I’m rescuing this from the comments section of my last Facebook post. It’s worth wider dissemination and it’s from the Los Angeles Times’ morning edition on Friday, written the preceding evening before the start of the Facebook IPO.
The answer can be found partly in the experience of people such as DeAnna Stephens of Charlotte, N.C. The 36-year-old video producer quit using Facebook in December, deciding she was frittering away too much time reading about what her friends were eating for lunch. Then she realized that she had lost touch with 900 people.
“I couldn’t believe how out of the loop I was on things in life,” Stephens said. Tired of being the last to hear about new jobs, new boyfriends and new babies, she signed up again …
I’m sorry, you can’t follow 900 friends in your Facebook feed. Whatever this woman may have believed when the reporter talked to her, it has no basis in reality.
In fact, I find the entire idea of 900 Facebook friends utterly stupefying. But I’ve also found those numbers, as on Twitter, not uncommon.
So rather than such things being a meaningful metric concerning the power of social networking, my hunch is they’re more a measure of the human capacity for self-delusion, of the desire in people to believe stuff that’s imaginary in terms of worth because lots of others believe the same thing. In other words, the Cardiff giant thing, the worth of a delusion being determined by how big a majority cleaves to it.
At this time I’m also a bit tickled that, other than the people who vested because they held large amounts of Facebook stock prior to the IPO, most didn’t make any gain on investment yesterday despite the volume of trading.
Inescapable in our American landscape are those motivated by fear. The blog covers a lot of them and it’s depressing. One can laugh dryly at how crazy it reads — those prepper survivalists and electromagnetic pulse crazies, ha-ha — but it’s one reason, among a good number, the country has slipped into paralysis.An entire political party thinks only in terms of what it fears. And its actions are then to attack those fears, or more accurately, those who they deem behind them.
The end result has been poisonous in the extreme. The Republican Party fears and hates science. It fears and despises people not exactly like its members, so much so it appears bizarre and mentally to those not part of it. Worse, as quickly as possible it drafts law and policy to attack those believed to be enemies.
Last week, the worst example was in Kansas. I’d skipped it for days but it essentially boiled down to the state legislature crafting a law targeted at Muslims, specifically through the cracked idea that sharia law is infiltrating the US legal system. (Realistically, every week brings news like this. So you may see things equally astonishing and nasty but attacking slightly different classes of people, places and things n your news consumption.)
Previously, the blog has written on this craziness here. Readers will note the constancy of it.
A bill that would outlaw the use of foreign legal codes in Kansas courts — broadly written but particularly aimed at Islamic sharia law — is on its way to the governor.
The final Senate vote, a lopsided 33-3, came after a lengthy and at times emotional debate Friday on the last scheduled day of the session. Lawmakers said they plan to come back next week; unresolved issues include the budget, tax cuts and redistricting …
But in an impassioned speech, Sen. Chris Steineger, R-Kansas City, said the bill was obviously directed at Muslims.
He said he was originally approached about the bill in January. The original pitch wasn’t about protecting the Constitution, but that Muslims were trying to use sharia law to take over the United States and had to be stopped.
“I thought that was quite ludicrous at the time and I still do,” he said. “This (bill) doesn’t say sharia law, but that’s how it was marketed back in January and all session long, and I have all the e-mails to prove it.”
It’s difficult to find any admiration for Republican Chris Steineger’s admission of regret. There’s a certain contingent within the GOP that knows the party has turned venomous and predatory. But they lack the spine to do anything about it because they are fearful of being purged.
To me, this is a women’s rights issue,” said Sen. Susan Wagle, R-Wichita. “They stone women to death in countries that have sharia law. They have no rights in court. Female children are treated brutally.”
Sen. Jean Schodorf, R-Wichita, said she had confirmed that criminal actions, such as stoning, are prosecuted in Kansas regardless of the offender’s religion, even without the bill.
Sen. John Vratil, R-Leawood, said he quizzed the bill’s supporters on when a Kansas court had ever based a decision on sharia law and had yet to be provided with an example.
The prime instigators who have built up an imaginary sharia law infiltration in US courts are Frank Gaffney, not coincidentally a birther and one of the chiefs of the Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy, and the people who put out the Iranium movie last year. Which, of course, made the case that Iran was a threat to the United States on par with the old Soviet Union and that it ought to be bombed immediately before US civilization was ended by its mullahs.
[The Republican Party has] “become an insurgent outlier — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”
One cannot fix a problem one will not face. And the new cultishness of the Republican Party is certainly a problem … — opinion piece, the Miami Herald
I coined the name Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy to describe these same manipulative paranoid nutcases years ago. While they do not have their fingers directly on the buttons of power in DC because of the presidency of Obama, they assiduously work the sidelines in other related areas — like attempting to institute Islam-o-phobe laws against an imagined sharia menace in the heartland.
And they have been successful.
“A bill that would ban Sharia law in Kansas has passed both houses of the legislature and awaits the signature of the governor,” reads a news report from yesterday.
“While the rest of us are busy worrying about the economy, partisan gridlock in Washington or maybe even the Facebook IPO, the Kansas legislature has been busy fighting off a perceived ‘threat’ from shariah law,” said Simon Brown of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. “[Governor Sam Brownback] hasn’t said what he will do with the anti-shariah bill, but stoning it would seem an appropriate response.”
An anti-sharia law from the heartland listing — from Google.
Following bad advice and the crowd I created an account on Facebook.
I’m not a good match for it and when the company began rolling out its new TimeLine format I thought a bit and decided not to cooperate.
TimeLine is built on the idea that you actually want to have one — a serial accounting of your posts, who you ‘friended,” and everything else you chose to “share.” And it wants it all in a gated community, immune to search, the exact opposite of this domain and everything I’ve put into cyberspace for the last twenty years.
So to make TimeLine useless, as far as my account and anyone viewing it is concerned, new material is deleted every couple days, sometimes sooner.
This had made a profile in which there are serial posts up until TimeLine was announced. And then an increasing gap, punctuated by a couple music videos I want to remain on one page of scroll, and whatever I have posted to Facebook in the last couple days.
By doing this your Facebook existence is mapped only in the present, or whatever slice of it you wish to present. All status changes and activities are immediately hidden. And if you wanted to see something posted last week, if it wasn’t one of my YouTube things, you can’t. You have to come here. Period. And if you don’t know how to do that because your primary cyberspace experience is Facebook, you won’t be able to do it. Which is fine with me.
There are some advantages to this, foremost — if you pursue it — being that you don’t have to worry about something from your past annoying someone you’d rather not stir up. Once in the habit, it automatically cleans up embarrassments or those things that don’t age well.
And face it, much of anyone’s day to day life is ephemeral. It doesn’t need preserving for the benefit of Facebook’s corporate clients.
The very idea of any value existing in a years long TimeLines of hundreds of thousands of Facebook captioned picture spammers masquerading as human beings should be enough to reduce you to tetany.
Mark Zuckerberg’s motto is to help make the world more connected and open. For 99.8 percent of all people that’s rubbish. They don’t need to become more open or connected. The human condition is not elevated by Facebook. There is no magical transmutation from lead into gold. There is no benefit to ‘liking” American businesses so Facebook can show you and those in your friends list what crap you buy and what movies you may have seen. You will not be handed career opportunities because you had a Facebook wall on which you came off as “passionate” in your interests. Corporate America is not combing Facebook to find new talent to hire, new opportunities to extend. And it’s not taking note of your ardent brown-nosing when you comment on a business’s or magazine’s wall posts.
On the other hand a nice Facebook page can ruin your life quite easily.
Take ex-Marine Gary Stein, who got the equivalent of a bad conduct discharge for a common sin — being a churl in public about the President. Unless he has a million dollar book deal in the offing, his Facebook page in trade now probably seems like a very bad deal. (Paradoxically, using my approach to Facebook, Gary Stein might have disappeared the content that got him booted before superiors saw it. But then all those anonymous armed forces Tea Party ninnies who flocked to his page to egg him on might not have thought it so great.)
General Motors figured all this out, or at least some of it. The company came to the conclusion there was no benefit to Facebook advertising.
My take has always been that, primarily, only morons click on Google AdSense links, and by extension, Facebook advertising. Those who do click may be doing so only out of curiosity, often to see just how awful whatever’s being shilled actually is.
And what benefit could any of that be to a big company like GM which puts things on network television everyday?
Once the dust has cleared on the IPO. Facebook’s market value will, absurdly, probably be higher than GM’s. GM employs hundreds of thousands of people worldwide. Facebook employs something over three thousand.
If you had any self-respect and intelligence and you were a manager at General Motors, you wouldn’t want to have anything to do with the cult of Facebook.
Yesterday, while house-sitting for a friend, I read the LA Times’ frontpage piece on lavish spending in the Bay Area as run up to Facebook’s IPO.
There’s Uber, which provides young tech titans with on-demand limousine service at the touch of a smartphone app. Exec provides freelance go-fers to fetch dry cleaning and run other errands.
Then there’s Lux Delux, a start-up run by Andy Hsieh, brother of Tony Hsieh, founder of online shoe retailer Zappos. The invitation-only travel service books getaways to Las Vegas, providing VIP perks such as tables at the hottest restaurants, rock-star access at shows and penthouse suites at hip hotels.
Snooki and the Situation would do well to watch their well-tanned backs. “Silicon Valley,” a new reality show planned for the Bravo network, is gunning for “Jersey Shore.” Its executive producer is Randi Zuckerberg, Mark Zuckerberg’s sister.
“We’re the best thing happening in America,” said one tech entrepreneur, who asked to remain anonymous so he could speak candidly. Celebrities “might be more famous, but this is where the true value is being created.”
Today’s most hilarious line comes courtesy of some nerd named Alexander Heffner t the Christian Science Monitor blog, the publication that used to actually be a real newspaper (no link):
Mark Zuckerberg has the potential to rekindle confidence in the markets and to engage everyday Americans in the kind of economic growth that has been limited to only a handful of individuals in recent years.
Kinda like the confidence inspiring Facebook co-founder who renounced his citizenship to get out from under US taxation.
Heffner apparently also believes Facebook has freed Syria and that it’s solved the problem of scarcity in organ donation, all in a couple weeks.
What’s next for Zuckerberg? Perhaps he’ll make the lame see, the blind talk.
An old Pennsy Dutch folk song would seem apt here.
While the rest of the country has gone to Hell over the last ten years, the Pentagon has been untouched. While unemployment and outsourcing of jobs to China surged, the US military budget ballooned. When the global economy crashed due to Wall Street malfeasance in 2008, the Department of Defense was spared all pain. When millions and millions of Americans were added to food stamp programs, the war machine didn’t even hiccup. Which makes today’s Pentagon assessment that China will pose a threat to economic security because it is copying our weapons the laugher of the week.
The Pentagon, in its annual assessment to Congress of China’s military, flagged sustained investment last year in advanced missile technologies and cyber warfare capabilities and warned that Chinese spying threatened America’s economic security.
“Chinese actors are the world’s most active and persistent perpetrators of economic espionage,” the report said.
“Chinese attempts to collect U.S. technological and economic information will continue at a high level and will represent a growing and persistent threat to U.S. economic security.”
Some graphs, conveniently taken from this week, on the real threats to economic security.
First, on outsourcing of employment, much of which went to China, from the Congressional Research Institute:
Second, unemployment plotted against escape from taxation of the US high upper class:
Essentially what has happened is that the US has abandoned all manufacturing with low profit margin to China. That means all household dry goods, consumer electronics and toys but not big ticket items like weapons, jet engines, automobiles, expensive health care equipment with no margin for error and aircraft.
The Pentagon and the arms manufacturing industry, or the self-licking ice cream cone, is only interested in the weapons part. Wouldn’t want anything to trump our Weapons Shops of Isher.
“The United States could be in for a surprise in 2013-15 if ‘China successfully exploits it extensive cyber-espionage efforts and unveils new weapons systems that are on par with U.S. systems,’ said Capital Alpha Partners LLC, a investment analysis group, in a research note on the Pentagon report,” reads the Reuters report.
Yes, that’s something that threatens the very existence of the vanishing middle class, no doubt about it.
All right boys! You’re really on top of things. If you keep doing what you’re doing, eventually there won’t be anything left to defend.
The court stenography pool in action. A screensnap’s worth 1k words.
The world is full of cheats, liars, lazy bloodsuckers and people who cut corners. If their house gets in your way, burn it down.
While you scale your mountain of success, lend a hand to the person behind you and pull them up with you. Atlas doesn’t shrug in my book. Atlas commends, constructively criticizes, encourages and challenges those following him. Be an Atlas.
Burn down the houses of people who get in your way. But lend a hand. The logic, scintillating, as usual.
The views shot up this mornin’. Someone, either inflamed or amused, has pointed it out.
And this might have something to do with it. Bravo!
One of my friends is always sending me links for lectures posted at TED. I always delete them and send a retort meant to discourage the sending of more in the future. It bums him out that I’m this way.
The reason TED stuff is virtually worthless: It’s for semi-bright nerds and other simple-minded and easily led folk who actually believe its a web engine for the portrayal of genius and innovation. If you subscribe to Wired, you probably think it’s neat.
TED is for tech industry groupies, part of the culture of lickspittle. And today it’s in the news in a small way for spiking a talk on the US economy, one in which a TED lecturer — a venture capitalist you’ve never heard of named Nick Hanauer — argued that the wealthy aren’t job creators.
Paul Krugman has made the same point, much more successfully and to a much wider audience on the pages of the New York Times for the past few years. And I don’t believe he’s ever needed TED to get the word out.
It’s not a hard point to make because all the data is in.
So the only bit one needs to see is a slide, its information now published in many different ways by different people around the web, on the tax rates for the wealthy versus employment in this country.
It destroys any argument that cutting taxes on the wealthy leads to more jobs for everyone else. In fact, just the opposite. There’s no more trickle-down than there is a tooth fairy. (But at least your parents put some coin under the pillow.)
Radically cutting taxes on the top over the long-term destroyed much of the economy for the middle class. Unemployment surged. It’s ugly.
Since these facts are anathema to all arguments about the economy put forward by the Republican Party, such information is often thought political.
So if you always thought TED was high-button excrement but couldn’t quite put your finger on what was shite about it, today’s news is an example. TED can’t deal with facts that might annoy its audience of libertarian tech shoeshine boys and girls.
The Arizona Star published a big piece on survivalists/preppers today. It featured Tim Ralston, mentioned previously on the blog as Tim Thumb, the man who shot a big chunk of his opposable digit off in a gun accident for the worst reality tv show, ever, Doomsday Preppers.
Why feature the heevahavas?
Well, they’re local color. And for some, including Tim Thumb, training preppers has become a business in a down economy. While the logic of taking survival advice from someone known for a spectacularly stupid and painful accident with a firearm on television escapes me it has apparently worked in just the opposite manner for Ralston.
There are firearms too, including handguns and a laser-sighted rifle. Because if there is one thing Ralston is sure about, people are going to get very angry very quickly when a solar storm knocks out the power grid. Or the economy collapses. Or zombies attack (though fictional, Ralston still has the perfect tool for reintroducing the undead to death).
The more people ready to face doomsday, he figures, the fewer who will come knocking at his bunker (and those of others) looking for food and water.
And that day could arrive next year, Ralston says, riding a coronal mass ejection (which is even sloppier than it sounds) that triggers an electromagnetic pulse …
Lisa Bedford considers herself a turtle in the disaster-prepping race. Slowly, steadily, the Peoria mom has amassed the food, water and equipment necessary to deal with a disaster — not the “asteroid strikes Earth” kind, necessarily, but the sort that might force the family to live on their own for weeks and months.
Bedford is a calmer survivalist, cringing when she hears of people talking about super volcanoes or nuclear attacks or melting polar ice caps and the global flooding that will result.
“It (doomsday prepping) seems to hinge on fear-mongering,” Bedford says. “At the core, I believe it’s about common sense and an awareness of what’s going on worldwide, not just in America.”
Certainly survival plays a part, and the author of “Survival Mom: How to Prepare Your Family for Everyday Disasters and Worst-Case Scenarios” has a gun and knows how to use it.
Her fears are more down-to-earth than those buried 3 feet under in a bunker. Should economic jitters give way to strife and panic, she will be ready. And if the doomsday scenarios pitched by extreme preppers make people more apt to stockpile necessities, so be it.
“Yes, the shows are fear-mongering,” Bedford says …
There is mention that preparation mania has roots from deep in the Cold War, specifically mentioning the Cuban missile crisis. There’s not much merit to the argument. A nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union was a real possibility although the number of warheads in the arsenals made fallout shelters pointless. And everyone was in the same boat together.
For the modern preppers/survivalists, everyone is definitely not in the same boat. If there is a shared community, it is one on the extreme nuts right and most of its theology is aimed at telling stories about how all the undesirables “in the city” will need to be warded off and/or killed after a disaster. And the end-of-civilization scenarios have little basis in the real world.
This bothers one of the preppers profiled in the Arizona Star piece. It’s been his business for decades and of the current craziness:
Cody Lundin of Prescott is someone who knows well the cyclic trends of prepping.
When Lundin began preaching the value of self-reliance almost 30 years ago … he was a voice in the wilderness …
But Lundin is having a difficult time bearing all the doomsday-prepper chatter. He shakes his head at the extremism espoused by those who want to store mountains of food and an arsenal of guns in a remote bunker.
The survival at all costs ethic makes him queasy.
Reporter Scott Craven mentions Tim Thumb’s Crovel entrenching tool for beating someone’s head in as a hit with the prepper crowd.
In the 1985 NYC world of the Watchmen, Rorschach only dealt with the city’s underbelly. His favorite activity was putting the squeeze on ex-felons at Happy Harry’s and beating to death those he ran across in the act of perpetrating violent crime. One scene from the comic shows him readying his cravat for use in strangling someone interrupted while raping a woman in an alley. When Rorschach finally comes to blows with a ‘better class’ of person, Veidt, he is easily defeated. Refusing to compromise on his black and white sense of right and wrong, he’s put to death in the snow at the bottom of the world by Dr. Manhattan.
So it’s hard to know what Rorschach would think is right for Wall Street. Because he avidly reads The New Frontiersman, a raggedy-ass newspaper from the extreme right, he would not be sympathetic to over-compensated business executives.
Since Rorschach’s sense of morality defined him, compelling him into the streets to destroy the wicked without mercy or hesitation, it is inspiring to think of what he might do to the shadowy bonus recipients of Wall Street. Would he throw one down an elevator? Handcuff another to a stanchion in an apartment, leave a hacksaw within reach, and set the room ablaze with gasoline? Would he “put fourteen in the hospital needlessly” while squeezing the name and address of their boss from them? Would he crush one of their skulls out of sight in the men’s room?
In the United States, it has not yet come to that. However, if the men of Wall Street are seen to be beyond punishment …
On the other hand, Rorschach had no fondness for liberals or others thought to be soft and morally ambiguous, those he thought equally responsible for the collapse of the alternate history 1985 America in Watchmen. He could be just as likely to take a look at the toxic decay foaming up out of the gutters of Wall Street, threatening to drown everyone not at the top and upon hearing screams for help, just whisper, “No…”
Who in Congress is feeling twinges from their conscience? Which men or women among them feel they should be doing something in this time of great need? Some members keep making requests for data crunches on various facets of our economic and national failure — like the youth labor market and corporate outsourcing — from the Congressional Research Service. And since the CRS is unfailingly honest in such matters, it has produced useful information, over which absolutely no action will be taken. Because the Republican Party, as everyone knows, abhors facts and information.
There is now widespread implicit knowledge that oursourcing has been very bad for Americans. But absolutely rock hard data, illustrated nicely, is always very good to have. If only because it is inarguable.
Two figures give one the gist of the CRS report on outsourcing. They are damning.
Outsourcing has not been offset by a 1-to-1 level in foreign return investment into hiring in the US. Also, US corporate multinational outsourcing has remained inexorable and constant over the last ten years, dipping or leveling only when a recession has occurred, or a global economic collapse. That is, it is no different now than at the beginning of the last decade when it really took off.
Readers will notice how the practice of shipping jobs overseas accelerated at the beginning of the last decade. The slope of the line has remained fairly constant with leveling occurring in the middle of the decade when the Bush administration put the country into a recession. It also plunged upon the global economic collapse brought on by Wall Street.
However, readers will also see how it had picked back up again slightly by 2009, while commensurate employment in the US itself was still plunging.
The second figure shows US corporate multinational foreign investment against outside investment into this country.
There is nothing particularly close to 1-to-1 balance after 2000. Jobs went overseas. The balance has always been negative for American labor with foreign return investment not making up the losses.
The report also notes that when the jobs and production lines go overseas, the value chains which include other related support industries also go with them. And are not replaced.
So who is requesting such reports and why? What is the point? Our leaders, and everyone else knows that at this juncture, no action will be taken, regardless of any findings or indications of ongoing calamity.
In e-mail, Steve Aftergood informs DD: “It’s entirely possible, even likely, that no one in Congress requested these reports and that they were self-initiated by the CRS analysts.”
So I could have been overly generous in my assessments. However, it is heartening that people of integrity and conscience work at CRS and are trying to contribute to the national debate.
Music to read a CRS report to. “You buy that toilet, it was made in China …”
