I don’t know if Naomi Klein coined the term, Blockadia, but it is, it seems, the new name for universal protest.  And it is growing.

Before we get into what that term means, this post is a small diatribe about the pathetic excuse we refer to as the media, a mild condemnation of BIG GREEN (Sierra Club, WWF, etc.) and a note of optimism regarding the way we all work together when faced with threat.

Seems we don’t rely on the BIG LIE MACHINE as much as I thought.

OK…Blockadia (the term for protest Klein employs for resistance all over the globe) is a grass roots, local and disorganized force for resistance to BIG INDUSTRY beyond the local level.  It is (mostly and currently) protest against the petroleum based economy in essence and, while likely a bit hypocritical (in that protesters drive to the protest site), the protesters are totally aware that petroleum AND BIG BUSINESS is the root cause of global warming and that they have to do something about it.

Seems the first thing they are doing is stopping the petro projects before they get off the ground.  In BC (where I live) popular anti-petro sentiment has grown to the extent that the Northern Gateway project is likely dead-in-the-water.  Kinder Morgan’s pipeline expansion into Vancouver is also facing overwhelming resistance.  After the disaster that was Mount Polle, a mine with open holding ponds will likely be severely resisted, too. The hoi poloi is protesting BIG industry all over the place.

The news is that this is coming from local people, disorganized except for the fact that they are the local and most directly affected by whatever it is they are protesting. Basically, Blockadia is NIMBY grown large. And NIMBY doesn’t do press releases or fund raise.

I write about it because Naomi did.  But the shock in her writing is that this kind of thing is a local phenomenon everywhere.  From rail-lines carrying toxic sludge through small communities to refinery expansions in big cities, people all over the world are organizing locally and saying NO.  Even Mongolians are protesting coal mining in China!

And there is no well-funded, well-known BIG GREEN MACHINE behind them.  These are local people resisting BIG INDUSTRY simply because they are against any more earth-poisoning at any level. It would appear that green consciousness is alive and kicking hard all over the world.

Ironically, fracking seemed to be the straw that broke the dam.  Even tho oil is the big bogey-man, it was fracking being done close to affluent neighbourhoods that turned mainstream system supporters into radical freaks.  Behind every cloud…..

‘Course, you won’t hear any of this from the media.  “Who cares if a group of neighbours blockades a pipeline extension in New Brunswick. Lead the news with the puppy stuck in the well and cut to the weather!”   But it turns out that particular local protest in NB did make the news after all due to the RCM Police over reaction at the time and their snipers aiming rifles at moms and tots.  But BIG media is generally NOT covering the BIGGER story of quiet, locally-based but international resistance to BIG OIL.  And it is happening all over the world.  Even the Nigerians are starting to fight back despite the Niger Delta being likely the most polluted-but-still-populated place on earth!

The real story is international resistance to BIG institutions.  You get puppies on your local news station instead.  But somehow the people are getting the message.

Does that mean they will win?  Who knows?  In lesser countries protesters go to jail for years simply for protesting.  Some are disappeared.  Hundreds if not thousands have already been killed by police and even we in the supposedly freer countries have had grannies carted off to jail and youth gassed and beaten.  BIG INDUSTRY pays for government and government pays the police.  Conflict is likely to escalate before it ebbs.

“Dave, why tell me this?”

Well, two reasons: people should know that their local protest, if not part of a larger organized movement is part of a larger consciousness movement.  If you are protesting the removal of mountain tops in Appalachia or fracking in Greece or pipelines through Wyoming, know that more and more people are doing what you are doing except they are doing it in their local area.  Resistance is universal and international and you should know that others are on your side at least in spirit and sentiment.  And all this on a scale that you are not likely aware of.

And secondly, I suggested in the last blog that conflict will escalate not only because police actions foster resistance but because people the world over are fed up with the BIGGIES and they are resisting.  That one of the BIGGIES is their government and the corrupted party politics system has yet to be openly resisted may just be a matter of time ….or it may never come to that if government ever gets a clue and starts doing the right thing.  Regardless, everything else BIG will feel the increasing resistance of the people.

Somebody had to point that out to us.  And Naomi Klien did (THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING). She makes a compelling argument that the revolution has begun in some small but growing corners of the world.  And, implicit in her message is an invitation: you might want to consider getting on board.

“100 years from now only little girls will ride horses, men will walk on the moon, and Henry Weinhard’s will be sold as far away as Denver!”

And 100 years from now there will be more Chinese in Canada than there are now people, everyone will vote Green and the ordinary person will live their entire lives in one building.

Henry Weinhard did their classic beer ad with the benefit of hindsight but the point was still valid: major shifts happen and they are, to some extent, predictable.  You just have to look.

China simply can’t continue to grow they way they have without having a spill-over or high-pressure release mechanism and BC has already proven to be willing and able to accommodate.  That trend will only continue.  It is no coincidence that Vancouver is the second most expensive city in the world to live (by house prices) after Hong Kong!  We are, in many ways, the same market. One thing is indisputable: the Vancouver market is Chinese driven.

Everyone who continues to vote (and that number will continue to drop because voting does not result in sufficient change) will be voting a GREEN political message even if that message is eventually co-opted by the main parties (as it is now being and like all popular messages have been).  The Liberals and the Conservatives will be green. Climate change and pollution are becoming the biggest threat to human existence and most people know that. Given enough time, even the dumb-as-merde Conservatives will get the point.

And putting living residences downtown where people work only makes more and more sense if you are going to be stuck in the matrix anyway.  You can already be born, raised, entertained, housed, work and socialize in some large complexes in Hong Kong, New York and Chicago.  And, I assume, some other large cities.  It is only zoning laws that restrict the modern vertical village impatiently waiting to happen.  The buildings will get bigger, car-sharing will grow and that life-in-a-box, all-in-one convenience-plex will multiply. Plug and play.

Already in Vancouver, one can live their entire existence in the square mile that is False Creek and Yaletown.

No, I am not going to try to predict more for 100 years from now.  That is not the point. The point is that life is somewhat predictable, trending is visible to everyone and the big forces affecting life are also somewhat predictable. Ergo, the future is somewhat predictable. If you can’t see far into the future nor very accurately, you can certainly see a few years ahead and you will likely be pretty close in your vision.

So, what do we see in the near future?  It appears that more, not less, conflict is coming. Many experts believe climate change will precipitate mass migration and already mass movements of people have proven disruptive.  There will be more underemployment – which is the new unemployment.  More obesity.  More mental illness.  More homelessness. The middle class will disappear.

More and more state/police/legal controls will be put in place – as they have been increasingly since the first world war and as they seem to be accelerating more and more lately. And those controls will create the friction and the very disturbances they are there to prevent.  Police states create criminal responses.

John F. Kennedy famously said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

But – and here’s the real news – many people will simply opt out of all that.  Many people will go off the grid, off the radar and off the social media.  They will not vote.  They will not work in the ‘system’ and they will become a real ‘underclass’, a relatively feral, passively revolutionary contingent that cooperates amongst themselves and like-minded groups away from the high-density ‘hives’.

The revolution so long predicted will be passive.  Non-violent.  It will be quiet.  And it will be by way of a subversive black market, disconnect, invisible rejection of the hive.  It will be almost an evolutionary departure.

And 100 years from now, the new alien will be them.

There is a great deal of misunderstanding about the publishing industry and this statement can be made by me even after having just published.  I don’t get it.

Well, Sal may get it, but I don’t.  It’s a mystery to me, it really is.  Financially, it makes no sense. None.  The printer takes the first ten dollars and the shipper (Canada Post) takes the next twelve.  The tax man takes 12% on top of that.  You are at almost $25.00 and counting. Put your book in a bookstore and they add 40% or almost another $10.00.  The book – with nothing yet shared with the author or the editor is now $35.00.  That is the way it is unless you go the AMAZON route and then printing and shipping are all included at $10.00.  A 12.99 cent book (ours) yields $3.00 a copy.

I can’t park my car for an hour in downtown Vancouver for $3.00.

So, you don’t write for the money.

You don’t write for the fame, either.  There may be some, someday, if you are really, really good but, if you are mediocre, fame proves more than elusive, it exists only in absentia.   And how could it be otherwise?  If you advertise, you lose your $3.00.  If you don’t, you don’t get your pathetic dollop of fame.  Hard choice.  The only other way is to self-promote by walking around and talking about yourself all day long.  But that is such a huge chore and fraught with logistics and, of course, costs, not to mention embarrassment, alienation and being shunned.  Doing book and pony shows at local libraries is a relatively easy way to make $30.00 if you are willing to spend $40.00 to do so.

So, fame and money are not valid reasons for doing this.  That just leaves invalid reasons and, being me, I have a few.  I wanted to share my rants with the world, vent my spleen, crack some whacked out jokes and outrage the targets of my literary barbs.  But Sal took all those out. Said something about being nice or saying nothing at all.  Another concept I have yet to grasp. So the book is ‘nicer’ than the author by a large margin.  And I am not so sure any of my benign, nice or even eccentric views on things actually made the cut.

Ravens, yes. Politics, not so much.

It does help to address the basic requirements of competency, however, and so that has to be the reason I offer up for this exercise.  The one I cling to.  The one I offer up as collateral for the loan I will need soon.

Competent Man: “A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, con a ship, design(and build) a building, write a sonnet (book), balance accounts (easy when you aspire to zero), build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly.

“Specialization is for insects.”— Robert Heinlein, Time Enough for Love

WARNING!!  RANT!!

Our government is changing.  And it is changing for the worse.  I know this is NOT news for many people (especially the five or six who read this blog), they already feel that to be true.  In fact, many Conservative party supporters are even feeling that way and, it seems, over two dozen sitting Conservative MPs are NOT running again – presumably BECAUSE of their feelings toward Harper.  That says something.

But politics is not why I am blogging this time.  At least not partisan politics.  Last night I watched on TV an ad for Canada’s military along the lines of the ‘Be all you can be’ ads the Americans run.  It glorified our military.  It heaped praise on soldiers for simply being soldiers.  It was blatant boosterism and sickening propaganda.

Yes, I know that these ads are not the first.  But they were the latest.

Now don’t get me wrong.  I think any person who signs up to keep our country safe is a good person.  Well intended, anyway.  I have no problem with that.  And if they actually have their mettle tested in battle or even in a peacekeeping mission, my respect for their commitment to our country increases even more.  I have no problem with soldiers and, in fact, I have intimate second hand knowledge of their sacrifices as my father was catastrophically wounded in WW2. He suffered incredibly and we, his family, suffered alongside him.

And that is the point, really.  War should NOT be glorified.  My father paid a huge price  for his dedication to Canada. His life was ruined (he had a 100% disability).  Being a soldier is nothing to be proud of until you HAVE TO BE a soldier. Then and only then is it something to be hailed as heroic.  And my father would likely disagree even then…“how the hell does a young man or woman know what they are getting themselves into when they sign up? War is hell and so is surviving it.  Don’t think otherwise, there is nothing good about it. And once you know how horrible it is, you just want out.  People should only do it when it is absolutely necessary and, even then, they should think twice!”

Harper’s government spent millions in television advertising waxing boastful about Canada’s War of 1812. Same for the Franklin Expedition.  Same for other stupid historical parodies like the Fathers of Confederation ads.  Harper spends even more millions now extolling military virtue at every turn and even going so far as to saber-rattle against Russia (Ukraine) and actually sending a rusty saber or two against ISIS/ISIL.  Canada is fast adopting a bombastic and pugilistic face where before we presented a neutral, peace-making presence.

If that was all there was to it, I’d just ignore the imbecile and hope that we eliminate his weirded-out personal agenda and influence from our country in the next election.  The problem is that he is leaving a legacy, a smear of stupid and evil that will stink and linger even after he has left the building.  Harper is a disease and we have not been inoculated.

“Why would you say that, Dave?  Won’t getting rid of Harper be sufficient?”

No.  Propaganda is an insidious thing.  People tend to believe what is brainwashed into them.  The inundating Harper-messages are sinking (and stinking) in.  Another stupid ad on ‘being a hardworking Canadian and getting a $4000 loan so that you can work in the trades’ runs even more often.  And there is a hidden message in favour of the oil industry in that, too.  Not to mention indebting youth for their education.  We are already tainted.

And it just feels to me as if it is ramping up.  Last night’s ad raised the hair on the back of my neck.  I have smelled the rank odour of politics gone awry for some time.  Last night I am pretty sure I also smelled a rat.

I haven’t been writing as much lately.  Don’t have that much to say, I guess.  Think about it: the last post was about walking a dog!  How sad is that?

Things still happen, of course.  Life is still set to ‘run’ even tho it might be on ‘sleep’ or ‘hibernate’ a bit more.  It is just that it is not quite so interesting right now.  The mansion is nearing completion and so our ‘gig’ here will end soon.  But that is more than okay, we are looking forward to it.  The book is launched (as we have repeated ad nauseam) and that is especially good, even tho there is a lot of follow up still to be done.  Actually, the follow up is a smidge onerous for Sal and when she complained about it, my son said, “Hey! Suck it up.  Life is not all fun and games, ya know?”  

Haunting words, those.  He heard them from someone else decades before.

My daughter called, “The lizard is dead!  I think I may have killed it!  Ohmygawd!”  And so we consoled her on the death of her friend’s bearded dragon she was caring for.  “Life is tough and then you die and so suck it up…oh never mind…sorry for the cliche and equally as sorry for your loss.”  

Then the next day, “It’s aaaaaalllliiiiveee!”  Seems the dragon went into hibernation or sleep mode.  So, dull must be going around.   Even for lizards.  January is a slow month, I guess.

I have picked up some more ‘stuff’ to cart back home.  Really good stuff.  Most of it heavy. But it’s all good even if it is going to be heavy work and it isn’t all fun and games. And slow is okay for me. Really. Semi-hibernation is just fine.  We all need to take it a bit slower now and then. No complaints.

So sometimes the cliches have to be modified a bit.

I try NOT to live a cliche.  I try NOT to be trite.  I figure if it is trite or cliche, I can read about it. Or watch it on TV’s so-called news.  It is my duty to seek out that which is NOT so ordinary, not so predictable, not so ordinary.  If life is to be full, I have to make it so.

Well, once in awhile, anyway.

Mind you, what with all the time spent sleeping, eating, ablutions, working and time in traffic, there is precious little opportunity for the new and magical without a struggle. Dull seems to take up so much of your time if you let it. You really have to work at finding the fun and games.  System requirements are such that even search time is limited and time spent actually doing any magic disrupts the ever-full routine of eating and sleeping and such.

Finding the adventure starts with finding the time.  And finding the time may just start with recognizing the dull.

So Sal thinks we should get a really macho 4×4 and drive to Tierra del Fuego.  We are not going to do that! (El Salvador alone scared the hell out of us – what is she thinking?)  But at least she is looking out for the next chapter of fun and games. That’s good.  That’s really good.  That is the first step to finding it.  I am currently still in sleep/hibernation mode and, because I still have some fun and games planned for this coming season (greenhouse, etc.) I am NOT looking very much at all to the distant future but I am happy that she is.

There may be another adventure in the offing yet.

There is a portion of the river, the seawall and the beach in West Vancouver that is designated an off-leash dog-and-husband park.  We go there almost every day.  The walk is less than a kilometer long and, when slowed down to a mosey, takes about an hour. We sometimes run over.  I mosey slowly.  But it is not all my fault.  We also stop to talk dog with all the people we now know.  Sally joined the West Van Portie (an abbreviation for Portuguese Water dogs) Walk-and-talk Group and we encounter a member or two on each visit to the park.

I even chime in now and again but just to inject little rude-but-funny-to-me comments that usually brings the discussion to a quick halt and we can then return to moseying.  I like to think of myself as the necessary punctuation so often missing in dog conversations.   Without me, they would talk forever.

But the park is not just for Porties.  All manner, breed, creed, colour and type walk there and, of course, they bring their dogs, an equally motley bunch.  The East Ambleside dog-walk is an international, universal, all-species meeting ground and, on weekends, it gets pretty crowded.  The dog-park is popular during the week but triply so on weekends.  I would estimate an average of 60-75 dogs and owners are there at any given time on the weekdays and up to 200 on weekends.

But here’s the point: despite everyone and their dog being different in every way and, unnervingly at times, all are also off leash and free to move and behave as they like, I have never witnessed a dog-fight.  Yes, I have noticed a few humans having a minor set-to but the dogs get along like it’s a love-in. Fiddich doesn’t actually like dogs(or many humans, either) but even he can tolerate all and sundry for the hour or so it takes to sniff a few select butts.  He looks forward to the walk even if it is bereft of any close friends.

There are signs everywhere, of course, telling everyone what they and their dog can and cannot do but few dogs read and even fewer owners it seems read English.  Or care. This is Freedom Point for the dog crowd and they exercise their self-anointed rights to do what dogs and dog owners do.  With the exception of a perverse but disciplined obsession with their dog’s poop production, there seems little to restrict any living thing down there.  It is not wild and crazy, it is very civilized, but it is not policed, monitored, CCTV’d or overseen in any way.  Dogs and owners are left to their own devices and they seem to be able to do that without any acts of terror of the human or canine variety.  Imagine that?

The reason for all this peaceful anarchy is that the land belongs to the First Nations and they manage their people, dogs and property on a trust-based, who-really-cares basis and they live and let live.  Yes, you read  that right: the First Nations have pretty much conceded a stretch of beach, river and the land around it to dog walkers.  We are not charged for the privilege.  We are not watched.  We walk our dogs and we go home cleaning up after ourselves.  And no one feels compelled to make a buck or taser anyone.

You want a taste of living off the grid?  Go to the East Ambleside off-leash dog park; that is as close as you are going to get to freedom in Vancouver.  Maybe just for fun – take a lama or a pony on your walk instead of a dog – no one will care.

We asked for a striking-but-mature model to pose for promotional pictures and lucked out by signing Ms M.C. Hart, the famous eastern book reviewer and former publisher in Peterborough, Ontario.  Ms Hart was very clear in her endorsement: “You can’t pay me enough!” and “I am having a real Read Island experience.  Pass the wine.  It doesn’t hurt the author’s work that I am completely snowed in and can’t get away. Luckily we have a very nice and hungry fireplace crackling away keeping us company.”

Ms Hart’s book reviews are always short and pithy.

“I have nothing to say!” said her husband and former editor, John Hart.  For John to be left speechless is quite a compliment in itself.  He has never been short or pithy.

We regard both these comments as ringing endorsements for the book – because they were so unforced and natural.   Almost screamed over the phone, actually….They ended their review by saying, “Please, no more questions.  The work speaks for itself.  Volumes. Much easier to read volumes than the actual book!”

By then the bad weather back east had disconnected our conversation.

But we took their last words to mean that maybe we should write a sequel…?

(I am kidding, of course, MC and John are two of our close partners, friends and supporters

AFTER THAT POST A BOX FULL O’ BOOKS CAME!!  

That’s enough time spent dwelling on the book, don’t you think?  Ready for something else?  A bit on economics………….perhaps?  Anyway, there’s a link to book sales on the side-bar now……..

On numbers:

Much of our life is influenced by ‘THE‘ statistical-type numbers we read about from the value of the dollar, the number of people employed, the number of immigrants, number of books sold, stock market indexes, barrels of oil, GDP and so on. We gather data and we gather data in the form of numbers and measurements.  We then ‘crunch’ them, sort them, analyze them, account for them and reconcile them.  And then we call all that ‘the economy’.  WE (the people) don’t actually do much of that crunching ourselves – not as individuals, anyway. Government does that for us.  It is the government that knows the economy.

And, to coin a phrase; government is an ass.

Seems most of the numbers we and other countries have been using for the longest time are woefully inadequate and completely out of date.  The leading indicators are not, in fact, leading us anywhere except into ignorance.  We collect more data than ever before but we then make it conform to a leading indicator model like GDP which is not an indicator of anything anymore.  We are making BIG GIANT policy with all the wrong numbers.

All this came to light in a flash of insight recently for the US Bureau of Statistics that concluded the above and then readjusted the US GDP overnight by $400 billion dollars. In a blink, their economy morphed into something different than it was the day before.

This kind of news is boring for most people and so it should be.  The leading indicators are lies and the statistics used to create them are damned lies.  And we don’t really listen to them anyway.  Most of us just know ‘in our bones’ that they are wrong or irrelevant and that the cost of living, for example, is rising higher than official Stats Canada says it is. We know they are lying.

“But why would StatsCan lie?”

Well, there are a lot of reasons, many of which are political. The main reason, however, is that it is in the nature of a bureaucracy NOT to change what it does and has been doing yet it is in the nature of human endeavours to change all the time.  Virtually all the leading indicator formulas were designed just before or soon after the second world war.  That is when the revised definitions of what constituted employment, what constituted a service and what was a product was more well defined and so were the metrics for measuring it all for the purpose of describing the economy and the world in which we live.

And then along came computers and other interesting inventions.  Not to mention a gazillion new types of business.  Everything changed, but the founding metrics didn’t.

For instance;  if you buy a car, that purchase is ‘measured’ as part of the country’s GDP. But if you plan to buy a car and drive around to look at them for two months, that effort is not.  Translated on a larger scale :Inventions that make it to market are measured, research and development is NOT measured.  Think how that lack might skew Harper’s appreciation for research and the sciences? 

And that is just one small example.  It was that kind of realization that had the US Bureau of Statistics revise their numbers – they had not been giving value to R&D.

But they screw up in other ways, too.  Interestingly, they eventually came to measure natural disasters as part of GDP.  In a weird way.  New Orleans gets wiped out – and no measurement is made that impacts GDP (they don’t subtract).  Then New Orleans is later rebuilt: the rebuilding is measured and makes a big impact on GDP. The fact that the state of Louisiana has had no net improvement (even after reconstruction) and has suffered a great interruption belies the truth of it all.

“So, why tell me all this?”

Well, mostly because the leading indicators indicate virtually nothing useful anymore.  So don’t look at them too seriously.  But the reason I am so interested is because I have a tendency to compare what I feel, see and know to what I am being told.  And, of course, I have concluded that the great THEY don’t tell the truth.  Now I know that half of that untruth is simply bad accounting.  They don’t KNOW the truth!

And I already knew the other half was just purposeful propaganda.

Bottom line: you have to look around and see what you see, you have to let your own senses tell you what’s what.  If you rely on StatsCan, the stock market indexes, the dollar, the price of real estate, you are, at best, getting a very inaccurate picture.

Probably the greatest single example (until recently) of a  major real-life indicator still unmeasured has been the air and water.  GDP would grow but liveability would diminish and even breathability was suffering in really bad places like big cities in China.  Rivers were and still are dying.  But health and well-being (nature or human) wasn’t measured and factored into any kind of economic metric.  Air and water weren’t ‘owned’ or taxed and so they weren’t measured.  A healthy river is NOT given a value nor is a polluted one.

Ergo: who cares?  Harper calls those who care about immeasureables,’ radicals’.

People measured particulates per million in our air and water but not in relation to human economic output. If it wasn’t linked to economics it wasn’t really measured.  Or valued anyway.  If it is not measured, it is ignored. And so China stupidly continued to poison it’s citizens and countryside blind to the cost of the cloud of poison in the sky and rivers. Until it was almost too late.  Maybe it is too late.  That scenario still has to play out.

“Is this an environmental rant?”

No.  This is simply a blog about lies, damned lies and statistics.  There would be no point, it seems, from believing any so-called facts from the likes of our official fact-deliverers (for the average Canadian that means media and politicians).  In other words: everything the media, the government, StatsCan, Prime Minister, Premier, Auditor General, Bank of Canada says is wrong and I think we can extrapolate that kind of mistake-sharing to all corporations, institutions and all officialdom.

Lesson: conduct your learning and thinking on your own and make your life decisions as if THEY (govt. et al) are purposefully lying, using the wrong numbers and/or are measuring the wrong things….’cause they are!

Please forgive the lyrical title (from the musical, Fame).  But we are up and present on Amazon.com and Amazon.uk so the paper-version, printed-pages-and-cover book is now real!

http://www.amazon.com/Our-Life-Off-Grid-Couple/dp/0994014503

Although, Amazon.ca seems NOT YET to have it except in the Kindle version.  Sheesh!

This news is pretty good ’cause I had an interview on CBC Monday and I said it would be up in a day or so.  Thank God, it is!  The interview was only 6 minutes long on All Points West with Khalil Akhtar but that leaves only 9 minutes more to fill to satisfy my Andy Warhol’s quota of 15 minutes of fame.  Or one and half more interviews. Woohoo!

Oprah for nine minutes should do it, eh?

Now, just for the record: no one reading this has to buy the book.  You’ve likely already read it in blog-version, anyway.  The book is really just an interminable, mutated, cobbled blog diary hacked and blended into something half-readable by an editor who thinks the author mad most of the time, stupid all of the time and funny but once or twice every hundred pages.  Sal is pretty fond of me but she is still an enthusiastic and staunchly correct (politically, manners, subject and grammar) critic.  So, her reserved, British-side has curbed our optimism.  “We won’t get rich and famous and, if we do, it will be in spite of our literary abilities not because of them”.

Which is good because I would be weak around groupies.

But please feel free to take it out of the library – when they get it – which will be sooner rather than later if you make the request (hint).  You can use it for fire starter if you want because that will require the library to buy another copy.  In that way, we can guarantee sales without burdening our friends.

Anyway, we retain the movie rights.  That’s where all the action is.  We’re gonna get Willy to play the orca.  I figure Jack Black to play the raven, Kevin James to play me, Kiera Knightley will make a passable Sal if she works on her smile and builds some body strength while adding construction and literary skills to her haute cuisine abilities.  Make-up and special effects will have to make her cuter, tho.  Industrial Light and Magic if they want to get even close to the real Sally.

It may have to go animated….we’ll see.  Shrek could play me………….

I have been holding off posting these past few days because I wanted to announce that the book (Our Life Off the Grid) had been published but – as of this writing – it is still a few days away.  Our part is done but it is stuck in the Amazon pipeline.  They figure to have it up before the end of the week.  E-books on Kindle and Smashwords are available now. 

http://www.amazon.com/Our-Life-Off-Grid-Couple/dp/0994014503

So, apologies for the delay in the special announcement.  Instead, we will resume our regular programming always in progress.  Back to RANTS by DAVID.  Lucky you.

Advertising on TV is expensive and it gets more expensive as the networks rank the popularity of their shows.  Famously, the most expensive ads are Superbowl ads and, of course, the most popular sitcoms Like the Big Bang Theory rank right up there.  Ads for prime-time TV run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars for 15 seconds of exposure time. Typically, the companies with the greatest profit margins or largest market share take the most expensive slots and produce the most expensive ads.  Think: Coke, MacDonalds, Nissan, Ford, Tylenol, Charmin’ toilet paper and panty-liners.

Imagine my surprise to find that the greatest amount of expensive ad time lately is Canadian government sponsored propaganda.  I counted three out of four ads during a BIG Bang episode that boosted Confederation with John A MacDonald, Oil Pipelines as environmental stewards and a loan program for students to learn welding.  In a rub-it-in-your-face twist, the fourth ad was a repeat of the Confederation with John A. MacDonald ad.

The ad for John A. is blatant propaganda and even features a goal being scored by the Canadians at a World Cup event implying that the fathers of Confederation invented hockey or, at the very least, were in favour of it.  And we should all be proud.

Prior to that we were exposed to ads extolling the virtues and bravery of those who fought in the war of 1812.  That’s right, folks, stand up and be proud of your ancestors who fought the Americans two hundred years ago!  Before that we spent millions celebrating the ill-fated Franklin Expedition that saw dozens starve and freeze to death in the North.  For little or no reason.

How is it that a country that is dropping the ball on taking care of veterans, cutting back on health care and shorting education (except where they offer loans to young people) has millions if not billions to spend celebrating crap by advertising on the National Football League semi-finals?

Yesterdays NFL semi-finals were brought to you in large part by the Canadian government!

We shake our heads at the lies and propaganda of North Korea that deceive their people. We are alarmed at the lies and propaganda of the Chinese government that prohibit truth in the news and misinform the people.  We wonder at the mindless boosterism of the Americans and their false history movies, black flag ops, yellow ribbons, flags-on-porches and love-it-or-leave it slogans.  And we can only imagine the lies of Putin and African dictators as they lie to, rob and enslave their people.

But Harper is doing the same.  More subtly, I guess, but still pretty blatantly as far as I am concerned.  But subtle or blatant doesn’t matter.  Why is a government (a monopoly) spending our tax money to promote a distorted version of history massaged to look heroic?  Why are we being inundated with silly images of John A. MacDonald?  Does anyone in Canada want or even appreciate actors dressed in costume re-enacting some kind of perverted version of history?

When you combine the mis-telling of the lone nut-case shooting in Ottawa, the glorification of largely irrelevant history and the lies and obfuscations that passes for debate in parliament, when you add in the constant drum-beat for more police and security measures together with restricted freedoms and invasion of privacy and when you consider the abuses of power by big corporations, government and our very own police force, you have no choice but to compare all that to other dictatorial and corrupt governments throughout history and around the world.

And the comparison is getting way too similar.  It’s frightening.