When Words Fail…make up new ones.

It’s been a bit of a lousy week. Lots of stress. Raising hands to ask for help, wanting answers. Lousy is one of those funny words. It is loaded with word goodness.

Lousy is a loaded word. As a parent, we remember the annual notice that comes around, warning us of lice going through the school. Just remembering the notice or even thinking about it now, my head starts to itch. And I’ve never even had lice. Not ever, nor did my daughter.

It was always the girls with the long well-combed beautiful hair. Our daughter could be a bit of a messy girl, so when she went to school, her hair was usually a bit of a mess. But she never got lice. So she never had to have the treatment of slathering her head with cheap hair conditioner and then running a super fine lice comb through the goopy hair. Got to get right into the thick of it to find those little nits. Nits is a nice word for eggs.

Today I went to yoga for the first time in months. It is a yin and meditation class. I love the language of yoga. Savasana. Pronounced with a shh sound. Translates to corpse pose. My teacher is a shaman; I love her voice and her way of expressing herself. She spoke today of softening, which I definitely needed. I’m a working Stiff, a cranky old man who can certainly use softening. She also spoke of equanimity, which means a state of balance and even-mindedness.

There are so many colourful names for the different poses that my body was supposed to replicate. Let’s call them Poceries. Drop the G and the R is silent. Poceries is my new word for poses. Dead poet’s pose. Dry spaghetti pose. Insane clown posse pose. It’s all a good stretch, until the spaghetti gets broken like somebody making pasta for their kids. You reach the point where dry spaghetti pose becomes can of spaghetti-O’s pose. That’s Poceries.

Am I going to yoga to learn the womanly soft ways or just to get the hugs at the beginning and end of class? Good question.

Speaking of questions, I have a few. Have you heard about the new censorship?

Of course you haven’t. It’s not the kind of news that they broadcast. Although it is plain and clear to see if you just read the terms. The fine print. You wouldn’t hear the news on Facebook (or Meta, as nobody calls it.) Meta doesn’t want to pay the Government of Canada, who is trying to level the playing field for journalists and make us safe for democracy.

But now we get a news blackout on Facebook. Government says, I see your blackout, and raise you three prime ministerial blackfaces. Something has to give. The centre will not hold.

Facebook won’t show the news, yet they are hardly the worst actor. That role belongs to the Musked Man, his Royal “Hey You Kids Get Off My Elon.” I am talking ‘bout the X-Man. I am talking about Twitter, or X as Elon Musk has rebranded it. Twitter was always the noisy kid, the anti-social media for people who love to argue.

Can you draw a line? Two points joined together. Now draw it in the sand. Now get the Government to tell you who to silence and who to socially disappear. Matt Taibi exposed the workings of the Old Twitter, how the US government, the Democrats no less, asked Twitter to censor certain people, and certain content. And they did.

Now Linda Yaccarino, the new X CEO, explains how the new censorship system works at X:

“Since acquisition, we have built brand-safety and content-moderation tools that have never before existed at this company. And we’ve introduced a new policy to [address] your specific point about hate speech, called “Freedom of speech, not reach.”

Freedom of Speech, not Reach.

Twitter / X CEO Linda Yaccarino leaks more information:

"We've introduced a new policy called Freedom of speech, not reach.”

"If you're going to post something that is lawful, but is awful, you get labeled. You get deamplified, which means it cannot be shared. And it is certainly demonetized"

If your comments or thoughts are not unlawful, but simply awful, the censors will de-amplify you. In other words, they will turn the volume down to zero. Like my wife does with the radio in the car. No one will see you, no one will hear you. And the biggest punishment, this coming from the Great Elon himself, you will be demonetized, because what is worse than losing your chance to get rich. He bites in your bit coin.

Should you or I be worried about these changes? Even worse than being cancelled by the woke mob, is being deamplified. You get reduced to another voice lost in the wilderness. If no one can hear you, you cease to exist. Enter the Savasana, the corpse pose.

Try that in a woke mob. Or a small town. Even Donald Trump will tell you that being ignored is the worst punishment of all. Worse than Rudy Guiliani’s hair dye. Indict me all you want, but don’t you dare to forget me.

Some people are surprised that Trump is still loved by so many. He is like the Ever-ready Bunny. We drop the writ and he keeps on ticking. And taking. All those donations to his latest defence fund. He is monetizing. Meanwhile, sore guy DeSantis is stuck in his Anti-Disney world, burning books while Florida sinks into the Everglades of oblivion. The new bad guy is Vivek Ramaswamy, a super hot Indo- American who can actually think on his feet. This guy will be interesting to watch debating Trump. Much more interesting than poor old Joe Biden will ever be.

Oh, come on! Sleepy Joe is not sleeping. He is medicating. Hello Savasana. Corpse Pose.