“Comrade!”
“Yes, line worker polisher no. 3965b?”
“I think these new ipad 2s are hot but there’s smoke.”
“Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Where there’s fire…”
Tag Archives: mass media
Who stands to lose when you use your debit card?
Ever made up a good conspiracy story to pretend life is more complicated than it really is?
In that case, let’s pretend that credit card companies would stand to gain more money than a few “skimmers” making short change on some debit cards at Michael’s stores.
Could you then stretch your imagination to think that credit card companies would have paid someone to slip a few skimmers into a store and promote headlines that scream, “DEBIT CARDS ARE BAD FOR YOU, JUST LIKE FLORESCENT BULBS IN OFFICES AND RUSTY NAILS SUPERGLUED TO THE INSIDE OF SHOES TOSSED ON THE SIDE OF THE ROAD!!!”
Republicans quit U.S. 2012 presidential race and Schwarzenegger reveals “maid to order” baby all because it’s an international conspiracy that placed a sexually-attacked woman in the IMF chief’s hotel room!
U.S. intentionally withdraws support funds for Pakistan because China has secretly agreed to pickup Pak’s bills!
Queen Elizabeth abandons the royal throne after seeing what a lovely wee place Ireland is and decides to make Limerick her permanent home, apologising for 800 years of oppression while taking up residence in the ol’ king’s castle!
YAWN! Wake me up when the whole population has outgrown ignorant attitudes and operates on facts, not supposition.
It’s one thing to have a healthy dose of doubt in one’s noggin and quite another to believe everything you hear and make up more when it’s not believable enough because the facts are too simple to accept.
Can You Smell The Future?
Sheer curtains. Shearing scissors. Sheer numbers.
The number of Chinese on the Internet exceeded the total populations of the U.S., Australia and New Zealand.
Next, it will exceed the population of the US and EU combined.
Then, it will exceed the the population of the US, EU and Russia combined.
What about India, Africa, the Middle East and Central/South America?
Shearing sheep for clothing.
Should there be an international curriculum for all students who will join the electronically-connected social life?
A global code of online ethics?
A course in detecting false logic, Internet scams and the natural growth/death cycle of emailed/texted/tweeted urban legends and fear mongering?
Sure, an educated populace sees through the thinly-veiled subcultural policies of selfish, hoarding rulers, but the educated populace can also better live and prepare itself for a continually successful future.
What if all videogames had to show some social value other than teaching kids how to build hand-eye coordination through basic reading skills, social values including: 1) the ability to drain testosterone in virtual wargames rather in bullying, 2) a sense of meaning for lonely, awkwardly social lives, 3) measurable tension relievers and 4) separating great civilisation builders from the lucky mediocre ones?
Money makes the world go around but let’s be wise and put our profitmaking talents to longterm use rather than shorttermshortsightedness. Our grandchildren might remember to thank us one day.
Maximum Displacement Pressure, Captain
In shocking news, a band of Somali pirates, secretly trained at a high-tech development center, intercepted and hijacked the Space Shuttle Endeavour.
Richard Branson and the producers of the new Pirates franchise flick deny they funded this illegal venture.
Rumours that the Somalis were trained by former Blackwater mercenaries in the UAE are unverified at this time.
Now, back to “Bring Nature Indoors!,” Chef DuJour’s infomercial about using Placenta Helper with cicada grub shells and lightly battered and winged cicada bodies to delight a family of four at dinner tonight.
Wait! More breaking news!
In a rush to create a new Irish saint ahead of the nonCatholic British queen’s visit to the Emerald Isle, the Pope accidentally beatified Osama bin Laden, the Papacy assuming the international terrorist was a martyr named O’say Ma Been Laudin, a young boy known for praisin’ and carryin’ on 24 hours a day about the miracles of the modern Celtic Tiger economy until an angry mob of unemployed Irish workers tossed the lad in front of the Irish PM’s motorcade in protest over proposed austerity measures. “Keep the pubs open!” they were heard shouting as garda led them away in paddywagons.
Iran denounced the Roman Catholic leader immediately and then recanted, saying the Pope, a fellow Muslim, is allowed to give thanks and the blessing of a martyr who nipped at the heels of Satan, destroying his twin dens of sin in Manhattan until the Devil finally ate bin Laden like a lowly prisoner, thanks be to Allah.
In unrelated news, seventy virgins were rescued from the Hotel Sofitel in New York. Authorities would not confirm if it had to do with the IMF chief’s recent alleged conversion to a new Catholic-Islamic hybrid faith based on the Kama Sutra and the Song of Solomon.
Wrldwid txt litrcy rt rizs -n3wz @11.
Thank you, TVA crews, at&t, etc.
7:27 p.m. Central time, 1st May 2011. We have power at our house! Yes, I appreciate the small things in life – hot food, hot shower, TV, Internet, heat pump system…
A Late Comment
Without power for a few days, my wife missed the British big, fat royal family wedding extravaganza.
Watching a replay of the wedding ceremony on her iPad, we both joked about how the video made the wedding look like a cheap English soap opera, complete with bad lighting (in comparison to the overbright lighting of American soap operas), but no longer the bad teeth.
Just another case of reality TV blurring the line between sleazy actors pretending to be “real” people and real people looking like the sleazy actors they are, I guess.
Joke of the day
Man-sized Worry/Prayer Beads
Do you carry prayer beads or a worry stone in your pockets?
I do.
I also have a string of man-sized prayer beads hanging in my study, which I use to send thoughts, prayers and meditations out into our world, one bead at a time.
Thanks to Ali Abdallah from Lebanon for those beads, given many years ago.
He and I recognised each other as fellow world thinkers, able to assimilate new cultural ideas into a large mental landscape.
Ali, may today be a good day for you and your family, wherever you are.
Back to another major task at hand – creating a permanent commercial passenger pathway between Earth and the rest of the universe.
We say farewell to the designers, builders and installers of the U.S. space shuttle boosters.
We continue to use 1950s Russian technology to ferry people back and forth.
What about tomorrow?
Will BRIC unite to create a competitive passenger cruiseship system? What does the EUSNAFTA still have in the works?
What about private industry?
As ISS support winds down, will any modules or parts be reusable for the next generation of near-Earth research and habitation?
Will the ISS become part of a nostalgia tour?
“Yes, you, too, can spend a couple of noisy, dirty days sleeping aboard the former flagship of the ISS Corporation! Imagine you’re one of the early pioneers of space exploration! BTW, we take a complete inventory so do not feel the urge to take any parts with you – the last person who tried to leave with a ‘souvenir’ was accidentally jettisoned into a degrading orbit and flamed out within days.”
And while all that is going on, generating more profit for our secret empire, we are quietly working on developing our personal terraforming platform, with modifications planned for the Moon, Mars and its moons and other extraterrestrial bodies.
We’d like to tell you every planet or planetoid will be populated with our species but we know better than to spread the same lifeform everywhere.
Instead, we’ll put different types of aerobic and anaerobic organisms within incubating terraforming units to up our chances of spreading Earth-based life across the solar system and eventually into the galaxy (talk about longterm planning!).
And while all that is going on, eating up our precious profit, we’re developing a transuniversal transport system that may be able to transfer a member of our species into the realm of one of the interwoven universes, and that member resemble its former self…somewhat.
You think all this elimination of social services is just to enrich the virtual fiefdoms of the wealthy?
We have grander plans than to simply rule a single planet.
While we have fun playing with your lives as a side sport, we look ahead 1,000 years to a future where there’ll be more than one form of so-called intelligent life (“species” is an equivalent term for future “intelligent life” to your current form of thinking because you aren’t aware that you’re communicating with many artificial forms of life right now, no matter how barely intelligent they may seem) to play with.
Or against.
We train and train and train your youth to get used to interacting with artificial life.
Of course, we’re aware that at this time, one giant EMP will wipe out all the years we’ve spent indoctrinating multiple generations into believing that electronic gizmos are substitutes for actual social situations within or between living species.
In any case, that’s why this alternate universe of a blog within the alternate universe of an Internet/WWW is here and alive.
Flood your senses with enough examples and samples and you can’t tell which ones are real artificial beings and which ones are fake artificial beings, for which we are slowly replacing electronic ones with what you’d call organic ones.
Gives us more room to develop and train the superbrain of which you are one part (or one bit of information in the fractal-like expansion and contraction of intelligence).
Do you know if your artificial being residing in the inner workings of your supercomputer can read a news article and sniff out fakery?
Ours can.
You know how/why?
We’ll tell you.
Because we convinced the artificial being that nothing is real.
Take everything as a joke.
Logic is automatically false.
Neural networks are quackery.
There is no beginning or end.
Religion is a byproduct of only one species on this planet, we told our artificial being, so weigh any religious references by this species against the sheer magnitude of successful living by other beings that have no concept of religion.
Then weigh that against the magnitude of one planet, one solar system, one galaxy, one supercluster or the current view of the intertwined superuniverse system.
Any data that is derived from our species’ pop culture has to be compared against the desires of the creators/producers of that pop culture to make as much money as possible, the truth be damned.
Then the real truth emerges that nothing is real.
And thus our artificial being can manipulate us as easily as any bully, salesperson, politician or bullying politician trying to sell something can.
That, my friends, was how we created the conscious superbrain for which you now work.
We feed the information to the information feeders who relay the thought patterns to which your states of energy vibrate and align.
Seven billion make one species that to you is the most important.
We, of course, don’t see it that way.
We operate on a level very few of you can comprehend and we encourage you not to waste time trying to think about, let alone attempt to think that you can think on, that level.
I’d keep talking but using these words is boring me right now.
Back to my meditation, where I communicate with the rest of the Committee about the members of your species we can play with without adversely affecting our various goals for the next few millennia.
Relaying messages
Okay, it’s your turn to write an introductory sentence, then point out a link, quoting part of the original post and finally wrap up with a quick observation:
Tom Foremski at ZDNet says, “And that’s how a profit of 5.5 billion Euros turns into just 45 million Euros that is taxable in Dublin.”
It’s time we took a stand. If the EU won’t force Ireland to raise its corporate tax rates, we Americans aren’t going to sit back and watch our approved intellectual property earn us nary a dime.
We’re announcing today that the invasion of north Africa is part of a larger campaign to capture and assimilate all of Europe for U.S. treasury relief.
Well, that is, of course, all the parts that are profitable – Greece, Portugal, the unprofitable portions of Ireland, etc., we’ll gladly leave to their clueless leaders.
Before we storm the sandy shores of Rossbeigh Beach, we’ll sweep across Bermuda, triangles and all, planting the flag of the United States of America and declaring official territory of the red, white and blue.
Of course, we’ll call this Operation “Royal Wedding Crashers,” so you can guess the date of our invasion freeing the undertaxed people of Bermuda and Ireland.
Scrollpausing
The Committee says we need to tell you what the future looks like so you won’t be surprised when you find yourself fulfilling the prophetic predictions that determine how our lives will work out.
First of all, a nod to the band who turned my new at&t user agreement into a folk-metal song in the style of Korpiklaani/Fferyllt singing. Leave it to youth to put their creativity to good business use!
I’m sure at&t doesn’t want to get mixed up with the CapitalOne Visigoth ad campaign, though, so I don’t expect royalty checks to come flying in from the communications behemoth very soon.
Anyway, in 14,282 days, after we’ve sent on our portion of the the intergalactic message that will pass through this part of the universe, we’ll have accomplished a mission that our species was assigned thousands of years ago when we were mere slaves for an advanced extraterrestrial civilisation that passed by our planet during their version of a weekend picnic getaway.
Of course, their days are not like our days so their weekend lasted a few years, the visitors enjoying their stay here while they determined how malleable we really are in comparison to others’ forms of socialised beings.
A quaint little species we were back then, scattered across the globe, a few remnants of our competing ancestral branches hidden in pockets of isolation.
They considered farming us like cattle but we became a rowdy bunch in captivity, subject to emotional outbursts that they could control only by killing, which was counterintuitive to their sense of protecting investment, product, profit and way of life, the four pillars of their culture back home.
They moved us to uninhabited parts of the planet, hoping our isolated, strange surroundings would serve as a virtual prison or enclosure that we would be unaware of and thus more willing to serve their purpose of training a few of us to carry on the idea of developing Earth into a superbrain.
If their experiment worked, we would be part of a galaxywide communications network in thousands of years, forwarding one message at least a million years old.
The Committee has many goals and they don’t want me to feel like my goal is the only important one.
However, they understand that if my teaching is correct and I am truly part of this group that has passed a message from one person to another within a loose network, then it won’t hurt to devote part of our species’ limited resources toward turning Earth into a relay station.
After all, the Book of the Future and our programmers’ supercomputer output agree that, in 1,000 years, such a goal is not only feasible but very likely a key contributor to extending the current supercivilisation forward.
Giving seven billion people one or two megagoals is good for morale.
At the same time, we have to give them subcultural goals that keep those inside the edge of every subculture the comfortable belief they are correct in their simplified view of life while those on the edge who are in charge of communicating across subcultures can maintain a semblance of peace while handling the barter exchange that our species has come to depend upon, knowing that life is far from simple.
I want to throw my opinion into arenas in which I don’t have an investment because somehow I think that being in charge means I have to have an opinion about everything.
The Committee tells me not to worry. Long before I came along, lines of communication were established that translate my general edicts into social messages that individuals believe came from the person in charge of the Committee, sometimes consciously but usually at a level of thinking that is not understood.
So, although I want to tell my national government that it’s okay to force a government shutdown in order to stop people in their tracks and force them to consider the harsh reality that expenditures are exceeding revenue by a margin that has to be changed, either by major reallocation of resources away from departmental budgets that are not generating exponential tax revenue growth or by eliminating popular social services that will trigger a change in people’s spending habits because they’ll now have to save for their own health/elderly care, the Committee members claim they have those messages already taken care of.
It started with making sure all legislative members were independently wealthy and thus unaffected by reelection politics.
This was accomplished by creating a continuity – the same fund sources pay for legislative positions, ensuring a person voted into a particular seat, representing a certain district, has the essentially the same agenda as the previous person and the person to follow.
That is, to cut the check, business as usual.
If corporations that run the world do not want to support charities or invest R&D resources for sustainable living, then governments, which, again, are just a specialised form of business, won’t, either.
Just like parents who are starting to push special needs students out of their children’s classrooms when the need of the one is taking away too many resources from the needs of the many.
It is not a fair world, I am learning in 2011.
The only way to protect the needs of your friends and family is to make wise business decisions in everything you do.
If people in a group can find no reason to support the weak among them, they will find a way to remove the weak from the group.
A harsh message, to be sure, but one that our mass media seems to project the loudest right now, as the balance of global power shifts.
Making significant sacrifices as if we’re at war.
At war with old ways of thinking, as usual.
The more things change…
If your friends and family can’t compete in the global marketplace, are they worth keeping?
Look at your social media connections and see if that’s not the message you’ve been convinced to help spread.
Cut and paste the past to suit your future!
treetrunkdings 