Rebirth of the Print Media

I have finally finished listening to Trump's first Press Conference.

Unrelated: I am out of Gin. I need more Gin.

I might be going crazy here, but people were harping endlessly on Trump's seemingly non-sequitur of "The leaks were real, but the news was fake" (timestamp 00:44:40). It sounds crazy (and it is) and contradictory, but I think I understood what he meant.

Remember the whole Death Panels thing years ago? The Fox propaganda machine took an idea that had some basis in fact and tried to spin it into a wild breaking news story, and then did the same thing with every hot-topic news story that would make Obama look bad: take a small story and whip it up into a big news story to discredit the current Administration.

Trump's position here is that the media is reporting the wrong stuff. The news may be true (the leaks are real), but Trump doesn't want the media to report it because it would present the people with a message that he doesn't want them to hear. If the Trump admin wants to control how the people are informed, then they would have to power to define what is real (real news) and what is untrue or not in-line with the Admin's messaging (fake news).

In fact, he even refers to that idea in the same session: that the news sites are filled with hatred against him, which they shouldn't be doing because he won.

So when he says that CNN reports Fake News, what he means is that they are reporting news that he does not approve of. Trump wants his government to decide what the media reports on and what they get to say. When Kelly Anne Conway says "We might have to rethink our relationship with the media," this is what she means.

You know who does that? North Korea. China. Russia. It's fucking crazy, and if Trump attempts to shut down the Internet and Social Media the way he has talked about in the past, we might see the grand return of the underground Print Media.

Nostalgia

As I'm writing this article (which started out as a Facebook Comment and lengthened into an article because it turns out I have more to say), I am reminded of my College days when I wrote articles for my college newspaper The Broadside. At that time (1986-1988), the Student Council that was so incredibly corrupt that over half the council members were ejected for using Student Council funds for a Get-Rich pyramid scheme (you can actually read about this here, published by fellow writer Keith Waddington).

I personally sat in a Council meeting where they openly discussed using the college money to buy alcohol on a student trip and disguise the expense as getting theatre tickets. So when I wrote an article in The Broadside about what I witnessed, the Student Council demanded that they get to approve articles before they could be publish. We we refused this request, they defunded the The Broadside and took our room away. The College Administration was happy to see us go because we were critical of them as well.

But The Broadside didn't go away. We went underground and continued to publish the paper with a limited printing (funded by secret donors), and our supporters helped us with distribution by sharing the paper person-to-person. Any copy that the Student Council president found was ripped up and I was personally threatened with physical violence several times. Of course, this only strengthened my resolve and gave birth to my backbone.

With a dictatorial administration in power, this may be the rebirth of the Print Media industry with an underground, community-driven financial and distribution system. Mark my words.

Comfort in Crisis

When facing crisis, there is some benefit to being reminded that "It's going to be okay."

Being reassured in the moment can give your mind and emotions just enough space to calm down, you can collect yourself, and come up with a plan to deal with the crisis at hand. Being told "It's going to be okay" is not meant to be a solution or an invitation to ignore the problem: it creates a port in the storm.

No one has the right to use your crisis to shame, humiliate, or abuse you under the guise of "Tough Love". Being told to "shut the fuck up", "get over it", "grow-up", "stop complaining", etc. is the opposite of helping. The person facing the crisis already knows what is at stake, and that knowledge can be so overwhelming that the person is either frozen in place or is actively fleeing. Any attempts at "tough love" just adds to the noise of the crisis and does nothing to help.

If you want to help out, show up. Don't yell out motivational slogans from the dock to help a drowning person. Jump in and keep that person afloat or toss them a rope and pull them in. It's messy, it's hard, and it's dangerous, make no mistake. 

But physically building a port in the storm is much more effective than yelling at the thunder.

The Colors and Techniques of Magical Problem Solving

Recently on a Facebook forum, the concept of Left-Hand path was raised. A person suggested that a Left-Hand practitioner of magic was a person who worked magic, but was an atheist. That's not a definition I've ever heard of. Another poster suggested this article on Left-Hand Path. While it does speak of the general community's fear or disdain for Left-Hand practitioners, it described them as people who work a magic outside of the mainstream practice or that are trouble-makers. I'm not a fan of trying to define a thing by what it isn't.

So here's my take on Left-Hand vs Right-Hand magic. I also need to point out that I studied Left-Hand path off and on for about 1.5 years with a mentor whom I greatly respect. Not everyone will agree with my take on this, but this definition makes sense to me.

Simply put, Left-Hand and Right-Hand magic describe magical techniques or styles that define how you approach a problem or how to achieve a goal.

• Right-Hand (white magic): increase the probabilities of achieving the goal. 
• Left-Hand (black magic): remove obstacles in the way of achieving the goal.

So let's use an example to illustrate this style choice. Let's say you are applying for a job and decide that you will perform a spell to boost your chances of getting it.

• Right-Hand technique: a few days before the ritual, you could craft a spell that ensures that the weather on the day of your interview is bright and shiny, that your interviewer wakes up refreshed, happy, and in a good mood, ready to be impressed by what you have to say.
• Left-Hand technique: you craft a spell that removes the other applicants from the running, which reduces the number of people you need to compete with for the position.

Now I know that the Left-Hand technique sounds pretty ominous, but this is where your personal ethics come into play. You don't need pianos to fall from the sky to squish your competitors and remove them from the job pool. You could just have them find work in other places or have them no longer be interested in the job, which in effect, removes them as obstacles. How they get removed is completely up to you and will reflect your values as a human being. Make the right choices.

Note: Remember that the magic can't do all the work. If you want that job, you still need to be well-dressed, clean, alert, and arrive on time. No amount of magic is going to help you if you show up late or disheveled. 

Let's look another more ambiguous example. Let's say that you have a friend who is very sick and you decide that you will perform a healing spell.

• Left-Hand technique: you do a spell that banishes the sickness from the body, removing the negative effects that make your friend sick.
• Right-Hand technique: you do a spell that boosts the person's immune system, allowing his own body to fight off the illness.

One aspect I discovered during my studies is that Pagans tend to practice both paths in their application of magic, but rationalize it as they see fit. In the Sick Friend example, a Pagan may say "Destroying the sickness is not Black Magic because it promotes health!" That's using the result to justify the action, and historically, this type of philosophy rarely ends well.

The Left-Hand path is all about removing the problem, so it would be very left-hand pathy to remove the sickness and very right-hand pathy to boost the immune system. These are just different angles and techniques to solve a problem, but it's your ethics that determine the flavor or the morality of those techniques, not the techniques themselves.

When you boil it down to its essence, Magic does not have color, nor does it have morality. It is a tool that is wielded by the practitioner, but it has no nature of itself. You can use a hammer to build a table, or you can use a hammer to kill a person, but in either case, the nature of the tool does not change. This is why we do not have Black Carpentry to build guillotines and catapults and White Carpentry to build tables and chairs.

I'm not a huge fan of the color associations. They are very North American in their nature and come with tons of connotative baggage. Why is White Magic good and Black Magic evil? I'm not going to explore the historical significance of those choices here, but I'm sure you can find articles on the InterWebs that describe both.