Peter, Paul & Mary Banned on Facebook?

 

You may not recognize the three folksingers above if you were born after the Bicentennial. They are Peter, Paul & Mary, three left-leaning folk singers who sang Woody Guthrie songs, songs by Gordon Lightfoot, Pete Seeger and even such radicals as John Denver. They were big during the great folk-music scare of the 50s and 60s. These guys waltzed the line between being patriotic Americans and card-carrying communists. I loved their music. Their hearts were in the right place and I could actually play along with their songs as a fledgling guitarist. 

Imagine my shock when the Facebook Gestapo (FBG) took down my post in which I linked to one of their songs on Youtube. They said the post violated "Community Standards" and could pose a danger to the delicate sensibilities of Facebook readers. The song was about playing right field in elementary school. I suppose they thought if you played right field, a baseball might fall on your head and give you a concussion or predispose you to grow up to be a conservative. To be fair, I did play right field and did grow up to be a conservative. Best to avoid such dangerous and patriotic pastimes as baseball, then. And Baseball is undoubtedly a racist and fascist sport.~

After much searching I found the secret "notifications" page where I was "informed" of my violations of "community standards." Below is a list of my posts that the FBG took down over the past year. Apparently, these posts were so egregiously shocking that ordinary members of the Proletariat could not be safely exposed to this material. 

My posts that Facebook has blocked in the past year:

1.  Glen Campbell - Playing the Theme From The Lone Ranger ( aka “The William Tell Overture) on guitar.
2. Steve Martin & Edie Brickell  -  Pretty Little One
3.  The Martins – Out of His Great Love
4. Peter, Paul & Mary – Right Field
5. Mercy Me – Just As I Am
6. The Minions – YMCA 
7. Riders in the Sky – The Cowboy Yodel
8. A picture of me and my daughter singing
9. The Blues Brothers – Theme from Rawhide
10. Jill Paquette – Sometimes Yes and Sometimes No
11. Burl Ives – Will There Be Any Stars in My Crown
12. Kathy Ryan – The Coal Quay Market Song
13. Wendy Francisco – God & Dog
14. Steve Goodman – The City of New Orleans (he wrote it)
15. Connie Dover – Where Shall I Go (cowboy folk song)
16. Anthem Lights – My Jesus I Love Thee
17. John Fogarty – Center Field
18. Lizzy Hoyt – V’la L’bon Vent (French voyageur folk song 150 years old or so)
19. Clip from Junebug – I Surrender All
20. Picture of Hillary Clinton on the phone calling the suicide hotline to place an order (ironically when I demanded a review on the grounds that it was satire, they reposted it, and I’m sure the fact checker on that one isn’t working for the FBG anymore, probably doing time in whatever passes for Progressive Siberia).
    

I noticed in going down the list that the FBG not only blocked the song "Right Field", they also blocked John Fogarty's "Center Field". Apparently the snowflakes working for the Book of Face, believe the game of baseball must only have left fielders. 

It would be interesting to watch them play a team with only left-handed batters. What with no one in right or center to field the barrage of hits sent into that part of the outfield by left-handed batters, the final score would be all kind of lop-sided. My bet is that the League of Communist Athletes would have the all-lefty team canceled.

It must be confusing to live in that headspace.

© 2023 by Tom King

21.   

 

 

 

Almost Free at Last, Master Mark!

 

My April 25 two week Facebook account restriction is supposed to end today - one month later. I think they may have gone back to February and added 2 weeks for the Hillary Clinton meme where she was calling the suicide hotline to place an order. The most recent post was about a guy who went on a school campus with bolt cutters and stole a child's bicycle - a dirty rotten thing to do by most societal standards. 

This February post got me in trouble.

Since the dissolution of CHAZ/CHOP in Seattle, we've had an epidemic of this that (accidentally if you listen to the FB fact checkers) correlates with the mass migration from Seattle by shopkeepers, the elderly and other victims of chronic predatory criminals. It seems the chaos and rampant crime that has plagued Seattle is leaking out into the nearby towns to which Seattle refugees have escaped. In my town, developers are rapidly building condos and apartment buildings for senior especially, to capture the flood of refugees with a glut of empty apartments freshly constructed. Many of these are specifically for seniors - Millenials and post-Millenials (whatever they are calling themselves) are excluded from these apartment complexes for obvious reasons, the penchant for loud late night parties, orgies, pooping in the pool and drug trafficking being just some of the reasons they don't want that kind in their "serene senior communities."  

Meanwhile in Seattle there are so many moving out leaving behind nearly abandoned senior housing complexes and empty apartments, that the progressive city council is thinking of installing their homeless drug addicts and mental patients in those empty apartments. The folks still living in those apartments, of course, are thrilled with the idea of having people used to living in the local tent cities as next door neighbors, leading I'm pretty sure to more episodes of 'Escape from New Seattle'.~ (note this punctuation mark .~ is called a snark mark and indicates sarcasm for those readers from Rio Linda who may miss it).~  

Anyway, I originally wrote this as a Facebook post, but decided that it would be safer to post it as a blog post with an innocuous headline that the vapid fact checkers of Facebook might miss. Anyway, the whole thing is ridiculous, but that's our leftist brothers and sisters who seem to be vying to see who can be the most ridiculous. This used to be called propaganda; now it's called marketing. It used to be called lying; now it's called "fighting disinformation."  

Gotta love them, they tell us.~ Yeah, right! © 2022 by Tom King

When the Physiognomy Publication Strikes.

 

Apparently, being "account restricted" means Facebook moves all your posts further down the newsfeed when published. They do this because their surveys indicate that people only look at the first few posts on their newsfeed and ignore anything further down. This is shadow-banning by definition and they do it for the most ridiculously trivial stuff - by and large any conservative jab that hits too close to home. This avoids outright blocking of accounts. I got in trouble for the meme about Hillary calling the suicide hotline to place an order.

This one got me "restricted".

The big 4 have seen what's happened to Twitter for doing censorship too obviously. Americans have a thing about being told they have to shut up because some elitist said they have to. Assigning "Account Restricted" status to troublesome members allows them to restrict people from seeing your post without setting up too much of a fuss. Twitter did get carried away with their own "power" when they banned a sitting president from their platform. Oops! That got them on the receiving end of a hostile takeover, triggering mass professional career suicides among their staff and weeping and wailing such as has not been seen since Donald Trump beat Hillary in 2016 despite the smart people's attempts at propagandizing the masses against the evil "Orange Man."

 

I just saw a meme that got a friend's account restricted for months. It was a picture of an "elephant in the room" with writing on its side that observed that the predicted massive death toll of the those who have been disobedient to a certain very visible high paid medical professional's orders, had yet to happen. All that to safely say Dr. Fauci on the book of Face without drawing the attention of nosy censors. Fewer words were used in the meme as you can see, but those words apparently flagged the Facebook Gestapo every time the meme appeared. The meme has been thoroughly eradicated from the net. Can't find it on several search engines or on any of the major social media platforms.

 

Though the meme may or may not be true, it has been and is being scrubbed. Even the email my friend sent me with the meme attached has disappeared from my gmail account AND to my shock, from my hard drive. The actual stats on vaxed vs unvaxed deaths vary from place to place and study to study. Early results in the UK had an almost 2 to 1 death toll among the vaccinated over the unvaxed. The uncomfortable thing for mandate fans is that, there has, in fact, been no mass extinction of the not yet and maybe never be v@#$%^&*ed. This is something that apparently must not and cannot be said on the book of Face. Because it is a debatable statement, but one which FB cannot allow to be said, it must be banned. Because it contradicts the imparted wisdom of the government, it seems the "account restricted designation has been useful to quietly "handle" such heresies by shadow-banning any discussion of the issue.  I almost didn't notice the little red flag telling me my account was restricted. Fortunately, I'm on 9 different social media platforms, so I'm not totally shadow banned.

This blog was originally a Facebook post (or should I say, "Physiognomy Publication post?"). I'm hoping I've avoided algorithm key words in my original Physiognomy Publication post that would alert and trigger the Physiognomy Publication's secret police. 

 

But just in case, I'm copying this to my weblog here and posting it with a hopefully innocuous title on any social media I have access to. Wish me luck, guys. If I get busted, I plan to play the victim card as a person of color. White is, after all, a color. In fact, white is actually a combination of all colors. Ironically true black reflects no colors at all. Technically it's colorless. That innocent observation would definitely get me banned on Physiognomy Publication. In the summertime though, I tend to be a bit swarthy when I'm out in the sun a lot. I'm also part native American (at least more native American than Elizabeth Warren anyway). Some of my Native American ancestors have entries on Wikipedia. I guess that means I'm oppressed.*

Please borrow and share this all you want. No charge. Ignore the copyright notice. That's just legal nonsense.

© 2022 by Tom King

 * And I don't care what color you are, I love you all. The human race is my favorite race. I plan to run it till I one day flop face first dead in my morning corn flakes.

Sins of the Brethren - Lies, Guilt, and Manipulation, Oh My!

I called out a fellow conservative yesterday, who posted one of those catalogs of conservative grievances and ended it by saying, "I am betting most of my friends don't have any guts, that's why so few actually read or respond to my Posts..." Poor baby. Nobody reads his posts. Boo hoo.

I pointed out that doing such things is using the same tactics the unearned moral superiority gang does to herd their own sheep and is little more than verbal bullying. If I don't glut my friends' timelines, message boxes and emails with their crap, the I don't love Jesus, I have no guts, or I'm a traitor to all that's good and holy.

When I pointed out the problem with this tactic, I got the following responses:

•  Bully you? How much of a sissy are you?
•  Someone must feel his manhood is threatened if this bullied him. Geezus!
•  I think you need to get a grip and stop acting like a baby.

I've heard this before from toadies in junior high trying to glean a pat on the head from the local bully. The deal is who feels threatened here - me who refused to be guilted into passing along something even though there is some misinformation in it or the folks who passed it on because they were told they had to in order to have "the guts".  Then, like good little toadies, they go after me for telling the truth about the manipulative crap at the end of this post.

I get tons of this stuff from people saying all sorts of inflammatory things who lay a little guilt on all of us if we don't bow to their wishes and pass this stuff on.

"I know who will share..."

"Pass this along if you love Jesus."

"Who is not ashamed of Jesus?"

"Who has the guts to pass this on."

"If you are my true friend....."

"Only true patriots will share this with 20 friends..."

Sound familiar? My manhood is not threatened at all. While the same folks who tolerated bullies and the cool kids and went along with whatever crap they were serving up back in high school are cutting and pasting, holding down their fingers and filling up their friends' emails and timelines with this softcore bullying so some twerp living in his mother's basement can brag about how many hits he got from his latest post, I'm just saying no and once in a great while instead of hitting delete, I warn people that this kind of stuff is what gave us a generation of mind-numbed snowflakes willing to swallow any sort of virtue signaling that social media and a corrupt Marxist education system ladles into their heads. Conservatives are supposed to be better than this.

There is, sadly, a fear-based far right element of conservatism that is every bit about controlling the schlubs as anything Antifa and BLM put out. They fear conservatives who think for themselves and are constantly searching for ways to take our minds off of what we need to do to save our nation. Instead they focus on generating blind rage against "the other guys."

We need to be building bridges instead of blowing them up. We won the presidency last time by speaking to that part of the center that wants to hear the truth. Trump even got to that part of the electorate that just wants to feel they are on the winning side or that someone understands their fear and is going to have their back. Trump did that remarkably well to the dismay of the left.  We can't rest there, however, until by reason we help those feeling-based voters see how their positions are reasonable and intelligent and teach them how to defend themselves against the herd. If we do that we free them from the influence of the herd and give them the courage of their convictions to stand alone. 

Using manipulation, fear of not belonging, and well-meaning lies to get people to do what we want makes us no better than the liars behind the progressive movement. All it does is convert them from one kind of herd beast to another. So let's stop using this tactic. The president is out there busting up the DC China shop. That's what we hired him for. What he needs behind him is a calm, cool-headed rational army with their passions engaged, but fully engaged in the service of reason and purpose.

Just saying.

Tom King

 

A New Twist on the Facebook Con

And now we have a new modern twist on the Miss Lonelyhearts con, using low tech, easily learned skills and Facebook.  The trick works like this.

1. The con artist (male or female) creates a brand new new Facebook account.  The con selects a person with a Facebook account who looks the part they wish to play. Usually they pick some mature looking guy in uniform if they are going after women. If they are going after men, it will be some busty young woman.
2. The con artist makes up a name that is similar to the person whose account is being cloned. Then the con person steals candid photos from the target person's photo album and posts the pictures as their own. 
3. Once the account is set up, the con artist friends a person who does a lot of cutting and pasting and other things that require extra steps. They particularly go after people who pass along posts that they have been bullied or made to feel guilty for not posting. These they mark as easy targets or "marks".

They particularly like playing older military guys, contractors particularly in the oil business or pilots when going after women. They like to play successful attract women when going after older men (the sort with disposable income).  

This kind of fake account is most effectively used to roll widows and lonely-hearted women and widowed or shy men. Inevitably the con artist flatters them and portray themselves as well off potential romantic partners. Then one day the con tells them they are stuck somewhere without a credit card and they ask the mark to wire them money, promising to pay them back when some money gets transferred to their account until they get their replacement credit card. 

When they get the money they disappear.  That's why they need a fake account. They disappear once they get the money. They need to steal your pictures so they look authentic with lots of friendly pictures. Most of the time they don't choose any pictures with a spouse. If they do, they tell the target that their spouse has recently died and they are so terribly lonely.

If you do get approached by one of these people, watch for these signs:

1. They will be overly familiar, calling you pet names and telling you how handsome or beautiful you are.
2. They will seek to become more intimate relatively quickly.
3. They will tell you how well off they are and how much money they make. It will be rather a lot.
4. They will tell you how much you mean to them and ask you for small favors at first.
5. They will offer to give you money or some kind of help.
6. THEN they will ask for money from you.

These people are truly despicable. Don't let them in. Be wise as serpents and gentle as doves.

© 2017 by Tom King

Mark Zuckerberg and The End the World

What are the odds that Facebook will

bring about the Zombie Apocalypse?

(c) 2012 by Tom King

I love all the pundits that are busily predicting the end of Facebook with a note of sadistic glee in their word processors. Yeah, the IPO didn’t go as well as everyone hoped (presumably including the inimitable Mr. Zuckerberg). So what? Why should Facebook’s hiccups make so many intellectual snooty persons happy?

I think it’s all the ordinary raggedy humans on Facebook that bug them - all those ignorant masses trolling around on Facebook telling their friends all about themselves. Here we have a publishing engine that allows people to present themselves in a deceptively attractive online format, their ruminations completely unedited and uncensored. And all these untrammeled thoughts and ideas, pictures and art just flow through Facebook’s pipes like either some sort of gigantic sewer system or like the vascular system of some amazingly vast unpredictable fun beast.

Which you see it as, rather depends on whether you are a regular raggedy human being or one of the legions of self-appointed arbiters of taste and culture who think that information flowing to and from “the masses” ought to pass through them to be cleaned up and made presentable first.

One good professor argued recently that Facebook and its social media compatriots, the smart phone, laptops, tablets, podcasts and eBooks threaten to make us all narcissistic slaves to cultural group think. He joins a tiresome procession of pundits who have predicted the end of civilization as we know it if some technology or other becomes widely adopted.

The telephone was supposed to make us slaves. And for a time, it did keep us hopping to answer the thing every time it rang. So, we invented the answering machine and voice mail so we didn’t have to get up from our movie or our book or our supper to answer its jangly summons. Email was supposed to chain us to our computers answering a vast flood of trivial communications. We invented the spam filter and learned to block obnoxious communicants the way we learned to throw out junk mail without reading it.

Now Facebook has changed our concept of friendship. Not to worry. Facebook and other social media have only freed us from geographical proximity as the end/all be/all basis of friendship. Facebook and its ilk have, instead, replaced geographic proximity as the primary determiner of friendships with social proximity through electronic connections. Facebook became as an expander of human relationships. With it and the modern array of tele-communications tools available, it is more than ever the kinship of ideas, beliefs and interests that form the basis for friendships. We may have 1200 Facebook friends, but we still effectively communicate within only a relatively small circle of active friendships.

We are no more slaves to the temptation to narcissism and groupthink than we ever were. Used to be we all accepted what the newspapers told us about the world. Later it was two or three radio networks, then pretty much it was Walter Cronkite on the six o’clock news. Now, you can find both sides of any story if you don't mind cruising around the cable news networks. You can even subscribe to a plethora of newsfeeds that send the news of the day in all its conflicting forms directly to your cell phone.

All this technology has NOT led to a melding of the minds or robot people with no will of their own. Au' contraire. The explosion in communication technology, far from drawing us all together, has confirmed us in our differences. Arguably better communication with our peers has led to near anarchy in places like the Middle East and to a looming civil war between the right and left in our own country. It’s not the smart phones that will destroy us. The technology itself is benign. If the world rings down to an end it will be because we surrender ourselves to the same old impulse to greed, lust and power that’s haunted the human race since time immemorial. It wasn’t cell phones that started the Crusades, the Holocaust, The Cultural “Revolution” or the Inquisition. If anything, improvements in communications technology have dragged such nastiness out from under its rock and killed it with light.

Let’s face it. Most of us realize our hundreds of "friends" on Facebook are just a network of acquaintances with no more influence over us than mere acquaintances ever have. Our circle of true friends still remains rather small - limited almost entirely by our inability to cope with more than a finite number of close relationships anyway. It's just that some of our new "friends" live halfway round the world. Thanks to social media, we are free to choose our friends these days unbound by the constraints of geography.

I think I’ll Skype my buddy, Martin, in Poland this weekend.

How cool is that?

Tom King
Puyallup, Washington
Now you know someone you can worry about if you ever hear that Mt. Ranier has blown up.