Prince and Tom Petty

Madonna and the dead fans

There are millions of you paying to go see a handful, or one, of them. They don’t want to see you, the individual, but you want to see them badly. They have power, but you don’t except as a part of the crowd that they control.  One individual bee does not matter to a beekeeper, and you the member of an adoring audience numbering into the thousands, don’t matter either. You are faceless.

People with that kind of power have to arrogant because everything in their lives show them to be better than each of you. They have more money, they get more attention, they have less stress. You give of your wages to make them more wealthy in return for a few hours around a stage with them on it. They have to see themselves as gods because you keep telling them that that’s what they are.

Do you seriously think that any act of kindness that they perform is not done purely for their own benefit? Do you think that Madonna seriously gives a shit about the anonymous worker-ants, the nameless cattle that get caught under her stage? The only bad thing about this for her is the potential for lawsuits and the inevitable bad publicity. I am not sure she is wrong. When people abase themselves they have to expect to be seen in that way, to be judged as less than.

Real life is “unimaginable”

"I just can't believe that there's people in the world that are capable of this type of hate," Ashley Markham, 26, told ABC's "Good Morning America" today. "This is just unimaginable." via Daughter of Slain Fla. Couple: 'This Is Unimaginable,'

Since when is murder “shocking” or “unimaginable”? Since TV that’s when. People get their news and their entertainment from the same medium it is inevitable that they get the two mixed up sometimes. It’s unimaginable because they think that what they see on the news happening to other people every day doesn’t really exist. They never in a million years thought that the crime that they see every night on the evening news could come out of the picture-box and affect them.

It’s like going to the doctor and getting a cancer diagnosis. You need to know now that something at some point has to kill you. You just learned the truth from a guy on the Internet, but you know what? You probably still don’t believe it. You think that somehow you are going to live forever.

All of these people think that if you live far enough from the real world, out in their gated suburbs free from minorities and poverty that somehow real life will never touch them. They get immersed in their lives of quiet comfort and forget that there is a world of people who want more than what they have so they get shocked when anything bad happens. Sequestering yourself from real life makes everything “shocking”.

Why newspapers so very badly need to die

Ok, so these guys went to journalism school and learned all the tricks of the trade. They do not like having all their hard word and expertise devalued. I understand that. Professional web-developers tend to look down on people who never went to school operating websites, chefs tend to look down on home-cooks as barely-competent amateurs. I get that. It goes with being being trained in anything, you resent all the people who have not paid their dues. It still does not mean that your product is worth my money.

The truth is that of all the professions listed above, journalists are the least necessary. Their “professional product” least worth paying for.

When was the last time a journalist did anything useful? Seriously. What have you read in a newspaper or seen on TV that changed how you went about doing anything? The front page of the New York Times today has stories about Judge Sotomayor, the CIA-Cheney conspiracy to hide things from congress, and Obama’s trip to Africa. Most people in America have made their minds up about Cheney and Sotomayor without having to read the Times, and their opinions have nothing to do with anything these people say or do. Most of the content of the major news outlets is worthless. It is reportage for the sake of reporting. You have all these journalists and this equipment so you have to put something out or it would all be wasted. There is a lot of effort put into making it seem important, meaningful, but it’s not. In a way bloggers have highlighted this. With hastily written, ungrammatical, inconsistently spell-checked work cobbled together in basements, they can put together a product that sells almost as well.

I did not know Michael Jackson, and aside from liking one or two of his songs back when I was still young, I have no sentimental connection to the man. If his passing and the subsequent issues were of any importance to me I would bookmark TMZ.com, not purchase a magazine or newspaper. Every issue that a newspaper might cover has dedicated bloggers who are obsessed with that one thing, people who would sell their first-born to find out something new and to share it with a network of similarly obsessed individuals. The blogs might be repetitive and hard to read, but you will get more information in five minutes than you would from a long, padded-out NYT article written by some disinterested preppie.

The big question is why this is even being debated. There was once a time when the fastest you could get your news was in the next days’ paper, where the stories would be fact-checked and edited and those writers would get another 24 hours to follow up. You got your stuff slowly because there was no more efficient means of dissemination than tree-flesh. Now there are better ways, or one better way, something faster and more efficient. All the stuff that we didn’t have to know is available along with the very few bits of info that it might be useful to have.

Brilliant Nike Marketing Strategy re: Jordan Crawford

So you are looking down the road at your next big marketing project, a kid named Jordan Crawford, and you need to get his name out there, get him in the market’s consciousness before he goes pro. You know this about the market:

1) It loves access to a secret
Like sex tapes or hidden cameras. People are voyeurs by natures, creepy little Chuck Berry’s desperate for access to a peephole. 

2) They have tremendous faith in the Internet
The belief that the Internet is a “wild west” not yet controlled by corporate or government interests means that people think that they might be allowed to see something that those in authority do not want them to see.  This “scandal” thrives on the fact that people have been searching for this video.  
 
3) A great many people dislike LeBron James
So much so that daring to compare him to Michael Jordan still puts you in great danger of being shot in certain circles. Many believe him to be an over-marketed Nike mascot who gets away with cheating on a regular basis. They actively want to believe that a kid, particularly one named “Jordan”, dunked on James.

4) There is a lot of sports-withdrawal going on right now
If you are not into baseball this time of year sucks. You want to go into football mode, but you are scared. You go into it too soon and you have to suffer till the season starts. You don’t even want to start thinking about basketball yet. Still any little bit of news grabs and holds your attention, like news of the girl that dumped you a decade ago. You pay attention even though you know it’s pointless.

5) Sports-fanship is largely about recalling things
What happened in such and such a season, the names of the positions, plays, colleges, who got drafted where, by whom, and in what year. Nothing is more important than knowing the name of people. It’s hard if these people are from a different country, or culture with strange names, but that just makes it more of a challenge, something for the true sports geek to feel proud of. This gets Nike and Lebron James even more deeply implanted in the media than they were previously.

It’s easy to fabricate a story like this
Seriously, the whole thing is about tantalizing rumor that seems to make somebody look bad, which, of course, is the most tantalizing kind of rumor. It has elements that have to get you hooked but that are not really verifiable. Meaning they can be easily disproved and dismissed at a later point. Whether or not you actually ever view the footage you know the name Jordan Crawford.

Diana Ross and Little Richard

What would happen if the KKK/White Supremacists had their way?

Let's say that you deported or ethnically cleansed all the non-Aryans, and got America to where it was entirely white and gentile. What then?

They would have to make sure that an ethnically mixed society would never happen again
This is what would occupy their time and efforts on into perpetuity. In order to prevent a re-occurrence of race-mixing they would have to eliminate all the Caucasians who let it happen the first time, and any who might let it happen again. They would have to get rid of everybody who ever had an interracial relationship along with all of their friends and family members who did not strenuously object. This means complete control of the populace. You cannot allow "free thinking" since it might allow in undesirable thoughts. You have to dictate right and wrong, and dictate how people live their lives. All of this can be excused as being "for the common good". People will allow all kinds of liberties to be taken from them if it is "for the common good". If your great grandfather showed a tendency to miscegenation you would be on a watch-list. You might be genetically prone to interest in dark-skinned people. In fact, if there were non-whites anywhere in the world it might happen again. That problem would have to be remedied.

They would root out and destroy all evidence of the genocide/ethnic cleansing
It would have to kept from view the way the Jewish Holocaust was. The media would not be allowed to broadcast it. This allows you to claim that all accounts of it are "propaganda" and that no such thing ever occurred. This means control of the media. The key to success here is to be able to beautify the past. Ensure that nobody is going to come along years later and "uncover" some incriminating shit. Anybody who took part in it would have to be removed lest they feel remorse later on in life and start blabbing.

They would have to re-write human ethics
This has been done before. Lots of people still think that exterminating native Americans was necessary and reasonable. The same thing can be accomplished with any minority if a government decides to put enough effort into demonizing them. People trust their rulers because life would be too scary if they didn't. They trust them even when they claim not to, still abiding under the rulership of men they claim are incompetent or evil.