Category Archives: News

If You Own a Mac, Expect to be Spammed by Companies Who Claim to Fix Viruses

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I’ve just started to receive “virus protection” emails from less than legitimate companies that never could sell their business to PC users in the past. I guess they figure that Mac people are stupid because they’ve never had to use virus protection in the past. So, they’re spamming the crap out of us, convinced that we’re all morons who have never seen the inside of a computer before.

I kind of knew this was going to happen, but I really wish companies like this wouldn’t prey on people all of the time. Yes, I own a Mac. But I’m also a pc technician who doesn’t need a SINGLE FREAKING BIT OF ASSISTANCE FROM STUPID COMPANIES THAT CAN’T SELL THEIR PRODUCTS TO PC PEOPLE SO THEY THINK THEY’VE FOUND A NEW MARKET.

Here’s the moral of the story: Mac people have had it good because virus makers made their crap for PCs BECAUSE more people were using PCs than Macs. Now, the number of people using Macs has increased (not because they’re better than PCs but) because there are more people using computers today than there were 20 years ago. That’s really the only difference.

What this means is that people who make Macs will have to be a little more diligent in solutions. If not, people will stop buying Macs. It’s simple as that. Software solutions in the name of stupid companies that made crappy products for PCs aren’t going to somehow make a mint on “stupid” Mac users. They’re going to lose money in that market, too.

Just saying.

Mainstream Smut & the Future of Cooperation Between Legacy Publishers and E-Books

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There’s a book story that’s been making the rounds lately. It’s a book called Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James (a pseudonym). It started out as an ebook and then went through a huge bidding war before it was bought by a major publishing house. It’s been compared to the Harry Potter series and the Hunger Games series, which is why the big bidding war took place. But the history of this book is a little, well, um, interesting.

You see, the book isn’t a young adult book. It’s an adult book. A very adult book. It’s basically a book about bondage and discipline, where a young woman gets drawn into a world where some dominant guy becomes her master. Most of the time, a book like this ends up being marginalized and sold as ebook smut. Such a book is very, very difficult to sell mainstream.

Yet, it happened. It became that “book” that adults bought (most often the demographic of housewives, which is another story itself) but didn’t really reveal they were reading. Now, the big publishing companies AND movie companies, see this as the next big thing and are looking to market it because of its success as an ebook.

Well, that’s going to be interesting, to say the least. You see, the book did really well because it was an ebook. Think about that for a second. When you buy an ebook, you can read it in public, and almost no one has a clue what you’re reading. But bring a book onto the train (an actual book) and everyone knows what you’re reading. That’s going to make it really difficult to get people to want to read this book in public. That’s going to kill a lot of chances of selling it to the mainstream public because it’s going to be the equivalent of reading erotica in public. Good luck on that one.

Yet, the publishing industry it’s got the next Twilight on its hands.

What this is actually showing me is that the Legacy Publishers (the ones who still print books and then ebooks as an afterthought) are starting to realize that ebooks are a viable market that might slowly overcome the old style market. Yet, I don’t think they understand the nuances involved in ebooks versus mainstream books.

I’ll let you in on a little secret: I also have an adult book out there somewhere being sold as an ebook. It’s written under a completely different name, mainly because I chose a long time ago to distance my writing name from that other stuff. It’s not that I’m not proud of the other novel, or even ashamed of it. I just realized that for simple, rational (and sometimes irrational) reasons, people are often more comfortable separating the two names for the types of books that are published under those names. Throughout history, mainstream writers have done this as a precaution to keep the two camps of readers apart.

An example: Some years back, there was a series of books written by John Norman (the pseudonym of John Frederick Lange, Jr.) about a mythical land called Gor. It was one of those series that had a huge following, basically taking a complete life of its own. The premise of it centered around a civilization of highly structured slavery. This series has spawned into a lifestyle culture of people who partake in the culture of living a Gorean lifestyle, which generally revolves around a strong master/slave society. Sometimes the genders are mixed (as in sometimes its female controlled, but most often it tends to gravitate towards a male dominant household). Anyway, because the ideas of his novels were so against the mainstream thought, Norman remained the header on all of these stories and Lange made every effort to keep his secret identity. During the 1970s, as the series was at its zenith, a woman I knew named Laura figured out who the author was, including where he was teaching and confronted him directly about it. For years, he protested his involvement but then eventually he gave in, realizing that secret was quickly catching up with him. Today, pretty much everyone who has ever read these books knows exactly who was the author. Fortunately for him, he was already so famous as a writer that it didn’t actually affect his teaching career.

The same kind of thing happened when vampire-story writer Anne Rice was revealed to be writing under a number of names that published books on male and female lifestyle slavery. Because she was already so famous as a novelist, these revelations didn’t hurt her career, and then soon after her identity was discovered, she started writing religious fiction, and her career has really never returned to the power career it once was.

What is interesting to note about all of these cases is that the stories themselves never really became mainstream. Even Rice’s book, Exit to Eden, which became a major motion picture some years ago starring Dan Ackroyd and Rosie Odonnell, never really became the hot seller as a mainstream novel. And the reason is simple: It was perceived by mainstream America as smut. Which is sad because it’s a brilliantly written novel (and a horrible movie adaptation that has absolutely nothing to do with the plot of the book).

So, as this “new” series moves into mainstream writing, I’m wondering how it is going to do in that realm. All attempts to bring S&M into mainstream have never succeeded. Madonna tried to do it for years, and every time she did, she continued to remain famous, but those attempts (including a picture book, several songs and videos and even a major motion picture) continue to remain obscure in her collection of mainstream releases. Recently, even Rihanna tried to present such material to a mass audience, and she was criticized for responding badly to her scandal of how she had been beaten by her boyfriend (which makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, as her adventures in that realm only served to be used as continued criticism…making some kind of weird connection to PTSD from being beaten by Chris Brown as her motivation behind why she’d do a move into S&M music video…yeah, the argument didn’t make a lot of sense to me either at the time).

The upshot of the whole thing is that no matter how hard people try, fringe sexual activity is rarely ever going to be seen as acceptable by sex-obsessed Americans who pretend to be shocked when they secretly covet all sorts of different sexual material. It’s like a politician who screams “sinner” at random strangers while having an affair with another woman to hide his predilection for having sex with children. America has never really made a lot of sense.

But expect to see a lot of shocked faces when people start to realize what they actually bought into now that everyone has jumped on the popularity of a bdsm book that publishers are convinced is ready for the mass public. I think they’re ready, but I’m pretty sure I’m wrong.

The World Moves on Without Me

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Years ago, I was working in military intelligence, and the training exercise was something you’d see on any episode of “24” or any other television show that pretends to understand what intelligence people do. Basically, we’d receive all sorts of intelligence information from sources, news, and wherever, and then based on an assessment of the map, we’d make recommendations about what needs to be done in order to counter the “threat”. It was a period of 24 hours we were dealing with (shortened for our exercise), but what kept annoying me was that no matter how many “brilliant” suggestions we made, the scenario wasn’t designed to actually implement any of our suggestions. So, if Dictator A was waging some kind of guerilla campaign, his actions would have sanctions based on any of the recommendations we made. In other words, it was all scripted out ahead of time, so no matter what impact we tried to make, we wouldn’t actually make a difference. The exercise serves two purposes: One, you learn to react quickly to a changing scenario, and (possibly unplanned by the designers) second, you learn that quite often intelligence people have all the information but no one bothers to listen to them.

Now, this could go on into a diatribe about intelligence and how no one pays attention to it, but that’s a column for another day. Instead, I’d rather deal with something a little closer to home. Having read my little introduction, I would like to put forth that my life is very much that scenario today. Except I’m no longer in intelligence. I’m an average Joe who has zero impact or say so in government whatsoever. And sadly enough, I’m discovering that it’s just as frustrating now as it was when I was supposed to have a voice.

You see, every day I read the news to see what’s going on in the world and in my local community. And every day, huge things happen, but none of them have any ties to me whatsoever. There was a huge protest in Oakland yesterday, where OWS people were arrested because of what they believe in. Police are up in arms (as they usually are), and the city officials are planning to “meet” this disruption with the usual gumption. Me, on the other hand, well, I’m not involved. I don’t live in Oakland, and even if I did, chances are pretty good that I’d be somewhat of an insignificant cog in the wall over there, so what’s it really matter?

Our country is going through huge budget problems. I have lots of ideas I’ve tried to share with people. No one cares. They listen to economists who have continued to prove they know as much as anyone else, and they argue amongst themselves, but the average person with a plan, or a solution, is insignificant. Instead, we’ve been relegated to the ranks of the spoken to rather than those who have a voice.

And that’s been bothering me a lot lately. Unfortunately, other than to complain about it to an audience that doesn’t exist, I really don’t know what to do about it. And I never have. Instead, I seem to live a non-existent life without purpose, doing the same things over and over without any path towards anything greater. The critic can easily say, well go do something, but I’m left in that same quandary of “do what? And why?” I guess that’s the whole attraction of the Occupy Wall Street thing for a lot of people. We’ve been so disenfranchised for so long that at least there you have a voice, even if no one really is listening to you again. For a fleeting moment, you get to yell and scream, and others around you yell and scream as well. But in the end, what do you get out of it, other than arrests by police and ridicule from everyone else?

In the end, you start to realize that the world revolves around some people, and the rest of us just occupy space. It’s like our only purpose is to be consumers of stuff that the revolved around people manage. We exist so they can have good lives, and we pretend that one day we might be one of those people, but secretly we realize we’re probably never going to be.

So, what is the average person supposed to do, other than live a mediocre life that has little to no meaning?

The Alternative to the Run up to War with Iran

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A couple of years back, I remember posting on a number of message boards that I suspected we were being led towards a war with a Middle Eastern country. I pointed out that our intelligence was HORRIBLE in that area of the world, and that most of our evidence and analysis came from people who were hearing everything second hand from other people who had an actual stake in causing problems between our countries. And then there was a whole bunch of “evidence” presented that I indicated only proved that there were buildings that looked like they had stuff in them, but we didn’t know what was in them, although we were being told weapons of mass destruction were in them because trucks drove up to them. Even Colin Powell stood in front of the UN and told everyone that there were definitely weapons of mass destruction because he had a Powerpoint presentation, which obviously had to be true because Powerpoint has never resulted in incorrect information being relayed to viewers. Anyway, people told me I was full of crap, while the other half of the people told me to shut up. And then shortly after, we went to war. With Iraq. But saying, “I told you so” is so deflating after the country has gone to war, so let’s just say that I commiserated with everyone else, once they stopped celebrating that we were at war and realized that we were, in fact, at war.

Well, it’s kind of happening again. Although people will probably say that they don’t see it. And others will probably tell me to shut up. But I see the exact same signs happening again, in that we’re leading towards a war with Iran because they’re some evil axis of power that does, well, evil things. And they hate us. So, we really will eventually have no choice but to go to war against them and change their evil ways by killing lots of their people, occupying them, teaching them government corruption and then spending the next decade figuring out how to get out of there and leave their new regime to their newly found corrupt ways.

But I wanted to write this to say that we should be concerned because this doesn’t have to happen. Sure, Iran hates us, as they probably should. I mean, we’re all infadels that sleep with our goats, or whatever it is they think we do. Basically, I think it can be narrowed down to the idea that they hate us because we don’t worship out of the same book that they do. Meanwhile, we feel we should invade them and educate them because they don’t worship out of the same book that we do. Of course, our Constitution says we really shouldn’t be discussing that book any way, but we haven’t really read that document in awhile, so we’ve kind of forgotten that. But suffice to say, we’ll probably go to war with them because we don’t understand them any more than they understand us, and neither one of us is really patient enough to sit down and listen to the other long enough to realize that we’ve both really stupid and believe really ridiculous things, which if you think about it is something we actually share in common.

Which is really what we should be focused on: What do we have in common? I’ve been talking about this for years, from my original thesis, Friendship Over Time, which basically means that as cultures start to develop similar customs with each other, they build friendships. And as we create more shared customs, our friendship grows until we have an allied partnership. We’ve seen how this can happen over centuries with nations that once hated each other but are now comrades in arms (and without arms…weapons). People learn to get along because they realize they share too many things in common to want to risk those shared activities. It’s why playing Ping Pong with the Chinese during the Cold War probably kept us from firing missiles at the Chinese during the Cold War. Yeah, it’s a lot less simple than that, but you get the idea.

That’s what we need with Iran right now. Build friendships with the people around them. Find the things they like to do that we like to do and see how we can build off of those shared traits. Think about it. What do we share with the Iranians right now besides a desire to build nuclear weapons? Do we both like to fish? Play soccer? Baseball? Stone virgins for talking to men in public? Or what? Are there activities we COULD share with each other if we found some forum to do so? Granted, we’re probably not going to want to approach each other through religion because those are our failings at friendship. So, we’d look for things we both like to do. If we want to employ State Department people to actually pursue peace, THAT is what they should be looking at, not trying to find some way to negotiate for things that neither side wants to talk about. The ways of peace that existed in the 18th century shouldn’t be the way we pursue peace in the 21st century because somewhere back in the 20th century, we discovered that those methods actually led to nonpeaceful things, like war.

So, as you start to hear the run up for war, I’d like to share with you the basic idea that we do have another way. We just have to be active in trying to pursue it. And honestly, it’s never going to happen from our government because our government is populated by people who have all trained in the same Kool Aid for decades of Cold War failures. Peace can be achieved through the people who aren’t in government. And we already have the vehicle to do it.

It’s called the Internet. We’re already conversing with people in countries that used to hate us. The other day, played World of Warcraft with someone who lives in Vietnam. He speaks English, but he plays on a US server because he wants to know more about America. So, he and I went and beat up demons together. Look. We shared something in common. We both liked casting spells against demons in a game that both of us play. Look how hard that was.

The Internet completely makes this possible if we’re interested in actually using it to do just that. Sure, we can text each other about how outrageous Snookie and The Situation are, or we can start communicating with the people out there who are interested in actually talking.

Or we can let the responsible adults lead us to war and kill them instead. I mean, really. It’s your choice, although history hints at which one you’ll make. So as you suit up to go play soldier in some Middle Eastern country, I’ll be suiting up to go on a quest with my friend from Vietnam. There are demons to kill, and we’re just the guys to do it.

The Demise and Failure of Sears Should Be Taught in Every Business Class in the Future

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A couple of years ago, I was interested in buying a Lifecycle exercise machine, or at least something similar to it. As I was wont to do, I wandered into a Sears store and took a look around. The salesperson met me at the exercise equipment and shortly after I told him what I was seeking, he somehow talked me into a treadmill machine instead. I think the selling point was that they didn’t have to put the treadmill machine together, but the bicycle machine would have required me to assemble it. Moral of the story is that somewhere down the line I ended up with a treadmill machine that ended up becoming a piece of furniture to put stuff on as I never used it more than the one time after I bought it. I would have used a bicycle machine, but a treadmill was a useless investment for me.

But at the time, Sears actually did a pretty good job of delivering the machine to me, and the purchase wasn’t seen as a bad one by me at the time.

Fast-forward a few years, and Sears has become a shadow of its once great self. Years back, every holiday season was seen as special because it usually culminated with the arrival of the infamous Sears catalogue. This was a sought after book that practically everyone in a household wanted to flip through, even if to imagine all of the great things that were offered, even if, like me as a child, you knew you could never afford them. Some years ago, Sears stopped sending out the catalogue for free (and may not even send it out at all, for all I know), which probably should have been the first of many signs that Sears was turning into a company that was nothing like it used to be.

Today, even though a lot of Sears stores exist in most major malls, it ends up being that one big store that people recognize as being there but people generally pass around on their way to the better stores. At some point, Kmart bought Sears (or they bought Kmart, or whatever), but the quality of Sears has been going downhill ever since. In today’s business news, it was reported that Sears has changed its online policy of upselling its warranty service when not requested by customers. This comes from a company that made it a policy to tack on a warranty service to high ticket items bought on its web site, causing customers to buy something they generally never asked for. When a customer reported them to ConsumerWorld.org, their response was that few customers had complained in the past. However, due to the outrageously negative response they have received (the different message boards covering this case have been nothing but a nightmare for Sears and its non-existent customer service), the procedures have completely changed for the future.

If you plan to launch a new refinery business, one of the things you need to consider is keeping the place safe and secure. It is therefore advised to work with experts in fire watch for refinery to address your fire safety needs.

This is not the way a company should be perceived when trying to make its way into the 21st century. The response from former customers (and I emphasize “former”) has been overwhelmingly hostile and negative. Reading the 296 comments on msnbc.com’s response to their article about this story shows a massive onslaught of negativity towards Sears for the way it has changed over the years from a company once touted as the nation’s retailer to one that people are embarrassed to mention in the same sentence as our nation.

What needs to be said is that if there’s another company out there that is attempting to see profit as numbers rather than customer service, their future is exactly what can be expected for a company that is more interested in padding CEO pockets than serving customers. I’m looking at you, Best Buy, which seems to be on the cusp of almost the same type of transformation as it becomes one of the only major electronics retailers left, yet treats customers like Mac users are treated by its genius bar (where Mac products tend to be user friendly until they actually have something go wrong, and not a single tech person at a Mac store has a clue what’s wrong with your computer or tech device because they’re not trained in technical stuff, just responding by scripted dictates). I went to the Geek Squad the other day to ask about having a programmable thermostat installed, and the “geek genius” (or whatever they call themselves) couldn’t figure out how to answer the question because it wasn’t something simple like “do I need virus protection for my computer?”.

Part of the problem of our future in technology is that more people major in business these days than they do in anything dealing with technology, which means that way too many people are interested in separating us from our money without actually being able to do anything to earn that money. Too often, the focus of companies these days is on how to maximize profits, often at the cost of doing business to get profits. Sears recently announced it is fixing its current money woes by shredding staff. Never a good sign. You’ll notice that the Post Office is doing the exact same thing. They’ve announced that they’re going to improve their bottom line by offering less service, slower service and possibly fewer days of being open. It’s almost like the one person they never hired (even though their problem has always been they hire too many people and keep incompetent ones) was someone who sat down and thought, “wait, is that really a way to build business?”

But who am I to say anything? I’m just a customer, and as I’ve already pointed out, companies don’t need me. They just need my money.

Has Dating Turned Into Some Kind of Weird Non-Televised Reality Show?

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There’s a story that’s been making its way across the Inter-tubes published on Business Insider, where a young woman indicates that dating made it possible for her to save a whole lot of money on daily living expenses, like food because men she was dating would pay for her meals. Now, while this sort of story isn’t all that new (women have been using men as potential mates as free meals for a long time now, about as long as commerce and dating has been around), the story makes the point that she did most of this in Manhattan, and she and her roommates specifically used Match.com in order to do it.

Since then, I’ve been reading a whole bunch of different articles on different sites where readers have chimed in, and basically everyone pretty much admits that this is nothing new, and that using various men on dates to get free food and tickets to movies (or the theater) has been a commonality for quite some time. On some of the sites, the commentary gets so crass as to project that certain “benefits” are expected after a certain amount of money spent, or a certain number of dates have been attended. The woman in the article indicates that she only dated men 5 times before dumping them (or moving on), so I’m not exactly sure where that fits into the calculations, but something tells me that that number has a LOT to do with that specific calculation, so I’ll just leave it at that and let you fill in the rest without having to say more.

What I do find intriguing is that dating has gotten into this whole “who pays for what” situation while in 21st century gender politics there has been a huge move towards equality of the sexes. As a commentary example, let me just mention that recently I finished off my schooling in which I did a Ph.d and a couple of MAs, and when I was dating in that pool of individuals, I found it quite intriguing that the women were demanding of equality at all times (whenever discussing rights, politics and academic rigor) but when an actual date occurred, there was an expectation that regardless of education, current state of gender politics or anything else, the guy was still expected to pick up the check for dinner. That included movies, or any other shared experience as well.

Now, keep in mind, when it came to “between friends” that changes a lot as in most cases a guy rarely ever has to shell out any money for a “date” when the “date” is being shared between friends, not two people thinking they are on a romantic date. So that’s a whole different dichotomy completely.

Now, I should also point out that way too often I’ll pick up the check regardless of the mindset of the adventure (be it romantic or friendship), but that’s just me. But what really gets me thinking more than I should is how many women actually walk into such an experience “expecting” certain things paid for. That includes drinks at a bar. I was at a group outing one night not too long ago when a young woman I casually knew sauntered up to where I was sitting and joined me. Within a short bit of time, there was an expectation that I was going to pay for her next drink. And I started to think to myself: “I’m not dating this young woman, nor am I probably ever going to be dating her, yet she has every expectation that the next set of drinks will be paid for by me, just because our genders are different.” At that moment, I was amazed at the brazen expectations people have, based off of ancient customs that have carried over into dynamics where they generally don’t fit any longer.

The whole dating scheme has gotten so that it’s very difficult for someone who is tired of playing a lot of the games that get played in this atmosphere. As one who abhors bars and drunk people, I avoid those places or people who frequent those kinds of places. Therefore, that leaves me with very few choices to find someone, other than venues like Match.com or Okcupid.com. As this article has shown me, and a lot of conversations with others have revealed to me, a lot of the women a guy is likely to find on Match.com or Okcupid.com are going to be very much like the entrepreneur in the original article, who sees any date with me as a chance to save money on her dinner bills. Whenever I go through the rankings of people advertising in my area on Okcupid, I’m left thinking that they’re really not looking for me, but for some weird fantasy of a guy who only exists on episodes of Gossip Girl or as a creature of the night in the Twilight movies. Recently, I found one woman who looked exactly like the down-to-Earth girl I was looking for when I read the last line of her profile, indicating that if the reader of her ad was someone who has EVER played World of Warcraft, she wasn’t interested. As those who know me know I’d be lying to say otherwise, I hid her picture and continued searching for that elusive someone who I began to realize probably didn’t exist.

Which is probably why I don’t date any more. I’d like to say that as a writer, I spend a lot of time alone on purpose, but sometimes it goes a little further than that. Somewhere down the line, I really got tired of the dating atmosphere and probably should have married years ago, but I never found the right person, so I realized at some point that I would have to go through a lot of the wrong people in order to finally find the right person, and just writing that is tiring enough. So, I tend to find solace in writing, reading a newspaper, and maybe a bout of magecrafting in World of Warcraft.

What’s the with all the old guys and child porn these days?

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Am I the only one noticing that way far too many “responsible” adult males are being charged with child porn crimes these days? You can’t seem to go an entire week without a pronouncement of some politician’s career being destroyed by allegations of child porn, some college sports guy running a “charity” that seems to be another word for “access to kis for sex” and now we have some university professor of engineering who allegedly was viewing child porn on his laptop on a plane in first class when he was photographed by another passenger and asked to stop viewing child porn by the stewardess. I’m not even going to comment on the allegations, other than to say, what the hell is wrong with people? Okay, what the hell is ALLEGEDLY wrong with people?

Okay, a long time ago, about the time Socrates was put to death for influencing children, old men seemed to have this thing for little boys, and back then it was one of those not talked about “discretions”. Fortunately, we’ve evolved way beyond that to where using children for your sexual needs is now straight out illegal, and yes, wrong.

Now, I’ll go out on a limb here and say that when it comes to personal mating things, I’m not exactly the poster child for normality, but come on people. Why are grown men thinking it’s okay to go after children? And then when they get caught, after they lawyer themselves up, they act like they weren’t doing anything wrong, almost as if they really want to say “come on, everyone’s doing it, right?” No, everyone’s not doing it, and not too many things freak me out or cause me to think there’s something seriously wrong with our civilization, beyond the usual things that make me think there are serious things wrong with our civilization, but this one just simply continues to evade me for any ability to understand it. And again, I’ve done some pretty bizarre things in my time that would cause a church lady to faint (or pass me her phone number…call me), but there’s one point that should never be crossed by anyone, and that’s the idea of consensuality, and NO, a child has no ability to make a consensual decision, no matter how convoluted your thinking process may be to imagine that such a thing is possible.

I’m sure a psychologist could explain all of this, but I fail to understand how someone can find this appealing in any way. But even worse, I find it hard to believe that someone doing something like this doesn’t realize it’s wrong and still manages to do it without ever seeking some kind of help. If I ever found myself doing something that was hurting others without their consent, I’d be seeking medical assistance immediately. At what point of cognitive dissonance does someone allow himself to think something like this would ever be okay?

All right. My rant is over. I hope I haven’t hurt anyone nonconsensually who ended up reading this. If so, I might have to seek out medical assistance.

Why Sasha Grey, the Porn Star, Isn’t Allowed to Read to Children in School

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In case you missed the ground-breaking story, the former porn star Sasha Grey, was discovered reading to little children at a public school, Emerson Elementary School. She claimed it was for Read Across America Compton, but according to Read Across America, they do not show any record of Sasha Grey ever having any affiliation with that group, or that she was reading for their program. Regardless of any of that trivial stuff, the uproar that came along was that a porn star, or ex-porn star, dared to read literature to little children who might be so impressionable that they’d start up porn careers, or whatever it is that paranoid parents assume is going to happen because of this. Believe me, they’re a lot safer around Sasha Grey than they are any Penn State football coach who might be volunteering to help out. I’m just saying.

But what’s even more interesting is this whole fascination with redemption that Sasha Grey is attempting to go through, and miserably failing. You see, if you’ve ever been a porn star, you’re doomed to be a porn star forever. In the United States, any sex-related career is about as low as you can possibly go, and any attempt to “better” yourself will always end up with some sanctimonious asshole holding that previous career against you because it’s so easy to do in our prudish environment.

Personally, I have zero problem that Sasha Grey used to be a porn star. So, I don’t care if she reads to children, administers mass during Christmas, or continues having sex with blindfolded midgets. However, I can’t speak for the rest of our society that seems to have problems with anything involving sex, even when serious incidents of hypocrisy are screaming in our face.

The real problem for me is that Sasha Grey is attempting to capitalize on her fame as a porn star and turn it into fame as a mainstream star without suffering any of the backlash for tying her fame to a questionable past. If she wants fame in our society, a society that frowns upon porn activity, then it’s really hard to cry foul when she has done nothing to separate her desire to be famous from her desire to be famous as a porn star. You see, Sasha Grey is most likely not her real name. It’s her “porn” name. If she wants to be seen as mainstream, she needs to completely separate her porn name from the name that she uses as a future star. But she’s not willing to do that because she’s gained a certain amount of notoriety for being a porn star.

The problem is the baggage she brought along with her. And that’s really no one’s fault but her own. While I don’t have a problem with her being a former porn star, I’m not the one she has to convince. She has to convince the rest of mainstream America, which is founded by a bunch of prudes who are two steps away from being a fundamentalist church state. If she wants to make her way as a famous actress, she’s going to have to live with the fact that a lot of people are going to hold her to her past, as long as she’s going to keep using that past to propel herself into a productive future.

And that means facing the fact that the majority of our nation is pretty shitty when it comes to holding people to standards they themselves can never reach, nor would they even try. That’s too bad, but no one actually has the right to be famous and rich. To do that, you have to actually go to the people who allow you to become rich and famous. And they’ve spoken. And what they said amounts to not wanting a porn star reading to little children.

Sure, it’s wrong in so many ways, but when has the path to fame ever been based on right and wrong?

The Ramifications of a Scientific Study That Purports That High IQ is Linked to Drug Use

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There was an article reported today on CNN’s site, discussing a recent scientific study in which high levels of IQ are linked to the propensity to use drugs. Immediately, the people who have responded have started making the usual faulty scientific connections, such as “that proves it! Using drugs leads to a higher IQ!” One responder, named JeffinIL, states specifically, “I never realized I went to high school with so many geniuses.” As usual, someone took the conclusions and then tried to return the conclusions to the hypothesis, essentially trying to create the cause from effect, rather than what the study itself said, that cause led to effect.

Okay, right off the start, I have to make a few comments on faulty reporting, which is leading (and will lead) to bad conclusions.

1. The data was collected in 1970 and just recently analyzed. This is not a RECENT study by any stretch of the imagination, even though the article attempts to make exactly that claim in the second paragraph: “A new British study finds….” 1970 was over 40 years ago. The people studied back then are now reaching latter stages of adulthood, which means that their “habits” and the findings are relevant to a group of people who are now in their 50s and 60s, not children as the study claims to connect.

2. The “high” score for IQ was registered as between 107 and 158. Not really that high when it comes to what people refer to as “high” IQ scores.

3. IQ has never been an acceptable gauge of someone’s actual intelligence. There’s a reason that IQ scores are rarely used anywhere other than in comparison studies in which people try to use them to inflate their attributes. People generally don’t take IQ scores to begin with, and those who do often take them numerous times to try to “game” the system. Other people learn logic skills that help them “beat” the IQ test, and mostly, the scores are considered fringe on the levels of acceptable science.

4. The study makes inferences that may or may not be contributing factors. While the only claim the study makes is that people with higher IQs report higher levels of using drugs in later years, there is no actual connection to drug use AT THE TIME of the IQ test, so there’s no way to know how much more education a person may or may not have had since having an IQ test. Socioeconomic factors were mentioned, but weren’t really discussed at length.

5. The study (and the author of the article) make a lot of guesses as part of the study, indicating that maybe people were “bored”, and thus turned to drugs because their higher IQ put them in a bored state of mind in comparison to other people with lower IQs who might not be as bored because, I guess, they don’t have as much to think about with their lower IQs. I mean, that’s the inference of that statement, but I’m just guessing based on the lack of information contained in the article itself. Seriously, anyone can do that kind of logical exercise, even people with low IQs like me.

The worst part of this study is that the way it is reported means a whole bunch of people are now going to be “armed” with faulty logic as trivial information they store away. When someone is at a party and someone offers him or her cocaine, rather than think, “no, that stuff might be dangerous”, in the back of someone’s mind is going to be the thought, “well, I did read this one study once that told me that people who take drugs are more likely to have higher IQs, so it might actually be to my benefit.”

It doesn’t take a genius to see that one coming.

They’re Trying Really Hard to Discredit the Anti-Wall Street Movement

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I’m really not all that surprised that the people who have the most to fear are doing everything possible to target anyone who has anything to do with the Occupy Wall Street movement. At first, it was an attempt to paint the movement as extreme, something that no one is interested in. Then it became popular, so they had to try other tactics, like attempting to fool listeners into believing OWS was filled with hypocrisy (“OMG! They have Ipads and they’re complaining about big businesses that might make technology stuff!”). That didn’t work because unlike previous movements of the past, the people attracted to the movement aren’t generally stupid. The movement has been appealing to a pretty educated crowd. It’s hard to derail that when those derailing it aren’t that much smarter than the people they hope to discredit.

So, the anti-protest movement, which I define as “people who have an incentive to keep things as the status quo”, is now targeting specific individuals as an attempt to destroy the entire movement. One obvious target has been Michael Moore, who likes to see himself as the everyman complainer, but according to Fox News (not exactly the most objective source, as it was the voice of the Republican Party during the entire Bush Administration), because Michael Moore has an expensive house, he’s really one of the one percenters, rather than one of the many included in the 99%. Here’s where that math doesn’t add up: Yeah, he’s rich, but just because someone is rich does not make them automatically a part of the problem.

Much of Michael Moore’s success has come on the coattails of debunking the myths of the rich, and empowering those without any power. As a result, he has become very wealthy for his actions. That should be seen as a good thing, not something to somehow force his followers to throw him to the wolves. Just because he made a success at pulling the veil back from the hidden excesses doesn’t somehow make him part of the hidden excesses.

The movement is about the fact that there are some really greedy, bad people out there who are trying to pull shell games on the rest of us. For way too long now, corporate entities have cloaked themselves in the shadows while doing all sorts of crappy things to the rest of us, like poison our water supplies, sell us damaged goods, sell wars for profit (not our profit, but theirs only), and allowed the changing of money that served to devalue the work of those who handle the actual work but benefit those who control how the money gets spent. When you have businesses built up with the sole purpose of generating more money from money, there’s seriously something wrong. When scientists are pulled off the assembly line of science and told its a lot more profit to be a businessman instead, there’s seriously something wrong.

There are a lot of pissed off people right now mainly because our education system has been teaching us that the American Way is the best course for the future. But we’re now starting to realize that those who make it rich in this country aren’t the ones who bought into the American Way (work hard and build a great country) but profited off of those who did. The ranks of the 1% should be filled with educators, scientists and innovators, not speculators, bankers, politicians and lawyers. THAT is why so many people are upset.

A lot of those people out on the streets right now are the ones who stood behind Obama when he was running for office in 2008, because his campaign promised a bright, brilliant future. Instead, we got a term of exactly what we had before, No more, no less. Hope and change yielded absolutely nothing but false promises. And the people who put Obama into power are smart enough to realize that no matter who they put into office next (Obama again, or a generic Republican), the promises are still going to be made with the reality that the next four years are going to be exactly what came before.

That’s why people are complaining. And discrediting Michael Moore isn’t going to change that.