Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

Facebook! I am pissed off with you! Two reasons!

Here’s the situation. First, I’ve been getting a lot of really creepy posts from a site which is called Poetry, Art and White Lace Beneath the Great Willow. I don’t know if they are at fault or if their only crime is sloppy moderation, because that’s always a possibility. I am not blaming Facebook for this. People post a lot of shit everywhere, because for some reason people just love being assholes. They spray paint crap on public monuments, they throw litter on the grass in public parks, and they do it on purpose because they hate the world.

The posts, in the most recent cases, were announcing the deaths of Simon Cowell and Sylvester Stallone, which sent me straight to their Wikipedia pages to check, which is what I always do, and they are both alive and well, I was glad to see.

So, I’ve tried to block and hide posts from that site and I get back ‘Action cannot be completed at this time’ and the best I can do is report them.

So, this morning, not wanting to go through the whole foofaraw, I just hit the X at the upper right hand corner and got back the reply “You will see less posts like this.” Facebook, what the hell is wrong with you? Never mind the fact that what I actually want is to see NO posts from this site, and NO posts of this nature, and that it’s really the lowest of the low to post a post saying somebody is dead just for shits and giggles, when they are actually still alive.

The thing that pisses me off is the obvious grammatical error. Fewer posts, Facebook, FEWER! Not less. Less is for uncountable items, i.e. less truth, less justice, less oil, less sunshine. Fewer is for countable items, like posts. One post, two posts, etc…

I don’t feel I’m being overly didactic. I don’t worry about putting a preposition at the end of the sentence, because there are so many phrases in English where we do that that the rule is meaningless. I don’t worry too much about misplaced commas, and I’m willing to overlook a lot of misspellings as possible typos.

But this is a very easy rule to learn, it is easy to check for and apply, and it is an important distinction.

Do you hire grammatically challenged people to do your programming and formatting? Does nobody check stuff before you make it part of your standard format? Is this the way youwish to present yourselves to the public?

For shame, Facebook. For shame.

Elon Musk, over the past couple of months, has revealed himself to be an extremely right-wing, horrible, possibly insane person. There were the mass firings and the revelations from many former employees about how horrible of a boss he is, several tweets which were severely uncool, and posing for pictures in Qatar with Jared Kushner.
However, as the shakeup at Twitter continues, some things have been revealed. In particular, the fact that the FBI was telling Twitter which accounts should be suppressed, for instance anybody talking about Hunter Biden’s laptop, which is now more relevant than ever.
This is huge news, it broke weeks ago, and not nearly enough people are talking about it.
I’m really conflicted about this. On the one hand, it indicates that I was right, the Hunter Biden’s involvement in Ukraine was a big deal, and my suspicions that the CIA was behind the Majdan coup of 2014, in which the legally elected (but Russia friendly) president of Ukraine was deposed have somewhat more justification than me just whistling in the dark and assuming that the U.S. government is evil just because they always are.
It is also a real solid indicator that free speech in the U.S. is severely compromised, and public information is largely shaped by the government, with the FBI acting as the Department of Propaganda, what Orwell called Minitru, it’s where Winston Smith worked in “1984.”
And it’s all due to Elon Musk storming in and smashing the place up. Like the blind pig that sometimes finds an acorn, or the stopped clock that shows the correct time twice a day, this one worked out for him.
One additional thing, before I go back to thinking of Musk as a horrible human being, with all the patent stealing greed of Thomas Edison minus Edison’s actual inventiveness: I think he will, despite all the fooforaw, eventually make money on Twitter. Sure, quite a few celebrities have canceled their accounts but there are still millions of people who use it to shout at the world every day, and will continue to do so as long as it exists. It is, as the saying goes, too big to fail.

O.K., mostly I’m writing because I haven’t written a blog in a long time and it’s not that I’ve been too busy, it’s just that I’ve been too lazy. I did read something this morning, however, which shocked the shit out of me and deserves a response.
Apparently, a woman named Jen Easterly who is the head of the U.S. governments Cybersecurity and Information Security Agency (which I had not known existed, and sounds evil as fuck, being only one letter different in its acronym from CIA) said (this is about a year old, but I’m just hearing about it now) “One could argue we’re in the business of critical infrastructure, and the most critical infrastructure is our cognitive infrastructure, so building that resilience to misinformation and disinformation, I think, is incredibly important.”
Cognitive infrastructure. Our cognitive infrastructure is our mind. She is, quite openly, talking about mind control. Now, you might say ‘no, she’s not, she’s just talking about regulating the internet’ but the internet, increasingly is our collective mind. You might say “Yeah, but you have to stop misinformation and propaganda,” but who are the biggest spreaders of misinformation and propaganda? Well, the U.S. government is definitely a serious contender.
Also, when they talk about controlling what gets posted on the Internet, that means they will block specific topics of conversation, people, and specific individuals, so yes, they most definitely are working toward mind control.
And they’re no longer even subtle about hiding it.

I can’t believe I haven’t written this blog since we got back from Crete. Although record heat waves, the continuing debacle in Ukraine and various other topics deserve to be written about, I have become lazy. Anyway, here we are on vacation again, although a short one, just a 3 day weekend but, living in the heart of Europe, we are absolutely surrounded with beautiful, interesting, and convenient tourist destinations. This time we chose Poznan, Poland, just a 6 hour drive, with a couple of short stops.

I thought ‘What a dull choice, there is nothing to see of importance in Poznan.’ I couldn’t have been more mistaken. Last night, after we got here, we walked around Old Town (under construction), saw a couple of fountains, a couple of castles, a whole bunch of interesting old buildings and some parks.
This morning, we decided to try the hotel breakfast. At first, it seemed a bit sparse, and there were problems with the coffee maker, but there were many little oddities (pickled mushrooms), and we did not go away hungry, for sure. Then we went back into town and toured Tumski Island, with an ancient Cathedral (I hesitate about entering Cathedrals when they actually have a service going on, as they did, but my wife is not so bothered), a museum which we did not visit, a cafe where we had lemonade and a blueberry cream cup (similar to one we’d had at breakfast), and an old chapel which actually served as a very cool museum, they had a 5 minute film on a loop in the floor. I had not realized that Poznan was at one point the capital of Poland, a critically important European city back in about 900. We then found the building with a very cool mural painted on one wall, and one which makes music when it rains, both of which looked much cooler when I saw them posted on Facebook but still, it was a very interesting, artsy neighborhood. Then we went to the botanical gardens and I was knocked out. It was larger than Prague’s, I think, with a lot more ponds and fountains, and it was free, which Prague’s is not. We followed that with a trip to the Palmiarnia, a series of greenhouses with thick, tropical foliage. It had really started raining by this point, so it was good to be inside for a while. Then, we started looking for some place to have dinner. Our first choice was a place we noticed last night, very good prices for a large plate of spaghetti, but they didn’t have a toilet which, by that point in our travels, was an absolute necessity for at least two of us. So, after a bit more trudging about the under construction old town square we wound up at a pizzeria where the prices were O.K. and they had normal facilities.
Tomorrow will depend on the weather a bit. If it’s sunny, we want to go swimming, if it’s cloudy, we’ll go hiking in a nearby national park, if it’s raining we may have to think of something else.

In any event, I highly recommend Poznan. If you’ve never been there, you should go.

The trip home was long and a bit exhausting, but we are back in Prague now and I’m re-adapting to old habits quickly, and planning on a poetry reading this evening.
On the twisty, narrow, mountain road up from Elaphonisi, we faced off against a parade of traffic in the other direction, mostly cars but also the occasional tour bus, all no doubt heading down to the wildly over-rated pink sand beach. We stopped in a little town which I think was called Boulgari, or maybe Voulgari, I don’t know and couldn’t find it on Wikipedia. The idea was to just find a kitschy souvenir shop for some last minute kitschy souvenirs, but what we walked into was more of a gallery. The proprietor was a short, old Greek man with a long, gray beard who would have been right at home in Middle Earth, and the shop had old coins strewn across the ground out front and into the road, and driftwood all over the place. Almost all of the stuff, ranging from very small to quite large, lawn statue type things, was made from wood.
We had lunch in Chania, and briefly revisited the port market, and then it was time to return the car. The airport was just across the parking lot from there, but since we had to have the car back at three and our flight was at 6:30, we had quite a wait.
The first flight was to Munich, and we had to wear masks, German law. I was hoping they’d serve us a meal, which would have given us an excuse to remove the masks in flight, but all we got was a small bottle of water. Of course you could take the mask off to drink, but they were actually fairly strict about the mask thing, with the flight crew regularly telling people to put their masks back on. Our flight from Munich to Prague had a couple of delays and three gate changes, and then the same issue with the masks which led to a moment of panic as I’d lost mine but we found a spare. It was almost midnight before we got home.
It took a moment when I woke up this morning to remember where I was.