Parents should take education into their own hands, even before COVID-19
Even though we sent our kids through public school, we homeschooled them as if they weren’t attending. That’s because the public school system in the US is so gutted, so hostile to intelligence, such a Babylon of pseudo-learning idolatry, that I have to wonder if it does more harm than good.
I dunno, it’s like US schools had some other focus besides learning. I can’t quite put my finger on it though. It’s on the tip of my tongue.
Maybe I’ll recall what it is…
In case you missed it (because who even checks by this dead blog to begin with?), I also covered freelance writing in a post-COVID-19 world. So there, you have your school covered and your work covered, all off-grid. Call us when we get a government that’s interested in doing anything for people again.
UPDATE: Dr. Fauci just said everything you’re about to read here in a vastly different number of words and more diplomatically, FSM bless his soul. He did that on CNN in an interview, 8/5/2020, but it’s a reiteration of what he says in this article. He remarks that anti-science sentiments are just “for reasons that sometimes are inconceivable and not understandable.”
Likewise, his family continues to get death threats merely to pressure this brave man into shutting up. That’s a point where I can express some solidarity with his situation, having confronted the exact same phenomenon for the exact same reasons when I started blogging.
Now on with the original post…
None of you reading today will have much reason to believe this. Indeed, most of the evidence is washed away from the Internet now. But I was once one of the most hated figures on the web. That was because, in the early 2000s, I was one of the few people advocating for science literacy via computing literacy.
Nobody wanted to listen then. Don’t Make Me Think was a bestseller. Command lines and hacker tools were held up as something holding people back, something to be avoided, in books like The Design of Everyday Things. Nick Bostrum proposed that we might be living in a computer simulation, and the entire Internet instantly agreed that this was ironclad fact, brooking no argument. Ray Kurzweil wrote book after book about how Artificial Intelligence would make computers “wake up” any day now, and the Singularity would be nigh. Matrixism was treated like a real religion by people who could not tell Wachowski brothers’ movies from reality.
Well, it’s revolution time in America again! What took it so long?
Around the nation, the Black Lives Matter movement has inflamed the nation and swept around the Earth. While I don’t hold out hope that much permanent will be gained, let me go on the record as saying I support it 100%, and Civil Rights for anyone, anywhere, at any time. Pictured in the banner: Graffiti in the Seattle “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone,” summing up the national attitude right now.
But in the meanwhile, I’m scrambling to select topics in my usual venues that are both on-point for the clients’ interests and relevant to today’s headlines. For instance, did you know that geek culture was founded on Civil Rights activism? From Star Trek to The Munsters to Night of the Living Dead, promotion of equal rights for all races, genders, beliefs, and lifestyles has been at the root of our most cherished institutions of sci-fi and fantasy fiction.
UPDATE: Actor Tim Russ gives his thoughts on what makes Star Trek tick, points out exactly the same parts I do without saying the phrase “Civil Rights.”
All of us nerds made zombie apocalypse jokes at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. I’m not so sure we’re joking any more. I’m sure as hell not.
Whenever I have braved the Outside World to forage for supplies lately, I get closer and closer to getting into a fight myself. I grew up in the mean ‘hoods of south L.A. so I’m no stranger to rumbles. I’m not scared for myself, but I had hoped for a more peaceful coast to retirement in a tranquil suburb by now.
You can clearly distinguish Team Human from Team Zombie
Team Human are the people who believe in science and reason. They wear their masks and gloves, use sanitary wipes and disinfectant, and keep their distance. They respect the store employees. All of us are out to go about our business quickly and efficiently with the least amount of drama.
Team Zombie isn’t buying any of that. They don’t wear protective gear, and make it a point to get into everybody’s face around every corner. They’re hostile and confronting. They scoff at our “imaginary” pandemic and vaccines and all of our “so-called” science. They’re out to pick a fight at every opportunity.
*NOTE*: This isn’t a normal blog post; this is a declaration of war. It is tactical and dirty because it was a dirty fight already before I got here.
Wait, I thought I was done fighting about free and open source software…
Yes, I distinctly remember closing down my old FOSS-focused blog, delivering my final battle report for the Great Linux Desktop Wars, getting one last laugh at the con artists I helped shut down, and moving on. The mobile market gives the read-only users their software, and we makers and doers have our laptops, so everyone’s happy. Android rules the mobile, Linux rules the server and industrial sector, it’s Miller time, right?
Dr. Roy Schestowitz, one of my old comrades in the FOSS wars, gave me a nice send-off in 2013. So yes, I must have properly retired.
Why is this still happening? Well, actually, a new thing is happening.
The Old Thing that was happening: Everybody had nothing but desktops and laptops. Makers and doers, us working folk, needed these tools to make and do stuff, using Linux and command lines and programming. Read-only users, people who do nothing but consume, wanted computers to be dumbed down TV sets for them to drool on, while hunting us geeks down in the streets to brand our foreheads with the scarlet “elitist” and then force everyone to use Microsoft Windows.
(To make a long story short, OK?)
That thing stopped happening because hallelujah, mobile came along and saved us. The read-onlys could have their TV set in their pocket and never cared about our tools again. It’s been a loooooong time since I heard anybody attack a command line.
But here’s the New Thing happening: Now the read-onlys outnumber the makers 9-to-1, and they are in charge. The read-onlys want to dumb down our tools anyway because they want everybody to use mobile like them and can’t see why we need powerful, complicated tools to do stuff. If they can’t get us onto mobile, beside them, so that no work gets done, they want to break the tools we use on laptop so we’re screwed anyway. Out of spite.
Dangerous things happen when you put a read-only in charge of an open source software project, especially when he’s the CEO of the company that owns it, and is – stop me if you’ve heard this before – yet another trust fund baby born into wealth and prestige who spits on people who do work.
Again, I thought this was over. I don’t want to go back in the trenches, I thought everyone had learned that lesson!
This is about WordPress, Gutenberg, and Matt Mullenweg
Get used to those three terms, because you’ll be seeing them a lot around here in the coming months.
Hello! Why, this is my own website! I remember this place! It’s where I come to blog some more after blogging for clients all day. Let me tell you, it’s hilarious to be in content marketing and have your own site be in the depths of Google’s 35th page of search results for anything at all. “Yeah, but my clients’ sites rank high…”
Latest boof THC cart bust: Green Box, a product I traced to a guy in Inland Empire, Cali, who takes vacations to Maui, rents the penthouse suite at Vegas casinos, orders the most gourmet cuisine from the finest restaurants, Instagrams all that, and still can’t afford a license for his bunk ass vape cartridge brand. Dude lives like Scarface before the fall, but it’s a fascinating look into street cart culture. If I turn up mysteriously dead, it was this guy. I love my job.
Second-latest boof THC cart bust: Fiyaman Extracts, which can afford to hire Tommy Chong to endorse them but also – surprise! – can’t afford a license for their black market, heavily-counterfeited product. I love my job.
Drama of the month: When I busted yet another boof cart brand, Gold Coast Clear, the seller showed up in our forum on DabConnection to snivel that our exposure hurt his little business and demanded we take it down. You know, because that’s more important than when 15-year-old kids die from vaping boof. So I got pissed enough to deliver one of those epic irate rants I’m famous for, titled “if we get your brand mistaken for fake, IT’S YOUR OWN DAMN FAULT!” If you read nothing else by me this year, do not miss this.
UPDATE 04/19/20:Readers have uncovered a massive, coordinated asstroturf campaign to spread fake news and rally a denialist uprising about the CoronaVirus. Buzzfeed concurs, noting ties to a special interest group.
See, I told you it was deliberate, not ignorance! Listen to your prophet next time.
The US is currently the most-infected country in the world. At a rate of one thousand people dying per day, we will soon match and surpass the countries where the virus has taken its deadliest toll. Currently that’s Italy, at 15K deaths. The US can catch up to that number by next week at this rate.
In the middle of all this, we still have a shockingly high denial factor.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and leader of the White House CoronaVirus Task Force, has been getting death threats. Merely for doing his job.
We could go on all day of course, but that’s enough examples for now. At this point, either the reader has turned away, or else I’m preaching to the choir. Because reality is politicized. So it’s time we looked at how it got that way.
So Zoom is the latest and hottest thing in teleconferencing apps, and it’s become the official video conferencing interface of the 2020 CoronaVirus pandemic. Isn’t that a cheerful backdrop for your company to get famous?
Lately I see a few people having fun with Zoom backgrounds. There’s the burning house meme which went viral. Others have picked backgrounds from The Office or Star Trek: The Next Generation. I figured I’d join in the fun, because if there’s one thing you all need right now to cope with the epidemic, it’s my deep-fried dark sense of humor.
Now that I’ve seen what a real doomsday scenario looks like, I’ve drawn some comparison with classic sci-fi apocalyptic tropes. Those Mad Max biker gangs have to go! Ditto the heroic and adventurous daring-do; our greatest quest is for toilet paper. Also, you can stick anarcho-capitalism where the corona don’t shine. However, 12 Monkeys and Stephen King’s The Stand called the shots right on the mark.
If you’re ready for my characteristic dark humor to take the edge off the CoronaVirus pandemic, head there. I’m told that I’m good at this kind of thing.
DISCLAIMER: This is an old post taken from my previous geeky technology blog. It is preserved here for hysterical raisins (it was popular at the time).
What with the concern over the proposed Internet filtering policy that is supposed to be put into place in Australia, we thought this would be a good time to bring this subject up. Our point here is not to enable people to commit crimes, nor to say that they should commit crimes. Our point is that (a) filtering doesn’t work, and (b) if honest, law-abiding citizens find Internet filtering interfering with a legitimate task, it should not only be their right, but their duty, to subvert the faulty measure.
This information will also prove valuable to those within schools, businesses, and other organizations that filter Internet usage. Although, we of course can’t be held responsible if you get fired or expelled for using this information. And we can’t believe we just had to write that, but not everybody reading this is living in a free country.
