The Dream Police and The Case of the 5lb Line...

==originally published Jan 2015==

I stand accused in the court of my conscience.  The crime?  Social profiling dishonorable motive.  The scene of the crime?  My favorite little greasy spoon diner, of course.  The particulars of the accusation?  Two kids, out of the bar early looking for a bite to eat before going on to what ever was to become of their evening, of their obviously evolving relationship, and the assumptions and assignments their conversation (carrying clearly across the quiet of a slow to dead point in the evening’s traffic) inspired in yours truly.

Both kids were college students of course.  The lad, by his words, on the edge of graduating with a technical degree of some sort in aeronautics, he spoke of taking a job as a ferry pilot taking aircraft in for maintenance work.  The lass really didn’t reveal her course of study, of her all I have is observation.

They spoke quite formally, really, very polite exchanges of well crafted sentences dealing with events relating to their lives on campus, nothing out of the ordinary at all.  In point of fact it was the very structure of their conversation attracted my attention to them, otherwise I’d have paid them little mind, left my assessment at a first impression: just a couple who’d found each other early in the evening and agreed to adjourn for more private recreations, the only point of interest a slightly voyeuristic chuckle at the difference in their statures: he rather tall, slender, refined in the manner of Scandinavian nobility with exceptionally long fingers, she an attractive and very petite lass of oriental heritage, my first thought concerning them was actually a quite benign hope they’d find a bit of genuine delight in each other as described in David Bowie’s song “China Girl.”  She seemed the sort of woman to fit the devotion expressed in the song, the kind where you just know if she takes it into her head to take a boy’s mind off his worries for an evening she knows exactly  how to go about such a mission of mercy.

If I’d left it there I’d not be where I am, standing in the dock of my own thoughts, but I didn’t.  As their conversation continued on phrase after phrase popped flags from the typical Republican political spiels, the unmistakable markers of the conservative elite, and it was the lad offering them. The lass would echo each he offered almost verbatim several exchanges deeper into the conversation, but never offered one in her own right.  She said several things quite in keeping with them, but never in the exact wording of the propaganda masters.  It got so dense I was entertaining the idea what I witnessed was a lad determined to rise through the political ranks of the Young Republicans using the lass as an audience to practice for the campaign trail.  If that was his intent I’d give him good marks, he had them well memorized, played them at appropriate points.

And yet, there was no evidence to indicate the lad was anything but sincere in his statements.  Ample evidence to indicate he was more than a bit frightened of his companion’s well refined sexuality (I’m not sure he was even aware that he was humming, in a quite pleasant voice, what I think were church hymns every time the conversation would cross the man-woman interface, any time she’d try and dial on even a bit of feminine allure as a complement), but nothing to indicate he was anything but sincere in his goals and ambitions, his values and his ethics.  

It is an impeachment of my objectivity as a pragmatic idealist that I’ve allowed the dishonorable methods and motives of the hypocritical and essentially traitorous Bain-AIG-Halliburton-Enron camp to become the default assumption of motive where a traditional-conservative individual  is concerned. 

Enter the above as exhibit A in the prosecutions case: gross cynicism inspired by  what was, at one time, the American dream being expressed in a social setting. 

Not an acceptable thing, but still, where it might have gotten me noticed by the dream police it wouldn’t have been likely to have gotten me indicted.  What got me indicted was my after the fact speculations concerning the lass.

Every university is host and home to some number of them, the women who attend with an mrs degree her prime and quite undeclared major. She studies hoping she’ll never need to earn her living with what she’s learned. Such women are not as common now as they once were, but they still exist in sufficient numbers to maintain the stereotype as an active subset of current society.  The stereotype is, of course, most often applicable to women where the conventions of her culture specify she is to dedicate her life to being homemaker and mother, her livelihood provided by her mate, her education a resource to enhance and enrich the lives of her children.

Such is an honorable intent, no rational fault to be found with it, certainly not enough fault to justify the venom directed at those who choose such a life by the bitter and jaded-jealous elements of the liberal world who attack the very concept as their morning litany.  Still though, it is true that such women really are predators after a fashion, hunting as they do for a man who truly embraces and internalizes the same code and convention to be her mate; and, it is equally true that such women (and men) are commonly the more if not most conservative of people. 

It was reflecting on my speculations concerning the lass in question that brought about the indictment of conscience.   If it should please the court then enter into evidence what follows as prosecution exhibit B.

The corrosion and erosion of the American ethic has, over say the last seventy five years, produced a subset of peoples who to casual observation in the short run will present the same demeanor as the family oriented conservative people mentioned above.  They will use all the same rhetoric, present themselves in the same manners and yet in objective fact carry agendas anything but family oriented, they who are the bread and butter mainstays of the industries of divorce, they who made necessary the instrument of a prenuptial agreement.   

These people are some of the most absolutely predatory of individuals to be found, and they like their opposites hunting the liberal worlds of the alternate lifestyles are in fact sexual  predators.  Since the instinct to procreation is universal it should be no great surprise that every facet of society will be home to a subset of predators who base their attack on that segment of society's unique deformities of this most primal of instincts, nor should it be a surprise these predators will adopt the closest approximation possible to the appearance of wholesomeness within any given social environment.

In my world the apogee of such predators are assumed (perhaps justly, perhaps not) to be most commonly found on campus living in the Greek houses, the campus’ self appointed elite, members of a fraternity or sorority.  As a matter of course quite a number of derogatory names have been devised to describe such individuals*, and equally of course those innocent of such ignoble motives are often victims of the disdain intended for those not so innocent, an ongoing case of unjustified guilt by accidental association.

That’s what I did to the lass in question, allowed that assumption to take the stage before any other, and that was wrong of me.  She’ll never know it, but I do.  My first thought, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, was to try and assign her a *Sorostitute, the most vile of predators working the conservative side of the equation.  I was actually arguing, in my thoughts, the idea that she was simply a higher class call girl entertaining a client as the more positive of the possibilities, a most distinct secret injustice inflicted upon a perfect stranger.

Like I said earlier, she really was a fine and foxy creature, clearly intelligent, attractive, sensual and seductive.  Equally the evidence of her behavior towards a lad obviously uncomfortable, frightened, of her unabashed femininity showed her to be a rather gentle creature really, she could have hammered him into stuttering silence at many points, but she didn’t.  In spite of all evidence to the contrary my conclusion was she had herself a twenty pound man hooked on five pound test, and with total sarcastic cynicism for my attitude I was wondering if she’d play him out and reel him in, or if he’d manage to break free and flee before being harvested. 

Mea culpa, guilty as charged.  The negative assumptions had control of my thoughts from so many different directions as to almost close away the rational, the real and leave me a peripheral agent of the very evil I was assigning to another.  Got to do better than that in the future if I’m going to do any good for anyone, including me.

Service Pack 1...

NOW that the hyper emotional propaganda based "repeal" nonsense has failed against the ramparts of democracy America can get down to doing what needs to be done... begin the refinement of the ACA to make it do what needs done for the American People. I implore all who might read this to push this thought to your representatives of either party: now, in full transparent democracy, set about refining the system with carefully considered amendments to establish truly world class health care for the nation.  Nothing of such complexity as a national health care plan comes out of the box ready to run, nothing does. That it ran at all is a testament to the vision of those who wrote the original. Now that the flaws have been seen it is time for the next stage... the tinker and tune stage to find the optimum way for it to run. The ball is in your court, Mr. Ryan. The nation is counting on you.

Concerning Tardation…

The word “tardation” is, of course, a shortening of  the word “retardation,”  a state of diminished abilities where said abnormality was induced by some element not native to the entity or individual in question. In modern usage it is often found in several forms as a derogatory suffix attached to some other word.

Tardation is a manufactured commodity,
it is not a naturally occurring state of life. 

The conservative politicos of the United States were the first I saw use such a suffix, for a time they were quite fond of teasing those of an opposing orientation by calling them Lib-tards, their implication obvious: in their world holding a progressive stance on matters political meant you’re a deformed caricature of a person unworthy of any respect at all. Of course it never seemed to bother them their targeted insult was equally a cruel mockery of those for whom fate set a simple life a challenge, but go figure. The radical right has never been known for any great degree of human sensitivity. Still, when they created the one term they equally created an inverse: if there are those where “Libtard” is a valid description then there’s equally a set to be called “Contarded.”  It is to the mechanisms of Tardation I wish to speak, because beneath the childish cruelty of such partisan labels I smell a most deliberate and vicious of international rats.

Where the terms are derogatory and callous they do sad justice to describing ever enlarging segments of our society. I will assert those segments are where a deformed, innacurate and irrational political belief has been deliberately introduced as the working counterbalance for the equally deliberate creation of a dysfunctional individual psychology,  and this to allow the dishonorable and the tyrannical to short circuit the functions of democracy and assume defacto control by bartering the antidote to the illness in return for votes come election time.

To put it in a nutshell I’ll assert what I’m calling “tardation” is the commercial wholesale form of what the psychologists will call the  enabler scenario with a political belief taking the place of another individual whose presence enables a toxic contradiction to afflict the life and times of those inducted into, or associated with, those deceived by the mechanisms of tardation.

In my reconnaissance of the Facebook world I realized the commercially funded and peer approval based mechanisms of the social media are all but optimized to install and support tardation.  I do not know if this was accidental or with malice aforethought, but with all things considered I can find little reason to doubt the social media are in fact a prime contagion vector of this affliction, and the primary maintenance mechanism of this set of afflictions which is so easily exploited by dishonorable power brokers working to subvert the foundations of democracy.

To speak to the specifics of tardation, how it was implemented on this group or some other is a rather large subject that must be considered on a group by group basis, it is a subject beyond the scope of one essay. In posts to come I’ll be addressing what I’ve perceived of it, and identifying such posts with the word “Tardation of:” in the title.

This subject will most definitely be continued. Semper Fi.

In the Beginning...

== brought forward from January of last year, 

just to break up me ranting about the consequences of FB ==

Gates looked out upon the sand and darkness was upon the sand, for the sand was without order and divided grain by grain in great contention.  When Gates perceived the chaos his thought was troubled for the sand reached high, yea, even unto the walls of heaven did the sand reach.  So Gates caused the Angel of Validation to go out upon the sand that NULL become NOT, AND when NULL was NOT peace fell upon the sand, for the sand did fall away from contention in great streams of choice, yea verily did the sand divide itself according to OR AND XOR each grain according to its’ nature that it might RETURN to GATES the harmony of His thought.  Gates looked out upon what had been wrought, and Gates saw that IT was good.

First Chip of Apple, #000000010

That is no sarcastic attempt at blasphemy, no it is not, for so might someone’s scriptures begin, somewhere deep into our future when the full truth has condensed into legend.

Playing with Fire… in a Dynamite factory

An interesting statistic crossed my sight the other day. It turns out roughly half of all Americans are Facebook users. I have never heard of any other single media source to  achieve such a massive following. The “Googleplex” no doubt exceeds it on total throughput, but the googleplex is a thing of distributed and dispersed functions, no single point accessed through the googleplex really rivals the social media giant. The sum of its’ competitors might rival it from time to time on some specific event, but on a consistent day to day basis the mechanisms of Facebook are without peer and without precedent in terms of a single point of social influence.

In the realms of social psychology Facebook is on uncharted terrain, and the facts of modern history show the terrain it is on is exceedingly unstable, volatile, in point of fact potentially quite explosive. Many, many things are now seen that have never been seen before, many things that had been seen as minor things, perhaps of legitimate concern within their scope but still minor in comparison to the full society, have been exaggerated to seem of such importance as to over shadow what is in fact critical to survival.

Call it fifteen years since the onset of the social media phenomenon, make it four generations of “social media” evolution to arrive at the modern Facebook and company. Across that same fifteen year run it cannot be denied that society has crystallized, polarized, and is at this point hanging over the edge of violent civil war, a war that does not even really have an ideology associated. On second thoughts? No, war is not the correct word. With no clear ideology associated what is seen in today’s news can’t really even be called a war, it’s much closer to a society on the edge of committing suicide.

I do not believe that these two facts are a coincidence of history, I hold that these two facts are linked, that the rise of the former is the cause of the latter. The mechanisms of the influence are hardly defined, of course they are not defined. Even the most casual glance across history indicates the Social Media are a brand new phenomenon. There has never been a single point driver to compare to Facebook and company, there has been no time for the society to actually understand the full consequences of how its’ own psychology will fare in such an environment of massively interconnected emotional transfer.

The facts of modern history make it a very, very open question: Can society remain sane in the face of the exponentially expanded environment of the social media machines? Will society remain sane, and survive as human, or will it collapse into history leaving behind only biological manifestations of the machine intelligence which destroyed it? After six months of observing the operation of Facebook that is the question I find myself facing. What is the nature of the dynamic Facebook has introduced into the human condition, and is it possible for humanity to survive with any fidelity of self in the mutated emotional environment those mechanisms have created?

As always, more to come if I don’t get shot first for daring to challenge Agent Smith.

Mission Improbable…

The Eyes of Takiea...
what was fiction is fiction no more.

Six months ago I took advantage of a situation I did not create to investigate the social media giant Facebook and in lesser degree it’s main competitor Twitter. The focus of the reconnaissance was not the people utilizing the media giants, the minor events and major drama passing across, but rather the responses of the robotically managed environments to what they (the robotic intelligences crafted into the structure itself) perceived of what the humans presented to them. My motivation? Call it a morbid curiosity concerning the unnaturally polarized nature of the current political scene.

The circumstance precipitating the recon began with the agent of the publishing house that published my first compilation of fiction, in concert with the person who agreed to work as a publicist for a percentage of any net profits, insisting that I had to have a presence on the social medias to sell any books. Their erroneous assumption was that I did not already have such accounts because I was simply frightened of the technology involved, an error I did not correct. At their urging I grudgingly agreed to allow the creation of a FB account in my pen name, which was done… an email account in that name and then a FB profile. It is my understanding it was that email account my publicist then used that to establish a presence on Twitter.

That the initial data recorded at creation for neither account would trace back to my machine or my ISP address was the enabling factor of my strategy. I worked from the assumption the new account (mine) would initially carry the personality profile indexes established for the accounts already associated to the address logged at creation. In short, I went in under the shallow cover of the robotic intelligences (let’s call him Agent Smith, just for a convenient handle) assuming it would see from the new account pretty much what it had seen from much older accounts tagged to those ISP/MAC id’s.

The tools of my investigation were crude and simplistic. They were anything but scientific. In point of fact they were the exact opposite: my knowledge of my own internal psychological makeup, and a very old (powerful in it’s day, competent now) PC oft modified over the years and an obsolete operating system. The PC was loaded in such a manner as to encourage short system hangs when being worked hard, those short system hangs when the image on the monitors would freeze for between half a second and two seconds while the operating system dealt with the difficulties I had deliberately arranged: two monitors of different size, the second and smaller requiring a custom resolution setting. The browser open on the main monitor and just the edge of its’ window moved over onto the second and smaller monitor resulted in an undefined region in the video matrix in the driver software, that undefined region what the machine was compelled to accommodate whenever the window was scrolled, that accommodation the cause of the short system hangs… a most primitive trapping tactic to intercept anything presented subliminally. That I caught what I did from no more of a trap than that indicates a frighteningly deep saturation of subliminal “advertising” on Facebook.

Beyond the ethically very questionable presence of subliminal “advertising” there was also an intense scrutiny on any facet where any commercial or governmental algorithm might be active acting as a filter mechanism for what came before a users’ eyes. In all truth that scrutiny produced more than a few chuckles, three weeks in the bots were totally confused about me, and feuding one with another as to how to handle me. On one instance the chumchum boxes along the side were presenting me these options: Modern Communism (complete to a red hammer and sickle logo), “The Modern Socialist”, and the one that cracked me up, the one with a picture of Old Glory and the caption “God, Guns, Guts and Glory.” Yes, all in the same frame. Those three selections were direct one to one to the content of comments I’d left on other people’s posts the day before. The idea that Agent Smith does not read and interpret every word input into his  system evaporated at that point.

Of course I did absolutely nothing to make Agent Smith’s job easier. I never so much as hovered my mouse over any suspect element, certainly never followed any link machine presented, the “suggested posts” were only scrutinized in relation to my words directed to another being human in the past 48 hours. I initialized the account with nine “friends” during the first week (chosen to represent the widest spectrum of society conveniently available from the folks I knew world of real life who had been active on FB for many years), I only accepted two friend requests in six months, and politely declined several by way of the messaging function, in each case citing some element of personal preference for a reason (I’m not gay, I’m not inclined to violence as a first response, no, I’m not interested in a Russian bride… my muse is a Ukrainian woman and already married) and watching what Agent Smith and his baby bots, the chumchum stuffers, presented to me afterwards. The correlation between those conversations and what was presented was beyond coincidence, Agent Smith monitors the messaging functions with due diligence and an even greater degree of subtlety in his responses. I say this with the intent of full warning: there is no privacy on Facebook.  Not from the machine itself.

At about the five month mark it was becoming obvious I’d passed some boundary, the advertising became what you’d see on TV, no connections, few correlations: Agent Smith was running me in “ABC” mode knowing I was watching HIM just like he was watching me. At the six month mark (a few days ago) I called the mission off, said goodbye, and began to sort and order my thoughts on what I’d learned both by the events observed and the psychological pressures I endured that were not explainable by any element of my own inner self. The account is still active, since I did not create it I can’t deactivate it, it is being used as an access point into several debate forums on current events, I am participating in those and marking all things observed in the interlinking universe of the social media (FB, Utube, DevArt, etc et al) for correlations to the subjects discussed. The most notable evidence of those communications is which of the many posts put up by the pages in question are presented first on my “wall” or home page for me to respond to. As is SOP for the mission I’m not giving Agent Smith much to work with.

In posts to come I’ll speak to individual events observed and present my analysis of the potentials and intents of what was observed, but for now let it stand that I consider the social media, any and all of it,  to be a clear and present danger to the functions of Democracy, and an ongoing hazard to the mental freedom and well being of all those who place even the tiniest bit of trust in them. I am ever more convinced the circus of the absurd running into the obscene of the political scene is but the tiniest tip of the iceberg created by the social media, and that the situation will do nothing but degrade into utter social chaos and collapse if the situation is not corrected as rapidly as possible.

More to come if I don’t get shot first… or wake up to find this computer and my modem a smoking pile of slag. Catch you later.

Only a bit more verbose...

Yea, ok... the song goes "Goodbye," that's all she wrote. I wrote a little more than that on my final post, and I'm gonna write a bahoompa more than that on the subject of the social media to be published here... but... first things first... them guys need a hot shower, the best damn meal the cooks can scrounge up (and yes, they've got money for black market beef)... and 48 hours in town where it's known there will be very generous favors awarded for treating them well. It was six months behind enemy lines to get boots on the ground intel about that facet of the enemy's operations. Mission made.