Ads are almost literally everywhere.
It is rare, but every once in a while I presume to speak for everyone. It’s not like this is breaking news or a controversial hot-take, either. No need to sit down or get a stiff drink:
Nobody, but NOBODY likes advertisements… except ad people.
Welcome one and all! Is your weapons industry suffering in the markets when there’s little direct war action to feed the coffers for your “investors”? Our simple program allows you to generate almost unlimited “excitement” for weapon, accessory, and ammunition sales.
2022 has been a year of explosive growth for the gun industry, and we see nothing but profits for the ongoing future. Take a look at some of the successful results from our non-stop “marketing” campaign for “freedom”.
NOTE: The continued performance of gun “enthusiasm” despite the “unintended restructuring” of the National Rifle Association and their extensive messaging platform is a huge cost savings since we no longer funnel funds into their Ackerman McQueen-led AgitProp strike team. We applaud the NRA’s continued efforts to remain relevant, however.
Without further ado here are examples of “successful results” from our industry’s non-stop “marketing campaigns”…
This is how. You do everything in your power to get gun laws relaxed, if not stricken entirely, so that more and more guns reach more and more true, red-blooded Americans. That, however, only reaches a certain saturation point. It’s not enough that one person own one gun. They need to need more guns. In order for your profit margins to soar in the short term, you need a catalyst.
You need the “Secret Sauce”; fear, uncertainty, and doubt, also known by its acronym, FUD.
As silly as FUD sounds, it is a devastating weapon that can strike without provocation or warning, and at scale, and all without specific instruction. It’s not enough that they feel unsafe in their homes, they need to feel existential dread. One of the most proven methods of instilling deep, unwavering dread is to see their children slaughtered like fish in a barrel, repeatedly. Preferably with some breathing room in between events so we can hone our messaging. We’d also like to thank Alex Jones who has been an indispensable asset in our efforts. We wish him well in his future endeavors.
One side benefit, as well, is that with so many excess guns and ammunition, a lot gets stolen, which must be replaced, which means insurance claims, and so on and so forth, providing a solid foundation for “gravy” profit margins in the peripheral markets and for suppliers. That also puts a load of guns into the “grey” and “black” markets, some of which generate more profits for us at gun shows, while illegal arms feed into the suburban, urban, crime, and minority fear secondary markets. And “Ghost Guns” are fine for now, but as they start to make headway, we’ll need to kick-off a “Vuse Maneuver” so we can leverage their work into our profit with minimal capital outlay.
As you can see here, the data is clear. Sales were distressingly low from the mid-90’s to the mid-00’s, but through our continued efforts on multiple fronts, we’ve been able to “eliminate” roadblocks to unlimited growth potential. A strong domestic weapons industry is critical. If we fail to protect this precious resource, hundreds of “Job creators” WILL continue to suffer, and we simply cannot allow that to happen.You can’t leave it at that, however, you’ve got to dig deeper. You need help from the community, even if you have to manufacture consent. People are sheep. They don’t know what they need. But we, the wealthy and powerful, the ones manipulating things behind the curtains and maintaining a carefully curated veil of legitimacy, we do. Well, we know what we need, and in the end, that’s the only important thing we care to know. Knowing more is exhausting.
At the end of the day, however, we applaud this young man for his crowning achievement as 2nd Place Master Provocateur in our fight to return America to it’s “Roots”; a “colored folk” shooting range dotted with murderous, little fiefdoms teeming with happy, little aryans, bristling with their powerful, little assault rifles. Our Manifest Destiny is at hand, my fellow Americans!
Won’t it be wonderful?
In case it’s not clear, this is satire. I’m upset about Uvalde, TX. How can I not? These little babies were murdered, slaughtered like so many pigs in an abattoir, just like Parkland and Sandy Hook and thousands of others mass shootings year after year after year before, and if things don’t change, many more in the coming years. And we pretend this is a “mental health” issue, claim the time after tragedy is exclusively for grieving and discourse of any kind dishonors the recently deceased, then make deals behind closed doors and in exchange for “contributions” to give the gun industry its fucking money’s worth.
A lot more than our children pay the price, as well. Just look up how many have been killed by gun violence in America in 2022 alone, and the humanists among us are traumatized because we feel emotions; the closer we are, the exponential growth in heartache. We’ve been here before, and we’ll be here again unless the people act, and that means getting out into the streets, which is what I hope we finally do.
I wrote the above piece back in 2017. I wrote another on my blog, the one that was destroyed by The-Host-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named, and no, it’s not Blue Host. I dislike them openly. I may repost it at some point. It takes a lot of work to convert from WordPress Gutenberg post formatting, so probably not.
I hope we get some of this shit figured out before someone does something so stupid we can’t come back from it.
I really do.
PS: Depression is a deeply misunderstood ailment that often doesn’t feel real, either to people who suffer from it and don’t know or to those lucky few who’ve never been depressed, though I’m not sure the latter is possible. I’ve suffered from depression for decades now and I doubt it will ever go away, but I’ve still managed to write… at least until Covid-19 came along…
PPS: My wife, daughter, and I had Covid very early, like in February 2020. Fortunately for us, our primary symptom was body-wide pain and we had none of the other, potential fatal problems. I’ll just gloss over the fact that I happened to get Shingles at the same time, but for those of you who know, you know. What came after, however, has been the most catastrophic symptom of my Covid infection; Long Covid brain fog. If it was already hard enough to write while depressed, Shingles kicked it up a few thousand levels of distressing.
PPPS: I’ve made countless commitments to restart my writing efforts, but I’ve only managed a few spurts of activity over the last few years. I don’t know if I can change that, but I’ll damn well try. I can’t sit idly by, randomly opining on the internet while atrocities are committed on a near daily basis. I need to start being a more active participant in this great experiment gone wrong, a sentiment I hope many more Americans like myself, humanist, open-minded, pragmatic, for forward-thinking, will choose to adopt. I’ll do my best and all I can do is thank you for reading my words.
My father being arrested for protesting, something he was quite happy to do. He was staunchly anti-war and would always stand up for the little guy. Well, mostly always…My sister summed it up best.
“I haven’t seen him in so long, he’s already been dead to me,” she said, or something like it. You get the point.
I was watching a video on YouTube about the new Anbernic RG351M when it paused itself. Then my phone rang. I could see it was my sister from the image that appeared on the display. I knew at that moment that she was calling me to tell me dad had died. She had texted me the day before letting me know that he was in hospice at home.
This was a marked change from years past. When my older sister died in the early 2000’s, I learned two weeks later, by letter from my father. Years later, when my mother had moved back to Southern California from Knoxville and would subsequently die of dementia, I was told about that a week late. When I figured out that my father had a degenerative brain disease and was likely going to die from it, I figured the same would happen when he did.
You see, our step-mother has been keeping us away from our father. Why, I couldn’t tell you. My sister and I agree that they likely planned it together, but I’d need more information before I were to make an educated judgement. There are loopholes in some of the timing elements that I’ll need to look into.
This, however, should illustrate the issue. I’m not sad my father has passed. No, I’m more concerned about the apparent shady behavior of our step-mother. Like my sister said, it’s like he’s been dead, but it’s taken everyone else a few years to figure out.
We expected it.
Like I knew that seeing my sister on my caller ID meant that he had passed. Like knowing my mother’s dementia would lead to her eventual death. This got me reflecting on familial relationships.
In a letter I wrote to our step-mother over Christmas, I likened our family to a diaspora of micro families that don’t frequently interact with each other, and when we do, it’s all through a veneer of casual, apathetic complacency. Happy enough with things to not be concerned about anything in particular. Pleasantries passed about like business cards.
This is no way for a family to act, so I’ve decided that I’m going to reconnect with my sister and her family and our terminally acidic brother. And maybe even our estranged brother-in-law, our older sister’s widow. My sister has already agreed, which makes me endlessly happy, but I have yet to speak to either of my brothers. I believe they will be saltier to deal with, but I shall make the effort.
I have lots of issues to deal with, personally, within my family, and among my distributed family, that I think it’s far better to at least work on positive communications with your family, despite the hard pasts. It’s so much better to work together as a team, leveraging our strengths and forgiving the weaknesses in ourselves and others, to achieve a goal. But it seems so very hard to muster the courage to work with some people. I’ll remind you of this, though:
We’ve all got our demons.
We could compare scars all day long, but in the end our pains our ours alone and we can neither share nor compare them with others. These burdens are ours to bear, but that doesn’t mean we can’t work together to share the load across many shoulders.
It’s never an easy row to hoe, change. Think of the metaphor. Dirt. On the top, it’s old and crusty and drained of nutrients. Underneath, however, the sustenance-rich, moist, life-giving soil has been spending years growing on the food of the past, and is now getting churned into the crusty, old topsoil, blending the two into an amalgam of old and new, each fighting for prominence. The old, running out of resources, desperately clutching at authority for validation, to keep mattering.
But they do matter. They need to move into teaching roles to feed the new soil being readied for the next tilling, and so on, and so forth… As each season fades into glorious reds and oranges before falling to the ground to feed the soil that feeds the tree that feeds so many, making room for the new leaves to stretch out and reach for the Sun.
My father fought for that ideal in Apartheid South Africa alongside Bishop Desmond Tutu. He fought for the souls of human beings to be recognized as such, in a society where racial segregation and hatred had become indoctrinated into law. With the help of many others, my father did his part to bring about freedom in South Africa.
You’d think that kind of deep human empathy would translate to a loving home life, but you’d be wrong. It wasn’t ripped from the pages of a horror anthology. It was my otherization because I was adopted. Likewise, it was dad focusing on my fuckups more than he focused on his blood children’s authentic issues.
He wasn’t a dad as much as he was an event.
But I’m not here to denigrate my father. I know that he loved us all, and we loved him. When I asked to go to Disneyland for my birthday every year, we went. I wasn’t abused, at least not in obvious ways. I was, however, sent off to boarding schools, anything to keep my away from home and out of anyone’s hair. At the age of nine, after truly learning that I was adopted from my mother, that growing sense of abandonment continued to swell inside me.
The sense compounded after, upon evaluating my life at the nexus of my eighteenth birthday, I counted that I had been sent to no less than nine different schools since kindergarten. There’s no question I was a difficult child. I won’t apologize for that. Those were times past that I can no longer rectify directly. That work must be done retroactively.
But it’s still hard knowing that, as a child, you had appointments to meet with your father in his office.
There’s an emotional distancing to that. It sticks with me, that I dealt with dad’s secretary almost as much as I did him directly. But there’s something that hurts far more, and it didn’t have to happen this way. Choices were made, and we have to abide by them for now, but I make no guarantees that I won’t go after them in the near future. What is it that I’m talking about?
That my step-mother wouldn’t let me see my father before he died.
That, I’ll never forgive. Or forget.
In the meantime, however, I think I’ll get to writing that which I should have been writing for a very long time.
Facebook. WhatsApp. Instagram. Adult Friend Finder. Yahoo. Marriot. Anthem Health. eBay. JP Morgan Chase. Target. Equifax. Adobe. RSA Security. The US Office of Personnel Management. [SOURCE]
This is a partial list of organizations that have been hacked and lost control of millions of user accounts since 2011. In the case of Yahoo, it was 3 billion.
That’s billion, with a capital “B”.
Photo by Matthew Henry on UnsplashThat’s a lot of people’s personal and, as in the case with Anthem Health, very confidential, data. In some cases it was just email addresses and passwords, some of which weren’t even encrypted. In others, complete packages of personally identifying data was taken. Many of these people are now targeted by scammers to steal from them or hold their data for ransom.
I found this to be an unacceptable relationship, but I already had an out. I’ve been a proponent of Free and Open Source Software (often notated as FOSS) for a few decades now. Back when we had a converted garage office in New Mexico, I taught myself how to build out early versions of Caldera Linux into a workable desktop and used that for my writing work for two full years.
But then, I’m a nerd.
A few years ago, my wife Rima and I were chatting in Facebook Messenger about something we were interested in purchasing. Neither of us had searched for it or mentioned the product in any social networking service. Regardless, ads for the product started showing up on Facebook and various sites on the web. I’m sure you’ve had a similar experience, and out experience embittered me towards Messenger. I felt that there had to be something better from people who were acting for the benefit of human beings, not the bottom line.
It was then that I started looking into alternatives that would offer my family the peace of mind that we had always desired, and I found Telegram. After some prodding, I got both my wife and daughter, as well as a handful of close friends, to open accounts, and we’ve been using it ever since. While my wife retained her Facebook account because of her sizable following, I closed my account, and haven’t found any interest in returning since.
The number of data breaches in all sectors has been on the rise, almost since the inception of the public internet, and this will continue to be a real issue that will affect real people and cause real damage as long as capitalism is the sole player on the internet at large.
First, you can stop using Facebook and their related services, WhatsApp and Instagram and develop a strong sense of skepticism when you are offered something for free. After being burned by Facebook, I did just that. I went out and leveraged my tools to track down services that would allow my family to communicate securely, and carefully vetted them for the values I was seeking. I had even considered WhatsApp back then, not aware that Facebook had already, or was about to, acquire them.
Photo by Kyle Glenn on UnsplashAfter an exhaustive amount of research, I signed up for an account on Telegram, and now I doubt I’d be able to get my wife and daughter to give it up, either. But, don’t take my word for it. Do your own research. Find out for yourself what circumstances would lead someone like Pavel Durov, the Co-Founder of Telegram, to say something like this.
Every one of us is going to die eventually, but we as a species will stick around for a while. That’s why I think accumulating money, fame or power is irrelevant. Serving humanity is the only thing that really matters in the long run. -Pavel Durov, Co-Founder of Telegram, 2019 [ SOURCE]
There are a number of other things you can do to give yourself the best possible chance in this increasingly difficult world:
The simple answer is to shift the balance of power back to the consumer. Right now, you give away your personal data, where you go, what you search for, what you buy, what you write and delete, which sites you go to, how you relate to other people, and much, much more in exchange for seeing advertisements.
Photo by Samantha Sophia on UnsplashYour data earns companies like Facebook money, as does the ad revenue. All of this free data people willingly give up dis-incentivizes them from offering real customer value and support, from fixing security flaws, and generally being good corporate citizens. The same applies to Google and others. Since Facebook has a few BILLION users, they don’t really give a damn about how it hurts anyone or risks the privacy and security of individuals. It’s not, after all, their problem.
The best way to fight this is to remove from these companies the source of their revenues, i.e., leaving their services and paying moderate fees and making donations to projects that do NOT sell your data and that do NOT earn revenue from advertising*. This generally means switching to some kind of open source-based projects, like the newly created project from Purism called Librem.one.
*some advertising isn’t bad, such as advertising on a news site, but it shouldn’t be targeted and it shouldn’t rely on spying on you to figure out what you want. A good advertiser will do the hard work to reach out to their target markets.
Librem.one is a set of services, using a range of open source projects, that are designed to replace things like Facebook Messenger, Twitter, Gmail, and Google Drive, among many more which are planned. We pay for this service in lieu of having our data scraped and ads blasted at us. The more of us who speak with our money and our choices, the more these services can develop into better, more accessible tools that help us through our daily lives.
All I ask if that you reevaluate what it is that you get from the internet and how those choices are affecting you and those around you, and choose to take a different approach that might actually benefit everyone instead of just people like Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, or the Google machine.