Inaugural JRSP Artist-Scholar Residency Announced for Fall 2025
Media Release
May 8, 2025
Sophie Ladd
JRSP Project Coordinator
University of Victoria
Inaugural JRSP Artist-Scholar Residency Announced for Fall 2025
The University of Victoria (UVic), in partnership with the Jeffrey Rubinoff Sculpture Park (JRSP), is pleased to announce that Canadian artist Siobhan Humston has been selected as the inaugural recipient of the University of Victoria and Jeffrey Rubinoff Sculpture Park Artist-Scholar Residency for 2025-2026. During her time at the Rubinoff Sculpture Park on Hornby Island, she will develop new work combining themes involving music, synesthesia and humanity’s entanglement with the natural world.
“I hope to tie together the circles of music and visual art, drawing what I refer to in my relationship to the beauty and mystery of nature as ‘poetics of place’,” says Humston, who has an international practice. “This residency will also allow me to reconnect to this area of Canada, putting fuel to fire for my deep love for the Canadian west coast.”
Following an international call in late 2024, 57 people applied for the 6-week residency to be held annually at the Jeffrey Rubinoff Sculpture Park on Hornby Island, followed by a week at UVic. After her residency, Humston will present an exhibit of the work and offer a public talk in October 2025 at UVic [date to be announced].
“Jeffrey Rubinoff held that art was an existential necessity—an expression of mature conscience, evoking our innate sense of the sacred and the sublime. Far from diminishing individual conscience, such art elevates and inspires it,” says Karun Koernig, Curator of the Rubinoff Sculpture Park. “Humston’s work exemplifies this vision, quietly co-mingling distinct form-worlds—the natural and the human. In her hands, everyday materials sourced from the land sublimate into visual poetry. Particularly compelling for us was Humston’s ambition to integrate a soundscape into her residency, resonating deeply with Rubinoff’s profound connection to music.”
Humston’s art has been exhibited in over 70 solo and group exhibitions in commercial, artist-run and public galleries, and is held in private and corporate collections in England, Europe, Australia and North America. She is the recipient of a Pollock Krasner Foundation Fellowship, a City of London arts bursary, Ontario Arts Council grants, a BC Arts Council education grant and, most recently, an Ontario Arts Council exhibition assistance grant for a 2024 solo exhibit. She has been featured on City TV Vancouver & Calgary, the Vancouver Sun and CBC Radio’s Arts Report.
Originally from London, Ontario, she graduated with a BFA in printmaking and painting from Crawford College of Art & Design in Cork, Ireland, followed by an MFA with a distinction in Art & Environment from Falmouth University in Cornwall, England. She then held a series of international artist residencies, including two years at Marlborough College in Wiltshire, England and a month at Hugo Burge Foundation at Marchmont Estate, Scotland. She returned to Canada to set up a studio on the shores of Lake Huron, where her ongoing research about the connection between environmental art, nature, spirituality and science culminated with a solo exhibit, In the Garden of Exquisite Unknown, at the Judith & Norman Alix Art Gallery in Sarnia, Ontario.
See her work at siobhanhumstonart.com or on Instagram @siobhanhumstonart or @siobhan.humston.artist.
Keep an eye out for updates on the residency and event dates at www.jrsp.uvic.ca, @uvic_rubinoff and https://finearts.uvic.ca/research/ and @uvicarts.
Claire Kennedy’s Inaugural Pottery Tour
Once a year since 1987 a group of potters on Denman Island get together to showcase their work via the Pottery Studio Tour. It’s an opportunity for visitors and locals to connect directly with the artists on the island and see their creations.
Some potters on the tour make their work available at other times of the year via markets or places like the Denman Island Craft Shop. There are others that use the Tour as a once-a-year event to showcase their art.
This year, Claire Kennedy will be making her debut as a ceramic artist during the Victoria Day Long Weekend. Before now you had to be gifted one of her funky pieces directly.
As a part-time landscape designer, part-time potter it’s no surprise she is inspired by nature. She was first introduced to hand-building ten years ago and enjoys the perfect imperfections this method provides.
Her process involves rolling out the clay, forming it into asymmetrical shapes, and etching designs and patterns into the sides. Her vases and cups often appear oblong or rolled with an overlapping seam, highlighting the natural process of creation.
“I’ve been really enjoying making orb forms and putting them together on the table instead of a tall vase,” she says.
A fan of matte glazes and neutral tones like black, grays and whites, Claire’s work is highlighted with the occasional splash of turquoise and chartreuse.
With a tiny personal studio, Claire has opted to display her work alongside friend and fellow potter on the Tour, Jeanie Rogers of Gilded Petunia Pottery. Visit Stop #2 to see her quirky and contemporary work.
The Pottery Studio Tour runs 10am-5pm Saturday, May 17 and Sunday, May 18. Maps and more information are available at denmanislandpotterystudiotour.com.
Binary Cultural History
Binary Cultural History
When, in 1968, I started programming computers we used room-sized machines, coding sheets, punch cards, magnetic tape storage and teleprinters to design and run our systems. All were housed in huge air conditioned rooms and for the next 25 years there was no widespread market for personal computers, a fact my grandchildren find difficult to believe. Computers cost millions of dollars to buy and run and so were available only to corporations. We were at the mercy of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs—a sexy IBM as Snow White followed by the dwarfs Burroughs, Control Data Corporation, General Electric, Honeywell, NCR, RCA, and UNIVAC. At Northern Electric we used Snow White along with four of the dwarfs: Burroughs, Honeywell, NCR and UNIVAC. The actual machines were housed in Bell Canada’s four storey, Pointe Claire processing centre. We also used machines in London, UK and Stamford, Connecticut over telephone tie lines running real time programs across the Atlantic a decade or more before the Internet appeared.
Computer programs or apps are binary not only because of the zero/one nature of their storage hardware but also because of the conditional binary form of logic used throughout. This is the logical ‘If/Then’ statement directing a process to be performed on the basis of a True/False test; statements are performed in strict linear order but can be directed to another portion of linear code. If A is true then perform B and bypass C; if A is false then perform C and bypass B. B and C are differing processes which may add up figures, search out stored data, or display something on your screen, etc or may be further If/Then statements. Indeed I was once given a program consisting of a single If/Then statement with 150 similar If/Then statements nested within it—a demonstration of the original programmer’s cleverness but no gift to the programmer having to maintain it. As conditional binary statements multiply like rabbits programmers had to impose their own kind of triage. You tried to identify a very limited number of the most common conditions to test; the untested ones you left out which resulted in most of those unintelligible error messages from Windows and Apple software.
Even our primitive AI relies on these binary choices; there are no maybes and no ambiguities in computer code. You can stuff as many conditions as you want into the final result but that result will still be selected by a final exemplar of binary logic. But the user sees the results of computer processing almost immediately and the perception is one of surety of result; we cannot help feeling that the unseen process has exhausted all possible answers at near light speed and given us the single one that we were looking for. Contrast this with an old-fashioned library card catalogue where, as you thumbed your way through dozens of cards, other associations of possible worth struck you. Those associations are hidden by a computer search; indeed Facebook’s algorithms rely on this fact and invisibly eliminate everything that numerous binary choices deem is extraneous to your request and then supply you with only what you ‘need’ which usually contains several thousand results you don’t need.
Either/Or, True/False, Yes/No, Black/White, Right/Wrong. What is the effect on our culture of a dominant diet lacking all ambiguity. Opinion as fact? Polarization? Reluctance to question further? Super-enhanced individually? Distrust of communal action? Belief in conspiracies rather than culture? To me this is a example of how our communal choice of technological gadgets unconsciously structures our culture—innovation built on the communal work of others with a belief in its usefulness. This leads to other elements in the community promoting their use by marketing them or using them on a large scale by public entities. We don’t need a conspiracy to set the goal posts for our culture but there is no doubt that certain groups of citizens will quite openly work to expand some of these new innovations. Such work of promotion is never the result of a single individual although one individual may be seen as the spokesperson for the group.
We begin to ignore the ambiguity in life which is so much a part of everything we do; we force answers into a binary Procrustean bed. One result is a distrust of truth. Truth is rarely amenable to black and white corroboration; it requires a matrix of the experience of others, logic, reason, and self assessment to reach a truth. Truth is dependent on our state of knowledge and as that is increased the truth stemming from it may undergo modification. Computers unconsciously shift us towards assessing everything on a binary basis; ambiguity and context fly out the window. In discussing the numerous fake memoirs which have often become ‘bestsellers’ in the past few decades, Kevin Young in Bunk states ‘Gone is the idea that something made up, unreal or surreal, could move us. Instead, readers insist that the thing that isn’t real is [real]: that if it affects them it can’t be affected; that they cannot have real feelings about made-up things’. In short, if it is real it is true. All we have to do is pass off lies as real and hey presto they become true. Fiction is real, truth has no place in our appraisal of a work, and the literary justification for actual fiction is gone. We have used a binary choice to eliminate truth and ambiguity. Perhaps this explains why the AI poetry examples given by Phoenix Bee in the Grapevine of some weeks ago came up with only the simplest couplet (AA BB) scheme; in spite of massive language learning AI’s ‘intelligence’ seems unaware that poets use dozens of other rhyme schemes.
Oakley Rankin
Letter to the Editor – John Grayson
Hornby Island Draft Bylaw No. 176 – pause request – revision request
Dear Trustees,
The map (Schedule D2) on page 5 of Draft Bylaw No. 176 is based on a 24 year old map. This old map has been updated by new more accurate maps issued by the Islands Trust Council in 2021.
Looking at the new maps (below) shows that the Draft Bylaw No. 176 is based on obsolete information. Unless the approval process is immediately paused and Draft Bylaw No. 176 is revised to reflect the actual state of Hornby Island groundwater, the Local Trust Committee will be unable to make informed decisions on the many important land, property, vacation rental, and secondary suite uses that are governed by Schedule D2.
Put simply, you cannot make the right decisions if you have the wrong information.
In particular, the new maps issued by the Islands Trust Council indicate that “Aquifer 1A”, as shown on the current Schedule D2, does not exist. The new maps are also much more precise and can be used to map Environmentally Sensitive Areas on a property-by-property basis. The map excerpts below illustrate this new accuracy, especially with regard to the Whaling Station Bay Peninsula (where Aquifer 1A is purported to be located).
It is my understanding that Islands Trust Council paid over $100,000 for this Ground Water Mapping Report. The Hornby Island Local Trust Committee should be provided with up-to-date and accurate Ground Water mapping information provided by the Island Trust Council before any further decisions are made. In the meantime, proposed Bylaw No. 176 should be placed on hold by the LTC on May 16, 2025 until the maps are corrected and updated.
Sincerely,
John Grayson, Hornby Island
Affiliations:
Winemaker/owner
Hornby Island Estate Winery & Farm
Treasurer
New Wave Wine Society – a province wide organization
Director
Hornby Island Farmlands Trust Society
Co-Chair
Hornby Island Economic Enhancement Corporation
Committee Member & Internet Lead
Hornby / Denman Islands Internet Committee
MAPS:
Below:
The pink portion on the right is Whaling Station Bay Peninsula.
The pink portion is marked “1A”
Below:
Historic Map from 1984 (41 years old) that influenced the creation of the map above.
Compare Whaling Station Bay Penninsula in each map – for all intent and purpose they are identical.
See the number “4” on the map below.
EXCERPTS FROM ISLANDS TRUST COUNCIL COMMISSIONED REPORT (2021)
APPENDIX 5: Potential Zones for Groundwater Recharge and Discharge based on
Depth to Water
Groundwater Recharge Potential Mapping for Study Islands
October 18, 2021
(Map)
APPENDIX 10: Groundwater Recharge Potential Maps
Precipitation Interception Potential – See Below
NOTE TO READER:
THE COLOURS COVERING the majority of the Whaling Station Bay Penninsula area:
BLUE AREAS = High
PURPLE AREAS = Very High
The readings quoted (above) indicate that “Aquifer 1A”, as shown on the current Schedule D2 does not exist.
See the first map (Schedule D2) at the start of this section of maps for comparison.
JG
Groundwater Recharge Potential for Denman Island and Hornby Island
(Map)
I learned this while retrieving a rogue recycling bin
April 27th, 2025
A philosophical puzzle. Dedicated to Jerry Pethick and Gordon Payne.
I learned this while retrieving a rogue recycling bin.
Arthur down the street has gone philosophical. This isn’t entirely new; Arthur tends to latch onto Big Ideas like barnacles onto a slow ship. Last year, it was competitive pickling, where he argued that the perfect pickle was a matter of personal perception. And the year before, he was convinced that garden gnomes held the key to a new form of renewable energy with their untapped vibrational energy. This year, though, it’s… reality. Or, more accurately, the stunning, earth-shattering, apparently hilarious revelation that fact isn’t objective.
I learned this while retrieving a rogue recycling bin that had escaped in a gust of wind and made a break for his prize-winning petunias. Arthur appeared on his porch, mid-lecture to, I assume, a particularly stoic rhododendron.
“It’s all perception, Bernard!” he announced, startling me and what I maintain was a perfectly objective squirrel. “The colours, the texture of this very railing”—he rapped it with a knuckle that I know is objectively quite bony—“they’re not fixed properties! They’re conscious interpretations! My brain creates the mahogany stain!”
I paused, wrestling with the blue bin. “Right, Arthur. Your brain’s doing sterling work there. Saved me a trip to the dump.”
He waved a dismissive hand, a grand gesture usually reserved for unveiling statues or shooing away wasps. “No, no, think bigger! The entire universe could be a dynamic construction of consciousness. The very ground beneath your feet, Bernard! Not solid rock, but sustained thought!”
I looked down at the cracked tarmac of his driveway, which had recently claimed the better part of my bicycle tyre. “Feels pretty solid when it’s eating rubber, Arthur. And expensive.”
This, apparently, was the old paradigm talking—the rigid, Newtonian, utterly unenlightened view of existence. Arthur was now operating on a different plane, having devoured several highly-marketed books with covers featuring swirling galaxies and single, poignant eyes—a plane where, theoretically, one could perceive things into being. Or, at the very least, unperceived them in it.
His first few experiments were modest. He tried to ‘unperceive’ the persistent patch of crabgrass invading his perfect lawn. He’d stand there, eyes narrowed, muttering about neural symphonies and shifting paradigms. The crabgrass, proving remarkably resistant to subjective dissolution, only seemed to thrive under the scrutiny, often displaying a perverse dew-drop sparkle that Arthur interpreted as ‘dimensional bleed-through’. I just saw healthy weeds.
Then came the coffee incident. Arthur, a man whose culinary skills peaked with toast (burnt), decided his morning instant gravel was a critical test case.
“Objectively,” he explained one morning as I passed his open kitchen window, “this is freeze-dried disappointment. Sulphuric, even. But subjectively? If I truly know it’s a symphony of exotic, single-origin notes, ground by artisanal monks on a distant mountainside… my perception will construct that reality.”
He took a brave gulp. His eyes widened, then narrowed. A slight, almost imperceptible shudder ran through him.
“Fascinating,” he declared, though his voice was a little hoarse. “The resistance is palpable. The objective programming is fighting back! But I felt a hint there, Bernard. A ghost note of apricot and regret.”
A week later, passing the same window, I saw him stirring three sugars into the same mug, eyes darting nervously towards the street. When he saw me, he jumped, sending a spoonful of white crystals skittering.
“Energy boosters!” he blustered, snapping shut the sugar tin with unnecessary force. “Fueling the mind for deeper perception!”
His ambitions grew. He attempted to ‘perceive’ a parking spot directly outside the packed post office. He drove around the block three times, eyes squeezed shut (a manoeuvre nearly involving a pedestrian and a lamppost), muttering, “Space… manifest… perceived void…” He eventually parked three blocks away and had to walk, blaming ‘consensus reality field interference’. It was a classic case of ‘perceiving’ a parking spot and ‘manifesting’ a walk.
The neighbourhood cat, Reginald, a creature whose objective reality included significant disdain for Arthur, became a target. Arthur spent an afternoon sitting on his porch swing, staring intently at Reginald, who was washing himself with typical feline indifference on the adjacent fence.
“Right, Reginald,” Arthur whispered, “Let’s test the higher strata. I am now perceiving you… as a majestic Bengal tiger! Stripes! Power! Existential dread in the face of my gaze!”
Reginald paused his grooming. He looked at Arthur. Then, with slow, deliberate precision, he yawned, stretched, and hopped down from the fence to scratch Arthur’s prize-winning petunias.
I watched from my porch, sipping honest tea that tasted, subjectively and objectively, exactly like tea. Arthur threw his hands up, narrowly avoiding knocking over a gnome.
“Subjectivity is hard!” he yelled to the unresponsive cat. “The universe has terrible latency!”
The beauty of Arthur’s conviction wasn’t just its absurdity but its complete failure to impact anything beyond his increasingly eccentric behaviour. The bills still arrived (he tried ‘perceiving’ them as junk mail; the bank disagreed). The council still gave him a ticket for leaving his bin out too long (‘perception of timely collection malfunction’). Reginald the cat remained resolutely unimpressed and objectively a tabby.
Maybe, I mused, watching Arthur retreat indoors, defeated by a feline and his mortgage statements, objective reality isn’t the illusion. The real illusion is the idea that we have no control over it, no matter how hard we try. Or the actual construction of consciousness is simply the ability to find endless, baffling amusement in the Arthurs of the world, persistently trying to edit a universe that stubbornly refuses their drafts. Either way, it certainly makes bin day more interesting.
Shucking Oysters: Blind Ambition
Shucking Oysters: Blind Ambition
By Alex Allen
If you think the BC NDP cares about the environment, think again. They have been stuck on rinse and repeat with resource extraction as the main economic driver for years. Eby displays no courage, no imagination, no thought or care for future generations, let alone his three young children. Despite concerns from Indigenous leaders, opposition parties and municipalities, the BC NDP are still hell-bent on fast-tracking major projects, in particular, mining.
Bill 15, the Infrastructure Projects Act, would allow Eby sweeping powers to designate projects of “provincial significance,” customize environmental assessments, turbo charge permits and override municipal concerns. Eby said it’s necessary to help get things done quickly in a world of uncertainty caused by Trump. Sorry, opportunity knocked. This is just another example of a pernicious shift that has made the NDP more moderate, overly corporate-friendly, and tightly run by a clique of operatives.
Of course, the mining industry is applauding this controversial bill. Yet research shows that fast tracking is no guarantee that they will all materialize. Simon Fraser University associate professor Rosemary Collard, co-author of a recent study of 27 BC mining projects, granted environmental assessment certificates since 1995 and projected to open by 2022, showed that 20 failed to do so. In fact, regulation was a factor in only three of the projects. The mines that did become operational, notably “under performed economically compared to what their forecast said in their environmental assessment.”
Not surprisingly, the BC Fraser Institute feels that fast tracking applications is not enough. The Institute says that the government needs to address the negative climate among investors. It seems that big mining corporations and their shareholders have issues with having to consult with First Nations. This pesky UNDRIP law of free, prior and informed consent, just makes it so cumbersome and time-consuming.
When questioned about the fast track process, the premier’s office replied with usual clarity, that “the projects will be focusing on reducing regulatory complexity with a focus on troubleshooting issues to support the selected major projects with significant potential to create jobs.”
Of the 18 mines going through the express lane: Red Chris is owned by Newmont Corporation, a Colorado-based gold-mining giant, while Eskay Creek is owned by Skeena Resources, in partnership with Tahltan Territory, and a majority owned by a group of US investors. When asked whether it had considered US ownership when identifying projects to expedite, the premier’s office said it was “focused on projects that create good paying jobs in BC that can help support families.” Eby implores us not to buy American liquor or travel south, but it’s OK for him to move full-speed ahead with this?
Among the biggest multinational corporations with interests in BC are those building fossil fuel infrastructure to ship gas through pipelines and liquefy on the coast for export overseas. Only one LNG project made the premier’s list: Cedar LNG, a partnership between the Haisla Nation and Calgary-based Pembina Pipeline Corporation. Pembina have partnered on many projects with the US private-equity and investment firm KKR. In January, the US Department of Justice accused KKR of having a “culture of noncompliance” for decades and now the firm is facing a $650 million lawsuit for anti-trust violations.
But among those most anxious for an upgraded power supply is Texas-based Western LNG, who owns both the Prince Rupert Gas Transmission line – a partnership with the Nisga’a Nation – and the adjoining Ksi Lisims LNG export terminal. In December, Western LNG announced significant investment by Blackstone, a US private equity firm, headed by longtime Trump adviser Stephen Schwarzman. Both men have much in common, having made millions being slum lords, laundering money, and committing fraud.
Quoted in The Tyee, Nikki Skuce, co-chair of the BC Mining Law Reform shared: “While BC’s list highlights energy security, clean energy and critical minerals – meaning materials required in the transition to renewable energy – in some cases the headings stretch their definitions.” Critical minerals are metals such as copper, nickel and molybdenum, all needed for the production of “green things” like electric vehicles, solar panels and wind turbines. (Oddly, the nasty one, lithium, is noticeably absent from the list.)
Eskay Creek, is mining for silver and gold – neither of which are critical minerals. “All of the investors who are trying to get these big gold projects off the ground are all licking their lips because of the financial instability created by Trump,” Skuce said. “That’s driving demand for gold and creating justification for large gold mines, even if it doesn’t provide critical minerals necessary for the renewable energy transition.”
This year’s service plan made no mention of the environment, with the BC Government actually cutting funding within the Ministry of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship. While the budget increased investments in permitting for resource development, it cut over $18 million from the land-use planning/programs budget that identify and address the cumulative effects of development.
Governments and corporations all seem to have forgotten the meaning of diminishing returns, unintended consequences, and the finite nature of resources. Chris Hedges wrote years ago in The World As It Is, that “these political and corporate masters are driven by a craven desire to accumulate wealth at the expense of human life.” The leaders of these resource extracting companies determine our fate; they are not endowed with basic human decency or compassion. From human beings to the natural environment, we are all “exploitable commodities.” And just you wait, the scouring has just begun….
How To Make Your Mind Harder For The Propagandists To Manipulate
The worst mistake you can make when reading the news is to assume there’s a good reason why the mass media report on something in the way that they do. That there’s a good reason why Israel-Palestine gets framed as a complex and morally ambiguous issue with no clear path forward, even though it all looks pretty self-evident to you. That there must be a valid and legitimate reason why one story gets more coverage than a seemingly far more important story, like how the release of one Israeli-American hostage is currently getting far more news media coverage than the deliberate starvation of an entire enclave full of civilians.
In reality there is no valid and legitimate reason why such things are covered the way they are. The coverage happens in the way that it happens because it serves the information interests of Israel and the western empire, and for no other reason.
So much western ignorance is facilitated by the manipulative way the imperial media report on what’s going on in the world. People assume that because they’re not hearing about a given issue all the time or in a particularly urgent tone of reporting, it must not be an especially important matter that needs their attention. They assume that if one side of a conflict isn’t framed as being clearly in the wrong, then it must not be.
Westerners assume that if the world were experiencing another Holocaust, another Transatlantic Slave Trade, another Cuban Missile Crisis, they would hear about it in the news at an appropriate level of urgency. But that simply isn’t how it works. The only reason the western public is ever told about anything bad that happens at a high level of frequency and urgency is when it is convenient for the western empire, like when Russia invaded Ukraine. When that happened it was the main story in every western outlet for ages, and Russia was clearly framed as the evil aggressor, with all the NATO aggressions which provoked the invasion going completely unmentioned.
When people hear the word “propaganda” they tend to think it means the same thing as “lies”, but that’s not accurate. The domestic propaganda that westerners are fed by the powerful does not typically consist of whole-cloth fabrications, but rather of distortions, half-truths, manipulated emphasis, and lies by omission.
Most of the worst things the US and its allies are doing in the world are reported accurately by the western press at certain times and in certain publications, but they simply are not given any emphasis and amplification after those brief mentions. If you look at the hyperlinks I cite in my articles to describe the criminality of the empire it’s usually either straight out of the mainstream press or some other independent author who’s citing mainstream news reporting. The difference is that I regularly spotlight those admissions, while the imperial media will mention them once halfway down an article somewhere and then let the daily news churn carry it away down the memory hole.
Western propaganda doesn’t consist so much of manipulating what gets reported but how it gets reported. How often something gets mentioned. How often the perpetrator of an abuse is explicitly named. The type of language used to describe a given offense. These adjustments might sound insignificant when they are described, but when put into practice across the board they are extremely effective at shaping public perception of world affairs.
The only way to get around this is to maintain an acute awareness of what’s being reported while ignoring distorting factors like frequency, emphasis and tone. You have to just focus on the raw data of what’s being reported about what the empire is up to from day to day without allowing your perception to be colored by the way in which that data is reported. If you come across a key piece of information about the empire’s criminality you’ve got to hold onto it and remember its significance for yourself, because the imperial press sure aren’t going to remind you. They’re going to be acting like it never happened by next week.
It’s bizarre once you start noticing how much of a disconnect there is between reality and the mass media’s reporting on world events. They’ll occasionally mention actual important things, but there’s no accurate sense of proportionality to any of it. It’s like if you were at a restaurant with a friend and a waiter’s uniform caught fire, and your friend just casually mentioned “Oh that guy’s on fire” before going back to talking about the meal for the rest of the conversation while the guy burned to death at the other end of the room. It is utterly surreal.
So one of the most important things you need to do to maintain a truth-based worldview is to take complete control over your own understanding of the importance of the pieces of information which come across your field of vision. You can’t rely on others to tell you how important they are, because all the most amplified and influential voices in our society are working to manipulate your understanding of their importance, and most ordinary people you’ll interact with are being manipulated by those voices to some extent. Public political discourse is overwhelmingly dominated by these distortions.
You’ve got to interpret the urgency and importance of information for yourself. By standing on your own two feet and looking at the raw data with fresh eyes before it gets jumbled around by the imperial spin machine, you make your mind much harder to bend to the will of the empire.
_______________
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