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Why Facebook Really Sucks

Over five years ago I wrote a piece for this publication called THE VAPID STATE OF AFFAIRS – FACEBOOK AND THE NEW NARCISSISM (MAY 26, 2012). In it I mused over the Facebook IPO and whether it would survive as the revenue model was all in advertising and market share. I have never clicked on a Facebook ad in my life and I do not even remember what they are about except recently they have become a bit more aggressive as I am suppose to go to Kelly Slater’s surf camp next summer. Yeah right. I was wrong. Subliminal messaging is a gold mine. The new narcissism has now elected a narcissist buffoon as president of the United States of America. As a nation we are becoming less intelligent and self-absorbed by the second.

I have always been skeptical of Facebook and it’s privacy policy, the algorithm that determines my feed and just the weird way that Facebook has made it so it is actually more difficult to contact your “friends.” In this post, I will outline the features of Facebook that really suck. No one talks about this much but it is time to shine some light on this strange company, actually a monopoly,  that has crept into the private lives of so many people.

7 REASONS FACEBOOK REALLY SUCKS

  • 1984 and Rewriting of History: Probably the #1 reason Facebook sucks is that Facebook will delete your posts if you are critical of Facebook as though they are  “thoughtcrimes” controlled  by the Thought Police as described in the novel 1984. I have experienced this first hand on Facebook.  A few years back I made a post explaining that Facebook was a for-profit corporation and that the space is actually not public but private and while they try to appear public the key motivating factor is profit and money. It made for a lively discussion on Facebook and (not that I care) got more likes and interaction than I had ever seen for a post of mine. When I tried to find that post months later, it was wiped from the site. Creepy shit. Mark Zuckerberg’s plea that the platform promotes democracy is just plain horseshit. Stop deleting posts that are not out of line if they happen to intelligently critique you or one of your allies.
  • Mental Health: Your feed is like a lab rats sugar water bottle feeding you spiritually non-nutritious waves of energy. Harry Shearer calls it the “envy machine.” “Good grief! Look at Charlie  Jones on vacation having such a good time and his dog is just adorable.” “What the hell am I doing in this cubicle thinking about picking up that flea medicine for Fido.” In the hospital mental health wards in a few years there are going to be people with Facebook addictions and 12 step social media recovery groups.  People who feel let down that people simply did not read their posts. My 23 year old son says that the site should have a warning when you log in similar to cigarette products. WARNING: THIS WEBSITE CAN BE HAZARDOUS TO YOUR MENTAL HEALTH. IT HAS KNOWN TO CAUSE DEPRESSION, ANXIETY AND UNPREDICTABLE NEGATIVE REACTIONS. PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK.
  • Terrible contact system: Contacting people on Facebook is obfuscated.  Do not even get me started with Messenger. It crashed my android phone.  By being able to control your method of contacting other people you are giving Facebook incredible power. How many people, your “friends” on Facebook do you actually have a mailing address, email or phone number for?   This is strange and devious.  Why can’t you just leave your phone number and email address on Facebook and get on with your life? These are your “friends” Here’s my number. When you are in town give me a call. I have left my phone number in a post and it is always wiped from the system.
  • Privacy: The sick concept of making money off of peoples’ intimate life experiences starting with your birthday. Why would users waste so much time contributing content to a website that could disappear in a flash or simply hold your content ransom? What happens in thirty years when you want to find something or someone you connected to on Facebook?  Will you have to pay to obtain the information you created? I simply do not trust it with any of my information. As they say, it is free and you get what you paid for.
  • All the bad parts of high school on steroids: Facebook is a bit like those cliques in high school but unlike in high school, you really have no idea who is in your clique. This is just creepy. Your feed comes up steering you psychologically in directions not of your choosing. It is like a carnival ride.
  • Facebook does not work for promoting local events If you play in a band Facebook is terrible as a platform for promoting an event.  You can invite people. Make a link to the event. It hardly ever works to get people out. The other problem is that your friends are all over the freaking world end up being the people who get more excited about your “local” event so promoting an event is pretty much useless. I get the feeling that the local people do not even see your post about the event.
  • San Francisco General Hospital This is something that is not written about in the news much, but it is the phenomenon of tax-dodging tech billionaires either building hospitals our making wings of hospitals and then having their names on the the front of the hospital. San Francisco General Hospital after Mark Zuckerberg gave 75 million dollars to the hospital is now called Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center and the hospital had to go through the hoops of changing the actual acronyms of the hospital to ZSFG. What a jerk. “I will give you this money but only on the condition that you change your name and jump through these hoops.” Zuckerberg’s wife is a doctor/resident that works in that hospital. In essence he was simply making for better working conditions for her and twisting city higher-ups around.  This becomes even more disgusting when you realize that Facebook for many years has been avoiding paying taxes and offshoring capital.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertwood/2013/02/19/tax-increases-why-facebooks-billion-dollar-income-isnt-taxed-at-all-by-irs/#49d7aba0d92c

Benevolent player for the betterment of humankind? I think not. Just the same old greedy capitalist.  Giving money to public institutions should not make it so your name goes on the front of the building. Photos of the all the signs they had to change coming soon.

Now I could post this little piece on Facebook but it would be gone in a few days – dragged off in handcuffs to the great Facebook digital trashcan.″

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Scheer Intelligence – Danny Goldberg: In Search of the Lost Chord

I cannot say I have read this book In Search of the Lost Chord but I have been really getting into this podcast. Robert Scheer, the veteran columnist from the LA Times and editor and producer of Truth Digg. The guests that Robert Scheer gets on the show are all surely friends of his but he still manages to keep their feet to fire and Robert asks some direct and often challenging questions. Here are some quotes from this interview.

Bill Graham also liked to get paid including in the 60s and he’s an example of somebody who balanced.. wasn’t perfect but the good outweighed the bad. I mean if you expect perfect people, you are going to be disappointed. Even Doctor King had some human frailties.

Danny Goldberg

When you bet on artists its a good bet and that’s the one thing I feel good about. I’ve always tried to put the artists I work with first and they have taken care of me.

Danny Goldberg

I have to say that it is a moment of sadness reading your book because San Francisco is gone. It’s gone not just in the sense of the summer of love its gone as the baudy town of honky tonks.

Robert Scheer

To check out the whole interview, go to http://www.kcrw.com/news-culture/shows/scheer-intelligence/danny-goldberg-in-search-of-the-lost-chord

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San Francisco Pride Parade 2017

June 25th, 2017 was the day of the big parade for San Francisco Pride – a celebration of diversity. For many years I had not paid attention to this event, usually trying to avoid the traffic congestion associated with such a large crowd in town. This time I had relatives and family marching along with the California Bluegrass Association Pride float. Below are mostly photos of California Bluegrass Association Pride float but I could not help myself to get photos of all the “diversity” and “causes.”

Intact Genitals are a Human Right
Intact Genitals are a Human Right

I vaguely remember the Gay Pride parade as being in the Castro but that was years ago. This year it was amazing how many sections were corporate – VISA, Google, Facebook, Workday, Wells Fargo, Intel, Bloomingdale’s, Levis just to name a few. These were all pretty tame in terms of visual presentation and you just had to wonder about the concept of punching the clock for your corporate job and walking down Market Street for your gay pals at VISA – how tame.

Foreskin is not a Birth Defect and It’s Not Your Mother’s Penis 

Signs at the SF Pride Parade

How times have changed as there are surely a few old timers in the gay community scratching their heads about the irony of success. Unlike a lot of parades the music in the Pride Parade is not really the showcase. When there is music it seemed to steer towards a prerecorded sort of night club drum and bass thing. Strange I never heard “I Will Survive,” Tina Turner or even Tony Bennett. There is a musical history to this movement.

Nevertheless, here were some truly interesting and bizarre groups. My favorites where the “Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence” (just the name is awesome), Church Ladies for Gay Rights dressed in loose-fitted old fashion dresses,  and the many church groups marching.  -The group against circumcision – Foreskin is not a Birth Defect and It’s Not Your Mother’s Penis was an interesting juxtaposition to the many medically altered people marching.

California Bluegrass Association Pride Float
California Bluegrass Association Pride Float

Then the California Bluegrass Pride Float came by. The float was truly awesome with the rainbow colors and a sort of front porch theme. The band was picking some fast fiddle tunes when they went by our spot. I am not sure if bluegrass has been played in many parades but the high register of the instruments and the lack of brass and drums make it a bit tricky to garner much impact.  It sounded a bit like bees a buzzin’.  But overall it was truly great to see some headline acts participating on the float – veteran Laurie Lewis along with members of the band Front Country.

While in the San Francisco bluegrass community there are actually very few openly gay people,  you could tell it was pretty special for Brandon Godman who came to San Francisco after being outed and discriminated against in Nashville. Brandon is an amazing fiddle player and was welcomed into the San Francisco musical community with open arms. In San Francisco, people are usually not discriminated against for who they love and choose to sleep with. Just ask the Church Ladies for Gay Rights standing up for others in their community. Women have been shit upon and pushed around since the beginning of time so look out –  the Church Ladies got your back!

[ CLICK ON IMAGES + ]

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Where is Janice Raymond?

The Internet has a strange way of broadcasting value and worth. A forty-year-old book about transgender issues can be a cornerstone of critical thought at the time but then gets misquoted and passed off as old fashion. Today the book is out-of-print but fetches around $100 used on Amazon for a used hard cover edition. You have to wonder why the publisher does not make another printing? Modern books read like pop self-help books, quoting daytime TV shows and sourcing checklists of acceptable pronouns. The Transgender Empire written by a “radical lesbian feminist” (how did she ever get that label?) is both academic, historical and cuts to the chase and journeys deep into the topic. Below is just a short quote from the 1994 reprinting.

The medical model is also a disease model. And here exactly is the rub. If transsexualism is treated as a disease, then does desire qualify as disease? As Thomas Szasz asked in his New York Times review of The Transsexual Empire, does an old person who wants to be young suffer from the “disease” of being a “transchronological, ” or does a poor person who wants to be rich suffer from the “disease” of being a “transeconomical”? Does a Black person who wants to be white suffer from the “disease” of being a “transracial”?

All these questions, of course, raise larger social and political issues and remove these conjectural “diseases” from the medical/psychiatric framework.

From The Transgender Empire – Janice Raymond
Reprinted in 1994 by Teachers College Press, 1234 Amsterdam Avenue
New York, NY 10027
Originally published in 1979 by Beacon Press
Copyright © 1994 by Janice G. Raymond

Download the pdf

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Open letter to Robert Thompson of NewsCorp

This is an open letter to Robert Thompson of NewsCorp. There is no link on your webpage on how to contact you so I thought I would write a letter. Sort of “old-school” don’t you think? I recently read Fake News and the Digital Duopoly in the April 5th version of the Wall Street Journal. Found it on a cafe table. Great op-ed, and I agree with everything in it. Clear and crisp writing and the article shed much needed light on lots of things.

Fake News and the Digital Duopoly
Google and Facebook have created a dysfunctional and socially destructive information ecosystem
Robert Thompson – Wall Street Journal

“publishers will routinely and selectively “unpublish” certain views and news.”

Robert Thompson – Fake News and the Digital Duopoly Wall Street Journal

I posted a piece on Facebook that was critical of Facebook and Google, the gist of which was just making sure all my “friends” know that Google and Facebook are private companies and that the space is NOT public and that they gather and mine your intimate personal history starting with – of course your birthday. This post of course disappeared from my history a few months later… never to be found again.

Your business model can’t be based on both intimate, gradual details about users and no clue whatsoever about rather obvious pirate sites.

I hate to tell you Mr. Thompson. Google and YouTube are the pirates. YouTube is one massive landscape of unlimited counterfeit movies and music. That should be the first thing addressed. It is called the revising of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. It is wishful thinking that this will happen by the sense of goodwill and altruism of YouTube.

Read about it here –

https://sfjournal.net/blog/breaking-news-after-over-8-years-googles-content-id-system-is-still-in-beta/

 

and

 

DIGITAL MILLENNIUM COPYRIGHT ACT 18 YEAR ANNIVERSARY

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BREAKING NEWS! We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite – Temporarily out of stock.

$45.73 on amazon.com

Temporarily out of stock. Order now and we’ll deliver when available.

Great to hear that vinyl is still the go to medium! Booker Little on trumpet is completely amazing! This is an album that I am not familiar with that is perfect for these times. It is truly incredible that it is over 50 years since this was made. It gives you the feeling that in present times we are moving backwards

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Insist!

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The U.S. Constitution and White House Interpretations

On the new United States President’s website https://www.whitehouse.gov/1600/constitution is a page about The U.S. Constitution. What is strange is that it is not the actual U.S. Constitution but an interpretation of The Constitution – so inconsistent with the strict constructionism or originalists so popular with conservatives these days. Is Scalia rolling over in his grave? Why would the U.S. Constitution be presented on the whitehouse.gov website this way? It is actually a form of disinformation or what is often now called fake news. Kids, remember to always refer to the original source not some hack’s interpretation of the document.

Let’s do a comparison.

First Amendment

Actual U.S. Constitution.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Trump’s Whitehouse Website

The First Amendment provides that Congress make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting its free exercise. It protects freedom of speech, the press, assembly, and the right to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

So far pretty good, but why not just publish the actual text and not how to think about the text. Then things get weird.

Second Amendment

Actual U.S. Constitution.

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Trump’s Whitehouse Website

The Second Amendment gives citizens the right to bear arms.

In Trump’s version there is no mention of the “well regulated Militia.” As always, people see what they want to see and disregard the rest. What we are witnessing here is what George Orwell called “Newspeak.” A simplifying of words, meanings and vocabulary.

You can read the novel 1984 or see more information at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak.

Welcome to 2017. A few years late, but we finally made it to that totalitarian state.

Read the source!!!

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Nine Out of Ten

In San Francisco, 9 out of 10 people voted for Hillary Clinton. That is remarkable. Did people in San Francisco think Hillary Clinton was the perfect candidate? Probably not. But what they did do was take their responsibility to vote for someone who was a decent human being who spoke in complete sentences.

While there have been many downright creepy and dim-wit presidents, mark 2016 as when the United States of America elected someone who did not even pretend to be a gentleman or show social graces in any way. Reagan, the Bushes, secretive and criminal like many, but at least they appeared civilized. Now we are a barbaric tribe who is becoming more illiterate every day. There was a time when people would read and think about the Bible. Obviously in the Mid-West and South, this is a thing of the past.

On January 20th, Trump will take the oath of office.

“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

– Section 1:8

I do hope that between now and then he will read and study the Constitution of the United States. Please pay particular attention to these few details.

Section 4
The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.

I particularly like this little ditty that has been trampled upon in the last 20 years.

8: To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;

And that freedom of the press thing will be good to go over.

Article [I]
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

And now what all the Evangelicals that voted for Donald Trump have been waiting for – the religious posters. Hang these up in your kitchens and above your bed just to remind yourself how incredibly inconsistent you are in your beliefs. This courtesy of the Huffington Post.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-vs-jesus-christ_us_5798e188e4b0d3568f85724a