilization knows that these events work very well ..too well, actually.
It’s too much, this daily bludgeoning. It’s like there is no escaping his grasp .. he’s here, he’s there, he’s bloody everywhere, attacking everything in sight, rushing through executive orders that tear at the fabric of society, as though he’s Santa Claus granting every nasty request on every nasty Republican politician’s wet dream wish list.
I can see that. It’s all too much. The thing is, people aren’t wired to process this much change on a daily basis. We don’t want to deal with disruptions day and night; we want to have a break from the onslaught, a chance to put up our feet and relax at the end of the day.
And sadly, all of this chaos and disruption is having the exact opposite effect to what he intended to portray. Rather than appearing a strong man and in control, his raving paranoia makes him seem in need of some ‘nightmare control spray.”
This was the American stance in the fifties. I think, for the majority of Americans, it still is. Maybe they need to remember their own history, and discard the revisionist fantasies of Trump’s Rasputin, Steve Bannon. This is not an America made great – it’s an America brought low by greed and selfishness. Not fighting, as one might think, to serve the people, but rather racing to the bottom to suck corporate dollars, aggressively and maliciously pursuing a race to the bottom.
where democracy is shoved aside as unfriendly to business, where opinion (literally) trumped logic, and the slaughter of millions of innocents barely raises an eyebrow.
Perhaps Huxley, in Brave New World, understood our impressionability more than Orwell did in 1984 … it’s not that we are being denied books or access to information, it’s that we prefer entertainment to knowledge.
“The world’s nuclear clock sits at one second to midnight .. but first, a word from our sponsor.” 
And, in what I consider truly tragic, we still have to somehow find a sense of trust in those we elect to lead us into this uncertain future, and I don’t know if we can suspend that much disbelief any more. There comes a point at which we simply can’t deny that each successive political ‘saviour’ is just a new mask on an old face of treachery, bought and paid for by market forces.
Despite no recent Prime Minister having been elected with a clear majority or mandate, sweeping changes that will affect Canadians for generations have been put into place over the last few decades, with barely a whimper. Or, if a whimper was murmured, it was simply ignored. At best, we changed lobsters and continued the dance.
From History Today, ” If I was forced to name the worst year, it would probably be 1914. In July of that year, a European order that had brought peace, prosperity and extraordinary artistic and scientific progress, began to unravel. The vast conflict that followed led directly to the Russian Revolution, Nazi Germany, the Holocaust, the atomic bomb, the Cold War and the mess that is the modern Middle East. Only in 1989, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, did we enter a relatively stable period – the ‘End of History’ – before it came crashing down on September 11th, 2001. ”
te to Mary. The normalization calmed their fears, and made people realize that they could relate to a drastic social change.
We want to pay as little as possible for any given thing. Corporations heard us; they outsourced manual labour to countries where they could pay lower salaries. And so those jobs, which we used to do here, no longer exist.
And what role will self-driving vehicles play in a future economy? Long haul truckers, cab drivers and couriers will find themselves out of work – not tomorrow, but within the next decade. And that’s a whole lot of drivers.
When Trump said, “For many decades, we’ve enriched foreign industry at the expense of American industry; subsidized the armies of other countries” while depleting our own. And,: “The wealth of our middle class has been ripped from their homes and then redistributed all across the world, ” he was outlining ” a world in which foreign relations are collapsed into a zero-sum game. They gain, we lose. ” (
The order was signed as many were on planes, en route to America.
Political parties that relied upon cutting taxes rather than shoring up their infrastructures and their citizens needs, just to get re-elected, are to be blamed. Every party, every country, big and small, passed that big buck along to their successors, enriching corporations and themselves in the process, while ignoring and angering their constituents, who had trusted them to explain what they needed to know and understand about their future.
And so, there were no television series like The Mary Tyler Moore Show, that allowed citizens to normalize a changing present and a very different future. Instead, there was a rise in conspiratorial, dystopic, dramas, and a rush to fairytale land, that deified cartoon superheroes, and fantasy characters. Reality shows, that weren’t really reality, appealed to the minority and the niche groups. And an entire genre of television catered to the needs of ‘preppers,‘ those that would stand alone and defend what little they had when the inevitable (to them) collapse of society occurred.
And certainly, there were good times to be had in the 60’s and 70’s, and I have tons of fond fuzzy memories of elephant pants and go-go boots, Sassoon haircuts, and Mary Quant and Twiggy makeup tips.
One of my favorite memories of my own misspent youth is of the first and only time I saw Janis Joplin perform live. The Montreal Forum, November 4, 1969. It was every thing I had hoped for – and more. I was first struck dumb by her presence and energy, and when that had passed, I rushed, like the thousands of others in the audience, to the stage front, to try and capture just a hint of that glorious essence by being closer to her.
And in that time, we who were actually young when Janis was young, who first heard these songs on our radios or our portable record players or were in the audience when she toured, bottle firmly in hand, and wailed her way into our hearts, were able once more to revisit a time when everything seemed possible.
But the gift that Kudelka gave us, by channelling Joplin’s spirit and music, was a chance to go back to our adolescence in our minds, to forget momentarily that, while we may be wiser, we are also greyer, stiffer, and a lot less supple than we once were. This Janis, then, a Janis Joplin that survived, and was celebrating a 74th birthday by once again sharing her talent .. this Janis relit the candle that aging, politics, and a general societal malaise seeks to extinguish in our hearts.
For me, this year has begun differently than many I’ve experienced in the past. Selling the house and moving into the city has brought a lot more freedom into my life. That light at the end of the tunnel turned out to be not an oncoming train, but rather a beautiful fat moon, always just out of reach, but wonderful to see.
e able to relax into your life and appreciate what you’ve got. Enough to be in control of your own life, but not so much that you seek to control others.
But I do have a sneaking suspicion that many in government are not who or what they seem. Remember that Outer Limits episode, Dead Man’s Switch, where a lowly soldier mans the button that controls activation of a final revenge weapon that will wipe out the earth should invading aliens turn out to be hostile? The final scene reveals that aliens are indeed parasites controlling the actions of those in charge, while the earth lies in ruin.
It seems odd to me that bars and restaurants are content to open around eight p.m. ish, or be open during the day, but empty, until some mythical magic time when bands appear out of the mist. There’s money to be made in the feeding and entertaining of people who start the day early, and are ready to rock by dinner time.
There’s a lot of room at the table, and a place for everyone, regardless of what time they want to listen, or what flavour they want to feast upon. Toronto’s got the musical munchies .. feed it!
There really is a delicious irony in the GOP’s recoil and revulsion at Trump’s latest faux pas – oh, sorry what I meant to say was, admission of serial sexual assault.
And it’s not because they’re embarrassed at his vulgarity. No, I think it goes way deeper than that. Trump just put into words what they have been putting into practice and law for at least a decade.
And, just as in the Bible, those most viciously condemned and punished are women. The Republican Party has effectively taken one giant step backward for mankind, a giant step forward for a Christian form of Sharia law.
And Mike Pence, Trump’s running mate for VP, has, as Governor of Indiana, been a huge proponent of controlling the pussies of Indiana’s women, insisting upon invasive medical procedures, (forced transvaginal ultrasound before having an abortion; state rape by any ones definition) while ensuring a lack of access to the morning-after pill or abortion options. And as recently as March 2016, he signed a bill that required that aborted fetuses receive what amounts to a funeral.
So spare me the pearl clutching, Republicans. Spare me the supposed indignation over Bill Clinton‘s CONSENSUAL if stupid fumblings with a starry eyed intern, and your belief that Hillary Clinton was his enabler, who should somehow have been able to control her husband, who was at the time the most powerful man of the land, and thereby disqualifying her from being President herself, two decades later.
See, that’s the thing, Republicans … women are people, not stereotypes. Sure, you can point to a woman or two that seems to embody the qualities you’re decrying, but that’s got as much relevance as saying that you saw a dog with three legs once or twice, so all dogs with four legs are anomalies. Stereotypes are personal observances rushed to judgment, nothing but ” a widely held but fixed and oversimplified image or idea of a particular type of person or thing.”
It makes his repeated insistence that, “there’s nobody that has more respect for women than I do,” a cause for serious alarm.
His entire campaign has been built around a fairytale of his own making, insisting that America is “in such a desperate place that a wild card like Trump is worth the risk. Trump fans talk like they live in a western town, where the banditos are so out of control, only a maverick gunslinger can save them. A man with no tax code, the fastest tweet in the West, covered in man tan. ” 
Trump’s vision of America resembles a zombie apocalypse, where the good townsfolk do battle against the bad zombies, killing with impunity, taking what they want or need when they find it, and yes, treating women as disposable chattel that the most powerful can have without any niceties.
As the denunciations from his former supporters, and calls for him to quit the race continue to stream in, I’m fairly certain we can expect more of that doubling down that Trump does so well.
A few weeks ago, I was having lunch with friends in the Market, when Molly Johnson came bopping along. Molly may be a Canadian icon – a singer, songwriter, broadcaster and philanthropist – but that day she was a woman on a mission, distributing posters and postcards to the local shops, in aid of her latest project – the first annual Kensington Market Jazz Festival. It was the first I’d heard of it. When I asked how I could help, she asked if my friend Barbette and I would volunteer to handle door duties at some of the gigs.
Don Cullen was the Pied Piper of Possibilities, of that first break, when the world was wide open to the new. New music, new sounds … whatever could be dreamed up, this was a place where it could be showcased.
frustratedboomers 