Musings On Media

The piece on FarceBook and Twiddle seemed to have hit a nerve, with a number of folks weighing in on both sides, but the one that struck me the most was from long-time reader and contributor Robert, to whit:

Hello Bernard:
Often times reading your blog is like reading my own thoughts, and usually it's during those moments when I am feeling quite alone with them. Timely is your blog because lately my  cognitive dissonance has been about the recent IPO offering of Tweeter TWTR as being a product of a kind of mass hysteria. At an earlier time I felt this way with the release of the Facebook IPO FB. It reminded me of when I was a kid and we had the old crank wall phones. The problem for those phones was that they were on shared lines and people could listen in making it a source of gossip. Mable could spread the word that Sue was in a family way, and such. After watching a Zuckerberger video my suspicions were confirmed that gossip was the very reason Facebook was invented. Facebook legitimized gossip making it a kind of art form. But gossip isn't all, you can stop being a nobody and share your vanities with a million other vain folks.  And Mable has become the NSA gossip queen that gathers it all. But the sequel IPO, TWRT astounding me even more since it has no substance whatsoever. Now everyone can not only be a legitimate gossip monger and vainglorious asshole they can also be Internet imbedded objects of commerce too.

I suspect that the ghost of Edward Bernays visited Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberger and told them, "Hey, I can show you how to get $billions from nothing if you simply kiss my hand and the Wailing Wall. You now have two generations that grew up watching moving pictures on screens, so if you put moving pictures on their cell phones their psyches are already so conditioned you can name the price and they will pay it. And if you rewrite the software and add more memory every few months they will go out and buy the same thing over and over  thinking that its new and improved. You can get the Chinese communist to put their slaves to work manufacturing the Ipods and Iphones and Ipads for pennies on the dollar. Pretty soon you will have more money than General Electric, Halliburton and Exon put together, and the public will have their texting, tweeting, twittering, gossiping, and snitching with moving pictures.

Best wishes

Yep, a lot of folks were mystified by the who IPO hype, which even now I suspect a lot of folks are buring out on, simply because there's no substance to any of it.  Folks don't post insights or poetry or utilize the medium as a tool of exploration and enrichment.  

Rather it is a compendium of people's minutia and public jabs at others who may have offended.  Much of it is vicious and the balance is mindless drivel.

Robert's point about the old phone system was exactly right, and for those who don't have personal memories about those old phone systems, it went like this:

Back in the Stone Age, especially in rural areas where the Great Phone Expansion was just reaching out its nefarious tentacles, there were things called party lines.  Any number of homes were all wired to the same circuit, which was wired to a central switchboard with a real live person physically plugging one circuit into another to complete calls.

Each household on a circuit had its own ring tone.  Yours might be two longs and a short to let you know the call was for you, but you would hear all the ring tones for all the phones on the circuit, and consequently the infernal contraption made a lot of racket during peak hours.

To place a call, you lifted the earpiece and cranked a handle on the side.  This created a series of electical pulses that would ring a bell at the switchboard to get the operator's attention.  To call cross-country, your operator would physically plug the circuit into a central line, which would initiate a series of folks plugging copper wires into other copper wires until it reached the circuit you were calling.  This laborious process led to the ubiquitous idiom, "Hold the phone," as you waited for all the plugs to be set just right.

Each circuit had a name.  The one we had when I was a kid was JACKSON, followed by three or four numbers to cue the operator which ring tone to use to get your attention.

The consequence of all this was that each phone on a circuit could hear every other phone on the circuit.  In some cases, housewives would all just pick up the phone at a given time of day and jawbone with each other.  This had the additional result of making the operator (Mabel in Robert's note) the queen of gossip, since she could hear what everyone was saying to everyone else on multiple circuits.  Thus was born the NSA.

Back in the day, you were privy to anything said on your circuit.  If someone had momentous news (a death, birth, etc.), it was only a matter of minutes before word was all over the county.  On party lines, someone was always listening.  Heck, some folks would just sit there and listen for hours at a time, perched on a stool next to the phone box on the wall.

In a vastly more complex way, that person sitting on the stool listening to the party line for hours is what FarceBook and Twiddle are all about.  It's a form of voluntary surveillance where you willingly publish your most intimate details on the party line while others sit and watch for whatever reasons.  It's a kind of sanctioned voyeurism where people post the minutia of their lives for others' entertainment.  We've all become the Town Gossip and the Town Peeping Tom, and our obcession with it is worth US$1.6 billion and change, apparently.

It's sick really that a select few insiders should make so much money off of people's most base proclivities.  But seeing as how they are monetizing just about everything else - air, water, carbon-based lifeforms - I suppose it is only inevitable.  Not that you've probably noticed, but pornography usually leads the way into new communications technology, followed closely by gluttony, greed, envy, and the rest of the seven deadly sins.

And so a core group of greedsters sit back and make a kajillion dollars off of people's baser instincts, while at the same time compiling all the intimate details of ourselves that we freely share with the world into phychological profiles, which themselves can be sold to marketers and spy agencies, bringing in an additional kajillion dollars.  Every twit and status update makes someone incredibly rich.

As P. T. Barnum famously said, "Every crowd has a silver lining."

Global Schmarming

Scientists are mystified!  They can't imagine why!  What could possibly be causing this phenomenon?

What a bunch of yutzes, is all I have to say about it.  Apparently, they are grossly overpaid and hardly smart enough to open a can of dog food.

Or, they are looking for a graceful way out of 20 years of hysterical bullshit about global warming.

Take your pick.  Personally, I'll go with option #1.

If you didn't click the link, then you may be wondering what the heck I'm going on about today.  Actually, if you google up my name, you may still find some old articles dating back to the 90s where I said, rather eloquently, that global warming was a crock.  I have never believed any of it, and have gotten into many a verbal fisticuff with true believers who thought that humans, 1) could have that great an effect on the Earth, and 2) that warming was made whole cloth out of nothing, that it was a temporary cycle in the normal weather patterns.

If you mow down every living thing and pave over the bald spot with asphalt, then stick a thermometer in the middle of it...guess what?  It's hotter!  Duh...  If you put the same thermometer in the middle of a corn field on the same day at the same lattitude...guess what?  Cooler!  Duh...

Now, these numbnutted bucketheads are using all their fancy satellites to find out that clouds, in general, are getting lower.  They are completely dumbfounded by this phenomenon.  What could possibly be causing this? How it is possible?

Listen closely, I'm only going to say this a thousand times.  The Earth is cooling.  Got it?

What does that have to do with lower clouds?  Well, it's a symptom, not a cause, as the linked article will have you believe.

Anyone who's gone up in the mountains or a helicopter can tell you that around 3,000 feet or so, it gets noticeably colder.  By the time you hit 10,000 feet, it's quite a bit colder.  Once you get to 20,000 feet, you'll need a heavy coat and gloves on the hottest day in the middle of summer.  Fact of life, that is.

So, the sun rises, heats the ground, which evaporates moisture, which causes the surface air to warm, which rises up in a convection current, carrying the evaporated moisture, until it hits the cold zone and the moisture condenses and forms what?  Oh yeah...clouds.

The lower the cold layer of air is, the lower the clouds.  As the atmosphere gets colder, the clouds will form at lower and lower levels until they become...what, kids?  Oh yeah!  FOG!

I'm tellin' ya, I should be getting millions in grant money to study these things.  For a cup of coffee and a half a pack of Oreos, I can do a damn sight better at this stuff than all those over-paid propeller heads.  Apparently, the BHP fumes from their pocket liners have eaten away their vaunted brains.

"What a moroon."

I mean, this is something they could solve with a tea kettle and A/C in their kitchen on a hot summer's day.  All the fancy gadgets and whirly-gigs are no substitute for just thinking and using common sense.  But then the readers of this site know that 'common sense' is one of the funniest oxymorons around.

What we are seeing here is the Earth's atmosphere slowing down and becoming less warm.  Because of that, the cold zone is dropping in altitude.  As a consequence, the layer at which moisture condenses out of the warm air is also getting lower.

Need further proof?  Well, if that were the case, then we would see permanent snow caps on mountains getting lower, and alpine glaciers expanding.  Guess what?  That's what the honest data is showing.  We'd also see more brutal winters.  Guess what?  Go ask a European about brutal winters.  We'd see polar ice caps not receding as much as they used to.  Guess what?  I could go on, but I think you get the point, right?

Need proof of the cold layer in the atmosphere?  Go look at clouds.  I know that not politically corrent anymore, because it causes folks to use their imagination and actually get out in nature and feel grass under foot.  But if you do, you will notice that clouds are always flat on the bottom and all start at more or less the same altitude.  The cloud bottoms show you exactly where the cold layer starts.  In fact, if you start early in the morning, you can watch clouds form at exactly that layer all day long.  Kinda cool, really (pun intended).

For those reading this who have gotten their panties all in a bunch, I will admit to believing in 'climate change.' In fact, in Texas we say, "If you don't like the climate, wait 20 minutes.  It will change."  Unless you live on the equator, like me, then all year long, the climate changes.  Yup, I'm a firm believer in climate change.  See it all the time (until I moved to Indonesia).

The other day, I was accosted on the street by a WWF fanatic.  Now, for me this is great fun, kind of like arguing with Jehovah's Witnesses who used to come to my door and try to convert me to idiocy.

Anyway, this guy asked me if I had noticed that it was gettng hotter in Jakarta the past few years.  I looked at him like he had just uttered the stupidest words ever spoken (and they were close to that).

I mentioned, somewhat politely, that this is the equator, numbnut.  It's always hot here, 365/24/7.  But no, I had not noticed it getting hotter.  In fact, the hottest I've ever seen here is 35C/95F, and a good August afternoon in Texas can hit 44C/110F.  So don't give me that 'global warming' crap.  I've seen hot that would make an Indonesian beg for mercy!  In fact, if it's hotter here at all, it's because you guys keep paving over the trees and buying more damn cars that can't go anywhere on the congested roads.  So sure, next to major arteries, it's going to be hotter, but on the scale of a planet, that doesn't even rate as a blip.

Most people go out of their way to avoid these roadside pitchmen.  This guy eventually started running to get away from me.  I will fight idiocy where ever I find it.  I will root it out and destroy it, if I can, one idiot at a time.

It's a good thing he never got a chance to bring up endangered species.

My favorite 'oops' just recently (before the clouds lowered) was that the normal mass of warm water under the Arctic ice cap, had shifted from its normal home over by Russia to northern Canada.  For this reason, they've been telling us for decades that the Arctic Sea was warming.  But now they can't figure out why the normal warm water had moved.  Hey guys!  Check the position of the water against the magnetic pole position...  Sheesh, what a bunch of moroons.

My other theory might have a better chance.  These scientific shysters have been pitching 'global warming' for decades, and have created a whole industry to try to change people trillions of dollars to eradicate the element that makes up pretty much all life on Earth (carbon).

Now they've been caught with their pants down, their e-mail shown worldwide, their theories and scare-mongering shown for what it is.  So they're looking for a graceful exit.  "Oh yeah," they say, "the sun's output has changed."  This, after years of saying the sun had nothing to do with it.  "Oh, look," they say, "the clouds are getting lower causing global cooling."  Obviously, they think we are a bunch of drooling baboons out here.

Boy, they are dancing as fast as they can to save their reputations and keep their necks out of a noose.  When you bullshit the entire world and scam trillions of dollars and make bleeding-heart numbnuts look bad, people get hurt...bad.  And by that, I refer to the 'people' who ran the scam.  Us regular folks have already been hurt...bad.

Imaging the scientidiots are cats, and they've just let loose of a mountain of poo, and now they're scratching and digging their hearts out to try and cover it up.  Live by the grant, die by the grant, I always say.

So, now that we've laid that mystery to rest, I wonder what else they will come up with?  The oceans are evaportating maybe?  NSS.

Stop The MADNESS!

Anyone in doubt that the US is finally and completely lost (even AFTER the TSA sex abuse) needs to watch the following video.  The USDA OWNS the word 'organic?'


I am thoroughly disgusted.  And lest anyone think they're safe anywhere else, these same rules are coming to a country near you.

The one saving grace about Indonesia is that the government is so corrupt that the people feel no obligation to follow any of the laws.  But, that can't last forever.  If Soeharto can come once, he can come again.

The thing is, I'm not so much disgusted with government.  It is only doing what it has always done throughout all of history: get as far up in your life as you will let it.  What disgusts me is that people are allowing it.  And really not just allowing it, welcoming it, encouraging it, feeding it.  They have gotten so snowed and brainwashed and drugged that they actually think there's a boogyman out there somewhere trying to kill them and the only thing that will save them is to let uneducated goons grope their genitals, force them to fill out forms to grow food and sell the extra, and track and trace their every move.

Got news for you, folks.  The only boogyman is the government itself.  It is creating an environment of fear and trepidation, to the extent of instigating acts of terror, in order to convince you that being a complete and mindless slave is the only way out.

AAAARRRRRRGGGGGHHHH!

I actually heard an interview the other day in which a man who had been travelling in Asia recently bemoaned the significantly lower levels of pre-flight screening, compared to dear old Amerika.  I wanted to reach through the speakers on my laptop and slap the idiot!

Are people really so controlled, so stupid, so...OWNED?  The reason security is so much less intrusive here is that Asian men would beat anyone to a pulp that got all up in his wife's and daughter's stuff, for ANY reason!

If you took my advice and picked up a copy of Black's Legal Dictionary (pre-1950), you already know that the original and true definition of terrorism is 'state-sponsored acts of violence.'  STATE-SPONSORED.  Individuals, even organizations, can not be terrorists.  They are insurgents, revolutionaries, malcontents, but not terrorists.  States, i.e. governments, are terrorists.  Does anyone doubt that Nazis were terrorists?  Not in their right minds, they don't.

And speaking of Nazis, almost everything wrong with the world at the present time can be blamed directly on Nazis, with the sponsorship of the Vatican.  Don't believe me?  Try this experiment:

Place a small pile of cake flour on the table.  Not too much.  Don't want to spend the rest of the night cleaning up.  Now, smack the palm of your hand down square on top of it, then lift your hand up.

The flour represents Nazis.  Your hand stands in for the Allied Powers.  What happened?  Some of the flour stuck to your hand (Nurmberg Tribunals), some stayed in the original pile (Germany, Israel, Brussels), and the rest scattered out all over the table, some in clumps and some in a fine dusting across the table (Operation Paperclip and its equivalents).

Remember, the Nazis weren't a 'political' party, per se.  They were a quasi-religious bunch of true believers in a school of thought that involved theology, genetics, mysticism, political science, in fact just about every aspect of life as we know it.  That kind of mind-set just doesn't give up because Eisenhauer and Montgomery come tramping through.

On top of that, they had the lion's share of wealth scammed from all of Europe.  Billions of dollars (1943 dollars) in gold, art, currency, you name it.  With that kind of dough, you think they would all get whacked at the end of the war?  Hell no.  They scattered all over the place, and brought their loot with them.

The US took a bunch of them.  Russia took a healthy share.  South America was crawling with them.  The Vatican helped scores of them escape, offering documents and safe-houses across the globe.  Wherever they landed, their contagion spread, aided and abetted by their hosts.  On top of that, the Nazis grew directly out of the eugenics and racial purity movements in turn-of-the-century America.

That's right, the US gave birth to the conceptual kernels that gave birth to the Nazis.  Why do you think the 9/11 attack was a replay of the Reichstag fire?  Or that the USAPatiot Act was a virtual verbatim translation of the Enabling Act?  Or that the US and Russian space programs were a direct continuation of the Nazi V-2 program?  Hell, the whole space race was nothing more than a ball-swinging exercise to see which side got the better Nazis.

Brown shirts, blue shirts, what's the difference?  Fatherland, homeland, same thing.  American fascism is just Nazism writ large across the globe.  Only difference is that they've had 60 years to perfect the propaganda and brainwashing and death rays.

The fact is, the Nazis have taken over everything.  They were scattered across the world, where they infiltrated into government, commerce and medicine.  Slowly but surely, they spread their philosophy until now we can't tell the difference between the Sturn Abteilung and the TSA.  Wars of conquest abroad, herding the folks back home.  Fascism is the same, any time and any where.

As Joseph Farrell points out in "Babylon's Banksters," the Anglo-American bankster class sold its soul (what misery scrap of it there was to sell) for a piece of the Nazi loot, which funded most of the 20th century and America's imperialism.  Now, the Nazis are calling in the chits, which we call 'bail-outs' and 'quantitative easing.'

And they've had 60 years to perfect it all.

BTW, go back on look that the logos for the Sturm Abteilung and the TSA.  Don't look at the pictures, look at the design elements...the shapes and overall layout.  Look the same?  I thought so...

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In other news, something else that just PISSES me off!

The global warming idiots just won't stop.  They were caught falsifying data, obfuscating facts and outright lying.  So they changed the name to 'climate change' and re-branded the whole pile of sh*t.  They spent how many years telling us our pollution was causing the imaginary warming?  And now they tell us that China's pollution is causing global cooling.

WHAT!!??

These Nazi bastards simply plug-and-play with our lives.  First, the Earth was cooling (70s), but then things got warmer.  Then, the ozone was disappearing (80s), but the Anarctic hole was shown to be a natural phenomenon.  Then it was global warming (90s), but the Earth started cooling.  They are desperate to make us pay for carbon, WHICH IS THE FOUNDATION OF ALL LIFE ON EARTH!  They want to tax us for breathing!  That's all this bullshit scam is!

Of the four basic elements, earth, wind, fire, and water, they've already got taxes on land and water.  They've damn near got a grip on air.  And they're trying to control fire by saying the carbon released is killing the Earth.

THE EARTH AND ALL LIFE ON IT IS FOUNDED ON CARBON, YOU DOLTS!

Next thing you know, they'll tell us the di-hydrogen monoxide is a killer chemical and we have to eradicate it!

I'm positively sick to death of all this CRAP!  It's all LIES, BULLSHIT and complete NON-SENSE!

Hell, Mars has orders of magnitude more CO2 in its atmosphere, but I don't see anyone saying the planet is balmy!  At best, you'll get a chilly shirt-sleeve temp at high-noon in the dead of summer at the bottom of a deep crater.

Anyone who believes this tripe is sadly misinformed, completely brainwashed or a Nazi bastard.  No other options available, sorry.

I'm going to go into a coma, somebody call me when people wake up and get a good, deep whiff of Kopi Luwak.

Maybe tomorrow I'll be in a better mood.