01.11.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 12:49 pm by George Smith
Google is your enemy. Like Facebook and Twitter, it is the pinnacle corporation for the Culture of Lickspittle. It’s search and ranking algorithms, stretched across the globe, have cemented the winner-take-all economic environment. If you’re not in the top of the ratings, you don’t exist in our Google-world.
For the past few weeks I’ve noticed Google mailing me every week with a selection of “the best” posts on Google+.
Today’s offering was what most people were liking, Google-plussing, and passing around.
You can guess how inane it was.
1. Fuzzy video of three men in Africa being chased by a lion! They come to their range rover and two dive under for cover. The third jumps behind the wheel and drives away. That’s some real Three Stooges-like comedy! Hawwwwwwww!
2. Fuzzy animated gif, “How to turn off a cat.” More precisely, how to turn off a kitten, a trick everyone knows who has ever had one, pinching the fur on the back of the neck as when Mommy-cat takes her offspring somewhere else. Hawwww! Isn’t that cute!!!!
3. Inane Google-doodle-like animation of a Rube Goldberg machine that makes blue balls. Hawwwwwwww!
This is what Google’s supercomputing technology does. Pump utter dogshit to hundreds of millions of people every day.
Google is so special, it swiped the picture I was using on my MrDickDestiny account on YouTube and put it on the old account I used for Blogger, and joined the two. I haven’t logged onto the latter in years.
I quit Blogger because I was tired then of being screwed by Google.
That was in 2009, five years ago, and I wrote about it here.
So, again, in 2013 Google took the picture I uploaded for my profile on YouTube and put it on the account I haven’t used in half a decade. It didn’t ask, it didn’t say it was going to do it, it just did it.
And now my profile picture is this attractive cipher symbol (see upper left).
When I tried to replace it with my old picture, Google wouldn’t let me do it. There is no dealing with Google. Ever. Google deals with you.
They really are inimical in Mountain View. There is nothing Google does that will ever help you out. And that is why the tech monolith is perfect for the Culture of Lickspittle. Its culture is the same, one with the kickdown society.
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01.10.14
Posted in Cancer at 5:04 pm by George Smith
It was two years ago today that Don Hunt, my friend, died. Surrounded by friends, he slipped away over the course of a day much like today in Pasadena. Warm and sunny, even a little more so than usual for this time of year.
This New Year’s I had the duty of writing to two of his old acquaintances back in Virginia. Colleagues of his at the Virginian-Pilot, they’d had Christmas cards returned-to-sender for the last two years and were trying to find out what had happened.
They searched the web and found his memorial, here, which led them to me.
And so I wrote them a condensed form of his last days, adding that he often spoke fondly of his old life back in Virginia.
The college football season, something we both enjoyed together, is wrapped up. In the two years since Don’s passing, it’s been a bit hard for his beloved Texas Longhorns.
I wonder what he would have thought of coach Mack Brown’s resignation and the end of era in which Don was at the Rose Bowl to see his team defeat USC for the national championship?
No, I do know what he would have thought: To everything, there is an end.
Today will always be a sad anniversary. But also one on which I and some friends look at a picture and remember the good and loving.
We released part of his ashes near a tidal pool on the beach in Santa Barbara. I can see it clearly still. Today, it was sunny there, too.
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01.09.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Psychopath & Sociopath at 3:06 pm by George Smith
After years of having no health insurance, no health care of any kind, this week I was informed I would qualify for the Medicaid expansion, funded under Obamacare, in California. And I received my benefit identification card in the mail. Prior to the years of zero health insurance I had a junk insurance policy, sold by one of the big providers nationally and in the state. It paid only for some part of a catastrophic illness that would probably kill you within a year. It was the perfect example of a large predatory fee to the insurance industry for years, in return for absolutely nothing, a tremendous business model in American capitalism.
From Taibbi blog, no link, on the standard Republican/libertarian cant on Obamacare:
[You’d] have to be a complete sociopath to assert that expanding access to health care to millions of people doesn’t improve their health – and that the only tangible benefit of health care reform, in fact, will be taking money out of the pockets of hardworking taxpayers like yourself, and redistributing it to the incorrigibly unhealthy.
Apparently low-income Americans will have no problem taking money from the affluent – the law will improve their “financial stability” …
Indeed, they are sociopaths.
The Republican Party, WhiteManistan, most of the citizens in the distant land where I spent over half my life, have devoted the last eight years to pushing a philosophy that makes it absolutely clear they want people like me to get sick and die.
They made it personal. And now they can boil in their own oil. I don’t live in WhiteManistan anymore. And the Republican Party in California is dead.
This is a tribe that because of two things, its towering hatred of the president and overriding desire to always malevolently strike at the less fortunate, has denied the service I will have to millions of their own.
It’s the Republican legacy and it’s unforgivable. They are demonstrably the worst.
Now you know why I did this. You write what you know, first hand.
UPDATED
Krugman:
At this point, the rise of the 1 percent at the expense of everyone else is so obvious that it’s no longer possible to shut down any discussion of rising inequality with cries of “class warfare.??? Meanwhile, hard times have forced many more Americans to turn to safety-net programs. And as conservatives have responded by defining an ever-growing fraction of the population as morally unworthy “takers??? — a quarter, a third, 47 percent, whatever — they have made themselves look callous and meanspirited …
Meanwhile, progressives are on offense. They have decided that inequality is a winning political issue. They see war-on-poverty programs like food stamps, Medicaid, and the earned-income tax credit as success stories, initiatives that have helped Americans in need — especially during the slump since 2007 — and should be expanded. And if these programs enroll a growing number of Americans, rather than being narrowly targeted on the poor, so what?
Still more Krugman, on the Medicaid expansion of Obamacare:
One thing I haven’t seen mentioned much, however, is that another aspect of recent developments — the rapid rise in Medicaid enrollment, despite Republican efforts to block it …
Medicaid gets a bad rap. It’s a poor people’s program, and it’s widely assumed that this means poor care. In fact, there’s not much evidence that this is true, and claims that Medicaid patients can’t find care are greatly exaggerated. Beyond that, however, Medicaid is the piece of the US health care system (aside from the VA) that does the best job of controlling costs …
One way to think about this is that Medicaid is actually the piece of the US system that looks most like European health systems, which cost far less than ours while delivering comparable results.
Now, expanded Medicaid is a key part of Obamacare — and so far, despite GOP obstruction, Medicaid enrollments have outpaced insurance through the exchanges.
This comment from the blog post at the Times is worth a read.
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Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 9:02 am by George Smith
What a coincidence.
Chris Christie.
Career ending. His office staff snarled traffic as an act of political revenge. The traffic jams impeded public services, like ambulances. One woman died. Lawsuits will ensue.
Wait for the hilarious Christie-Cuccinelli presidential ticket endorsement by Ann Coulter, the Governor Christie for President barbecue apron.
“Nobody wants to talk with him, walk with him, be seen with him…”
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01.08.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 1:24 pm by George Smith
In the e-mail, from Rock n Roll Fantasy Camp, the place for middle-aged white guys to reward themselves with a Dad Rock getaway:
ATTENTION!!! Rockers: If you were in a band in High School or College band during the years of 1985-1995, Rock ‘n’ Roll Fantasy Camp is looking for your bands’ [sic] photo to use in an upcoming HS/ College social media campaign. Please submit your photo to reunion@rockcamp.com. More details to follow.
Trouble is on the way.
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01.07.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 5:06 pm by George Smith
One of America’s pressing problems, TIME magazine and a doctor’s group at the Centers for Disease Control informs is, wait a beat, excessive drinking!
“Excessive drinking’s medical impact drains the country of $200 billion yearly, according to the CDC …” reads the magazine.
A CDC doctor behind a report on the drinking problem says his colleagues should now engage in “motivational interviewing” with their patients to curb the plague of excessive drinking.
No word on whether an alternative method, eliminating mass unemployment and underemployment, was considered to reduce American excessive drinking, or whether excessive drinking was used as a pain killer or, perhaps, an anti-depressant, cheap drink being easier to access than prescription medication and psychotherapy to cure the blues.
Internet advertising is the best advertising.
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01.06.14
Posted in Bombing Paupers, Culture of Lickspittle, Cyberterrorism at 1:55 pm by George Smith
The US has the biggest national security infrastructure in world history. It’s globe-spanning. And what’s its purpose? To hammer poor people, mostly.
Nothing advertised it more than, once again, 60 Minutes’ lame publicity work for the National Security Agency.
Let’s stop a moment and look again at what the NSA chose to show on television.
From the transcript at Cryptome:
Metadata has become one of the most important tools in the NSA’s arsenal. Metadata is the digital information on the number dialed, the time and date, and the frequency of the calls. We wanted to see how metadata was used at the NSA. Analyst Stephen Benitez showed us a technique known as “call chaining??? used to develop targets for electronic surveillance in a pirate network based in Somalia.
Stephen Benitez: As you see here, I’m only allowed to chain on anything that I’ve been trained on and that I have access to. Add our known pirate. And we chain him out.
John Miller: Chain him out, for the audience, means what?
Stephen Benitez: People he’s been in contact to for those 18 days.
Stephen Benitez: One that stands out to me first would be this one here. He’s communicated with our target 12 times.
Stephen Benitez: Now we’re looking at Target B’s contacts.
John Miller: So he’s talking to three or four known pirates?
Stephen Benitez: Correct. These three here. We have direct connection to both Target A and Target B. So we’ll look at him, too, we’ll chain him out. And you see, he’s in communication with lots of known pirates. He might be the missing link that tells us everything.
The disconnect from our world and theirs is total. They’re using all their massive computing, relationship-mapping software and data sucking power to spy on people who are among the poorest and most desperate in the world. They are “chaining” them out.
Look at the photos on Cryptome.
The NSA is showing the young people bent over their computers. They think they’re defending the country against foreign threats.
What they’re really doing is spying on the pathetic in the worst places of the world using virtually unlimited technological resources. They should be ashamed of themselves. And Edward Snowden has brought them a measure of it.
Somali pirates pose no real threat to Americans. More die, per year, from attacks by angry bees.
Take a look for yourself.
Such bad guys.
Yet this is the example of metadata sifting of the networks of global enemies the NSA chose as an example to show the American people on prime time television.
The NSA workers shown are just more cogs in the big machine, a machine that bears no resemblance to a military that once existed to destroy the Axis powers.
That is all gone.
In its place, a monstrous and growing device that’s been at it for well over a decade, grinding after the paupers and the piss ants even after an original threat has been annihilated, selling it forward by convincing only the gullible that the targets pose serious threats to the country.
Under this mechanism of distortion and unreality, one can justify anything.
The people who make untrustworthy networks:
Many of the cryptologists skipped grades in school, earned masters degrees and PhDs and look more like they belong on a college campus than at the NSA.
Actually, [solving] the Rubik’s cube took [one of them] one minute and 35 seconds.
Recent score card:
Afghanistan: Hammering poor people. Majority of Americans want to leave, feel it’s not worth it, are ignored. Malnutrition worsening.
Libya: Hammered poor people to depose one famous dictator. Created failed state.
Syria: Resisted hammering poor people for the sake of getting at one famous dictator.
Iraq: Hammered poor people for a decade, rendered country into ruins, then left. Country now in bloody civil war.
What Keith Alexander, director of the NSA says:
“Well, my concern on that is specially what’s going on in the Middle East, what you see going on in Syria, what we see going on– Egypt, Libya, Iraq, it’s much more unstable, the probability that a terrorist attack will occur is going up. And this is precisely the time that we should not step back from the tools that we’ve given our analysts to detect these types of attacks.”
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01.05.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 4:53 pm by George Smith
Associated Press has published a bit of inside-look news on the business of Internet rigging. None of this is new to readers. But some of it is worth underlining because it is the Google-rigged American internet, and our corporations, that are the reason for it.
The global network, developed here, is now a fertile ground for sweat-shop click factories and website riggers in the poorest parts of the world, employed by American business to inflate their net statistics and social networking numbers.
Anyone could have seen it coming:
[An] Associated Press examination has found a growing global marketplace for fake clicks, which tech companies struggle to police. Online records, industry studies and interviews show companies are capitalizing on the opportunity to make millions of dollars by duping social media …
Dhaka, Bangladesh, a city of 7 million in South Asia, is an international hub for click farms.
The CEO of Dhaka-based social media promotion firm Unique IT World said he has paid workers to manually click on clients’ social media pages, making it harder for Facebook, Google and others to catch them. “Those accounts are not fake, they were genuine,” Shaiful Islam said.
A recent check on Facebook showed Dhaka was the most popular city for many, including soccer star Leo Messi, who has 51 million likes; Facebook’s own security page, which has 7.7 million likes; and Google’s Facebook page, which has 15.2 million likes.
[Oops!]
In Indonesia, a social media-obsessed country with some of the largest number of Facebook pages and Twitter users, click farms are proliferating.
Ali Hanafiah, 40, offers 1,000 Twitter followers for $10 and 1 million for $600. He owns his own server, and pays $1 per month per Internet Protocol address, which he uses to generate thousands of social media accounts.
Those accounts, he said, “enable us to create many fake followers.”
The Associated Press story features boilerplate on how bad it is. It reports Google and others do not approve and strive to stop it. The Internet rigging industry has also spawned corporate counter operations in which specialty firms are hired to analyze counts and expose click fraud, allegedly to preserve the sanctity of true popularity and the internet experience.
But please. It’s dead. And it was Google and other internet giants who did the deed.
Yes, by all means, we should listen to this advice:
David Burch, at TubeMogul, a video marketing firm based in Emeryville, Calif., said that buying clicks to promote clients is a grave error. “It’s bad business,” he said, “and if an advertiser ever found out you did that, they’d never do business with you again.”
Yes, bad. But here’s the way the world Google, Facebook and Twitter works:
They’ve made this digital ecology where only the very top results in search, the biggest numbers on social media, matter. It’s their code that did it, their design. They own it and it’s a winner-take-all place. There isn’t anything for anyone else. Not even crumbs. It’s the top or nothing. Root hog or die.
Since that’s the case they bear the responsibility for making the incentive to cheat overriding.
Taking measures to stop cheats doesn’t fix this. These are just band-aids over a system of rot that is web search and its social approval and reward by numbers ecology.
And to a great extent, it’s to Google’s and Facebook’s and Twitter’s advantage.
For instance, it is only through being in the top of search, or at the top in numbers of “likes,??? that one is rewarded by linking and algorithms which present you to others, thereby giving one the opportunity for practical monetizations.
On the other hand, it also means Google and everyone else that made the environment have to pay much much less in their “revenue sharing??? schemes while passing out blandishments that everyone can be made “partners??? in monetization.
What it is, in the end, is that their monetization schemes are now like a chance at winning the lottery for almost everyone. Nonexistent.
Last, our human nature in dealing with the web has a hand in the mess.
People respond strongly to perception of popularity and that perception is gained by counts.
When everything is judged by numbers of clicks and likes and position in the top fold of the search return, everyone else not there might as well not exist.
To take advantage of cheating schemes, then, is not illogical.
I’ve said this cynically, but truthfully, once:
You’re already in a pit Google-world made for you. So if you take advantage of search gaming or buying astro-turf and likes from click farms, what’s the worse they can do?
Make you more invisible? Haw. [Bitter laughter.]
Let’s explain it again.
If you’re not in the top you are toast, thanks to American-made search and social-networking technology.
It’s a somewhat different matter for those already at the top who stupidly buy more rigging and get caught at it. Then they have a negative publicity effect to deal with.
But for those who have no publicity, they are not likely to get any on Facebook or wherever because here’s another open secret:
Even if you promote yourself honestly on Facebook or Twitter and pay scrupulous attention to your ‘friends’ and ‘followers, now the situation is such that no one pays attention because, once again, they look at your numbers (or Facebook algorithms look at your numbers), and you get nothing, or are hidden from the all important stream because, well, you’re a nobody.
In the Culture of Lickspittle, nobody does favors for anyone below them.
Since this is the way it is one cannot totally honestly argue that there is a practical serious downside to getting into rigging other than potentially losing an account that couldn’t be monetized into anything, anyway.
Gaming YouTube — from the archives.
Google’s revenue sharing and advertising scams.
Internet counts and popularity:
In the alternative world that began with the true rankings reversed [by count inflation], the least popular song did surprisingly well, and, in fact, held onto its artificially bestowed top ranking. The most popular song rose in the rankings, so fundamental quality did have some effect. But, overall – across all 48 songs – the final ranking from the experiment that began with the reversed popularity ordering bore absolutely no relationship to the final ranking from the experiment that began with the true ordering. This demonstrates that the belief that a song is popular has a profound effect on its popularity, even if it wasn’t truly popular to start with.
Hat tip to Pine View Farm where I more incoherently chalk-boarded it.
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Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 3:19 pm by George Smith
Have a laugh at the title, a bleak joke.
Today, if you’re American and want to listen to the Green Bay Packers /49ers game streaming on Internet radio, a game that is sold out, you can’t.
Corporate America put a stranglehold on the net. Local radio stations cannot stream NFL games because of “NFL rules.” The National Football League is one of the biggest money-making operations in American history.
Three years ago you could catch NFL games on radio. And ESPN often streamed some of them, as well as most college football games on-line.
Not anymore. If you gave up American cable television because of its monopoly power and unfair pricing, corporate American struck back.
Today, ESPN allows no viewing of any of the big bowl games, or most college football games, without making you first log in on-line through a cable television provider.
But you do know who gets ripped off by the internet in 2014?
Everyone else non-corporate. They — more, accurately, WE — all get to enjoy the alleged promise of the Internet without the power to make deals designed to maximize ballooning profits.
So America and the civilized world can still have all that free music from middle-sized to little guys at the big web portals.
Famous old meretricious saying:
Information wants to be free!
That worked out well.
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01.01.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 10:39 am by George Smith
Pleez, Mr. Pope, don’t criticize capitalism for stomping the poor, it makes American plutocrats angry and then they’ll stop giving money to the church!
Really:
One of us might look at this and say, “so [Home Depot founder Ken Langone] doesn’t want Pope Francis to tell the truth about capitalism.??? Not only that, but how this comes across is as a sort of economic blackmail: you continue saying irresponsible things about the sincerity of rich people’s Christianity, then those rich people will show you exactly how they feel about turning the other cheek by withholding the funds to rebuild cathedrals. In other words, if you want our money, lie about capitalism, or, at the very least, stop telling the truth …
[For] some 2,000 years the biggest problem facing rich people has been how to “be??? Christians without BEING Christians, if you know what I mean. The Republican Party has solved this problem in the simplest possible way: by restructuring Jesus’ gospel and turning his teachings about rich and poor on their head. Now rather than blessing the poor, Jesus is a capitalist’s capitalist who blesses the rich. Naturally, many capitalists are less than enthusiastic about the emergence of a Pope who seems to actually know what Jesus’ original message was, and not only takes it seriously, but is busily repeating it to all and sundry.
Great essay.
Jesus of America: “Wealthiness leads to Godliness.”
You will also surely enjoy The Compleat Sayings of American Jesus.
And Happy New Year from Pasadena! The TV eyes of the country are upon us! And the WhiteManistan Blues Band will be praying, I mean, playing “Jesus of America” today.
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