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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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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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- Written by: Rod Boyle
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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...
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Been awhile again since I've cleared my cookies, this time all the ads on YouTube are offering me a criminal pardon.
For what I wonder? Clearly my browsing habits are suspect, or my musical tastes put me in a dodgy demographic, and I wonder what specifically I've been accused of...Bank Robber? Drug Dealing? Sexual Predator? The ads aren't that specific, only that I should apply now and get a full pardon...
It makes you think of the larger picture, the society we live in, where we share so much, on facebook, twitter, tumbler, you name it, we're voluntarily baring an artificial staged version of our lives to the world. And behind the scenes, Big Data, as revealed by Snowdon, is assembling an even more thorough picture of us than we can imagine. Even George Orwell never imagined anything like this.
Our every search and click on the web is tracked and saved by our ISP's, our every online purchase, our every email, photo, posted online, is copied and stored in mass data facilities, even when we're not online (and that is rarer than we think), the EULA (End User License Agreements) often bind us to ridiculous agreements we'd never consent to if we took the time to read them. Few of us do, look through your Windows 10 EULA (you didn't upgrade, did you? Well, you read the EULA first, I'm sure...) and find that even your offline activities are tracked and shared...
Cell phones, every photo, text, tweet, phone call, download, is stored and archived, along with geophysical and temporal data - where and when you made the call, and to whom, even when turned off they track our location, and all of this data is warehoused in giant banks of servers, offshore, Utah, Edward Snowdon tried to wake us up, the government arbitrarily declared him a criminal.
GPS data, collected even when you've turned your phone off, triangulated via cell towers, leave your phone at home and your vehicle will now report back your location, the continuing integration of technology in our lives makes it increasingly impossible to escape it's pitfalls...
Algorithms sort, collate the data, developing a picture - precisely - of who we are. Better than many of us know ourselves. And while the data is vast it only awaits the right person (or wrong) to ask the question, and all the answers are at their fingertips...
This information, distilled and made available to corporations in abstract, aggregate forms, helps them to decipher and predict our behaviors, target us better, prey upon our needs and wants, to direct, extort, exploit us, the data, the product...
And the police, already, bill C-51, wanting access to it, the government's far too compliant, it's an easy leap to imagine this information being used to implicate people in thought-crimes, - wait - it already has, think terrorism, Minority Report, the web, internet, not only serving us but engaging us, leading us further in wrong directions, this constant, targeting of us, assisting, predictive texting, and ultimately betraying...
...And now I begin thinking of crimes to commit...