It’s no secret that I despise Facebook and will never use it.

Of the many, many things I can’t comprehend about it and why people like it is that it chooses what you see, and that’s only getting worse.

Talk about a filter bubble.

I’m smart enough to choose what I read for myself.

When I start to feel human, I think of Facebook and then I don’t any more.

Yeah, some cultural appropriation is offensive, agreed.

But what makes me laugh about it all is that some of the “appropriated” cultural items were themselves adopted by the culture accusing others of appropriation not that long prior. In other words, people are up in arms about the very things their grandmothers and grandfathers did with aplomb. (Most “ancient” traditions also aren’t nearly as old as people imagine, also.)

I understand the iniquities of colonialism and all that. That is a factor. It’s not nothing. But about some things, people should really just chill the fuck out and concentrate on something more important.

I’ve been more sensitive lately to journalists recounting history inaccurately.

For instance, I just saw this claim about WWI.

For the first time in human history, warring sides could see each other from above and plan their attack.

NOPE.

Balloons had been used extensively in military operations starting in the US Civil War, sixty years prior. Fixed-wing aircraft made that easier, but it was nothing new.

That took me ten seconds on Wikipedia (though I already knew most of it). Why can’t journalists do this?

With Ferguson, even more people are discovering what I learned as a nineteen-year-old escorting mainstream media for the US military: that is, the media almost never reports what really happened, but rather some sexed-up, nearly fact-free version of events that reproduces the prejudices and obsessions of their audiences.

The truth really doesn’t matter. Gaining as much attention and thus the most eyeballs and ad clicks is what matters.

You think the media is working for you?

No, they are not and never were. They are working for the people who pay them, i.e., the one-percenter white male over-50s who run the media in reality.

As in most of life in late capitalism, if you follow the money you know right where to look.

From a comment here:

German police officers fired a total of 85 bullets in 2011, 49 of which were warning shots, the German publication Der Spiegel reported.

Officers fired 36 times at people, killing six and injuring 15. This is a slight decline from 2010, when seven people were killed and 17  injured. Ninety-six shots were fired in 2010.

Meanwhile, in the United States, The Atlantic reported that in April, 84 shots were fired at one murder suspect in Harlem, and another 90 at an unarmed man in Los Angeles.

‘MURICA.

I don’t mind vocal fry in regular speech, but I absolutely cannot stand it in songs. First of all, if you’re using vocal fry in a song, you’re almost certainly off pitch.

Second, it just sounds bad, like you broke your voice. While ok in regular speech, while performing it makes you sound like you need to take a break. Or perhaps never sing again.

Vocal fry just has no place in music, really.

Despite what I said in my post below, I’m always a bit shocked when I read comments that people make about low-wage workers, such as Dan in the comments section of this story.

(There is no reliable way to link to comments on Slate any longer. Another brilliant UI/UX “innovation.” The “share” button appears to allow it, but doesn’t actually function in any of the four browsers on two different OSes in which I tested it.)

So here’s a screenshot of one of his odious comments:

Not only is nearly everything in the comment casuistic or utterly fallacious, it is contemptible in that it presumes that social arrangements have to be this way.

They do not.

I’ve spent many years studying and learning about other economic arrangements throughout human history. Not that all of them were superior, but the market system as we think of it now is an anomaly. Pretending that society must be ordered just as it is now is completely ahistorical and is in no way supported by any evidence at all.

It is a convenient fantasy used to justify inequality and theft of labor from people like Jannette Navarro.

The universal basic income is the best solution to all this, by the way. As long as it’s not allowed to be hijacked by libertarians to destroy Medicare/Medicaid and Social Security.

And Dan is a putz scumbag.

One of the reasons I’ve only been lukewarm on fighting for higher wages in industries like fast food and manufacturing is it’s like fighting over who gets to sit on the sun deck on a sinking ship.

That is, those jobs are all going to go away. It would help people now, and that’s why I care at all. But it won’t help them for long, and the higher wages go in those fields the faster those jobs will disappear forever.

In 30-40 years, 95% of fast food jobs will be kaput.

"I Forgot You Were Here." Guardians of the Galaxy, Storytelling, & Associated Face Punches.

I can’t understand this. So many women are already the audience of these films. So many more would go if they weren’t belittled. Even in general, more moviegoers are women than men.

It’s bad business, and that’s what makes it puzzling. But business as I’ve noted is not just about profits, it’s also about power. This is another good example of that truth.

We made this tonight. It was very good.

We used chicken bouillon because it’s what we had on hand and we are not vegetarians. Also used onions instead of shallots.

One of the best new recipes we’ve tried lately.

One of the things that strikes me about the police having the vast arsenals of military-grade weaponry is that it is pretty unlikely that they have that much training on how to use it correctly or perhaps at all.

It’s just there to intimidate and to look impressive, and to satisfy authoritarian fantasies.

As a nation we have decided that the police have a job that is so dangerous (it isn’t) that they can do anything they want. It’s actually funny in a way, because all their violence and body armor and tanks just show that they are a bunch of wimps. Does a real man panic and put seven bullets in a boy because he doesn’t immediate respond to the officer’s command? Of course not.

Since I first wrote a draft of this post, there has been a whole spate of articles pointing out that the military actually has a better ops manual for how to treat protesters. That is perfectly correct. The Ferguson police are militarized, but only for show. They are not well-trained and certainly not well-intentioned.

The paperless office is finally starting to become a reality.

That’s interesting, though not too surprising. It takes a long time for habits to change, and sometimes you just have to wait for old generations to retire and allow new ones to take their place.

Like many things, it just takes the oldsters retiring and/or dying for processes and approaches to improve. Not that everyone old is hidebound, but one has to admit that it is a tendency. Mostly gone are the days of an executive having his or her assistant print out emails to read.

At a previous job, there were people who for some reason would print out documents and hand them to me. I would always say, “Ah, no! Don’t hand me yet more paper, please. Put it out on the share.”

What am I going to do with a piece of paper? I can’t search it. Can’t get it to anyone else easily. Can’t look at it on a tablet or another device when I’m outside of the office, and have to keep track of it and even file it if it’s important.

About tablets, that’s the one area in the workplace where they can have some use: as a supplementary device one can use to view documents in meetings or at client sites, or for taking orders, etc.

Not coincidentally, this is how tablets are already being used by many businesses.

Police Militarization In Ferguson.

The police in Ferguson – and most militarized police forces around the country — have more and better equipment than I did when I served in the army. And I wasn’t in some forgotten-about unit on a small base, either.

The police are largely now an occupation force arrayed against their own citizens, and have nothing to do with the credo “to protect and serve.”

This of course tends to happen in oligarchies.

Awake within a dream: lucid dreamers show greater insight in waking life.

I’ve been lucid dreaming since I was 10, in fifth grade, after I read about it in an Omni magazine and decided to try it.

There was another kid who was doing it with me, and we talked about building a “dream VCR” one day. We didn’t quite understand the extent of the technical problems involved in that at the time.