My Momma used to say…

“We can’t do that anymore, because too many people abused the privilege.”

It’s with this in mind, that I’ve been wondering about making services like Twitter and Facebook simply illegal.

I know this flies in the face of freedom, it says that these businesses would be shut down and their employees would be unemployed. That is antithetical to most core American values.

Bear with me here.

Twitter has become a cesspool of hate speech, most everyone agrees that is a true statement. After all, Twitter itself has seen fit to invest in all manner of protections against hate speech, from algorithms to manual reviewers.

Twitter has been forced to endure lawsuits and congressional hearings regarding censorship. Twitter now employs a cadre of high powered attorneys and law firms at great expense just to protect itself from legal action from people who are offended by what they read on Twitter, and those who sue because their opinions are deemed to be hate speech or misinformation.

Facebook is in the same boat.

The simplest solution is to shut down these corporations.

Too many people misuse these services, in some cases these services are being misused to the point that illegal activities are being coordinated through them. Congressional investigations have stated this was true in the Jan 6th event.

This means that both corporations have become inadvertent accomplices to criminality. Not just locally, but on a worldwide level.

Twitter and Facebook were good ideas. Their founders were naive about the nature of humanity. It’s not their fault that people say things that other people do not like. I’d suggest that both corporations accept that as experiments in connecting and unifying people, they’ve essentially failed.

This failed experiment is also not their fault. They’ve proved that too much information exchange between people tends to amplify the worst aspects of social interaction.

Shutting down these kinds of services would tend to limit the negative and deleterious effects of all kinds of misinformation.

Think about it. There wouldn’t be anymore vaccine misinformation.

Local problems would remain local.

Politicians would have to focus on getting votes by traveling to communities and interacting with the residents of the community.

Unqualified or poorly educated journalists wouldn’t be unable to spread unvetted information.

Opinions would no longer be taken as facts without any proof.

Juries in court cases would be easier to impanel because there would be less likelihood of bias or prejudiced information tainting the jury pool.

I think the benefits of shutting down these kinds of services would greatly outweigh the negative consequences.

There would be a period of adjustment of course.

People would have to learn how to live with privacy again. A lot of people would have to deal with addiction issues related to endless scrolling. Neighborhood and Community events could help to address these addiction issues, and at the same time could more effectively address local problems.

Local print media would possibly see a resurgence thereby creating more jobs.

Our government would find it much easier to make sure that their messaging was clear and understood. They could focus on the mainstream news outlets and make sure their statements were read precisely.

Surely, the elimination of all this free exchange of hate speech would be in the best interests of public safety and security.

Just a thought…

Here it is, Confirmation that we live in bizzaro world

Ran across this article on American Thinker.

Putin’s Remarks About ‘Woke’ Culture Deserve Serious Consideration

The translation is a little rough in the quoted material from President Putin’s speech. But it’s very readable and he makes some good points.

I suppose this caught my attention because Putin is supposed to be “The Bad Guy”. I grew up in the 60’s At the time common perception was, the Russians were always evil… In fact over the last four years we’ve seen that much of Washington D.C. still seems to think this is the case.

Sting made a little bit of a wave with his song, Russians love their children too, back in the day.

I’d long thought that the Russians weren’t the comic book super villains they’d been portrayed as. The first time I heard Sting singing this song I remember being glad that someone else was thinking along the same lines.

Now, President Putin is speaking a truth that so many of us in America have been cowed into keeping to ourselves.

I’m posting his comments copied directly from the American Thinker Article because even if you don’t have time or inclination to go to the piece itself, you should read Putin’s comments to the Valdai Discussion Club.


The fight for equality and against discrimination has turned into aggressive dogmatism bordering on absurdity, when the works of the great authors of the past – such as Shakespeare – are no longer taught at schools or universities, because their ideas are believed to be backward. The classics are declared backward and ignorant of the importance of gender or race. In Hollywood memos are distributed about proper storytelling and how many characters of what colour or gender should be in a movie. This is even worse than the agitprop department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Countering acts of racism is a necessary and noble cause, but the new ‘cancel culture’ has turned it into ‘reverse discrimination’ that is, reverse racism. The obsessive emphasis on race is further dividing people, when the real fighters for civil rights dreamed precisely about erasing differences and refusing to divide people by skin colour. I specifically asked my colleagues to find the following quote from Martin Luther King: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by their character.” This is the true value. However, things are turning out differently there. By the way, the absolute majority of Russian people do not think that the colour of a person’s skin or their gender is an important matter. Each of us is a human being. This is what matters.

In a number of Western countries, the debate over men’s and women’s rights has turned into a perfect phantasmagoria. Look, beware of going where the Bolsheviks once planned to go – not only communalising chickens, but also communalising women. One more step and you will be there.

Zealots of these new approaches even go so far as to want to abolish these concepts altogether. Anyone who dares mention that men and women actually exist, which is a biological fact, risk being ostracised. “Parent number one” and “parent number two,” “’birthing parent” instead of “mother,” and “human milk” replacing “breastmilk” because it might upset the people who are unsure about their own gender. I repeat, this is nothing new; in the 1920s, the so-called Soviet Kulturtraegers also invented some newspeak believing they were creating a new consciousness and changing values that way. And, as I have already said, they made such a mess it still makes one shudder at times.

Not to mention some truly monstrous things when children are taught from an early age that a boy can easily become a girl and vice versa. That is, the teachers actually impose on them a choice we all supposedly have. They do so while shutting the parents out of the process and forcing the child to make decisions that can upend their entire life. They do not even bother to consult with child psychologists – is a child at this age even capable of making a decision of this kind? Calling a spade a spade, this verges on a crime against humanity, and it is being done in the name and under the banner of progress.


When, Vladimir Putin makes more sense than most of the “Leaders” in the West, we’ve gone around the proverbial bend.

Putin, in his time may well have done some questionable things. He has probably had dissenters and dissidents imprisoned. He’s certainly in absolute control of his nation.

One could say he rules with an iron fist, making money along the way. These are things that have been said about President Putin for years and during that same time Leaders in the West have pointed to President Putin and said, “This is what we’re fighting to prevent.

Were you to ask the folks arrested in the “Jan 6th mostly peaceful protest” if they felt there was any difference between America and Russia today, what do you think their answer would be?

What would locked down Australians or New Zealanders say?

When Vladimir Putin… Now, think about this, Putin alludes to cancel culture, essentially saying it’s no different than Bolshevik thinking. Perhaps we should all take heed.

We might even thank President Putin for speaking truth to the “power of the mob” because he is in a position of authority that allows him to do so.

I was just thinking about the way Putin treated Obama. It was obvious there was no love lost there. In my opinion, Putin consistently humiliated Obama on the world stage. Putin and Trump appeared to have at least grudging respect for each other.

With Biden… Putin has demonstrated that he may be a man of honor. Thus far he’s taken actions to protect his nation from Biden’s fuckups.

But he has not actively humiliated Biden. After all, there is no honor in embarrassing or fighting with, a sick, weak, opponent. When Kamala becomes The President, I’d bet that Putin will mostly ignore her too. That’s not sexist, there is simply no honor in beating-up the village idiot.

Indirectly, Putin not engaging in any serious way with America’s leadership is in fact humiliation. It says that we are no longer powerful or threatening. Without saying it, Putin is communicating to the world, that America has become irrelevant.

Given that President Putin has much more experience dealing with communism, and socialism, I suspect that he will be able to manipulate our leaders into whatever he sees as advantageous to his country.

Be that lifting tariffs, export controls, or increasing trade. Russia is a modern country now, in another five or ten years it may well be completely indistinguishable from any other European country, with one exception. Russia will be moving forward into the future, not seeking to destroy itself with pointless divisiveness or contemplation of its navel.

Who knows? Perhaps I’ll have a lovely retirement in a Moscow suburb.

I rewatched Elysium the other night…

I’d seen the movie a while ago. It’s from 2013.

Matt Damon, Jodie Foster.

The first time I saw it, It was pure science fiction.

Now, well, it was unsettling to rewatch.

The premise is that the elites of the world live in a marvelous space station. They have the highest technology and medical devices that can instantly fix whatever ailment someone might have. The elites living on the space station live in opulent luxury and ease.

The folks left on Earth, not so much. That’s the set up.

It’s a typical underdog makes good despite the odds, scenario. Complete with an abusive supervisor and shitty worker safety. The movie depicts abusive police and parole officer robots and a criminal element that is generally criminal out of desperation, not any particular desire to commit crime.

The folks left on Earth are treated as if they’re unclean and generally left to squalor and hopelessness.

At the time the movie was made, It was probably a commentary on wealthy countries ignoring the poor.

Eight years later, with our current political situation, the movie has a somewhat different tone.

I’ve noticed that a lot of the older movies in my collection are changing. It’s not that the movie is being re-edited, it’s that my perspective is changing.

What was once escapist fantasy and easy to dismiss as unthinkable is becoming more thinkable, perhaps even possible.

GATTACA from 1997 springs to mind.

That movie was pure fantasy when it came out. Entry to workplaces and venues was restricted based on DNA “purity” testing. But watch it now with vaccine passports needed to enter certain venues or travel, and it’s suddenly not so fantastic.

There’ve been a number of references to Orwell’s 1984 but there are a lot of other science fiction stories & movies that are equally unsettling against the backdrop of events we’re living through.

The weird thing is that a lot of my personal collection deals with these themes. Okay, so perhaps I’m a sick puppy. Whatever!

I suppose it’s proof that whatever we as humans can imagine, we will be able to achieve.

Jules Verne in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea imagined a submarine that was powered by some mysterious power source.

We named the first nuclear submarine after Captain Nemo’s Nautilus. Verne had no knowledge nuclear power but he imagined a dangerous and unending power source.

Later, Forbidden Planet from 1956, explored the price of hubris.

The Krell, learned everything and then turned inward. They destroyed themselves in a single night accidentally, because they forgot about the darkness within their own souls.

Arthur C. Clark explored the human condition in many of his stories, I like his books, but I like his short stories more.

All these stories have at their core, kernels of much older stories. Human stories, from cultures across the planet.

Stories that at one time were teaching stories designed to instill values into whatever culture they existed in.

These stories explored right and wrong, good and evil, and I think we should listen to those ancient voices as much today.

We can and have modernized many of those stories but somehow the lessons contained in them don’t have the same impact in today’s society.

The notion that greed is a trap is explored in the story of King Midas and also in a Native American story of the eagle who became imprisoned by man because the eagle would not let go of a fish.

Two entirely different cultures separated by thousands of miles and years, and yet the message is the same. Greed leads to ruin.

We, Humanity, can no longer afford to allow hubris to blind us.

Our technology is marvelous and magical. A thousand years ago steel was the metal of the gods. Technology at any point in time is always the most advanced.

Human drives though, remain just as primitive as they were before we ventured out of the Olduvai Gorge in Africa.

I think it’s time for us to rediscover the stories our ancestors left us. There are lessons to be had, and enjoyment in learning those lessons.

Go grab a copy of Greek Tragedies. Look to Shakespeare, read Verne, or Clark, or Orwell, or rewatch any of the old movies in your library. Enjoy the entertainment and take a moment to consider the meaning behind the story.

Be warned, your pride might be bruised when you find that you’re different from your ancestors only due to your iPhone.