Day: December 10, 2009

PZ Myers on death

We should feel grief. Pretending that they have ‘transcended’ into some novel quantum mechanical state in which their consciousness persists, or that they are shaking hands with some anthropomorphic spiritual myth in never-never land, does a disservice to ourselves. The pain is real. Don’t deny it. Use it to look at the ones you love who still live and see what you can do to make our existence now a little better, and perhaps a little more conducive to keeping our energies patterned usefully a little longer.

Correction REDUX

I know I haven’t been posting much about The Correction, but not because I haven’t been thinking about it. One of the reasons I took some time off (apart from the fact that I felt I had to) was that I knew the money I’ve earned or been handed due to no effort on my part is going to be worthless at some point.  I am currently guessing 6 to 18 months.

Some American politicians are trying to work on the problem. Without a complete withdrawal from foreign wars, I fail to see how reducing the American debt to the point it can be paid back is possible.

This article, which comes from an American think thank which is focused on the effects of economic policy on working families, but which is centrist by Canadian standards, gives the skinny.  By Murrican standards they are scandalously left wing, but Canadians have kind of a different take on that.  Let’s just say they ain’t the Fraser Institute.  The skinny is that without an immediate deflation of the dollar of 20 to 30%, there cannot possibly be a controlled or ‘soft’ landing of the economy in response to a global shift away from the dollar, and a crisis in which the major nation lenders extend the digitus impudicus to the continuation of American government borrowing.

The US is our biggest trading partner.  For 35 out of the 50 states, we’re the biggest single customer.  Over 50% of what we produce, manufactured or services or food or energy, goes south.  When that market dries up, and believe me, it will, Canadians will be very glad that our infrastructure is in better shape and we can actually feed ourselves, heat and electrify our homes (at hellish cost), and have the banking structure in place to weather the disaster, although the economy will be disabled and crushed by horrific interest rates for a long while.  We may actually have a ‘replacement’ currency for foreign money to flee to… if there’s no place for the Euro-seeking investors and speculators to go.

I really feel for my kids; but we have survived pogroms, forced immigration, religious repression, the Russian Revolution, global depression and war, historically, as a family, and we will do it again.  It’s not an option to whine.  It is what it is, as my old employer used to say.

Right now, it seems like the market collapse is happening someplace else.  It isn’t.  It’s happening right here, right now.  We’re moving goods on credit across the ice of Lake Ladoga, and when the thaw comes, we’ll be pooched. I predicted that the collapse was imminent back in 2004.  The US bailout prevented bad things from happening, but the evil day is still coming.

The future is here… it’s just  unevenly distributed. (William Gibson).

The glue

I think my family is glued together with movies. Last night, Jeff and I watched Support Your Local Sheriff for about the nth time, but it was Keith’s first time watching, and I don’t watch movies the same way I used to, so I was impressed.

James Garner makes being effortlessly masculine and a bit of a selfish bastard poetry in motion; Joan Hackett does the smart but ditzy daughter with a verve and authority which is delightful; Jack Elam is flat out brilliant; Bruce Dern as a yob = lucky guy, he got some of the best lines; Walter Brennan as his long-suffering crusty cuss of a father is like a multi-layered parody of himself; all the casting is marvellous.  The script is where it starts though, and William Bowers, also responsible for Advance to the Rear, the remake of My Man Godfrey with David Niven, and the Sheepman, wrote one for the comedy ages.  Highly recommended.

Another movie I watched recently, which I am not going to recommend because it’s a damned strange, disturbing, and not very kind to animals movie, was The Holy Mountain.  I was whipping around somebody’s personal best 100 movie list on the internet and this one got mentioned with such inarticulate adoration (“Just see it.  It’s too hard to describe”) that I had to make Jeff get it from Zip.

I LOVED IT.  I can hardly wait to show it to all my coolest film fan friends, because it is strange and marvellous and disgusting and eye-popping and very memorable.  About an hour in, I thought, “Man, this movie simply cannot get ANY better (this was at the point a six foot ball python showed up… there are A LOT of animals in this movie.)  In another scene a guy gets to take a symbolic (rebirth) bath with a baby hippo; women get their heads shaved; a guy who’s like Jesus shares a joint with a quadruple amputee; one hundred lamb carcasses are paraded around on crucifixes; a man gets hauled up the side of a building in an incredible, bizarre shot; tarot cards are invoked; and the end … well, it predates the end of Monty Python and the Holy Grail by quite a bit, and there’s NO WAY on earth you can convince me that Terry Gilliam didn’t see it before they made Grail.  Anyway, the movie is about spiritual quest(s) and it pauses occasionally to kick militarism, consumerism and religion with glee and hobnailed boots, while mocking itself and occasionally giving hints about how to deconstruct the movie.

Even if you don’t follow the ‘plot’ it is an amazing and very big budget piece of awesome weird, and the visuals completely saturated my ability to take them in.  And I liked the hippy dippy music, so there.  The director says, “I ask from film what most people ask of psychedelic drugs” and the only response to that was/is, “Yes.”