Hootings and Ramblings of a Deranged Dead Blogger

Thanks mostly to my own foolishness and sloth, this blog has the buoyancy of a lead brick and the influence of a field shrew. I had hopes for it. I thought it could get me ahead, or help me hone my craft. Instead I alienated myself further, and whatever dozens of readers I might've had have dissipated into the dark aether of the internet. My foolishness, and also my stubbornness. Due to my own stubbornness I view modern culture with basically unbridled contempt, and instead of trying in any way to improve things, I wallow in this dead end era of hype, spin, and mindless arrogance. I despise the way of life I spinelessly inhabit.

There's a funny anecdote from the 19th century, beginning around 1860, wherein Great Lakes fisheries completely destroyed a species of sturgeon. First it was considered a useless bycatch, and was stacked to rot on the shore and fed to pigs and generally misused... then its worth was discovered, which put it in the nearly fatal sights of the greedy optimists who believed there could be no end to natural riches. That fish still survives at some infinitesimal fraction of its pre-19th century population. What's this got to do with anything? Well the fisheries industry learned very little from the destruction of the Great Lakes.

In the ensuing hundred and fifty years many other species of fish have been devastated, the ocean's been filled with garbage, radiation, and the refuse from dipshits on cruise ships. The oceans, allegedly the birthplace of life, have been treated like a merry-go-round of possibility and nobody wants to take responsibility or change how things are done. Now, I don't ever believe that life will just give up because conditions are bad. The oceans won't entirely die anytime soon, but our ability to sustain ourselves with their bounty is diminished by all the bone-headed nonsense unrealistically optimistic businesses perpetrated.

What's that got to do with anything? It's why I'm a pessimist. Why I'm shitty, of a bad temperament unless I've drank enough to escape the downward pull of reality. What happened in the Great Lakes happened in a slightly different sense with every market crash and recession, every extinction prompted by humanity, and and and... so what, right? Things need to be the way they are so they can remain the way they are, so that people big and small, rich and poor, stay calm and comfortable and their entitlements to misery or luxury remain constant. We need to listen to the optimists as we climb out of each increasingly unbelievable crisis, and ignore the realists who warned us all along.

Even thinking about it bothers me because it's all such hackish reasoning. It's been done a million times, the truths are self evident and the truisms are deafening but it doesn't lead to real progress in any meaningful sense, which is either a factor of the naturally tardiness of progress and evolution or the sign that something is deeply wrong with the world and its most powerful and influential humans. Are the people at the top evil? Are they simply ignorant? Are the powerful inflated with such a facile self-worth and arrogance that they cannot be touched by the truth, by self-doubt, by any of the checks and restraints nature set on the human mind? Are they doing the right thing, trying and failing, and it's just 'leftists' who paint them with a broad brush of villainy? What is it? Why is it so hard to find a clear perspective? Is there none or does nobody care enough to attempt it?

Old sociology texts have only made me more cynical about success but as a result I'm a nobody, with no long-term goals, no particularly fun vices, and modest unglamorous hobbies like attempting to learn as much as possible, reading, and traveling, mostly on my own power, to nearby places - in short living in a cage of my own design within the larger cage of socioeconomic convention. Lately it's not been enough, but what I eschewed still seems hateful to me, but I have fewer and fewer certainties. Whatever is righteous and humble opens me to criticism (some legitimate, some merely hateful of divergence) and misery, and the sense that I am doing less harm than others doesn't matter, when others won't ever give a shit or sacrifice anything... I am giving myself a kind of slow martyrdom that lots of people live because they can't escape it, but which I chose out of perverse instinct.

Well whatever. Nobody knows anything. The people who get paid millions to hold the title of CEO are protected by the majority opinion that they have a 'necessary skill-set' and 'important contacts' and while that may be true in some cases, it is most often the product of a privileged upbringing and those 'important contacts' liking them. There may have been sexual favors and silence on sensitive secrets traded for power. There may, for all we know, be a few dozen secret societies that encourage the conspiracy set with half-truths in order to make the very idea of conspiracy (which in its least-fantastical and most realistic sense has been true for thousands of years) laughable to the mainstream. If the search for truth becomes a joke it will frighten away the serious-minded because their reputations may suffer (and have, in the flawed examples of yesteryear) But even so: what of it? If they're that successful and we're still alive, with coffee and a newspaper of a Sunday morning, who gives a fuck?

Why the hell does anyone care about celebrity culture? It's corrosive and stupid and the worst kinds of people are made rich by it and it's just a shameful, stupid spectacle that could be replaced or eclipsed by more edifying things that aren't advertised as heavily and let people be themselves. From what are Ellen and her feel-good safety show distracting you? Why is the internet three-quarter owned by celebrities? Why do even people who 'hate that shit' know where Kanye's yacht is parked, give a shit about the Kardashians? It's not celebrities, but rather their passionate followers, who should be flogged and shamed. Celebrities should be ignored, and have some of their riches taken away and donated to charity or used to defray government debt (debt is the new money, since money is just based on imaginary value now)... although the governments are celebrities and don't deserve the money either. I don't hate the entertainment industry... we need distraction so we don't think about killing ourselves or how little any of this means or how foolish our young aspirations were or how fucked the world might be. Maybe we should get rid of the middleman and let the entertainment industry run countries, and the world.

Why aren't soft drinks heavily taxed on the basis of their unhealthiness (it's only fair if tobacco and alcohol are rightly taxed based on their unhealthiness, which is not two orders of magnitude worse than drinking some carbonated sugar water each day)? Why do people get so upset at commonsense agreements that may make life easier for everyone?  Why do we all get off on the idea of hating someone (it is acceptable with targets like criminals, terrorists, people in other countries, and the insensitive)? Why are so many people around the globe so proud of being so ignorant? Why all this conflict? Lots of it was started by Western governments, who 'rule' an anesthetized populace with increasingly nauseating and wasteful habits and thoughts. Convenience and venality have destroyed humanity. If a system this disastrous and uncontrollable could collapse, I would say we are living in the closing years of it, but I don't even know what to think anymore. Avarice looks after itself, but where does it all end?

I wish more people could be happier with less, and with the idea that their not taking something ensured it would get to someone else who needed it. Decades of surplus production and planned obsolescence have made consumerism a nightmare of waste and distraction and its precepts have invaded everything from politics to faith to the 'third world' (outdated term, I know)... but I'm not about to launch a crusade even though I think it's miserable and destroying the best and most promising parts of being human and jeopardizes the whole world. I don't care... I exist within that system anyway and would have to take drastic steps to actually leave it, much less oppose it, which would then further invalidate my position due to 'extremism' and 'ecomania' and other bullshit critiques the comfortable heap on the anxious. If I find a way to stop colluding, I will be branded a traitor. There is no place in the law for people who see an urgent need for progress, who see the Western Lifestyle as a blight that needs to be changed now, painfully, not in 'a generation' while our prospects diminish.

I guess I'm saved by the need to laugh and to seek out the absurd before I even think of countenancing the more prosaic horrors implicit in the contemporary world. Even so, it's not enough... I feel powerless, completely powerless, to stop any of this madness and I always have. I feel so disinherited that I no longer consider myself real or a part of anything... I'm just a detached actor with no lines or stage presence, no beliefs be they foolish, hopeful, angry, or anything. I live in a void and everything that convinces me otherwise is constantly in danger of being swallowed by the deepening void of nonsense that has given rise to our slick, dishonest, empty culture. Those 'backwards' parts of the world don't fear the West – they pity it. 

[Don't worry, I will return to low-risk stuff next week like reviewing products, interviews, and less dire observation tempered by humor. Or I'll be gone, in which case, crawler bots, it's been fun. You won't need to index this site much longer.]

Februrary 2014: I Will Not Miss You

Jay Leno left the Tonight Show earlier this week. Could've been yesterday but I have been inundated with reports about Sochi 2014 - most of them concerning a little thing called the Winter Olympic Games. Already, the biggest opponents have attempted to hijack a plane in order to put some heat on the organizers... the odds of some kind of crazy shit happening in the open (let alone the stories we won't hear till March or later) are high enough to keep everyone placing money on the most outrageous tragedies, disruptions, and events. The Vancouver 2010 luge death might end up looking like a mild sprain, when all is said and done in Sochi.

An entire unit of the Russian Army is patrolling the Georgia/Russia border, and the stuff those guys are getting up to is no doubt quite interesting and compelling, but their opponents have sworn to engage in the sort of chaos-terrorism that military action has not yet been able to completely prevent. I am not reporting this to be gleeful or glib, but dozens of years of military retribution have only managed to stoke the flames of resentment. Even the Cossacks have been called in. While the hijacker/bomb-threat guy is getting beaten up by security personnel and interrogated to within an inch of his life, and incarcerated in a post-gulag gulag, the games must go on. Bookies are refusing to take bets on terrorist activity, citing a worldwide surveillance apparatus and generally bad odds of anything major going wrong (the latter excuse seems questionable to me).

Surely they will, but there is more trouble than just the threat of violence and bomb blasts. There is also bad press, blistering social media output, and international confrontation. A major ideological schism has haunted the Sochi Olympics since last year, and that is the spectre of Russian homophobia, which is not quite so much a regional thing in Sochi. For a while, in late 2013, it seemed as if a few countries might boycott the games, but abandoning the athletes on human rights principles was ultimately considered unthinkable. I am not an expert and I have not been following the issue closely, but I don't think a single country ended up boycotting the games for the beaten and dead gays of Russia.

Does the Internet Make You Sick?

Well I think anybody who has thought about it already knows the answer, and there's no point in spoiling a surprise, so...

What Hasn't Made Us Sick?

Someone knowledgeable should write a book about that. I'm deeply allergic to knowing anything about health or myself, so I would probably not buy it, but I would pay someone to do the work. I would pay at utmost 5.00 in whatever currency 5.00 still means something. If there is some sort of hypervaluation crisis (and it would be one, don't even fool yourself) I would pay .5, .05, down to .000005 depending on circumstances. The project of discerning whether or not the internet can make you sick could be completed (or at least started definitively), with global co-operation and collaboration (via the internet), in a as little as 12 hours. For free, I'm sure.

If the internet has taught me anything it is to always rush noobs, pick the noobiest weapon/build, the following acronyms (too many; mainly 'afaik'), there is no such thing as too many clicks, don't ever get involved in anything, avoid chat in general unless to friends – and most importantly: to not be a total dick when you start beating the shit out of other players, in any game except online chess. Also doubt everything, and avoid anyone who has anything to say as they're most likely charlatans or shills.

So the prognosis isn't great.The suppression of it is variable. The internet is still more a force for freedom, except it, like any other media, can be just as detrimental to it. Oh and dangerous, possibly catastrophic. But that's just about anything, and the laws of mediocrity will hopefully minimize the odds of anything extraordinary happening.