Tag: internet

Waiting for Equilibrium

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All of the parts of our culture have become a mishmash of old and new components that really don’t align and add to the sense that our whole world is completely out of balance and headed for a crackup.  Well, all that is true but I get the impression that this is just how the world feels to everyone as they get older.  In fact, it was probably even more extreme a hundred years ago when people from really old cultures came in contact with American progressivism in the 1920s.  And the tension between the old comfortable conventions and the chaotic modernism of the on-line existence is what will force the exact shape of what comes afterward.  After all, there are things going on now that cannot possibly go on in their current shape.  They are just too maladapted to last for more than a few years.  And these excesses will spawn reactions that will modify and even optimize some of the new customs and patterns that the next generations will adopt.

So, no matter what the world looks like in the coming generation, I won’t like it because it’s not my world.  But it will fit the people living in it.  And I will have had whatever input I could provide by my limited feedback to my contacts in the younger generation and by providing an echo of what the world was like in my time.

Aside from whatever small influence I will have on the new culture what I will contribute to is the historical record of my time.  The sum total of all the historical records of the second half of the twentieth century will be an enormous treasure trove for those who look back on that time period.  It will be recognized that that era spawned the single most impactful technological event of the last thousand years, the digital revolution.  And because of this enormous change the customs and practices of this generation will be studied to see what effect this innovation had on the older culture that pre-dated it.  Because these changes are unprecedented.  And I believe the negative effects of this revolution will be dire.

And at some point, corrective actions will need to be initiated to mitigate the harmful consequences on humanity.  Some technological and commercial products may have to be banned in order to minimize the dysfunctional outcomes that these practices create in the same way that we prohibit the use of certain very dangerous drugs that create addiction in humans.  And conversely, new products and services may be mandated to provide humans with patterns and behaviors that are known to improve individual and group mental health and benefit society as a whole.

Well, that’s a lot of supposing.  But I think it’s a safe bet that we are currently living in the time when the most imbalanced on-line culture exists.  I think as the maximum disruption of pre-digital culture is reached the imbalance of the digital culture will begin to recede as equilibrium around the new structures occurs.  The only question is will it crash our civilization before that equilibrium is reached.

29AUG2025 – The End of an Era

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I clicked on the link to the ZMan’s website to check out whether anymore comments appeared on the his last post and found the above copied error message from his webhosting service.

So that’s that.  It finalizes a sort of empty place in my internet routine that is now reinforced by corporate schedules.  A bank account is emptied, a bill isn’t paid and a website disappears.  And the world moves on.  I guess we all leave a small footprint when all is said and done.

Hail, hail and farewell.

The ZMan has Died

Eulogy for the ZMan

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12FEB2025 – No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

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If you attempted to access the site today for some period between 9am and 10 am EST you may have seen the dreaded 404 ERROR message on your screen.  And so did I!  A week or so ago I upgraded my site.  I needed more memory and resources.

And so for a day I experienced some wonky stuff where my posting disappeared and my hair fell out and I turned into a werewolf briefly.  But then everything was okay.  Well, today I was on-line and doing this and that when suddenly my connection to the site turned into that 404 ERROR message.  I tried the limited things I could think of and they were completely ineffective.  Then I went to my site host and started crying and shrieking and after about an hour of fiddling with settings it got fixed.

They never warned me this was going to happen.  To be fair it’s more complicated than that.  They didn’t check to see if I had a particular firewall arrangement that has to be aligned with any changes to the host IP address.  But as everyone knows I’m the lamest web master in the multiverse so there was no chance of me anticipating the problem that came up.

Anyway, apologies for any interruption to your viewing pleasure and back to the show.

The Golden Mean

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Today I was thinking about normalcy.  I looked through my archives and I have at least six posts that have the word “normal” in their titles.  So I read through some of them.  One of them was a celebration of life coming back to normal after the COVID lockdowns.  But the others were about defying the culture’s attacks on normalcy.  Things like celebrating sexual dysfunction and deviancy, especially with respect to indoctrinating children.

And so, it got me thinking about normalcy as a greater good.  And even averageness as opposed to either depravity or perfection.  Certainly, when compared to the ugly and even deformed there’s nothing wrong with pointing at perfect beauty as its polar opposite.  But most people aren’t perfect.  They’re ordinary.  And in the psychotic world of social media like TikTok, the only acceptable identities are either girls with faultless synthetic beauty (“TikTok face”) or the various mutants celebrating their separation from human normalcy with body positivity (morbid obesity), individuality (face piercings and blue hair) and gender affirmation (amputations and hormone therapy).

Averageness is a hidden strength in the world.  Disdaining normalcy is a disease.  Even those who actually encompass some extraordinary perfection in either appearance or other characteristic like strength or intelligence rarely find greater happiness in their lives than people who just get on with the ordinary business of earning their bread and feeding their families.  Take as an example Bruce Jenner.  An Olympic decathlon champion who had immense athletic ability, good looks, fame and fortune.  Now he’s a celebrated eunuch who pretends to be an old woman.  And his children and step-children are carnies hawking depravity as a product.  A more miserable ending for an extraordinary talent I can’t imagine.

Convincing children, especially teenage girls that unless they’re flawlessly beautiful that maybe there is something wrong with them; maybe they’re even transgender, is an example of how the perfect can be the enemy of the good.  What we should be telling kids to consider is how they can best utiilize the gifts they have and how lucky they are to be healthy and normal.  After all, average and normal leave plenty of room for kids to grow up happy and healthy.

What we should be celebrating are people living their lives in the real world without anyone capturing it for clicks on social media and without anyone caring whether it’s photogenic enough for TikTok.  Real life has nothing at all to do with the internet except maybe for the ease of finding a YouTube video on how to replace the battery in your laptop or how to program your camera to shoot on two memory cards.  For that stuff it’s actually useful.  It shouldn’t be there to tell kids what they need to look like or act like or sound like.  That’s how you end up with these idiots on campus with openly gay boys in keffiyehs extolling the virtues of Hamas, an organization that would throw them off of buildings if they happened to fall under their jurisdiction.

And the only way to embrace normalcy is to live normally.  And that means in the real world.  You need to do things in real life and specifically you need to get out of your house and spend time with people.  And that is what all smart parents should be doing with their kids.  Get them out of the house and force them to put their phones away and do actual things with actual people.  And the best thing they can do is work.  Because work is the basis of human life.  And work that forces them to come in contact with people is invaluable.  Even the most introverted intellectual must learn how to interact with his fellow man.  I mean, if you’re Albert Einstein you can end up as a genius in an ivory tower.  But even Einstein began as a clerk in a patent office.  And he was probably a better man for having done it.

So average looks, average intelligence, average salary.  But if you work hard and learn how to live in the real world, then probably you can have a good life.  So, forget about Harvard, see if you can get a job fixing dishwashers or troubleshooting a network.  Leave TikTok to the beautiful people and the insane.

A Veteran Newsman Makes Some Good Points About the “News”

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Ken LaCorte sends e-mails about his articles to my inbox.  He is a former Fox News big shot and he has a lot of insightful stuff.  But in the article linked below he considers whether there is more harm than good in all the outrage that he (and I) traffic in:

https://kenlacorte.substack.com/p/too-many-trees-not-enough-forest

“We’re inundated with stories and social media posts algorithmically chosen because they provoke reactions from people. Computers are quite literally targeting us not with the most intelligent news of the day, but those designed to evoke an emotional response to encourage likes and sharing.

Every morning I do my best to think up something of value for you. While I’m confident that I’m providing you with solid and, hopefully, insightful thoughts, I sometimes wonder: am I part of the problem? Does focusing on the daily political drama and unsettling politics-related behavior help us stay diligent? Or depressed?”

He’s right that at a certain point we’re not making our lives better when we spend all our time reading about this crap.  I guess we each have to decide what that balance is.

But stop by here once in a while anyway, for the witty banter and gnomic wisdom.

A Man with a Plan for Reducing On-Line Censorship of the Right

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This guy has identified two programs that the Biden administration uses to censor all of us on the internet.  Kudos to him.  Hey McCarthy, put these two line items in your funding bill.

Quantitative Analysis Interrupted

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There is a program called Google Analytics.  By virtue of the largest internet surveillance system imaginable it keeps track of every link click on the world wide web.  It must be a truly massive system of mainframes buried under the Rocky Mountains and probably uses up enough electricity to power the Eastern Seaboard.  And by virtue of this horrific gathering of information, I can glean which of my posts and which of my links are most interesting to the general public.  It even tells me whether the links were based on search engine inquiry or direct input or referral from a third-party site.  And all of this information is somewhat interesting.  For instance, some days I get a link on an aggregation site and the majority of my traffic that day will be from this referral link.  In fact, on days like that my overall traffic might be ten times the normal site traffic.  And this is good because some of this new traffic might become regular viewers and show up every day.  So, the Google Analytics (GA) is valuable to more than just the FBI in their never-ending search for Americans who don’t love Big Brother.

But I digress.  So anyway, about a year and half ago Google started announcing that GA3 would be superseded by GA4 on July 1st 2023.  But a year and a half is such along time.  It might as well be never.  And so, sure enough, I ignored this warning for … a year and a half.  And who knew?  Eventually, July 1st 2023 turns out to actually exist.  In fact, it’s 15 hours, 27 minutes, 47.33 seconds away!

As is my way last night at around 1 am, I managed to get the new GA4 link set up on my site dashboard.  Of course, the link isn’t really producing any data but that could take as much as 48 hours according to the helpful scolding I receive from Google whenever I look at the output.  So probably for the next few days (and probably much longer) I won’t have GA4 telling me that anybody is out there.  Of course, the website dashboard has an access log of the clicks but it doesn’t provide a trendline and totals so it’s not as useful or convenient.  What it means is I will be forced to understand yet another new system because of the unstoppable march of PROGRESS.  Ah well.

So, the good news is that you’re all still out there even if Google’s “Eye of Sauron” isn’t hooked up to my local palantir.  The bad news is that I wasted and am still wasting precious time messing around with these absurd systems that inevitably become less useful and less convenient every time they roll out a new edition.  But the upside is that even if the whole system crashes and burns at midnight tonight, it will still be the first day of July and that is cause for celebration in and of itself.  For the last ten days it has been cloudy and raining almost every day.  But yesterday it cleared up, and the forecast for today and tomorrow is sun.  So, I’ll let Silicon Valley’s minions have their way with my analytics and instead concentrate on more promising phenomena like some macro shots of the mushrooms that all that rain has engendered.

Distraction

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“But he himself went up alone into the secret room under the summit of the Tower; and many who looked up thither at that time saw a pale light that gleamed and flickered from the narrow windows for a while, and then flashed and went out. And when Denethor descended again he went to Faramir and sat beside him without speaking, but the face of the Lord was grey, more deathlike than his son’s.”

(J.R.R. Tolkien,” The Lord of the Rings)

 

Everybody reading (and writing) this post is a news junkie.  So, thinking about political matters is part of our nature.  But constantly reading the news and opinion pieces all day long is bad for you.  It creates a lot of stress.  It can depress you.  And over the long haul those kinds of things can kill people.

But there’s another thing it does to you which also causes enormous damage.

It distracts you.

When you follow these stories and agonize over the drip, drip, drip of the unfolding drama on line or in the media you lose track of the important things you should be thinking about and doing.  You are distracted.

Now I am the poster child for this behavior.  During the post-9-11 period I obsessed over every detail of the war news.  I think I spent the whole Bush presidency looking at the casualty data coming out of Iraq.  And, sure, that was a vitally important aspect of the news but it blinded me to what I should have been thinking about.  I should have been questioning the underlying reasons why George Bush wasn’t obsessed with eliminating those injuries and deaths.  I was missing the bigger picture.

And more importantly, it distracted me from paying attention to my own private matters.  Financial considerations, professional responsibilities, even family concerns took a back seat to what was going on half a world away because I became obsessed with the details of a drama that I had no control over and which was played out on a medium that had become omnipresent.

As a reality check, I admit I am still obsessed with the details of the culture war that has engulfed our world.  In fact it’s at the center of one of my primary activities, this blog.  But like a recovering addict I’ve developed a program for modifying my behavior and rebalancing my life away from the source of the compulsion.

The first rule is to monitor your time and limit the amount of time you spend reading the news and opinion journals.  That’s key.  Figure out how much time you need to accomplish all the other things in your life that need doing and then allocate something less than the remainder of the day to your obsession.

The second rule is to develop a clear understanding about how things work in the real world.  That way you can clearly distinguish in your mind the things you have control over and things that you do not.  If you can convince yourself that you are already doing everything possible to mitigate the problems you worry about, it may relieve you of some of your anxiety.

As an example, if you’ve decided that electoral fraud has already made election of a Republican president or a Republican senate impossible then it’s no longer sensible to spend endless hours worrying which Republican candidate will be nominated.  This might allow you to concentrate your efforts on finding a Red State to move to and deciding which candidate in that state you want to see as governor.

And the third rule is ENJOY YOUR LIFE.

Fretting over the antics of the clowns in Washington steals from you time and happiness.  There’s always plenty of time when you can obsess about the horror we see every day in the news.  Pediatric transgender medical malpractice, deep state trespasses against the constitutional rights of Americans, green energy frauds, state-sponsored anti-white violence; you name it.  There are enough outrages in the news every day to rob you of joy for the whole twenty-four hours.  But don’t let it.

Compartmentalize the time you waste on line fussing and fretting.  Force yourself to walk away and do something fun or useful or both.  And by doing this you will imperceptibly make the world and your world that much better.  Because while you’re sitting there fretting, you’re not making things better you’re just making yourself worse.  And you’re making the little bubble that is your world worse.

So, after you read this break away and rejoin the real world and go outside and breath some fresh air and tackle some real-world problem and check it off your list.  Denethor, drop the palantir and pick up a sword.

The Metaverse?  Really?

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I read today that Meta (Facebook) is tanking on Wall Street because the Metaverse (Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of a virtual reality existence for his customers on the internet) is meaningless nonsense that nobody would waste his time on.  So untold billions of dollars of corporate value has evaporated as supposedly one of the most valuable corporations in the world had thousands of highly paid computer scientists playing around with Oculus 3D headsets and video games.

I don’t know about anyone else but I have to wonder whether these geniuses maybe aren’t really all that bright.  I’ve always suspected that the federal government has used its seemingly inexhaustible supply of fake money to make Amazon, Google and Facebook horribly rich monopolies in exchange for the data that they mine from us.  Amazon was allowed to drive their brick-and-mortar competition out of business and Google strangled newspapers, television and every other advertising outlet.  And Facebook was allowed to get a piece of that action, as was, to a much smaller extent, Twitter.  But I think in the back of his mind Zuckerberg has always thought that eventually the jig would be up.  Google takes care of all the ads.  What is Facebook for?

So, he tried to answer that question by imagining a new world that was so flashy and fun that everyone would be glad to waste all their time just being CGI versions of themselves and flying around.  The only thing is it turns out it’s really just boring and ridiculous.  Who wants to sit around all day with a 3D headset on doing basically nothing?

Maybe the good news about all this is people are starting to wake up to the limits of living on-line.  What is accomplished by staring through a headset for hours at a time.  Is anything being produced?  Is anyone benefited?

It’s probably time for on-line companies to concentrate on a subscription model for services that people actually want.  Amazon at least sells stuff and ships it to you very quickly.  What does Facebook do besides spy on you?  Really, not very much.  At least when they weren’t suspending and banning conservatives, they had some rationale for saying they were a social networking medium.  Now they’re some kind of nanny state surveillance bureau to stop normal people from communicating with each other.

So, I’m interested to see what Elon Musk starts doing with his new domain after tomorrow.  Right now, Twitter is even more pathetic than Facebook.  But at least it knows it.  It doesn’t make enough ad money to show a profit and mostly it doesn’t seem like there’s anyone actually there watching.  Although it’s hard to tell because anyone I’d be interested in is shadow-banned by definition.

I’m hoping Musk starts out by unbanning everyone and eliminating the algorithmic bias against normal people.  Just starting with that might cause some interesting things to happen.  It might not make any people on our side suddenly stars but it might turn off the spotlight that currently shines on the Left.  I’d enjoy that.

But long term we might find out whether someone smart could make money running a town square for real and without a big government subsidy to pay the bills.  Somehow, I’m still hopeful that the idea of on-line communities can have some value.  Maybe all that’s needed is an honest broker allowing likeminded folks to form communities that can benefit each other.    Or maybe that’s a mirage and only government money keeps these things like YouTube afloat.  But it’s time to find out.

One thing I know for sure is that the Metaverse as Mark Zuckerberg imagines it, as some kind of free floating Holo-deck on the cheap isn’t an actual thing that millions of people will pay to inhabit.  And the idea that people will pay money to purchase virtual land in this absurd dreamscape is beyond ludicrous.  To me this exposes the juvenile sensibilities of the people running these companies.  The industry is deeply in need of adult supervision.  Maybe Musk will show himself to be in that category.

Come Out, Come Out, Wherever You Are

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I’ve been writing this blog for almost five years.  And now that I’m providing enough content to warrant people keeping up with it it’s begun expanding its following, which is of course very gratifying to me.  And I am especially grateful to those of you who have passed along the site address or the link to a particular post.  I think this is the real “organic” growth mechanism as opposed to a Google or even a DuckDuckGo search link.  The opinion of the target audience is the only meaningful measure of the success of a journal.

But I must take the time to ask you all for a favor.  I am not looking for money or more clicks from you.  I’m not even looking for compliments, although praise is a wonderful narcotic that I crave as much as the next man.  What I’m looking for is feedback of some sort.  And it doesn’t even have to be agreement, in fact, disagreement combined with your opinion on the subject at hand would be splendid.  And I’m certainly not looking for histrionics and mock squabbling.  The last thing I think we need is more Jerry Springer theatrics.  And I’m not looking for people to make declarations that they consider dangerous for them to make.  I am quite aware that government and corporate busybodies are everywhere attempting to imitate the KGB on a Keystone Cops basis.  What I’m looking for is a real dialog with the audience.

As much as I like hearing my own voice and as much as I enjoy the scintillating brilliance of my every captured thought, I still believe that there are other people out there in the universe who have something that they can add to all this marvellousness.  I hold to the idea that there is intelligent life in the universe besides me.  And my goal is to discover it and make contact with it and learn something from it and even enjoy the camaraderie of shared humanity.  I feel like that character from the Pink Floyd song saying, “Hello, hello, hello is there anybody out there?”  But I know there are many somebodies out there.  I’ve met some of them.  And they are fantastic people.  But what would be more fantastic would be to reach a critical mass where the conversations become self-sustaining and I become almost an insignificant part of the dialog.

Think of all the brilliant and thoughtful and experienced people that are out there.  And they’re being thrown off social media by the hundreds of thousands and they’re rooting around on the internet looking for a community.  Some have probably found some good ones.  I’ve done it myself.  But many of these places are extremely odd.  Maybe it’s the times we live in.  Maybe it’s some artifact of the monetizing system but there is just too much anger and confusion.  Even the ones that seem to have a lot of good information on what is going on are strange and sort of depressing.  I’m looking to build some kind of community that at least can function in a way that allows information and some kind of dialog to go on.

I think that with the stalinesque woke purges going on almost everywhere in our society; in social media, in corporations, in government, in schools, in churches, even in the military; it’s necessary to have a place where we can go and be able to say what we want to without having someone tell us that we’re not allowed to.  That’s actually the origin of this site.  I got tired of being censored on photography web sites when I disagreed with the ridiculous leftist slant to everything on those sites.

Now, I’m sure there will be plenty of readers who will find that their views fall so far to the Left and the Right of where I am that this site will be uninteresting to them.  The woke will think I’m just a hateful racist.  In fact, I’ve been told that repeatedly.  And there are people way out on the edges of the dissident right who will find my beliefs hopelessly naïve and useless to their taste.  And that is reasonable.  I have no desire to straddle hopeless opposites.  It can’t be done.  But I know that there is an enormous swath of people that exist in the spectrum of conservative thought that would benefit from a chance to talk to people like themselves without being lectured to and hectored and treated like bad children or criminals.

So, if you have anything at all to say.  Say it!  I don’t need your name or even your actual e-mail address.  Put down whatever you like.  But pitch into the conversation with me.  It’ll help me.  It will help other people who are shy.  And who knows, you might really enjoy talking to other intelligent and like-minded people.  So come out, come out, wherever you are.

And if you like what you read here, tell a friend or two or three who are like you and might enjoy it too.