peter b and sibel talk to ray mcgovern — UPDATING

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... Vladimir Putin's opposite number in a state spy organ. Just needed to reïterate the asininity of thinking Putin is some kind of devil because he was a KGB agent. Putin joined the KGB at age 23 and resigned at age 40. McGovern, after serving as an intelligence officer in the military for a couple years, spent twenty-seven years in the CIA, and decorated by Bush for his service, before retiring. I am not besmirching McGovern. I'm saying you're being a thoughtless ass for thinking Putin is some kind of demon on this basis.

It's also my opinion that you are being a thoughtless ass if you think Putin has been killing all those journalists and spies, when he has so many murderous billionaire oligarchs working full time to discredit him. Yes, if I were Putin, I'd have rounded them up, locked them all in the slammer and thrown away the key. Putin only told them they could keep their filthy lucre so long as they NEVER interfered in politics in any way. A distinctly anti-fascist move, designed to get the most for the Russian economy while protecting it from further depredation by billionaire crime bosses. He has been as good as his word. He leaves them alone, but the moment they start trying to take over media organs and political movements, kabam, they're locked up. Much more difficult and dangerous than my way, but probably better for the people of Russia, given all the givens.

I don't know Putin's soul—haven't Dubya's powers of insight, I guess—but I want you to quit solidifying around all the bullshit propaganda you've been fed, and hysterical raving and finger pointing by people more avid to lap that up than even you are. If you have seen nothing else by visiting this blog, you have to have started putting it together that our minds have been being controlled for our whole lives, that our time in school was about planting all the basic misrepresentations upon which to perpetuate our exploitation.

We have no viable basis for dissing Putin or Russia, while Putin and Russia have a multitude of bases for dissing us.

And I've given up on the Wikileaks controversies because they have now muddied it all so hopelessly that it doesn't bear comment anymore, that it's actually wrong to comment on it at all now... even though, obviously, others don't see it that way.

So, viva Wikileaks.

If you listen to McGovern droning, here, all the way through, he seems to be making a pretty good case that the danger of Israel attacking Iran any day now is high....

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For your entertainment...

I just went out to inspect my garden, pluck bits of tree duff from the Scottish moss, see if I oughta water, scrutinize the daisy scene, ignore for once the weeds, that sort of thing... and my neighbor yelled out her window that she thought I ought to write a book and call it The Barefoot Contessa. I told her I thought that had already been done. She says a sequel would be just the thing.

Sigh.

I should have asked to speak with her husband, just to goose her....

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For your convenience...

I've noticed people coming in from various social media sites and so I got over myself enough to make it easier for you to share this stuff when you are inclined. Find now itty little unobtrusive buttons under posts toward this end. I still don't approve of your participation on those harbingers of doom, but I do in fact want your life to be easier.

I tried doing it with this cool gizzy that floats along at the bottom of your screen and might even have used it, despite its search function being Google, except that it put a big blot on whatever image was on the screen, instructing you to click it to share it. I'd thought merely clicking in the floating toolbar gizzy would suffice, but... noooooo. So I yanked that puppy, pending some ability to make it stop being so obnoxious. [Got rid of the obnoxious part the very next day.] [It's a damn Israeli company and I can't do that.]

Having thus put myself on the precipice of a headache, I will now engage in my coffee thing and chill.

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For my aggravation...

Not having my medicine coffee yet, I just noticed that now Blogger has put stats on my dashboard... on top of the whole comments and spam malarkey.... No sooner do I nix Google Analytics for being Google Analytics on TOP of not being accurate, which none of them are, none—let me repeat—none of them are accurate, and not very edifying at all, being mostly geared toward people wishing to gauge themselves against targets they set for themselves, or some such twaddle, than they decide to put their bullshit stats on my dashboard!

What is this?

The Perils of Pauline?

Crikey.

Anyway, I think Blogger must be feeling the pain from too many moving over to WordPress, because they are trying to make this have all the functions of WordPress blogs. I'd've moved to WordPress if they'd let me have my goddam template. They would if I pay, and they would if I wanna use their software on my own site, which involves paying too. So I guess Blogger/Google is trying to prevent more defections or something. They could probably recoup a lot of popularity simply by returning to conformance with their old motto; to wit: DON'T BE EVIL. But that, I guess, would be too much like altruistic or something, and fascists aren't having ANY o' dat.

Right. Coffee.

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For Edna's edification...

Someone by the name of Edna, I hope not my aunt, wants to know how I can be so assertive about stats being inaccurate. I know because I have had friends who were obsessed with stats and popularity ratings on certain ratings services. I have NOT been able to hang with that stuff, even as I have tried to be a good neighbor, a good Netizen, and do what I can to help, with links and joining services, the works. I tried to go along peacefully with that stuff, but then I started noticing wild anomalies, which put me in mind to try out the various and sundry popularity enhancing tools and stats services and ratings systems... all that shit... and see if I could find some measure of uniformity, or even a trend toward yielding up a viable notion when combining them all in some abstract formula. Zip. Bubkes. No dice. The places purporting to keep track of who's linking to you miss shitloads of them. The places purporting to rate your popularity miss shitloads of them AND adopt some completely inscrutable formula for deciding your popularity rating, and, sure enough, your rating goes up and down, sometimes by hundreds of points, with NO correlation to any other measuring device extant. At whim. Not any of the services that count your visitors, at least none of the free ones, agree on Thing One. They can diverge from hundreds of hits to thousands of hits, according to cosmic alignments only.

I then took each in turn and did everything I could to test the patency of their information. Not only could I not make them count or reflect any of these testing maneuvers with any reliability, but as though by karma, things would happen, accidental discoveries be made, that showed it was NOT just me. It was happening to everyone. And systems you felt you could contribute to in order to boost someone or some post you admired, could be and WERE being GAMED by maniacs, to actually make it more harmful to speak up for some truth teller or other than to just nut up. It seems that if you insist on these things, the best way is to just pick one and tell yourself to believe that, which I, of course, do NOT endorse, delusion being very low on my totem pole. I kept ONE of the stats services because OCCASIONALLY it lets me identify an asshole... which I am happy to report is not necessary very often.

Maybe paid services are more reliable. Probably not.

I'm sure it's all new and improved from the satanic games at Digg and Reddit over at MyBook and TwitFace and SpaceBuzz, for whatever other failings I'm certain inhere, but I'm crazy enough, thank you. You are welcome to go there, and now you can even go some of there from here, but that's as far as I can go.

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For my entertainment...

I rented "Brooklyn's Finest" since Richard Gere is in it; "The City of Your Final Destination" because I have to find out; and "Date Night" because that Carell guy is so pleasantly putzy. I need a rest from my doctoral blitz. That stuff Farrell was talking about last night fried my circuits. I gotta slow up to get all my wires back in order.

I may even put some brandy in my evening blueberry thing.

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For your information...

Date Night was a dud, with some very, very funny spots in it. Steve Carell is so entertaining, but I was disappointed by pretty much all the rest of it.

Brooklyn's Finest was sad and horrible and Richard Gere was the very least engaging of anyone in it. That was hard to bear. He just wasn't convincing at all... or rather... went sooooo far into the empty shell he was playing that he was just, well... completely empty. Don Cheadle and Ethan Hawke were riveting... even though the plot lines and situations were outright horrifying. The movie really slammed the living shit out of upper level law enforcement, and placed the cops down here with us human refuse. Still, I don't think it excuses them. I won't think it until they start realizing who they are and who we are... and pick the right side.

The City of Your Final Destination was mostly a day dream, a dream of love and gorgeous loneliness. They had to throw in a bit about the parents who had to flee the Nazis, the parents who didn't feel safe anywhere, just had to elevate the suffering of the chosen while it went about making us dream. Great acting, mostly, and gorgeous setting, but I really hated having to be jarred awake at the end.

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