Month: September 2022

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The super-rich ‘preppers’ planning to save themselves from the apocalypse | The super-rich | The Guardian Tech billionaires are buying up luxurious bunkers and hiring military security to survive a societal collapse they helped create, but like everything they do, it has unintended consequenceswww.theguardian.com

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Excerpt from Guardian Observer article by Douglas Rushkoff Sun 4 Sep 2022

The Silicon Valley escapism – let’s call it The Mindset – encourages its adherents to believe that the winners can somehow leave the rest of us behind.

Never before have our society’s most powerful players assumed that the primary impact of their own conquests would be to render the world itself unliveable for everyone else. Nor have they ever before had the technologies through which to programme their sensibilities into the very fabric of our society. The landscape is alive with algorithms and intelligences actively encouraging these selfish and isolationist outlooks. Those sociopathic enough to embrace them are rewarded with cash and control over the rest of us. It’s a self-reinforcing feedback loop. This is new.

Amplified by digital technologies and the unprecedented wealth disparity they afford, The Mindset allows for the easy externalisation of harm to others, and inspires a corresponding longing for transcendence and separation from the people and places that have been abused.

Instead of just lording over us for ever, however, the billionaires at the top of these virtual pyramids actively seek the endgame. In fact, like the plot of a Marvel blockbuster, the very structure of The Mindset requires an endgame. Everything must resolve to a one or a zero, a winner or loser, the saved or the damned. Actual, imminent catastrophes from the climate emergency to mass migrations support the mythology, offering these would-be superheroes the opportunity to play out the finale in their own lifetimes. For The Mindset also includes a faith-based Silicon Valley certainty that they can develop a technology that will somehow break the laws of physics, economics and morality to offer them something even better than a way of saving the world: a means of escape from the apocalypse of their own making.

Court Painter hired out of work acquaintances in a modest attempt to illustrate the roles of what he thinks the super rich life style is all about. Quite convincing I must say!

Danielle Smith leadership contender for UCP seen with pet prairie dog

However…

Alberta Lieutenant-Governor Salma Lakhani says her office would independently evaluate whether a proposed Alberta Sovereignty Act was constitutional before signing it into law.

Her remarks come as Danielle Smith, the perceived front-runner to become the next leader of the United Conservative Party and premier of Alberta, has proposed legislation permitting the province to refuse to enforce federal laws it believes are against Alberta’s best interests.

Lakhani said Thursday her constitutional role is the most important part of her job and that Alberta must follow the rule of law.

Source CBC News September 2,22

Lieutenant Governor of Alberta, Her Honour, the Honourable Salma Lakhani AOE, B.Sc., LLD (hon)

Howard Anglin: Alberta’s Lieutenant Governor is risking a perfect storm of unconstitutionality

You can’t correct an unconstitutional Act with an unconstitutional act

In a dispute between two governments, each sovereign in its own sphere, it is not for one of the two disputants—in this case the provincial legislature—to decide which is right.² Instead it should fall to a third party to arbitrate the dispute, and in our constitutional system that is the judiciary.³ Both Smith’s plan and the Lieutenant Governor’s reaction misunderstand this—the first because she doesn’t like it, the second because she apparently doesn’t understand it.

Court Painter was invited to create an intervention project by the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC.

He chose to do a series of multiple paintings entitled Classified Documents which were installed through various galleries. He explained,” I am not usually in favour of creating copies of my own paintings however there was something about the still life subject and image of classified documents that I felt was necessary and urgent as an emphatic artistic statement ; reflecting an aspect of the contemporary ethos in America… Yeah, that’s it!”