This is not the kind of news that Fox considers important. They will ignore it while feeding conspiracies and inventing new things at which to be outraged.

Rudy has been running on thin air since November, visualize the Coyote tricked, again, by the Roadrunner, convinced he won't fall as long as he doesn't look down. He is a rude (sorry) reminder of what age can do to you if you ignore the signs of inevitable decline. There is a time to hang up your spurs.

I hope that Rudy doesn't become the scapegoat for Trump but he is the classic…

by Mike Meyer ~ Honolulu ~ April 30, 2021

We are so focused on the disasters perpetrated by the collapse of the Republican Party into a fascist, authoritarian, and corrupt set of criminal conspiracies that it is hard to see the larger signs of social failure. Institutional destruction producing the inevitable physical and social infrastructure decay is a wasting disease.

Things work for decades until more and more things break. Large and powerful states can survive for those decades, not noticing the decline and then actively ignoring it. As we see in America, failure to invest in your infrastructure and…

This is very interesting. I could go off on historical tangents, but I won't. Only a little bit: the reference to the Greek Sibyls is also a link to the Greek mystery cults combined with Judaism to produce Christianity. And that, of course, produced the crusades, ultimately the justification for anti-Semitism and consumption of children in the Blood Oath. The Fascist/Neonazi movement was very much from the early nationalism and linked back to the Crusades as a racist/ethnic fantasy.

The change, as noted here, is the paradigmatic explosion of the internet handed the equivalent of the printing press to everyone…

by Mike Meyer ~ Honolulu ~ April 27, 2021

While fear and complexity of the hyperobject monsters we have spawned cannot be ignored, too large a minority have committed themselves to that insanity. We will not survive without massive loss if that continues.

The majority of us are traumatized by what we see but are unable and unwilling to say what must be done beyond narrow and, often, superficial corrections. We do not have language that is acceptable to articulate the needed actions because that language seems to be a reversal of all we have hoped to achieve.

That long…

by Mike Meyer ~ Honolulu ~ April 23, 2021

When in doubt, we perform rituals. Anxiety and insecurity are constant factors in our lives. That has always been the case, but the anxiety levels are much higher in civilizations and astronomically higher in postmodern civilizations. As we have become more complex and urbanized, we now spend most of our time looking for relief from stress, anger, pain, and insecurity.

We perform rituals to relieve stress as we get ready to accomplish an unpleasant task after attempting it or ensuring success in a pleasant task. Ritual is often thought of as…

Turner set up WTBS and then CNN in 1980. As I was with the cable division of Time Inc, at the time that was a major distributor of WTBS (later TBS) I watched it very closely.

Turner started a lot with regular programming of music videos on WTBS that led to MTV. The distinction is that CNN was all news, all the time based on traditional journalism. It was not designed to be entertainment.

Murdoch turned cable news into a means of locking in audiences based on sensationalism with the less educated and increasingly threatened, white demographic. Walter Cronkite journalism…

by Mike Meyer ~ Honolulu ~ April 21, 2021

It is hard to watch a person attempting their best in a situation where that best is no longer relevant. There may be many reasons for this, but we have a surfeit of them in America of the mid 21st century.

These are the tragic preparations for traveling on a ship that has already sailed and sunk. It is not only too late but is now embarrassingly morbid as if we are celebrating a present being given to someone who has just died.

This is hard for everyone as we do…

No shit. I'm not mentioning Joe Biden, who is attempting to do what must be done if the US were still a viable nation-state. That is no longer the reality as the American Empire crumbles and predatory capitalism consumes us.

I am more and more convinced that the answer is replacing people in charge with democratically audited algorithms If the hard work of monitoring government algorithmic decision is ignored by the population then it is our own fault allowing a poor AI decision to be implemented. But even then, AI stupidity would be logical and transparent even if based on faulty data and better than criminal insanity from the humans that were replaced.