WordPress is an annoying outfit, most likely an Intelligence front. Very little of our lives, especially intellectual activity, escape the hand of enclosure, wherein we are lured to the paddock thinking it is a place where we get to freely express ideas.
They have, for several years now, been pressing writers into using a program called “Gutenberg,” which they claim to be superior to their old program, now called “Classic”, where in we simply write and avail ourselves of several simple, basic commands for organized presentation, such as blockquoting, linking, insertion of images, and limited text features such as bullets and numbering. We don’t need any more than that, but Gutenberg is a complicated maze of options, most of which might be useful to specialists writing, say, a scientific paper, but way too complicated for ordinary blokes. Keep it simple should be the rule. But WordPress insisted that we use Gutenberg, removing Classic from our options. For our own good of course, They know what is good for us.
I have lost most of whole posts using Gutenberg, unrecoverable. They go away, and a blue paragraph appears saying that certain of my writing is unrecoverable. I complained to WordPress, and found that I could return to Classic if I paid them an additional $200 a year, not gonna happen. Finally, after losing once again most of a post to Gutenberg’s nonsensical layout, a WordPress “Happiness Engineer” (no kidding) gave me back Classic at no fee. However, now I find that WordPress has removed most of the commands normally available in Classic, forcing me once back to Gutenberg. Whenever criticized for the goofiness of Gutenberg, they go all smug, saying that we need to be trained in its marvelous overblown and unnecessary features. If we resist, they use force. That is why the commands disappeared.
Microsoft operates in this manner too. I use spreadsheets, not so much as I used to, and there were far better options available than Excel, but they went away. Now it is Excel, and nothing else, and do not try to tell Microsoft that their product is inferior. They are f******* Microsoft, and are smug and indifferent. That is how it works when the market is cornered. Mediocrity rules. Gutenberg is mediocrity, mandated by morons.
That line I just drew there is no longer available for use in Classic. They removed it.
The psychopathy going on around us is becoming more intense, leading to ostracism, loss of moral freedom and privacy. A certain woman I met once and did not like is part of a female hiking group, and has taken it upon herself to vet members of that group to out anyone who has not been vaccinated. There is, you see, a. dangerous virus going around, and she has a duty for sake of preserving life to expose anyone who has not undergone vaccination. Un-vaxxed people are free to hike with her, but not ride in a car. She is a moron, and also a journalist, but I repeat myself. It gets worse. Her brother is a doctor, her sister a nurse. The three of them have scaled the peaks of brainwashed insolence and ignorance, safely ensconced in moral certitude.
This woman, let’s call her Gertrude, has not a clue what is in the vaccine, has never done any private inquiry or independent thinking, which is not taught in journalism school. She imagines we are threatened by invisible pathogens out to get us, never once stopping to think about that ridiculous premise. It comes from authority figures, and as a journalist (and a moron, but I repeat myself) she learned in her somewhat non-rigorous education that she should always follow authority figures, never questioning. She is now one who lectures her fellow hikers in long text messages, a royal pain in the ass. She is breaking up the group, for the good of the group, of course. What is a fun activity, hiking the Colorado Rockies, is now filled with tension, privacy invaded, and non-vaxxed self-assured and independent-thinking members ostracized. Gertrude insists that if a person does not disclose vax status to her, that they maintain six feet distance from her. That is not nearly far enough. She needs to be quarantined, for the good of the group.
I have known many journalists in my life, and all of them almost without exception are smug and stupid, poster children for Dunning Kruger. The only field of endeavor I know to be more oblivious and less self aware: virology.
My wife and I have an ongoing 26-year Scrabble match, kind of a nerdy thing to discuss. I had it on my iPad, but could never connect to the Internet to get the dictionary updated. I finally consulted the Internet, and was told that if I uninstalled and reinstalled it, that would fix the problem. Being clueless, I did that, and when I went to reinstall found that there is no more Scrabble online, and that by uninstalling I had lost the program forever.
Further research told me that Hasbro had sold its online version of the game to a company called Scopely, and that significant changes had been made. They basically dumbed down the game so that kids would play it, infuriating hard core players. Said one complainer to the company, you are basically targeting eight-year-olds with the flashing lights and talking cartoon characters. Scopley relented, and reintroduced classic Scrabble, but I cannot access it because to do so I need a Facebook account, and you can bet that if I still did Facebook they would want to access my entire list of contacts.
We still have the board version, and enjoy it because we are so evenly matched. We have enjoyed passing many hours on plane and train rides, but without the iPad version, no more. I wish on Scopely giant failure for downgrading the product, but mostly I am tired of kids with short attention spans that respond to flashing lights and cartoon characters. That’s really annoying. I guess I don’t like kids.
Piece of Mindful 
What makes you think WP is Intel? Do they censor?
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Speaking from experience, yes, they do censor. I had my comments shadow-banned by the WP platform.
As for it being an Intelligence front, considering it’s size and scope, I wouldn’t put it past them to be an Intel project, just like YouTube, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, etc.
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A long-held suspicion. Just as Facebook was able to squeeze out MySpace due to Intel backing, WordPress has come to dominate blogging. No, they do not censor me, but because I am enclosed, if they decide to do so, I cannot stop them. The iron fist is there, I suspect, covered at this point by a velvet glove.
Did anyone ever suspect Facebook would become the censorious monster it is back before Covid? But to be able to censor everyone, they first had to enclose them.
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Enclosure is also the foundation of block chain technology. Data collected and stored FOREVER serves to educate the AI, as it learns EVERYTHING about us. Bit by bit we are being captured. Alison’s latest interview gives more details: https://wrenchinthegears.com/2021/10/19/culture-jamming-a-blockchain-summit-in-texas/
Blurring lines is not new. This is the 1981 version of our digital fog today. “Is it live, or is it Memorex? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfcCXh_RLjE
The true self is never destroyed. Self-hypnosis only masks what is Truth, about ourselves and everything around us.
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“The three of them have scaled the peaks of brainwashed insolence and ignorance, safely ensconced in moral certitude.” Besides a hearty laugh, that poetic line chilled me for some reason, maybe because I know imbeciles of that stripe, jackasses braying about their volunteer work at jab centers. That woman is a menace. Hopefully her blood steeping in cortisol and adrenaline constantly for over 18 months will curtail her continued defilement of nature’s riches.
But I have to ask; does she still mask? Are squirrels allowed within the six feet?
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Oh yes, your wording reminded me of what I told two highly-paid IT pals 18 months back, “This is the largest restriction since the enclosure movement.” Of course, you are talking about the enclosure of thought and opinion in this case.
One woke up about four months back and sincerely apologized for not seeing the abundant clues (I was like, no need, I’m stoked for you!), the other has disengaged, not even sending any more links to the Martian Post or the New York Lies, preferring to wedge his head in the sand. He actually pays for those two feeds.
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She insists that anyone unvaxxed not ride in a vehicle with her, and while hiking maintain six feet distance. If only this were not common.
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Doing that in 2019: She is referred for psychiatric treatment.
Doing that in 2021: She is a paragon of scientific reason.
It’s been a crazy two years.
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Maybe she does know the vaccine is harmful and she’s just going along with the agenda as a way to boost her own ego for being to ugly to get laid in her 20’s. If her brother is a doctor and sister is a nurse then there is a financial incentive as well.
Facebook is recently in the headlines that it will undergo a company name change. Maybe they will change it to Gertrude.
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I was reading this yesterday.
https://www.gavi.org/vaccineswork/next-pandemic/marburg
The gleeful speculation about how many possible pandemics are in the pipeline to choose from, links to the exciting possibility of desktop design to marketing vials of vaccine product in 100 days and the dangers of the idea of ‘my body, my choice’ applied for the ‘vaccine hesitant’ are all there on one insane page; a showcase of institutionalized logical fallacies. Does anybody even read this stuff? Does a computer write it?
Today I came across this.
https://themooster.net/t/clinical-use-of-pcr-testing-totally-discredited-by-the-whooping-cough-pandemic-that-wasnt/125 It has a little 11 minute video.
I was unaware that there were some ordinary people in the medical machine who have functional bull**** detectors. It seems like the designated spokes opponents for the narrative popped up overnight with their scripts. Is this old news to you all?
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I lost brilliance from a crashing website 10 years ago. Since then, everything over a paragraph long starts as a Word doc. Even Facebook comments. That word app has never crashed- yet. Everything I’ve posted here still exists as a word doc. That may defeat some of Word Press’s process, but I don’t handle anger and stress very well. Copy and paste beats happy pills..
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I’ve heard of a few isolated incidents where people have lost large documents due to inexplicable Word glitches. I use it, but even as I labor to manifest my brilliance at the keyboard, I feel like a fool for not writing my drafts in longhand in a notebook first. We know that all of our technology is owned by psychopaths, and none of it can be trusted.
Before I fully “woke up,” I noticed a recurring detail in various feature articles about different authors I came across. The articles would note that such-and-such author (one of them was John Grisham, as I recall) writes first drafts in longhand on a notebook. When this information was always imparted with bemused incredulity, along the speculation that the novelist in question was probably the only and the last writer in the world to be so quaint. Even then, I recognized this as propaganda. We are not supposed to write in longhand. All of our creative endeavors must be tethered to and dependent upon technology.
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Yes, yes…I feel the same sentiment about the direction of society.
They built a fake castle near me called Medieval Times, My first thought as it was going up was, “people are going to love it.”
They do.
Why journey to a real castle somewhere far and different when you can hop in the Tesla and be at the fake castle in 20 minutes?
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Very nice insightful comment.
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