Days of Change

The FakerNet

I’ve been online in one way or another for over two decades. When I was in college, college-based computer accounts and ftp sites were the main route for communication, so I chatted using my real name. In the 90’s, I also set up addresses using aliases and nicknames. Anonymity ends up being a pretty important thing. Sometimes you can be persecuted for what you say because of what you believe. The internet is full of people who are more powerful and anonymous than you are. If they go after you, the limited information you have online can be your only defense.

For the last few years, around the time the company became public, Facebook has been interested in creating a community where everyone’s online identity is connected to their real life identity. This isn’t surprising. Facebook started as a sort of college yearbook on the internet. Facebook has become a major resource of people looking up old classmates, friends, children and the terrified people being stalked before they went into hiding.

For people under the age of 30 or so, online presence of social interaction was done through media that contained their name instead of their handle. Minor celebrities started interacting with their fans on personal sites, then MySpace, then Facebook. Now major celebrities are on Twitter and Instagram as well. Still, Facebook is the leader in trying to tie everyone’s social media experiences together. Facebook is now used to log into many other accounts. If you’re not “on Facebook” (which sounds almost like being on a drug) like me, you can’t see much on anyone’s Facebook page. It is the biggest private club in the world.

No one may be entirely anonymous on the internet, but there is a lot of difficulty finding every person you want exposed. I’m not a left wing celebrity or politician. I don’t always say the right PC thing. I know the chilling affect my real identity would have on my expression. It’s not about the “public square” either. In the old days, you could say something and not have a camera phone video of it show up a decade later. If I can’t always control my image, I still want to control my handle.

Everything New is Better Forever

I came across this post from a website called Stop the Cap. The proprietor writes a lot about how greedy cable companies are and how no one wants to pay for TV and the internet should be virtually unlimited (he praised Lithuania’s cheap internet today). What I’m writing about is his eulogy for the concept of linear TV. This is the “old” way where you watch a program at the time it is scheduled on a broadcast of cable channel. Many people now watch on DVR, online, or in an “on demand” basis. Supposedly this is better because the number of commercials is less and the fast forward button is handy.

I remember about 7-8 years ago when Facebook basically killed MySpace. A lot of glowing stories came out about the company. Then there were the stories of ruthlessness and intellectual property theft. Now, it’s about data mining and breaking any semblance of privacy. Facebook has wanted people to use their real identity for years, but now they are enforcing it for technical support and page locking. You need to send them the same kind of documentation you need to cash a check.

Non-linear TV has some attractive selling points. Once you have an internet connection, (which isn’t that cheap) the content is free. There are fewer ads. You can watch when you want. YouTube has a larger variety of shows. Netflix made “binge watching” commonplace. It’s a new era where you can mainline entertainment.

What I see overlooked are the drawbacks. Ad revenue brings in a lot of money. Broadcast networks with the most ad money have better shows with more famous actors and higher production values. Most shows on the internet and many on cable frankly suck. The paucity of ads on internet sites is indicative of the fact that there’s not a lot of advertiser interest. Plus, the internet is rife with technical issues. I can’t remember the last time I was watching a direct cable to TV set where I saw “Buffering” in the middle of the screen.

TV is becoming more narrow casted. Some of the things I watch on the lowest rated cable networks are actually old shows like “Fantasy Island.” I know some of the YouTube “stars,” especially the ones who get their real pay day in the form of traditional advertising. You can chase having to see ads, but broadcasters (or narrow casters) will just do like they did in the really early days of TV. They’ll start putting Corn Flakes and Pepsi right in the plot lines of the episode.

Everyone Out of the Pool

I think the concept of White Privilege goes out the door when the presumption is that in a dispute between a White person and a Black person, the Black person is assumed to be getting the raw end of the deal. In less than 3 days, a national story has been made out of a trespassing incident because of the ubiquitous use of cell phone video and a large media cabal willing to promote the opinion of the people who submit those videos.

A McKinney, Texas community saw a pool party get way out of hand and called the police, where a number of teenagers and young people were subdued. The racism angle is focused mostly on the police, but many websites are references claims of racists comments (not on video) reported to Buzzfeed. Buzzfeed is the “news” organization specializing in comparison lists, cat videos and driving citation given to Marco Rubio’s wife. A picture is worth 1000 words, but an edited video can feed a narrative for months.

The reality is that criminals came to a private place. Some “promoted” the event on Twitter, charging an admission fee. Others tried to jump the fence. When told to leave, they cried racism, even though it was obvious this was not a public event. Liberals complain about “gated” communities. There’s a reason why they need gates.

GOP Rising

Since the Democrats burdened America with Obamacare, Republicans have been winning one election after another on a district and statewide basis. Now, a CNN poll (h/t Hot Air) tells us that George HW Bush and George W. Bush have both seen gains in their approval, while Clinton stagnates and Obama slides. This is important because so much power is concentrated in the American presidency. New York and California are Electoral slam dunks for Democrats. Those 80+ votes and 60 or so in blue states put Democrats halfway to victory before any cheating begins.

The last Republican to win was GW Bush. He did it by running an effective campaign. McCain and Romney ran bad general election campaigns, but they also ran terrible primary campaigns. They were presumptive winners and the primary process actually lost them support among the base. Now that the Tea Party is fractured and people are sick of Obama, it is almost easy to win the primary and possibly the general election for a Republican. My advice is to be conservative, be consistent and play favorites with the media. A bad MSNBC interview can last for years. I bet that Rand Paul segregation interview comes back at some point. Refusing to go on low-rated network programs, however, yield little in the way of consequences. Imagine if Sarah Palin could have simply appeared on Greta instead of Today.

Obama and Clinton have and are running cherry-picking campaigns. Obama started kicking legitimate media off his list and replaced them with panty-sniffing bloggers back in 2008. Hillary remains mum on just about everything. Obama makes his media events on talk shows and children’s programming. Media is the disease in politics. It’s time to starve a fever.

Little Darlings

For whatever reason, the story of a strip club in Las Vegas has made national news. Little Darlings is trying to keep true to their name by recruiting high school graduates (who are 18 and older) will billboards suggesting “Pay Your Way Through College.” While local news loves stories like this, it actually brings up some interesting aspects of society and morality.

Las Vegas as a city features topless revues and allows legal prostitution along the outskirts. A strip club is almost quaint, like an old burlesque show. I imagine that the first choice for an entertainment minded young woman is as a showgirl. If that doesn’t pan out, they may end up in prostitution. From a relative morality standpoint, a strip club is middle ground.

Our ideas of traditional morality tell us that stripping is bad. Those girls don’t make a fortune and often end up doing it until they don’t look good enough to make any money. The patrons are even kind of damaged. It may be entertainment for some, for others it is a sad existence and morally corrosive. Early feminists also saw it as exploitative, making men who own the clubs rich and using up the women working in them.

Lately, our interpretation of stripping has gotten more permissive. Modern feminism accepts the theory of the empowered woman who chooses sex work as a legitimate profession. Libertarianism lauds the idea that women have a lucrative employment choice. It is possible for a stripper to earn money, make wise financial decisions and invest in their future. The statistics just don’t bear that out.

As I get older, I realize that “conventional morality” has a lot going for it. A stripper is more likely to be paying their way through a boyfriend’s drug habit than their own college tuition. Stripping is also a gateway to porn, which ironically is a gateway back to stripping. A stripper is probably less likely to be the next Diablo Cody or Felicia Michaels than a high school basketball star is to being drafted by the NBA. There’s always a price to pay for doing bad things, even if it’s for the right reasons.

She Asked for It

No, I’m not writing about the increasingly bizarre antics of Mattress Girl. I’m mostly writing about an interview by CNN’s Erin Burnett of Pamela Geller. Geller is known recently for the “Draw Muhammad” contest that drew armed Muslim criticism. It turns out that the FBI has also found some evidence that Geller was a high value target for Muslim terrorists who wanted to behead her in a similar fashion to other victims of Muslim terror around the world.

Burnett essentially accused Geller of encouraging death threats by her provocative actions. Geller does want publicity, but for the terror plotting happening in this country and the encouragement of it by the government looking the other way. Geller schools Burnett, but I’m sure Erin isn’t too broken up. She is the provocative one, trying to keep her ratings up at CNN since she helms their Number 1 show.

Walker or the Texas Ranger

With so many Republicans in the primary race now, there are finally a few actual governors to choose from. Walker is a really solid and pretty unsexy candidate. Now we have Rick Perry, who may be both hat and cattle this time. In 2012, Perry ran in a field filled with Tea Party candidates who swapped pole positions on a weekly basis. Perry started strong and faltered quickly. There was no time for do-overs that year.

I would take about 99% of Republicans over 99% of Democrats in any presidential race, especially considering the way the Democrats bowed to this administration’s horrible policies. Still, I like Perry. He’s made a name for himself for being a right-wing iconoclast and his corruption is quaintly localized. Most of all, I like the ads. Check out this doozy from 2011.

Trading Patriotism for Security

The Patriot Act is dead. Long live the Freedom Act.

In typical Newspeak fashion, Obama has signed off on the same process he wanted over a year ago. The bulk collection of metadata will now be held by data providers. The federal government will legally need some sort of warrant to access the data. We don’t know how broad the warrant would be. If they suspect someone in New York City, can they collect all the data from everyone on the Eastern Seaboard? Do the phone companies want to sell this data, like Facebook has in the part? Companies can no longer be compelled to hand over data, but they can be bribed and they can still be handed secret warrants they have little ability to refuse.

Metadata is best at predicting trends for marketing and personality profiling. It’s why most phone companies keep it. It is lousy for finding a trail of criminal activity and useless for predicting it. Police use phone records only after they have a suspect (or two) to find a connection to the victim or another conspirator. This Freedom Act will hopefully eliminate the Edward Snowdens who just want to peek. That’s what the White House wanted all along. Whistle blowers are bad for business. They had to go through the trouble of renaming a law.

The Caitlyn Jenner Post

Dr. Josef Mengele used to experiment on prisoners of war by mutilating them, testing their ability to survive trauma until they died and killing sets of twins after doing something horrible to one. He also had an obsession with changing eye color using chemical pigments that often blinded the victims, at least until he killed them and sent the eyes back to Berlin. This is what happens when a sociopathic doctor gets too much power.

You can find a doctor to do just about anything in the world, especially if he gets permission. If his peers agree that it is acceptable to do, it could very well be accepted. When plastic surgeons were offered the challenge of changing gender, it became a supreme challenge. The first male to female surgeries were crude and ugly. Still, they got better at it and most of the modern world seems to think it’s fine. I guess we’re lucky they make colored contact lenses now.

There’s good reason to ask if a thing should be done, rather than if it could be done. We’re not all Sheryl Crow here, if it makes you happy, it could still be bad. I understand the libertarian urge (which is more about isolationism) that it’s none of our business, but we are being psychically bombarded with the idea that we much re-gender people because they want to be a certain way. We’re told that someone can be a different gender without even getting “the surgery” and that a man who wants to live as a woman is still different from a transvestite who only dresses like a woman.

It is not being “cis-normative” or some other bullshit term to reject that buffet of identifiers. Some things are just normal. We have one gender or another. Every damn cell contains those chromosomes. It is normal to be straight. Otherwise, the human race would die out. Variations are variants. They don’t have to be bad, but they are not the norm. If something is not the norm, by definition it is not normal.

People can do weird stuff to themselves all they want, but those doctors are not liberating you as much as proving their skill. Just don’t pee on my leg (with whatever manufactured urethra you have) and tell me it’s raining.

Unsurprising Consequences

I’m laying my marker now that Hillary Clinton some Democrat becomes president in 2016. The field (pasture?) of Republicans is growing by the day, most of them joke candidates with little chance of winning. Most of the legitimate candidates are staying out of it at the moment to keep their powder dry. I blame the GOP.

So, here’s the problem. The presidential primary (and caucus) system is stupid. It was created as a progressive reform to make the people more of a part of the process. That’s not how the parties want it, so they’ve manipulated the process. Democrats have superdelegates. They used them to shift the balance of support to Barack Obama when it looked like Hillary Clinton would make the race close. Republicans are closing up the primary schedule and reducing the overall number of approved debates to decide a winner fast and get them to the convention intact.

There are two ways to run for president. Have a ton of money in the bank from early donors or win early and get first crack at regular donors. Maybe three candidates have a source of money already (Carly Fiorina has her own, but if she’s not an idiot she won’t use it). Anyone who has any interest in running no longer has a chance to form an exploratory committee and feel out donors. They are using the 2012 model. Be the flavor of the week and win a primary, then try to get the support you need to run for the next primary.

Frankly, the Republicans (and Democrats, I guess) should just have the party bosses pick their candidates. The only reason they don’t is because people love rigged contests that look competitive. The “convention” is a big infomercial that the media tries to block when Republicans have a minority on-screen. It would be great if the GOP just decided to save their money and just pick Jeb Bush. Then he could spend all the campaign money on beating the Democrat.

That’s what’s going to happen anyway, except Jeb is going to lose.