Advertising has gotten totally out of hand on this blog, and I have decided to upgrade to get rid of it. I don’t know the details but assume that with purchase of the domain, readers will automatically be linked from the old address.

Bill Hicks summed it up nicely. Lizard first showed me this performance, Dead-on. Google has gotten so bad that I don’t use it anymore – I cannot get past the paid links. And it’s funny, as each one who pays is guaranteed front page visibility, which cannot be.

In regular venues, I cannot move the cursor over the screen without the annoying pop-ups. They have gotten around pop-up blocking by making them part of the web page. Perhaps the worst is the pre-roll where we are forced to sit through an ad before seeing a video. The worst I ever saw was at a Cincinnati Reds site where a man with a baton backed by noise appeared from the left and danced across the screen hawking cars. That was a browser closer.

The Internet started out a quiet place. Advertisers have done everything in their power to destroy it. They first hit us with pop-ups. Then pre-rolls, and now embedded pop-ups. Spyware tracks our buying behavior. Parasite software sneaks on and asks you to buy their product in our lower right screens, without us even knowing how they got there. I have spent now over two hours removing parasite ads from this computer, a new one. Most recent was a box saying it was time to upgrade my “real player” at one time a real product. It wasn’t that at all. It was parasite programs, and it took a long time to get the bastards off.

Most recently, a bar full of ads appears on this blog screen at the bottom with the slightest maneuver of the mouse on the screen. That was my last straw.

They are ruining the Internet just as they ruined commercial TV and AM radio. What’s that you say? Without the ads we don’t get the content? I DON’T CARE. Without the ad-supported content, something better will come along. PBS and NPR, for all their amazing crap news, offer cultural programming that has few rivals. (Our NPR outlet down here in Denver, by the way, runs advertising all day long. They just don’t call it that.)

Advertising is the curse of modern life. Advertisers have to be annoying and intrusive, subversive, loud and repetitive. They have to get our attention.

Thank you, free market, for destroying our serenity, privacy and sanity with your ads. You really, really suck.

The United States is the only industrialized country to award diplomatic posts as political spoils, often to wealthy campaign contributors in an outmoded system that rivals the patronage practices of banana republics, dictatorships and two-bit monarchies.” (See link below.)

Interesting article here about the circus that the Obama ambassador appointment regime has become. Luxembourg, Hungary, Norway and other countries have been graced with ambassadors whose only qualification has been bundling contributions to get Obama’s sorry ass elected.

Max Baucus, ambassador now to China, gets off lightly in this article even as he knows nothing about China. (Many have interpreted his public stammering as a Cantonese dialect – that might have played a part in the appointment.) But the idea that he is somehow fit to be ambassador to such an important country is nonsense. He was chosen to get him out of the senate to make room for John Walsh, the top-down “choice” of a Montana Democrats to take Baucus’ seat this fall. (The new Senator from Montana will be Rep Steve Daines. He’s a Republican, a fitting senator for this mostly Republican state whose Republican Party leadership has for too long conceded the senate seat to Baucus with only token opposite because … Baucus is a cloaked Republican.)

The article notes how Obama, who pledged to limit the abuse of the ambassador-appointment process, has instead abused it beyond any before him in modern politics. It’s just one more piece of evidence Obama is, as Nader described him, nothing but a “con man.”
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PS: Most readers, politically in-astute, will interpret this article to conclude that I am a Republican, that I support Daines. Not true. I simply conclude that of our two choices (only) for public office, Democrats somehow manage to consistently top Republicans in sleaze.

Pain makes people grow up faster, makes them smarter, stronger.

There’s something about Billings … the place makes me want to swing my fists and not stop until I get to city limits.

It’s unfair, I know – a whole damned city, 100,000 people, creeps me out. I probably know a hundred people here. But I was part of it until 2001, and feel it every time I return – the redneck right wingers with their homespun all-knowingness and the comfortable liberals who are more interested in cliche art than real people. (I think there is a small part of Richard Adams’ Watership Down devoted to them.)

Perhaps it’s the liberals that make me swing hardest. They have populated Montana avenue with their trendy stores, built a new library, have their own magazines to honor one another as they listen to YPR and vote for Democrats.

I guess I prefer the redneck right-wingers. At least they are on the outside true to the inside. The liberals are so full of pretense. (There are some pwoggies around, I know. I just don’t know where anymore.)
Continue reading “It’s over, Billings, and really, it’s not you. It’s me.” →

[Swede Synopsis: People should not eat each other’s internal organs. That’s wrong. Proceed to comments.]

Over the past quarter century I’ve been exploring and adjusting, feeling embarrassment at mistakes and shock at new findings. There is no destination port on this journey, but not a day goes by that I don’t feel closer to some “truth.” The problem: truth can be so ugly as to be unbearable so that most either avoid it or turn away in disgust. They are upset not by what I view as “truth,” or something like it, but rather that I must hate my country!

I don’t hate the United States of America. People are the same everywhere. This country was blessed with two oceans and abundant resources. It could thrive in internal peace without being destroyed by the internecine warfare of Europe. I’ve traveled some – Europe, Canada, Mexico and Asia, and will do more. But each return home is welcome. I belong in this country.
Continue reading “Internal organs of dissent” →

[Swede Synopsis: Corporations are collectives. Proceed to comment section.]

Billy Bob entered the voting booth that November day to get it done early, before the crowds arrived. He caught the smell of coffee from the nearby cafeteria – his polling place is the local grade school. Seated at a long table were the aging troopers, mostly women, with large floppy registers full of names. He found his and signed and then entered the booth to do his duty.
Continue reading “Public Citizen” →

[Swede Synopsis: Multiculturalism good thing. Advance to comment section.]

This falls under the “Why am I not surprised?” header, but the truth is, I am surprised. One of the nicest moments during the Superbowl was a rendition of America the Beautiful sung in many languages and including a woman in head garb. Zounds! There’s a controversy now among the small-minded, but about the wrong topic.

It was sponsored by the biggest pusher of high-fructose corn syrup in the world, the Coca Cola Company. HFCS is just another form of sugar, and as the name states, has higher fructose-to-sucrose ratio than table sugar. The body does treat fructose in a different manner than sucrose, but for us non-scientists, it helps just to think of it all as “sugar.”

Science journalist Gary Taubes, author of Good Calories, Bad Calories, suggests here and there that sugar ought to be classified as a poison. While apples may not be harmful, perhaps even beneficial in some manner, drinking a glass of apple juice is the equivalent of eating four apples at a sitting, literally dousing the body with sugar. A 20 ounce Coca Cola is the equivalent of eating four glazed donuts – neither is good for us, but somehow Coke evades the spotlight while donuts are criminalized. How many Americans now start their day with four glazed donuts a Coke?

When New York Mayor Bloomberg tried to limit soda sizes, he was quickly demonized, and no doubt there were board meetings in Atlanta about how to respond. The usual bullshit about how market choice trumps good public policy won out, and Coke still flows in huge quantities there. “Information” is unwelcome in our “free market,” while advertising can hype any kind of shit and call it Shinola.

In Mexico, now officially the most obese country in the world, the government’s response to its health crisis has been to urge people to limit their daily intake of Coke. No doubt there are board meetings going on in Atlanta. Those death merchants, those high-profile sponsors of obesity and diabetes, are worried again about their freedom to market their poison. NAFTA means that corporate privilege trumps good public policy in Mexico, just like here.

But it was a nice ad. No doubt they intended to stir up a controversy. As long as the name is spelled correctly, the Coca Cola Company will reap millions in free advertising from a single paid one.