Obama appointees attack free and open Internet

Savetheinternet.com, a lobby group which exists to defend net neutrality and is strongly opposing the FCC’s moves, claims that American web users are in serious danger of having their freedoms swept away: “expect internet blackouts that extend far beyond the popular content vendors as smaller websites are caught in the crossfire. Tweets, emails and texts will be mysteriously delayed or dropped.”

“Videos will load slowly, if at all. Websites will work fine one minute, and time out another. Your ISP will claim it’s not their fault, and you’ll have no idea who is to blame. You also won’t be able to vote with your feet and wallet, as there’s no competition in broadband, and all ISPs will be playing this game,” the group states on its website.

As a CPA I’ve had constant exposure to wealthy people over the years – they cannot be grouped anymore than Hispanics or teenagers. But I have noticed a tendency that puts them under the heading “humans.” Unless they inherit their wealth, more common than not, they are bright and ambitious risk takers during the initial phases of wealth acquisition. This is because there is far more to gain than lose in their risk-taking behaviors. It’s perfectly natural.

With success the objective shifts from acquisition to preservation of wealth. Risky behavior goes out the window. Now the objective is security, and that requires a different strategy. This naturally leads them into politics, where their wealth is most at risk. The anti-tax attitude dominates, in fact becomes an obsession.

It’s perfectly natural. In their shoes, I would probably behave in the same manner. But the greater good requires minimizing pools of private wealth, as in the end these great private fortunes take over the political system, and we lose our democracy and personal freedoms.

Oh wait. Too late about that. Done deal.
____________

There’s something similar going on now with the Internet, the fight for “net neutrality.” The same principle is at work – those companies that have had success on the Internet do not want any upstarts bumping them off. MySpace was taken down by Facebook, and does anyone remember Netscape? It will happen again and again unless someone puts a stop to innovation and competition.

That someone is Obama. His strategy was simple: He lied his ass off. While claiming to be a champion of a free and open Internet, he quietly put people on the FCC determined to take it down. Now he’s silent on the matter.

Here’s a great op-ed piece on Internet history and net neutrality, predictably from a non-American source.

Police Academy 8?*

Do you ever wonder why, after the success do the movie Rocky, that there was Rocky II, III, IV, V, VI …. people eat it up, that’s why. A successful movie formula is gold, money in the bank.

Even so, I do wish that the American public were a tad less gullible. Just once. Just a tad.

Read this. And this. And get your beer. We will cry together.
_____________
*I was looking for a dead, moribund movie franchise to name this post, and remember the Police Academy movies, and then discovered that Police Academy 8 is scheduled for release in 2014! This post just writes itself! The American public will eat it up!

Movies and TV present fantasy images of journalists

imageOne of my favorite movies of recent times is The Bourne Legacy. People had low expectations for it, as Matt Damon was not aboard to reprise his title role in this fourth Bourne movie. They brought Jeremy Renner aboard as Aaron Small and with Rachel Weisz, the results were stunning. The last half hour was one of the best chase sequences I have ever seen.

Robert Ludlum invented Jason Bourne – I was a big Ludlum fan too. His books were formulaic, of course, even predictable. What I liked, however, was that every good guy was a potential bad guy, and there were no saints. Americans were not exceptions. In the world of spycraft, they were all shits.
Continue reading “Movies and TV present fantasy images of journalists” →

Terrorist primer

The U.S. has opted not to bomb Iraq at this time.

Here’s how to read that decision:

  • 1. The U.S. lies about everything they do.
  • 2. Ergo, they are lying about this too.

You figure the rest out! We just got back from a week in Yellowstone, sleeping with the grizzlies, walking until my feet burned like firecracker punks. Man I am tired!

Here’s some extraneous data to consider:

  • 1. When they say bombing “Iraq,” they mean “ISIS, or the US/French/Turkish-run terrorists that have recently been turned out of Syria.
  • 2. The U.S. rarely turns down a bombing opportunity.
  • 3. Ergo, they might be bombing and not telling us about it, or might be holding back.
  • 4. If they do bomb, it will not be against ISIS forces, which are allies in terror, but rather to assist ISIS forces. So if they bomb, it will be against Iraqi cities and towns, to soften the place for ISIS.
  • 5. They will lie about that.
  • 5. That’s because they lie about everything they do.

OK … Take it Phil.

How pathocracy* takes hold

*Pathocracy (n). A system of government created by a small pathological minority that takes control over a society of normal people.
________________
This almost sounds like an Onion headline, but I ran across a Facebook post that said that a new study by Princeton and Northwestern found that the United States government does not represent the will of the people. We are an oligarchy, it concludes.

Zounds. No shit, Sherlock!
Continue reading “How pathocracy* takes hold” →

Elephant sex

Theirry Mayssan at Voltaire Network (Jihadism and the Petroleum Industry) goes a long way in simplifying the “ISIS” attack on Iraq, reducing it to a squabble among oil companies, primarily Exxon/Mobil (aka “Qatar”), and Aramco. The big losers in the conflict are Turkey, Britain, China, and if course, beleaguered Iraq (under unrelenting attack by the US since 1990). The winners are the US, Saudi Arabia and Israel. ISIS itself is a well-financed terrorist force under US, Saudi and French command.

Saudi Arabia claims it has increased production to make up for any shortfall in world supplies due to this conflict. They do not have that capability. The US-backed democratic kingdom, where criticism of the government results in imprisonment or decapitation, is merely fronting for ARAMCO and selling the oil stolen from Iraq on the world market. As Meyssan points out, ISIS could not market anything without cartel, that is, US support.

The goal? It has not changed since put forth by the Bush Administration in 2001, to redraw the map of the Middle East. This particular facet of the oil cartel (NeoCon) scheme involves breaking Iraq into three manageable provinces. The policy has not changed and is unaffected by three presidential elections during that time. US elections do not affect policy, and are mostly for show, a puppet-shuffling affair.

These issues remind me of the old notion of elephant sex, where there is a lot of shuffling of feet on he ground, while the real action is going on high upstairs.

A conundrum

Iraq is under attack again, this time ellegedly by Sunni-led forces straight off duty from terrorizing liberating Syria. National Pentagon Radio reports that Iraq “claims” to have retaken the city of Tikrit, and Iraq reports this as fact. What is true? Why do I need to know anyway?

Put a different way, what is the role of American news media? Is it to keep me informed? Or, more likely, is it to keep me uninformed?

And if their job were to keep me in the dark, how best to do that? One way would be to simply pick up the microphone and tell me to mind my own business, that these things are all above my pay grade anyway. But that would be counterproductive, as it would only stimulate my curiosity.

So the best course of action in keeping me uninformed would be to pretend to keep me informed, and to invest tons of money simply to build an image of people dedicated to reporting things that are true. As The late Johnny Carson was so fond of saying of his job, comedy, “if people buy the premise, they will buy the bit.”

So the best thing to do is to get off the American grid and seek information elsewhere. But wait a minute. American “news” reporters are quick to report to me that China’s Internet is heavily censored, and that Chinese people don’t even know it because they cannot access web sites that would tell them as much.

Them dumb Chinese. Surely Americans can access anything and everything without censorship … wait a minute. What’s wrong with this picture. Our news media lies to us all day long, but we are free to access information elsewhere on our own? This, in a fake reality environment propped up daily in every corner of our existence including movies and television programming?

I deliberately avoid American news reporting, and seek information elsewhere. Does this make me better informed, or better deluded?

Take this study and shove it

This has been bugging me, and it was in the comments and not a private conversation, so I will pass it along here. A guy named Truthwillwin1 came here after I had paid a brief visit to Doug Ernst’s blog, and offered up a the following “study” he and others had done. This has to be the batshit craziest nonsense I have ever seen:

We recently did conduct a fun study to see if people are hypocritical in their views on giving and it had some interesting results. The study was conducted in 2 phases.

Phase one was to ask if all people should be covered for health care and we asked about their views on the fairness of the tax system.

Months later the same group of people (968 people) was asked a question something like this. If you received an A in this class would you be willing to reduce your grade to a B and give others in your class the points in order to help the ones that are failing pass?

The results were very interesting (a quick summary):

  • 436 believed we should all have health care.
  • 863 believed the top brackets should get a higher tax to support the lower income groups.
  • 39 stated they would take a grade reduction to help others.

When it came to actually providing the assistance the majority was against it, yet when it would come from others they were fine with having them embrace the burden.

The next goal may be to see how much a person is willing to pay…

WTF? Giving away a grade? How about instead of that give away intelligence or good looks? I know what the mindset is behind this, that money is a symbol of success and accomplishment, in and of itself a valuable commodity rather than a device used to enable commerce. And that is the funniest thing about this study – normally they try to be clever and disguise their objectives. They did so in this study, and here is what they discovered: The people doing the study do not understand money, social structure, caring and compassion, or the health care system. They are stupid.

By the way, I pay taxes and willingly support Medicare and Social Security and assistance for those who are in true need. I would never give away an “A” I had earned in a class. That’s dumb. I told him I thought the study was more education than a survey of attitudes, and that it was contrived to boot. He got angry, commented that he’s a professional in these matters, and left in a huff. Which is OK – he’s the type with a cannot let someone else have the last word. Since I am that type too, we were doomed to tragedy, hours of painful exchange. This is not meant for bait. He’s gone and there are no links.

It’s just so freaking stupid that it needs to be highlighted. What payroll is he on? Are my taxes paying for this nonsense? This, AND we have to pay for their stupid wars? Jesus! Give a poor citizen a break. Now they’re just rubbing our faces in it.

Searching for missing keys

street lightA relative of ours was stricken with galloping cancer back when we lived in Montana, and I took him to visit doctors in his final days. While doing that he was in an agitated state, and was strident in giving me directions on how to get there, where to turn, where and how to park. It mentioned this to my wife, who is a wise woman despite her spousal choice, and she helped me understand. It was an expression of powerlessness, she said. He could not control the big things in happening to him, so he was taking charge on anything he could. He just needed some validation.

I followed a link this morning from here to here, and that brought me back to our loved one and his galloping cancer. Throughout this post from Douglas Ernst and his wide and varied responses, I am picking up on his sense of powerlessness. He must be validated in some fashion, and for that to happen, his vote has to matter, and if his vote mattered, then having the Neocon fake liberal Obama in office must be having a deleterious effect on foreign policy which must have been prescient before handed over to incompetents in 2008.

Voting matters, elections have consequences, you see. His vote is a wise one, those for Obama messed things up but good.

I left a nugget there but Douglas screens comments, so I don’t imagine it will ever see light of day.

It’s always difficult to judge intentions after the fact. ISIS was birthed and sprung on us as a grown-up and, like all events, our job is to imagine that it is somehow spontaneous and that the largest military force in human history, with scores of bases and billions in armaments in the region, with its own contrived country nearby, is just watching and hoping for the best. Our job too is to imagine all good intentions in Washington, all malevolent intent elsewhere. Our job too is to imagine cold calculated skill from Republican administrations and incompetence from Democrats. (That last job requires imagining that American elections affect changes in foreign policy, itself a job.)

It’s tough being an American. We have to form opinions without knowing anything. We do our best. Mr. Ernst, you’re making the best of it.

[He let it stand! We’ll see how long I last there. He answered me, I answered him, and then suggested he ban me. Just being proactive.]

Monday meanderings

The usual Monday morning cluttered brain here needing to unload. Instead I sat down to read for an hour or so, and it led me to a revelation that has some explanatory power – people talk about the Stalin purges and Mao’s Cultural Revolution as defining events in those cultures, all with the arrogance of smugly superior civilized people watching others self-destruct.
Continue reading “Monday meanderings” →