CBS Sunday Morning

She-who-must-be-obeyed loves CBS Sunday Morning.
It is pretty good. I listen to it as I sit at the computer.

Today they had a segment with Ted Koppel interviewing Sean Hannity. Mr. Koppel deprecated the fact that ever since the FCC dropped the Fairness Doctrine [ if a broadcast airs a view, it must make time to air the opposing view] in the late 1990s, political radio has become strident and one-sided and divisive.


It's the Internet.
Blame the Internet.


The Internet revolutionized communications.

Just as did the printing press.

They printing press oversaw the era of Martin Luther, yet it also nurtured Thomas Muntzer and chronicled the Peasants' War.

If the Internet is revolutionary, how do we make sure the revolution does not eat her children?

 The Internet Devouring His Children

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WTR !!??

Washington (CNN)President Barack Obama on Thursday vowed retaliatory action against Russia for its meddling in the US presidential election.
"I think there is no doubt that when any foreign government tries to impact the integrity of our elections that we need to take action and we will at a time and place of our own choosing," Obama told National Public Radio.

Describing potential countermeasures by the US, the President said "some of it may be explicit and publicized; some of it may not be."

It isn't fair that Russia should bully the US. The US is relatively new to the Internet and digital tech and this is really just Russia being a cyber-bully. Shame !

WTR !?
What The Rus!?

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One Thing To Remember... Tar Candies

Tar Candies Growing from the Asphalt

Information is everywhere and easily available.

Being intelligent beings, we take a great deal of pleasure in processing information, generating belief systems, and generally establishing credos of common sense and how-the-world works.

That's why the cable TV 24-hour/7-days-a-week and the Internet are like colorful, appealing, sweet jujubes made of tar and turpentine: they make us bite, we find they are not quite what they promised to be, and we have the mess stuck in our teeth forever.

Back before 2008, I was all gloom and doom. Very few others were.

Now everyone is gloom and doom, except the people like bank presidents who are interviewed on (1) cable TV, and (2) on the Internet.

Every attitude acts like tar candies, and it is a struggle to find what's really going on. Just as we should not have believed those who in 2008 said the DOW would hit 50,000 - and that right soon - so should we not hearken to those who say the sky is falling now.

Look at the herd mentality that we exhibit.
I mean, is this the species that we really want to have unlimited access to automatic weapons?


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note:
The "tar candy" was based on the notion of "tar baby", and that concept has become murky as it has been used sometimes in what might be considered racist form over the years.

I wanted to use "tar truffles", but it was too, too, reminiscent of Tartuffe, and I would constantly be wondering why Moliere was popping into my head.... as he seems to be right now.

自强不吸 (Self-Improvement Never Breathes)

Self-Improvement Never Breathes (自强不吸)

Beijing was suffering from smog last week.
According to China Digital Times
http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2015/12/motto-of-the-week-self-improvement-never-breathes/

... [Some Chinese Netizens changed the] Tsinghua University motto into a joke about air pollution: thus, “self-improvement never ends, strong morals carry heavy loads (zìqiáng bùxī, hòudé zài wù 自强不息，厚德载物)

becomes “self-improvement never breathes, strong morals carry heavy smog (zìqiáng bùxī, hòudé zài wù 自强不吸，厚德载雾).

(The official English version of Tsinghua’s motto is “Self-Discipline and Social Commitment.”)

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Tantalos Shrugged

I was spending a hour yesterday reading about the allies of Troy in the Trojan War. In particular, I read about the Thracians and the Phrygians. I think I became interested as I had yesterday put up a post with a picture of Helen and Paris in which Paris was wearing a Phrygian cap:

Helen on the left, Paris on the right

Phrygia was a land approximately in the middle of Asia Minor. In the Trojan War, we have the Greeks (Argives, Achaeans, Danaans, etc.) in the West, the Trojans and the Phrygians and the other Trojan allies in the East and Northeast, and the Aegean Sea in the middle.
This same area was to be the setting for the war between the Greeks and the Persians centuries later.

I referred to Wikipedia for some quick references to Phrygia, Lydia, Caria, and other allies of Troy in Asia Minor:
Phrygians. (2015, October 18). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 22:35, November 9, 2015, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Phrygians&oldid=686383740

[...]

Mythological Accounts
The name of the earliest known mythical king was Nannacus (aka Annacus).[4] This king resided at Iconium, the most eastern city of the kingdom of Phrygia at that time, and after his death, at the age of 300 years, a great flood overwhelmed the country, as had been foretold by an ancient oracle. The next king mentioned in extant classical sources was called Manis or Masdes. According to Plutarch, because of his splendid exploits, great things were called "manic" in Phrygia.[5] Thereafter the kingdom of Phrygia seems to have become fragmented among various kings. One of the kings was Tantalus who ruled over the north western region of Phrygia around Mount Sipylus. Tantalus was endlessly punished in Tartarus, because he allegedly killed his son Pelops and sacrificially offered him to the Olympians, a reference to the suppression of human sacrifice. Tantalus was also falsely accused of stealing from the lotteries he had invented...

(emphasis mine)

I came to an abrupt halt. What lotteries were these? I do not think I have ever heard of the lotteries of Tantalus. So I began to look around for some starting points where I could commence my search.

Interestingly enough, the Wikipedia entry for "Tantalus" does not mention it.
Tantalus. (2015, November 8). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 22:42, November 9, 2015, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tantalus&oldid=689697146

but there is more information by which you may recall Tantalus:

...Tantalus's punishment for his act, now a proverbial term for temptation without satisfaction (the source of the English word tantalise[19]), was to stand in a pool of water beneath a fruit tree with low branches. Whenever he reached for the fruit, the branches raised his intended meal from his grasp. Whenever he bent down to get a drink, the water receded before he could get any. Over his head towers a threatening stone like the one that Sisyphus is punished to roll up a hill.[20] This fate has cursed him with eternal deprivation of nourishment...

Tantalus was reputed to be rich. Another king of Phrygia was Midas of the golden touch, and Croesus - "rich as Croesus" - was a Lydian king whose realm included Phrygia. Tantalus' father was Zeus and his mother was the nymph Plouto, and "plouto" meaning "rich, wealthy" can refer to absolute riches or it can be a euphemism for the gods of the underworld.

From the Suidas, Porus and Kuster, 1705 edition:

which in Greek and Latin describes the saying applied to someone very rich, that is, "he gathers the talents of Tantalus", where "talent" is a Greek word for a large sum of money.

The word outlined in red is a declensional form of "plouto", meaning wealth and also being the name of the nymph who was Tantalus' mother.

But there is no mention of "lotteries"

However, it seems that subsequently people using Wikipedia may have mentioned "lotteries" to a very great degree. Searching on Google using "Tantalus was also falsely accused of stealing from the lotteries he had invented" :

1)LiquiSearch
 Phrygia- The Mythic Past
http://www.liquisearch.com/phrygia/mythic_past

...he allegedly killed his son Pelops and sacrificially offered him to the Olympians, a reference to the suppression of human sacrifice. Tantalus was also falsely accused of stealing from the lotteries he had invented...

no citation to any source

2) Atlantipedia
Turkey, Phrygia
http://atlantipedia.com/doku.php?id=turkey_phrygia
...because he allegedly killed his son Pelops and sacrificially offered him to the Olympians, a reference to the suppression of human sacrifice. Tantalus was also falsely accused of stealing from the lotteries he had invented...
no citation to any source

3) Hurdan Answers
Tantalus
http://www.hurdan.com/q/tantalus

Tantalus » was also falsely accused of stealing from the lotteries Tantalus had invented »

no citation to any source

4)Omics International
Phrygians
http://research.omicsgroup.org/index.php/Phrygians

...One of the kings was Tantalus who ruled over the north western region of Phrygia around Mount Sipylus. Tantalus was endlessly punished in Tartarus, because he allegedly killed his son Pelops and sacrificially offered him to the Olympians, a reference to the suppression of human sacrifice. Tantalus was also falsely accused of stealing from the lotteries he had invented...

no citation

This goes on for a while.
There is no reference to the lotteries of Tantalus anywhere I can find in the ancient literature, nor in the philological work up to the present, until the mentions made at present, and all of these quotes are exactly the same, indicating that they were copied whole from some basic source.

The only thing I can possibly think of is that possibly someone has seen klērourgia which is a word based upon klēros, meaning "lot", as in "casting or drawing lots". The word klēros may also meant a "lot (of land)", "an estate", and klērourgia means "inheritance (of estates)".

There could be an accusation of theft of inheritances, but I cannot find it anywhere else.

Case in point:

Today on Facebook a friend posted an excerpt from a book of something wherein there was a list of some things that Mr. Obama once asserted to be true and turned out to be false.

This seems to be some sort of support for Ben Carson's fast-and-loose... with-the-truth.
(Sort of a Brian Williams and Bill O'Reilly Syndrome, possibly stemming from the trauma Mr. Carson experienced when he stabbed his best friend.)

The trouble is, where do the assertions come from? With Carson, we have the documents in the case in front of us. With Mr. Obama's past, we have nothing but our faith in the goofiness of politics and what someone says on Facebook. And as far as whether Mr. Obama's assertions listed were true of not, that is too much dependent upon our predetermined world view.

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Flash Player

This morning I finally shut off Flash Player in Firefox.
I usually have at least 4 tabs open, reading and following links and looking up references. Every page has advertisements running and slowing things down to a crawl.

So I turned it off.
If there is something I want that requires it, Firefox asks me if I wish to activate it for just now or for automatic operation. There is not much I need to watch on it.


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YAHOO's Email Is Awful!

YAHOO's email was updated and made shiny and brand-new a couple of months ago, and it is absolutely awful.

It does not have sorting by name of sender, if you can believe that.
Furthermore, trying to track threads of emails is horribly difficult. I cannot believe they tested this mess. I have never gotten used to it, and I do not think that has ever occurred before for me and my computers.

YAHOO... fix it, or I go to Gmail!

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Dion O'Banion's Credit Card Company

Apparently, the cost of real security on the Internet or in commercial networks - like the cost of so many other things: the cost of remaining Ebola free, the cost trying to reduce CO2 levels, etc. - is just too much to be serious about.

So we will play catch up, and "make-do in the meanwhile".

I have signed on with a credit card company - Dion O'Banion's Credit - that has taken a hint from protection rackets for the neighborhood store owners of early 20th century Chicago, and which makes it their strategy to accept  "protection"  money to defend their card-holders from prominent (yet faceless!) groups of hackers and techno-thugs. 
They hack the hack, in other words.
Dion's takes interest and some extra vig (a cut, a take) for protection, and makes our lives here much easier, since our militarized police only deal with insurrection-scale problems.

And - just guessing at the near future - when Net Neutrality is scuttled and destroyed, Dinny O'Banion's will be ready with its groups of hackers to provide illegal internet access and speed to fight against the coming Prohibition...

providing urban Internet Speakeasies instead of the present Internet Cafes, making "bathtub" broadband, or being broadband-runners sneaking access from Rogers in Canada into the States...

 "What's The Password? ...  And Yer User ID?

And Yer Momma's Maiden Name?...  "

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photo:  http://www.deadoralive.net/obanion/intro.html

The Axis Of Internet Social Media Blocking

Mother Jones
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/03/turkey-facebook-youtube-twitter-blocked

Countries which impose restrictions upon social media as outlined in Mother Jones seem to form an axis, sort of. The most recent was Turkey, where " Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip  ( "Yip" ) Erdogan says that social networks are facilitating the spread of wiretapped recordings that have been politically damaging..."


Axel FoleyNorth Korea is distinguished by being yet a member of another axis.It makes you think of an award show for axis participation. The award could be called an "Axel". The family Kim must have a whole trophy room of Axels by now.

I do not do social media, so it is a point to be mooted (debated) in some moot (used for debating) Moot (assembly for debate and legislation).

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Net Neutrality

What gives the US Supreme Court the right to undermine Net Neutrality?

The Internet was developed originally by taxpayer money under DARPA, and  in  its entire existence there has been adherence to the Priniciple of Net Neutrality.

In other words, there is ample precedent that the Net be neutral and remain so.

The Conservative Majority on this Court once again has given a free ride to corporate interests, allowing them to transform something that is not theirs to change.

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How To Dodge A Java Update

I would like to start up my computer some day without seeing that another Java the Hutt update is available.
It is almost as annoying as Adobe Air updates.
Java is particularly good, because once it has installed, it immediately informs me again that there is an update available, and let's spend some more time on verifying the version, OK?

Or Firefox updates.
I save a large number of references as complete web pages. Suddenly, sometime since Christmas, I updated yet another Firefox update after putting them off for days, only to have them pester me more and more. Lo and behold! I can no longer save complete web pages.

There is a fix with SavePageURL or some such thing which is an add on used with web pages saved as HTML files. It seems to work well.

It only took an hour to research and search... that's how you do it when you're a tech consumer schlub on the "techie" end of the stick: you research and search.

On my new computer, I am actually staying with Internet Explorer.
Whatever Firefox has to offer just is not worth it.

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Humans As Chattels

The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/16/technology/facebook-amends-privacy-policies.html?_r=1&

... Facebook pressed forward on Friday with official changes to its privacy policies, first proposed in August, that make the terms of using Facebook more clear than ever: By having an account on the service, its 1.2 billion global users are allowing the company to use their postings and other personal data for advertising...

It is a wonder that a society can create such an entity, such as the Internet, which in its beginnings was hailed as a new liberator of the mind, and turn it into surveillance, repression, and exploitation.

There must be a different business model for a social website, and there must be a form of government which does not automatically infringe the rights of its people in as gross a manner as has the NSA and the CIA of the US government.

That is what the future is: new tools that resist being forced into the old dies of oppression and exploitation.

As long as human beings are fungible beings, mutually interchangeable beings within an economic system, there will exist this economic oppression and political oppression.

The great religions of the world are nothing if not the constant affirmation that each human being is individual and free, where the great politics and economics of the world are constant reminders that human beings are but chattel goods.

We will soon be called upon to leave it all behind. Some will depart, some will stay behind. They will look at the clouds and check which way the wind is blowing, just like the friends of Noah did.

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Twitter Goes Public! Bayesian Probability Goes Public!

Twitter had its Inital Public Offering, and the seventh pillar of the wisdom of the Internet was finally set in place.

I am going to ignore Twitter, just like I ignore Facebook.

Read the following:
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/520671/ads-could-soon-know-if-youre-an-introvert-on-twitter/
Ads Could Soon Know If You’re an Introvert (on Twitter)

Trying to derive a person’s wants and needs—conscious or otherwise—from online browsing and buying habits has become crucial to companies of all kinds.
Now IBM is taking the idea a step further. It is testing technology that guesses at people’s core psychological traits by analyzing what they post on Twitter, with the goal of offering personalized customer service or better-targeted promotional messages.

“We need to go below behavioral analysis like Amazon does,” says Michelle Zhou, leader of the User Systems and Experience Research Group at IBM’s Almaden Research Center in California, which developed the software. “We want to use social media to derive information about an individual—what is the overall affect of this person? How resilient is this person emotionally? People with different personalities want something different.”

Zhou’s software develops a personality profile based on a person’s most recent few hundred or thousand Twitter updates. That profile scores the “big five” traits commonly used in psychological research: extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness to experience. It also scores the person on measures of “values” (for example, hedonism and conservatism) and “needs” (for example, curiosity and social harmony).

Zhou says she is working with several IBM customers to test how the technology might help their businesses. She declines to identify the companies but says they might use the system, for example, to tune marketing messages sent by e-mail or social media, or to select the promotional content displayed when a customer logs in to his or her account.

[...]

 Many businesses already make use of software that analyzes social-media activity. However, it is aimed either at helping corporate representatives interact with customers or at summarizing the overall volume and tone of a discussion (see “A Social-Media Decoder”), not at profiling individuals.

Will Twitter sell its profiling info to the CIA, like AT&T sells information? Will the NSA get to view it? You know darn well they will try in the near future, and - judging from what we've seen - they will succeed in getting into our heads even more.

The data collection will be constant. It will be the biggest experiment in Bayesian statistics in a society ever conducted! Bayesian analysis can be powerful stuff if properly done. There are too many passkeys and not enough deadbolts... and freewill cannot be free under constant scrutiny.

It's a fool's game of lethal proportions.
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Freedom Box

Garry's Subposthaven:
http://sub.garrytan.com/schneier-the-internet-is-built-on-mass-surveillance-and-government-intelligence-is-addicted


Security expert Bruce Schneier on what has come to pass:

Imagine the government passed a law requiring all citizens to carry a tracking device. Such a law would immediately be found unconstitutional. Yet we all carry mobile phones.

If the National Security Agency required us to notify it whenever we made a new friend, the nation would rebel. Yet we notify Facebook. If the Federal Bureau of Investigation demanded copies of all our conversations and correspondence, it would be laughed at. Yet we provide copies of our e-mail to Google, Microsoft or whoever our mail host is; we provide copies of our text messages to Verizon, AT&T and Sprint; and we provide copies of other conversations to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or whatever other site is hosting them.

The primary business model of the Internet is built on mass surveillance, and our government's intelligence-gathering agencies have become addicted to that data. 

I really like the Internet.
Yet, it seems true that the business model of the Internet is built on surveillance on a mass scale, from businesses watching what we are interested in and what we are purchasing, to the government watching what we say and whom we say it to.

Can it be changed?

Perhaps Freedom Box?

Big Brother's Embrace

Big Brother as conceived in Orwell's 1984, not some cable-TV-real-life thing, is not really necessary in a society which actively seeks to pin point and locate its members for reasons which are not entirely clear, but which seem to come down to "We do it because we can."

I mean, why would anyone want to self-locate themselves all the time? I am at church, I am at the gym, I am at Lucky Baldwin's for Ladies Night....
Why?
Of course, I do not even like biographies for the most part. I was reading about James Joyce's biographies in the NY Times Review of Books, and even that was boring beyond description. I guess I do not get it: I enjoy sporting events greatly, but I find the spectacle of watching and listening to sports figure talk about their feats to be a gruesome form of torture.
Similarly, even though I may read a book and esteem it a masterpiece of literature, the entire idea of going to Christmas dinner at the author's house and chit-chatting with him, his aunts, nieces, and nephews, to be a Fuseli nightmare of the first water.

I myself write. I know how different writing is from speaking and conversing, particularly face-to-face, and I have grown old watching people afflicted with my conversation seeking ways to extricate themselves and yet maintain some sense of dignity and decorum.... Even Tom Wolfe in person cannot be as natty and perfectly clothed as Tom Wolfe the feature of our individual imaginations and our media imaginations.

Anyway, read the following about supplying too much information on the web.
Remember, individually we may all be saints, but let us form groups, corporations, and national governments and we become akin to the spirit of Negation!

NewScientist
Big Brother Is Watching Facebook And Twitter
21 June 2012 by Jim Giles

...officials at the Department of State issued a procurement notice on 1 June asking software developers to submit bids for a contract to supply tools that provide "deep analysis of topics, conversations, networks, and influencers of the global social web". These tools will analyse conversations taking place in at least seven foreign languages, including Chinese and Arabic...

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The Future of the Internet

Slo-Death App

It is not Facebook.

Facebook is a scheme designed to encourage social interaction so that it may exploit it. The future of the Internet is going to be similar to the future of Space exploration: it is not going to be a repetition of our past; it will be something new and better.

Facebook reminds me of a beautiful vampire..... alluring, yet quite deadly.
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