Category: Things that make you say hmmm?

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One of those dreams that you wake up from with chills

Iearth.jpgn the dream I’m sitting at my computer wandering down an unfamiliar data pathway on the ‘net.

My screen freezes then starts showing random characters.

The characters resolve into a message:

After careful observation and consideration. It’s been determined this civilization will not achieve Kardashev Type 1 status.

Therefore the warning message transmitted from Buoys in the Oort cloud has been modified and will broadcast for another thousand cycles.

New Message Reads, “Warning – Do not approach the third planet. Primitive species, extremely dangerous and warlike. Minimal spacial abilities with crude atomic weapons. End Message”

Message is being transmitted on all frequencies and in all known languages. Additionally system wide cradle defense batteries have been deactivated. This world is of no further interest to our people, and no longer under our protection.

Humans will have to fend for themselves. We will no longer provide protection from Slaver or Raiding species. Nor will we provide any protection from asteroid impact.

Orders are as follow: Evacuate. Collect any genetic material of interest, finalize reports, back up all cultural databases for subsequent study on Phoenixie Prime. destroy all bases and fall back to our ships. As we exit the system we will destroy all of our technology except warning buoys to prevent potential misuse.

Ten thousand years has been more than enough time for a civilization to evolve. Most do it in four thousand years. We’ve been too lenient and allowed our love of this species to stay our hand.

Report to your assigned ships for evacuation no later than 90 days from today.

Signed,

Commander Sol 3 Joint Annunaki / Phonexie Research Expedition.

Then the screen scrambled again and my computer rebooted.

I woke up in one of those Who, What, Where, things you have when you wake up from a nightmare.

As I collected my wits, I realized that a message like this appearing on every display device across our planet would at once confirm the existence of extraterrestrials, and just how disappointed they were with us as a species.

The ensuing chaos would be epic and imagine the wonder and sadness the world would feel as space craft suddenly appeared and left in very unsubtle ways. 

Then it occurred to me. I don’t think there’s been a significant meteor impact (meaning really damaging) for about 8 to 10 thousand years.

Now you have some insight into the weirdness of my mind.

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Abracadabra Alakazam Your online security is all a Big ‘Ol Sham

Just like the TSA waving their hands and muttering incantations when you try to board a plane.

10 years ago, I moved my checking and savings accounts away from Wells Fargo.

Recently I had need to speak with them and got the usual “you can get faster service by going to our web site”

During the course of the conversation, the representative, a lovely lady from Virginia told me that my records were very out of date. (I rarely have need to do business with them.) 

I told the lady that I knew that. And then told her that the reason for my call was that I couldn’t do what I needed to do online because the online system wouldn’t let me update the account profile.

The reason is this, I needed to change the phone number and the email address, but in order to do that I had to have access to one or both. Since I have access to neither, the system wouldn’t allow a change.

This was compounded by the fact that they didn’t have a cell phone number on file with which to send me a verification code.

Okay say I, “Since I’ve given you all the verification information and was able to tell you what the old number was, can you just make the changes? And can we proceed from there?”

Her answer is yes, “but we’ll have to add your cellphone number and then you’ll have to wait for us to send you an email telling you your number has been accepted, so that when you call us back to actually do what you needed to do, we can send you a verification text, so that we know it’s you…”

This somehow seemed totally logical to her.

She followed up by telling me it was for my security.

Sigh…

If I were a nefarious person, I could just as easily play along with this game, having changed the cellphone and email addresses, and I’d have access to do what I was trying to do in the first place, It would only take me keeping track of stuff for 24 hours and then calling back.

What exactly does the bank think is going on? Do they think that criminals have some kind of short attention span?  Are they thinking a criminal is going to forget about the score they were working on, over the course of 24 hours?

By the way this is the sort of thing that has turned me off traditional banks. Credit Unions seem to be a little more direct about getting the job done. 

The banking and insurance systems seem intent on making things so secure… That ONLY criminals will be able to access our data, because they have the time to commit to accessing the accounts.

40 minutes on the phone, and I still have not accomplished what I set out to accomplish.

So now I’m waiting on an email… 

I’m thinking that it’s not worth it. A far more direct method would be to keep my money in my mattress and eschew traditional banking institutions altogether. The problem is that  gold is heavy, and hard to store or move. Diamonds on the other hand are small, light, and easy.

Hummm I wonder…

Perhaps it’s time to close this last bit of business with Wells Fargo. To do that I’ll have to be in a bank branch sooo that’s on my TODO list.

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I am in shock that PC bullshit has gone this far.

Laura.jpgThe American Association for Library Service to Children has removed Laura Ingalls Wilder’s name from one of its awards. They’re changing the name to Children’s Literature Legacy award. Read the article Here

For those who may not know that name, this is the Author of The Little House on the Prairie series of books. You know, an American Classic. The books are considered semi-autobiographical. 

This is being done because in the books she implies Native Americans were not people, and later describes African American people as “Darkies”. 

Laura Ingalls Wider was born in 1867. The books were published between 1932 and 1943. 

Since the books are semi-autobiographical in nature, it is not surprising that they might contain some racist stereotypes. From the perspective of the author, these stereotypes would have been a normal part of her lexicon and she wouldn’t have seen anything wrong with using them.

Once again the PC police are subjecting classical literature to the standards of today. Who’s next? Mark Twain? After all, his writings speak of a black man who was a slave.

I honestly don’t see the point. Why waste the energy to rename awards? In the words of a famous politician, “What does it matter at this point anyway,”

Fahrenheit 451 6I read about stuff like this and think Fahrenheit 451,  or the book burnings of Nazi Germany.

Authors create snapshots  of their times and environment. Without those perspectives from more or less “average people” I feel we risk losing something of ourselves. This is especially concerning if we continue moving toward editing our past just because our current standards are rightfully different from those of our past.

Maybe I’m worried over nothing, in fact, were I in my twenties reading this, I’d probably give it no thought. But one benefit of age is perspective.

It’s not about looking back fondly on older times. It’s the realization that one of the best ways to mark progress is to look at where we’ve been. In that, literature gives us a view that we might otherwise not have. A first person narrative while biased, allows us to see what was normal and contrast that with what is normal, for better or worse.

NevilleC_Hitler.jpgAppeasements typically don’t work, ask Neville Chamberlain. If you don’t know who that is, look him up. He & Hitler had an interesting relationship.

This kind of renaming and whitewashing of history is nothing more than appeasement. In the long run, one incident isn’t significant, but when the appeasements add up well, Poland gets annexed.

Even if you don’t agree, give it some thought and figure out where you personally would draw the line. 

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In a time when privacy is of such concern…

thisisyourbrainontheinternet.jpgWhy is it that almost every single company you apply to for a job asks for you to create an account on their site?

Are we applying for jobs or are we providing information for data mining?

Well, I wouldn’t be surprised to find out, it’s both.

I detest having to create an “Account” just to apply for an advertised position, and I’m always concerned when a job application site asks me “Security Questions”

What’s your mother’s maiden name

Where were you born

What’s the name of your pet

What school did you attend

These bits of data, when aggregated with other bits gleaned from other sites can form a very complete picture of you as an individual.

Why do I need to create an account in the first place? The company I’m applying for hasn’t hired me, and in all likelihood we’re only going to have one time when we have contact with each other. The Odds of my returning to a particular corporate web site for anything other than prepping for an unlikely phone interview are exceedingly small. So why should I have to provide anything other than a resume and cover letter?

bigstock-210973132.jpgThere are currently something like 300 accounts stored in my web account password manager, at least 250 of those are from sites that I don’t visit or have only visited one time. Yet each one of those entries represents a corporation that has some amount of my personal information. This is information that I shared in the hopes of getting a job and it’s information that is no longer under my control.

Knowing how data can be scraped and related, and how easy it is to include similar results from other people, I’ve become concerned not only about my loss of control of that data, but also the veracity of data presented as “Me” on sites like Mylife.com, Beenverified.com, spokeo.com, and peoplefinders.com. That doesn’t even touch what Google may report.

The issue for me is, due to the proliferation of these sites, it could be a full time job just asking them to remove me from their records and verifying that they’ve done so.

I don’t particularly have anything to hide, but I am concerned that these sites could inexpensively be used to create a very convincing false identity, leading to successful identity theft. I’ve been through that once and have no desire to repeat the experience.

As a minor example of how easily data can get screwed up, I once had an argument with a lady, (who may or may not have been a very distant relative) on Ancestry.com over whether my Father was in fact my father.

According to her research, my step siblings were my Father’s original family and my half brother (we share the same father) and I didn’t exist. She had pictures of my Dad in her ancestry page but the birth dates were all incorrect for all of my step siblings. I figured “Fine” live in your own fantasy world lady, but I was there and I know who my father and mother are.

The problem was, that every-time I corrected the data for MY immediate family in my account, her data would override mine. Matters were made worse when my stepfather and mother started adding information from their ancestry page and my mom discovered her marriage to my biological father and my subsequent birth were being erased by this lady that we didn’t even know. My mother tried reasoning with this woman and got nowhere. You do not want to piss my mother off, she will rent a bulldozer and get certified as a heavy equipment operator,  just to smash your car into a pancake.

I lost interest after a while because I was beating my head against a wall. I signed off of ancestry and haven’t been back. I purchased an application that runs locally on my computer. That way I can maintain the integrity of my personal family data without having someone arbitrarily make changes.

You see, this stranger was searching for context and her locating my branch of the family was easier than finding the real branch of the family that she was connected to. So instead of doing the research, she started creating or editing data that fit her narrative.

Imagine a scenario like this in more important matters. Your job history, your credit history, your criminal history…

How would you even go about correcting it? Unless you ran a background check on yourself periodically you might not even know that you had been cross-linked with someone else. The problem there is, the longer the cross link exists the more “True” it becomes.

I explain all of the above to support my implied assertion that we are being “Programmed” to give away random bits of ourselves without much thought. The consequence of which is that our identities and security is being eroded.

SocialNetwork.jpgDo you really want your employer, your date, spouse, or your mother, to know about that rather large kinky sex toy you purchased on Dec 27 2005 at 3 PM in Los Angeles?  Or how about that time when you went to a shooting range with your boyfriend?

You may have purchased the toy as a practical joke, you may have gone to the shooting range to see what guns were all about and decided they weren’t for you, but the people looking at the sales records won’t know that, and you’ll never have the opportunity to explain because the folks looking at the data will never give you the chance.

We’re moving more and more toward a contextless world.

We see it in media coverage of political figures, Who cares if some politician dressed up in blackface AND a KKK outfit for Halloween in 1977, when they were 13 years old?

In a contextless society, that event reads as… Politician dressed in Blackface KKK robe. This insensitive leader must be removed from office immediately! It’s an outrage!

Not only do I not want to participate in that kind of society, I don’t want to hand a society the weapon to harm me.

So that’s why I’m very twitchy about websites demanding that I create an account for the simplest of things.

Call me paranoid if you wish, but that doesn’t mean I’m wrong.

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Life is funny…

Just when I’ve decided to un-case my demonic wings and go back to being “that guy” I have a chance encounter, and a weird “Message?”

“That Guy” for those who haven’t known me for 30 years, is someone that I spent a great deal of effort putting in the ground in my consciousness. That was the “me” that lived for conflict, revenge, hostility, and chaos. That was the me that loved and got off on political games, and causing discord simply because I could.

The me of today might say stuff, but it’s usually in the context of joking.

The “Me” of years ago wouldn’t joke about it, he’d revel in it and feed the fires until someone quit or got fired and enjoy watching the fallout. About the time things settled down again, I’d start all over. Not for any reason other than it amused me, and so many people were so dumb that they didn’t realize they were being played.

It took a lot of effort and time to break myself of that habit. On balance, that effort was rewarded because I no longer had to carry the burden of guilt about the misery I’d had a hand in creating. I also slept better at night and came to like myself a lot more.

It is with a lot of conflicting emotions that I even consider letting that genie back out of his bottle. He’s an addiction, power corrupts, and manipulating people into dancing my dance a little, even for the right reasons can easily lead to manipulating people just for the fuck of it.

There’s an insight into why I react sooo very poorly when people try to manipulate me.

Just tell me what you want. I’ll either agree or not, and we’ll move on from there. Don’t try to engage me in your bullshit then try to ease into something that you already know I’m going to be opposed to. Just cut to the chase, make a reasoned case for why you want me to do something and thus opens the negotiation.

Anyhow, I’d just come to peace with letting “That Guy” out of his bottle. I was going to go into work and just start fomenting chaos and seeing if I could end a few careers. I’m not deluding myself, I wasn’t considering doing this for any greater good, or altruism.

This was about nothing more or less that revenge, hate, rage and feeling like I’d been betrayed.

If, as part of the collateral damage, some good came of the destruction, then so be it. Call me Shiva and make me a god.

So I’m sitting in a bar. I’d decided to have a whiskey before getting on the long drive back down to San Diego. The place wasn’t very busy, so I asked the bartender if he liked what he did.

He said, “Yes. This is the greatest job in the world.”

I thought to myself, “Interesting, what’s his angle? No Job is that good.”

He went on, “I used to be in the mortgage banking business. I made a shit ton of money but never had the time to enjoy it. I don’t make that kind of money here, but I make more than you’d think and I leave this place and go on with my life. I don’t think about work when I’m not at work.

I thought about it a minute and concluded that I’m looking for something like that.

The bartender went to go help a new arrival.

He came back and said you know we’re hiring. He said, “I can teach anyone to be a bartender, I can’t teach someone to have a personality. “

I chatted with the patron next to me for a minute.

The Bartender came back asking if he could close my tab out. He was going off shift. I said, “Sure and and asked for an application.”

Can’t hurt to ask…

I decided to wait for a couple weeks before letting “That Guy” out of the bottle. Maybe the universe was trying to tell me something, maybe I’m not as at peace with going back to who I was as I think I am. 

Either way, it’s another choice.