I'm reading Elle Read's Black Pill, and shortly after I started it I took some time to watch the movie Matrix again. That's the one where the smart computer coder, Neo (Keanu Reeves), joins a band of revolutionaries to start a battle for freedom from an AI-dominated world. At the outset, the leader, Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne), offers him a choice of taking a red pill or a blue pill for an awakening or a life of continued delusion.

Today's Elle Read says that there are many in society now who have swallowed a black pill and live in a worst-of-times reality. This is the "kali yuga" apocalypse, a world of conspiracies in control where the darkest imaginings of crippled moralities can justify any action in pursuit of survival. Storm the US Capitol buildings; start your own private army of Proud Boys with your own cache of guns. Think Heritage Society's Project 2025 with its blueprint for replacing US democracy with an oligarchy of the super-rich. In that Q-Anon deluded world, Donald Trump would be merely a puppet - not a nice scenario.

Salvation however, is at hand. And those hands as weapons employed by the enlightened mind of Neo, could stop bullets and rout the real evil-doers of the Matrix. Or, if you prefer our own 2024 reality, the weapon of an awakened electorate can defeat the populist (terrible perversion of a perfectly positive term) demagogues. That electorate toppled a Brexit-bound old-school-buddy government in England, hip-checked the alt-right party in France while giving their governing party a sharp rebuke, and from Mexico to Argentina is revising the macho-money establishments with female presidents and their socially-conscious agendas. Even Canada might learn a few things and not fall prey to the policy-penury sloganism of its oppositiion party leaders to realize that just changing ties for T-shirts does not signal a change (or actual creation) of a substantive platform of reform.

How did I get here? There, see; it happens to all of us. Biden stumbles a bit, forgets a name here or there and suddenly everyone piles on and he can't win. Every time he goes to make a speech, everyone is waiting for the gaffe rather than the inspiration. Yes, he did the right thing, but only because he knew that perception will almost always trump facts with an optics-over-all electorate. And that brings us to our own red pill remedy. If Kamala Harris can keep the momentum through November to the White House, we all can take a lesson and start adjusting our own orientation to the powers we think are in control of our lives.

Look over this list of terms that I downloaded from some site of "New Words Everyone Is Using Today". A lot of them are descriptive of unpleasant attitudes or conditions. Granting the media maxim "If it bleeds, it reads" there still is too much generating of darkness in our discourse and I want teachers to come to our rescue. I belong to that noble band, and so I know first-hand that whenever or wherever a problem exists, it must be the fault of the education system and teachers should fix it. Seriously though, the classroom is the place for a general awakening and that means empowering the individual developing mind, not the imposition of beliefs. Fortuately, the elementary school teacher has always done that and done it for low pay and high snoopervision. Today, basic literacy acquisition involves a rapidly expanding lexicon and I don't envy teachers their task. Look what happened when greed and inflation got together.

Economics 100 says that the "trickle-down" effect was just a cute way of getting people to believe that corporations and the people who ran them would see that workers benefitted from corporate profits. We had a parliamentary enquiry into that issue and Galen Weston gave MPs a smiling report on his company's reinvestment of "the profit we do generate … back into the country".

"No you don't," say the researchers at Canadians for Tax Fairness who showed that reinvestment went from 33% to 2% while distributions to owners climbed from 12% to 35% in the two years from 2020 to 2022. Pandemics can hide a lot of corporate sleight-of-handouts. Those reports, one by Canadians for Tax Fairness and the other by CLC economist D.T. Cochrane, reveal that many of Canada’s major corporations are using their profits to enrich their owners, instead of using them to benefit Canadians. Just a short time spent reading morning news feeds can be the equivalent of popping that red pill; you can read the story here if you feel up to it. No little hand appears over the underlined text, so you have to copy and paste.

 https://breachmedia.ca/canadas-soaring-corporate-profits-reinvestment/?ref=readthemaple.com

So, that was a long ramble wasn't it - pills of different colours and reactions, politics, new words, corporate greed. Go get a cup of tea or a strong drink and enjoy the sunshine. I know Israel and Russia and some other bad actors are still acting badly, and the climate is going to get worse before we make it better. Write the letter, donate to the cause, hug your friends. You can't do everything, but you can do something and if you find others to do it with, you'll leverage your effectiveness. I will too.

2024 Language

incel involuntary celibate  (and women are to blame)

a belief that feminism has ruined society

black pill / kali yuga / end-of-times "awareness" of how awful things are

4-chan and assignment of blame (elites, women …)

8-chan (Watch the Matrix movie again just for fun)

Q'Anon or read Elle Reed's Black Pill

alt-right

meme / icon graphic or representation of a value or quality "She's brat!"

enshittification products fall apart / service providers degrade quality of service and count on your never reading the new terms-of-service agreements

bed rotting staying in bed watching TV or iphone

brain rot internet-conditioned mind using social-media slang and meme  

references. Why you don't understand your grandchildren.

girl dinner snack foods on plate. I'm for it.

mid (pronounced meed) mediocre, unimpressive

bussin' great, wonderful

the ick disgusting (response to another's actions) "He gives me the ick!"

pretty privilege advantage in society because of good looks alone

Barbiecore Barbie fashion / pink predominates

slow fashion good clothing, well-made, repairable

greedflation companies raise prices on any pretext - Check your food bill.

cozy cheap plots (simplistic, sex & violence in simple sentences)

climate breakdown / extreme heat wave, heat dome / atmospheric river -All bad stuff

bag holder person holding investment to meltdown instead of divesting as in "left holding the bag"