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- Written by: Rod Boyle
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I will give you this, that if you've found this, that art to you isn't some accurately rendered portrait of a duck, panda-bear or wolf. That you've set the bar a little bit higher and have some appreciation of both the history and role of art...
That said, there's no accounting for taste. Still, I'll try and sum up my own tastes and expectations below...
The role of the artist is to open us up to new experiences, thoughts, feelings, realizations and understandings. These things are not done from the center, they are done from the outskirts, from the margins...you cannot see or describe the shape of the world if you live at the center, from the center you see the world spreads out limitless and without end, rather you must live and travel upon it's edges...
...the artist, they delineate and describe the shape of our world, our expectations, of emotion, of love, of thought, they open up to us the doors to worlds we are too fearful and inadequate to explore ourselves firsthand...
...there is the myth of the self-destructive artist, Orpheus, any one of a number of popular singers, Van-Gogh, ... the myth survives, because what do we expect of them? That they travel further than us, experience more than us, that they feel, love, understand, intuit more than us, and that they somehow bring us back and translate some portion of their understanding, so that we may, vicariously, live through that minute remainder of their experience, the bored suburban housewife who never has been camping, a picture of a wolf upon her wall, the articulate university graduate, never been kissed, Klimt's "The Kiss", the pedant, never outdoors a single night his entire life, "Starry Starry Night", the voyeur, Egon Schiele...from a person's taste in art we may somewhere discern where their life is lacking, what speaks to them...
...For those who would live, they need nothing, they need only to create, for the rest there is the artist, that shared and subdivided, infinitely replicated portion of life that is dulled the moment it is shared and discovered, perhaps only music stands up to the endless replication and division of art, everything else wears thin...but if you were wondering why art doesn't grow in the suburbs, why, it's the same reason that love doesn't, life doesn't, intelligence doesn't, art demands a richer soil, and the comfortably numb will never weep for joy or sadness to fertilize it...
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
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Now it seems, what with the elections recently passed in Canada and Alberta, and elections happening in the US, that we're not being offered a viable selection of candidates to choose from.
Popularity is not a qualification.
Now while leadership courses abound, few offer any measurable increase in skills and none are relevant towards leading a country. And everyone seems to have their own idea as to what constitutes "leadership" - in Alberta, most people feel that business is a great background, as if the country were somehow a corporation that exists to serve shareholders. While some aspects of the metaphor hold up, what generally transpires then is you end up with a government that favors corporations over people, and a fundamental principle of government is "For the people, by the people", not "For the corporations, by the corporations".
Education - degrees in Economics, Drama, Teaching, Political Science - where relevant embraces only a narrow aspect of government, or embraces theory over fact, and where irrelevant serves only to make the leaders a laughingstock.
So what then, would be an appropriate combination of skills and background, that would serve as a prerequisite for leading the country? Implicitly we like a post-secondary education, a church-going family man (married, with children), it's nice if you speak French (Canada is bilingual, after all), it's swell if you've a successful business background (inspires confidence), but each of these skills on their own and taken together hardly qualify anyone to run a Country.
But explicitly, what qualifications should we ask for? If we were running a help-wanted ad for Prime Minister, what would be some of the skills and background we'd look for?
Probably someone who had lived a fair number of years both in the East and West of the country, to gain an broad understanding of each of the provinces expectations of government. Too frequently we select leaders that have lived their entire lives in a single province, and govern as if that province were the world. A demonstrable understanding, first-hand, of the global economy, and of the history of the country, a shared determination as to the future of the country, perhaps someone who had financed their own education (because those people who have had their education given to them have a very different view of the world than those who have had to earn it), and perhaps favor candidates who had lived abroad a minimum of X years in countries that differed Q,Y,Z in terms of politics, GDP, etc.
These are just suggestions with a view at making you think: What background would your ideal candidate have? And what prerequisites would you consider imperative for the governance of a Country?
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
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An interesting article on some new and as of yet inexplicable relations amongst Prime Numbers.
Link: https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160313-mathematicians-discover-prime-conspiracy/
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
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And when people tell you that their sick, unwell, and you think to yourself of how much of our sickness, unwellness, disease is simply a result of our wealth...
We are spoiled, for sure, think of Obesity, an epidemic here, admittedly with smoking it prevalently affects the lower classes, but think, our poorest citizens can still afford to eat too much, eat out, eat fast food, and smoke, and compare this to those people starving and you'll acknowledge that we have perhaps a little too much money. And there are the things like cancer, heart attacks, strokes, diabetes (type 2), dentistry, most of which things trace back to lifestyle choices - diet, exercise, and otherwise. And where they don't they come back to things like life expectancy - old age, dementia, Alzheimers', more privileges of affluence, these things in some countries they are struggling to attain...
Addictions, nicotine, alcohol, whatever else, these have to be afforded, a sure sign of too much money...
And there are the awful psychological afflictions, things like narcissism, neurosis, boredom...all of which are privileges we take for granted, despise and treat even...how fortunate we are...
Our wealth is killing us...
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Since the idea of restricting firearm sales and ownership in the US is so repugnant I've come up with a different strategy for eliminating Gun Violence.
First of all, it would involve the renaming of guns to reflect their intent and purpose. Away with the cool names like "HK SAM" or "AK 47" or "GLOCK" or "Smith and Wesson". In with brands like "The Mall Destroyer", "The Schoolyard Chum", "Bully Bully" ("The tragic but understandable reaction to bullying? Really? WTF PEOPLE!"), "The Terrorists...", "Gangsta's Choice", "Clear and transparent abuse of Authority", & "I AM THE LAW", "Above the Law", "The Compensator", "Revenge", the "Al Queda", the "Xenophobe", the "Vigilante", the "I lose fist-fights", I'm only scraping the surface here folks, there's a radical re-branding underway and the possibilities are endless. Only one rule - name every gun to it's manufactured intent and purpose.
Secondly, and this is a tough sell, but let me explain. Make every gun manufacturer and distributor accountable for the misdeeds of the weapon. I know, I know, there is something so fundamentally un-American about holding any corporation accountable or liable for it's actions or products, but such accountability would:
- Make the gun distributors a whole lot fussier about who they sold their shit to.
- Raise prices of guns, which given their awful possibilities should really be a little more pricey than they are. The increase in price would be necessary to pay out the many foreseeable lawsuits.
Well, that was easy enough. Now on to world peace...