Support your local TSA (or not)

Got these courtesy of talk show host Neal Boortz. Check 'em out -- they're a real hoot.

Remember, though: No laughing in the airport pat-down line. No levity whatsoever. (I found this last part out the hard way while boarding from Kona Airport, but that was too long ago to go into.)

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Obama's got Woody Allen's vote ... for dictator

Do people actually pay attention to these Hollyweird types?

This is from Fox:

Woody: Obama for 'Dictator':

... director says President Obama should be given dictatorial powers for 'a few years', GOP should 'get out of his way' ...

Let's see. Woody Allen? THE Woody Allen? Does he still have credibility?

But then, let's get inside the head of your average voter. Credibility means nothing. It's star power, baby. Which is why folks actually pay mind to what Barbra Streisand and Woody Harreslson -- and Woody Allen -- have to say. That's why they keep voting for California's action-figure-turned-Governator. 

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Arizona belongs to who?

This comes from commentator Neal Boortz:

OBAMA'S OPEN BORDERS: "Just to remind you --- Barack Obama hasn't done one thing since Arizona's new law to solve the problem of Arizona's open border with Mexico. He hasn't done anything since he was elected. He won't do anything this week. He won't do anything next week. Truth is, Obama doesn't want to close the border. The criminal alien invaders will keep pouring in. Remember ... a Pew Research poll showed that 58% of Mexicans believe that Arizona belongs to Mexico anyway. Just keeping you up to speed. How's that hopey-changy thingy working out for you?"

I wonder how many think California belongs to Mexico?

Meanwhile, Los Angeles is now the largest city to boycott the State of Arizona, and there's pressure on Major League Baseball to boycott next year's All-Star Game, which will be in Phoenix. The latter, by the way, sure reminds me of the NFL putting the squeeze play on the state over the Martin Luther King holiday back in the 1990s. 

These boycotts generate a bunch of noise, but in reality don't work all that well. The NAACP has been boycotting South Carolina over the Confederate Flag issue, and it hasn't exactly kept people away. If it did work, then how about boycotting Los Angeles for being led by a bunch of politically-correct pansies?

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My Facebook officially shut down, now what?

OK. My Facebook account is officially shut down. I euthanized it this morning.

Now, there's the problem of filling some of that void; social media without the social media.

I found this article in some blog called the Dead Dog Cafe (hey, I don't name these things) that is worthy of my consideration. In truth, there are no real secrets there. The writer suggests using:

• Twitter for status messages. I do use that, but the signal-to-noise ratio is ridiculous. The infrastructure is too wide open, and you usually need some third-party software or service to filter things. It's not as completely messed up as Facebook (give it time), but in the interim it handles my short messaging needs.
• Pidgin for chat (although Meebo is also good for this). Generally, dust off your old chat accounts and instant messaging and use those. Do people still send instant messages?
• Regular email for messages. OK. I still use email, and a lot of it, but I'll admit I'm an anachronism. Email is, like, so '90s. Do the folks of the "millennial" generation use email?

The Low Tech Times (I love the layout, by the way) echoes some of this, but adds blogging to the roll-your-own social media mix. The writer, S. P. Gass concludes: "The only reason I can think of to sign up for a Facebook account is to drive traffic to my own sites."

Which, said and done, is the only real reason I can see for keeping Facebook around (except for my friends who are used to exchanging political comment & other nuggets of wisdom with me). But does Facebook actually drive traffic to these blogs? I can't rightly tell, though it's helped make my circle of friends aware of my doings and writings. 

Gass (great name) further stirs the puddin' in an update to his original 2009 piece: Spend time with family and friends in person. Send a postcard every so often. Send an email. And he reiterated the concept of blogging, preferably in a platform where you own the words you write.

On Facebook the natives are getting restless, and you might find some new flavors of Kool-Aid around. But it doesn't matter what flavor you're drinking, the results are still the same.

Meanwhile, there's a new Facebook group that apparently started within the last few minutes: "10 Reasons To Delete Your Facebook Account." Uhh, it ought to be interesting to see how many members it attracts:

• Hypocrites will join the group, maintaining their Facebook accounts to do so.
• Non-hypocrites will merely delete their accounts.

But then, you find that in the real world, too. Some folks will complain and start a movement about something that upsets them, and in doing so feed the problem. Others will quietly (or maybe not so quietly) cease to be a party to the problem. Unfortunately, our society -- particularly our political structure these days -- seems to favor the first course of action. 

See you around the Web ...

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Why I'm dumping Facebook like a bad habit

I never could get into the online games and other trappings, but Facebook was still one of my guilty online pleasures. Well, not exactly guilty; many of my friends are on it and that's how we correspond.

Put all that in the past tense. By the end of this week, I will shut my Facebook account down. It's not so much that it's a waste of time -- though in many respects it is -- but the Facebook interface has gone from bad to worse.

Like it or not, Facebook is a big phenomenon in the online world. It started some years ago as an interactive message board, and from there it grew legs. By itself it made that other groundbreaking social media site, MySpace, into an irrelevancy. OK, MySpace helped Facebook along by being the overloaded piece of junk that it is. For a long time, Facebook's big appeal in the social media world was that it wasn't MySpace.

I'd written extensively about Facebook's problems, mostly in the privacy realm. But many of these privacy issues in the past could be chased down to that great void that sits between chair and keyboard. If the computer operator is brain dead, then all sorts of weird things will happen with the computer.

I've noticed recently, though, that Facebook is playing it fast and loose with user privacy. Several new settings were implemented over the past few months, and all of these -- though billed as something that would enrich your Facebook experience -- tend to "share" your personal settings with everybody.

As I write this, I have a modest 104 friends on Facebook. Unlike many social media users, these are people I actually know. I've met nearly all of them, and the few I haven't met I've corresponded with enough to call them friends.

A Facebook employee, in an off-the-record chat with New York Times reporter Nick Bilton said that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg really doesn't give a rip about your privacy:  

@nickbilton: Off record chat w/ Facebook employee. Me: How does Zuck feel about privacy? Response: [laughter] He doesn't believe in it.

Bilton's original tweet, and it sure triggered a firestorm online. OK, you can debate this point here from a journalistic standpoint and from a factual one, but this statement certainly lines up with many of the changes I've seen on Facebook.

The final straw came Saturday night, when I got a video from a friend of mine. The still-shot preview showed a nearly-naked young woman, viewed from the hip. Now, I'm scratching my head. This friend of mine is a family man, one of the most honorable people I know, a good Southern Baptist, and just what is this all about? What didn't help is that the caption called this an "optical illusion."

OK. I'll bite.

While I bit, I was told my video viewer was out of date. I was asked if I wanted to download a new viewer. Now, I'm thinking. I use Opera 10.50, which for Linux is still in alpha. I mean, my software is bleeding-edge stuff; why should my viewer be out of date? Like an idiot I clicked on it.

A couple of things then happened:

1) The video was automatically sent to many people on my friends' list.

2) The .exe file to the viewer sat in my /home/download file. I noted the name and ran a Google search. The program in question, flvdirect.exe, is billed as something that would help download torrents but is actually spyware. It'll do all sorts of nefarious things on your hard drive and it monitors your surfing habits.

For the next hour or so, I heated up my high-speed Internet line. Running Google searches on the offending software. Firing instant messages back and forth with a Facebook (actually a real) friend who also got the video -- from me. Posting my findings on Facebook. I finally got to bed at 2 a.m., exhausted. Spreading malware sure is hard work.

The flvdirect.exe file did not affect my computer. I use a Linux system, which is immune to junk like that. The friend I exchanged messages with runs a Mac, which like Linux is also built off the lock-tight UNIX operating system. If I was using a Windows box it might be a different story.

All this episode did was spread on my Facebook account, and perhaps made my friends wonder if I'd flipped out. It robbed me of some valued sleep, and when you look like me you need all the beauty sleep you can get.

And it ticked me off. Completely. Enough to convince me to shut down Facebook.

OK, folks. Here's how this works. I still have two active email addresses; you can catch me at either one. I have two phone numbers; if you have one of those numbers you can give me a holler if you need to (those who don't have the number, well, there's a reason for that). I have my blog; those who read my posts on Facebook can read the exact same stuff there or even grab the RSS feed for your news raleader. For social media I have Twitter and LinkedIn, and if you're at least 50 years old you can catch my old folks' social media page at Eons. So it's not like I'm disappearing off the face of the earth, or even off the Web. Shoot, I make my living on the Internet; I'm not about to shut that down.

But Facebook? That's a whole 'nother matter.

If you use Facebook and have a Windows system, keep your virus checker and spyware screening system up to date. Seriously. AVG makes an excellent virus checker, it's free, and I understand it does check for spyware.

Don't click on weird-looking stuff, EVEN IF A FRIEND SENDS IT.

Got all that? Good.

In the next few days I'll be checking on other social-media options, and reporting on them. All of these, by the way, will feed directly into my Facebook page so they can be read there. If you access my material from there, you'd better read it fast before I shut the whole thing down.

Here's the upshot: If you're comfortable with the direction Facebook is going, by all means use it and enjoy it. But since I'm not comfortable with any of that, you can deal me out.

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Whether we like it or not, Obama shows his hand

Another Obama-ism, at a recent Nuclear Security Summit:

That key sentence again:

"Whether we like it or not, we remain a military superpower."

Whether we like it or not? Pray tell, what does our alleged president mean here?

Personal footnote: I used to think he was just overmatched, in over his head, just a community organizer thrown into a job he is not qualified for. But with statements like this, it looks more and more like he has an agenda. A plan. And it's one that turns us into one of those European nations that's going down the drain. The more I think about it, the more it looks like he wants to castrate America.

Enough of that. With that off my chest, here's the deal:

If you happen to be one of those folks who doesn't like it, I just have one thing to say:

"Delta is ready when you are."

Please. Go away. Get your slack butt out of this country and quit bugging me. OK?

(Gee, what's so hard about that?)

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Speaking your piece: Blogging whys and hows

[First of a short series on public discourse]

They used to say about newspaper publishers that you never argue with a man who buys ink by the barrel and paper by the ton.

But that was a couple of decades ago. Now the guy who buys all this ink and paper has no real credibility. He's in the tank. Newspapers are dying. Network TV news is dying.

But the need for a free, independent press remains, and probably now more than ever. This brouhaha over the ObamaLosi health care plan is instructive. If it wasn't for public discourse via the press and Internet, how would you know some senators -- maybe even yours -- sold their votes for a bit of pork or a few judges? How else would you know what is in that health care plan, and how much it would cost to future generations? How would you know about that gigantic proctoscope coming your way, unless someone tells you about it?

I've written plenty about the stuff going on in Washington, and I've hardly scratched the surface. But I'm not unique. Plenty of bloggers do the same thing, and some do it as well, or better, than me. But that's OK too.

More people get their news via the Internet these days. And with today's tools (Google Reader, Twitter, Facebook) it's easier than ever to share news. Shoot, even with my modest 540 Twitter followers, you can see the potential. Assuming my average Twitter follower has 2,500 unique followers of their own (and I'm clearly shooting wild with the numbers here), you can see how word of something can get out on the Internet:

• First generation, my followers: 540.
• Second generation, my follower's followers: 1,350,000.
• Third generation, my followers' followers' followers: Forget it. Smoke is pouring out of my calculator.
• All of this takes place within a few seconds.

OK, that's some real fuzzy math, but you get the idea. Now you know how a news story or video can go "viral."

Years ago, thinker Marshall McLuhan named the printing press as one of the great extensions of man, arguing that it made the common person into a reader. He later amended it with the copying machine; everyone's a publisher. Ol' Marshall's no longer around; if he'd lived to see blogging and Twitter, he'd say everyone now has a newspaper.

But you get the drift. The media is no longer top-down, i.e. a publisher and a gang of reporters telling you what's news. It's now bottom-up, with the common man setting news policy.

Now, that sea change is for better or worse. The Internet has a horrendous signal-to-noise ratio. For each solid, meaty piece of reportage there are about a million pieces of fluff about Britney Spears or Tiger Woods. Sometimes this bottom-up news policy does make me long for some good old-fashioned elitism.

Still with me? Cool.

Setting up a blog is easy. Just about anyone who can turn a computer on and point a mouse at the Web browser icon can do it.

I'm using Blogger, which is a platform owned by Google. What's beautiful about it is that it's free, it's easy, and initial setup takes almost no effort at all.

Before you do anything else, decide what you want to blog about. If you want to write a bunch of crap about how many beers you puked up, or who you hooked up with last night, do me a favor: Please ignore everything I say here. We've got plenty of the likes of you on the Internet, and you're probably looking at the wrong web site anyway.

But if you're interested in the world you live in, if you are able to string together a few coherent and independent thoughts, if you're not a Kool-Aid drinker, then let's talk about blogging.

• Go to blogger.com to set up.

• Give yourself a sign-in name and password. If you have a Google account (such as gmail), use that.

• Come up with a name for your blog. You will soon be known for that, so choose carefully.

• Pick a template. There are plenty, and some are butt-ugly. But pick one. Don't worry about all the cool widgets and things just yet; you're just writing now. Got it?

• Pull up NEW POST, then write a headline.

• Lock and load. Get your thoughts down.

• Read it over. If it looks like it's what you want to say, click on PUBLISH POST. See how easy that was?

• Don't worry that no one is reading it. Keep writing. If your stuff is good, the readers will come. Tell folks what you're doing. Put it on your Facebook page, or whatever social media you're using.

• Stick with it, and learn the nuances of blogging as you go. There's a whole new science about it. For now, though, just write.

• If you don't write worth a flip, just use your computer webcam and talk to your readers. Start a YouTube channel, save your videos and talking messages there, and post them to your blog. Just make sure you're, well, wearing something -- PLEASE? -- when you make your video.

That's the basic stuff.

OK, so why am I giving up all this information?

Because I can, and because we need more voices out there on the Internet. We need more, well, I said it. Independent thinkers. Folks who don't give a rip what the mainstream is saying. Folks who, like that guy in David Baldacci's Camel Club, "want the truth."

Something smelling funny in Washington, or in your state capital? Don't just sit around whining about it. Blog about it.

(Props to commentator Michael Berry of Houston for putting this idea in my head.)

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[In a future Column, I'll continue this thought ... I'll discuss ways of keeping up with all these Internet headlines. Think RSS here.]

Hoping this song sticks in your head ...

This is just too good ... unfortunately, it's also too true.

The singer here is Jim Hawkins, someone I'd never heard of.

Props to Richard Todd of WTMA for bringing this to the attention of Charlestonians everywhere.

Great stuff. It's one of these songs that'll stick in your head for a while, whether you want it to or not. Hope it sticks at least until the next election, huh?

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Pass the salt ... while you still can

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, after introducing laws regulating smoking and trans fat in his city, is asking restaurants and food packagers to hold the salt.

Here's a story about it in The Guardian, a publication from The United Kingdom:

... the campaign, called the National Salt Reduction Initiative, aims to cut the quantities of sodium in packaged and restaurant foods by a quarter over five years. The city claims that if the 2014 target is met it will help save many thousands of premature deaths ... Americans consume on average about 3,400 milligrams of salt a day ? well above the recommendation of the American Heart Association of less than 2,300 milli­grams. Most of that is out of the individual consumer's hands as almost 80% of salt intake is already added to packaged and restaurant foods and only about 11% added in the home ... high salt levels can raise blood pressure, which increases the risk of heart disease and strokes ... Dr Thomas Farley, New York's health commissioner, said that 1.5 million New Yorkers already suffered from high blood pressure ... "If we can reduce the sodium levels in packaged and restaurant foods we will give consumers more choice about the amount of salt they eat, and reduce their risk of heart disease and stroke in the process," he said ...

OK, you might think. Let those New Yorkers live their lives any ol' way they please; what does this have to do with everyone else?

Here's the thing: New York City, like California, is a testing lab for strange new laws. Give it a few years, then what happens there will eventually happen in the rest of the country.

Back in the 1980s, writer John Naisbitt penned "Megatrends," a futuristic look at American society, and while he missed the mark on some of his guesses he was spot-on with others. In Megatrends, Naisbitt listed five states as "bellwether states," arguing that, as I am, what happens there will happen here. He kept up on trends by following the news in those five states. To Naisbitt, California was a bellwether state then, but New York wasn't. He did list Florida and Connecticut as two of the other states to watch 30 years ago.

Although it's not something I'd brag about, I grew up in California. But one thing I did gain from my 30 years there was that I had a sneak preview of today's and tomorrow's headlines. I wasn't terribly surprised to see the number of illegal aliens in South Carolina; in fact some folks in the Palmetto State thought I was some sort of mad prophet because I was predicting this here 10 years ago. I'd already seen it happen on the other coast. And I wasn't shocked to see new laws regulating smoking here; in the late 1980s California cities were already banning smoking in public places. We California products -- and New Yorkers now -- already know what's going on.

But then, Californians and New Yorkers know what's going to happen because they're often the trigger for new laws elsewhere. The more folks emigrate from these places, the more they'll bring their laws and customs with them. They become missionaries, trying to bring "civilization" on those poor backwards country boys in the South and Midwest. Shoot, no wonder folks in the South don't care that much for strangers. It's like what the late Lewis Grizzard, a great American, said of the southern states: "Come on down. Marry our daughters. We just don't want to hear how you did it in Cleveland."

Partly because of health concerns (but mostly it's nothing but preference), but I don't use much salt myself -- and I'm glad to share some of my own cooking hacks here -- but I'm not about to ask the government to regulate other people's salt usage. Are you kidding? Even if I could, the feds are the last folks I'd want to involve in this.

Again, from Guardian:

... the difference between the salt drive and the previous health initiatives is that this new mission will be purely voluntary. Smoking and trans fats were both banned, and the posting of calories imposed on larger chains, but in this case food manufacturers and restaurants will be encouraged to participate out of concern for public well-being rather than by compulsion ...

Yeah, that's what they all say.

Almost everything starts off as voluntary.

But here are a couple of things to chew on here:

The federal government is on the verge of taking over our health care system; it's just a question of how thorough a takeover will be at this point. The feds will then have an interest in cutting health care costs one way or another. While there's this talk of rationing health care and cutting back on Grandma (some of this is pure smoke, while some is actual fire), they'll start looking more at the prevention angle. Smoking is definitely a factor in respiratory and circulatory problems, fats fill your thighs and arteries with all kinds of sludge, and too much salt does a number on your blood pressure.

So you know it's coming.

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