Al-Quaeda on the Run in a "More Peaceful World"

Let's revisit the words of the smartest president who ever lived and his equally brilliant VP  over the past 4 years and cast them against the reality of today's event. Surely we will see that all is well in the world and going according to plan.~

•  "[It] could be one of the great achievements of this administration. You're going to see 90,000 American troops come marching home by the end of the summer. You're going to see a stable government in Iraq that is actually moving toward a representative government."  - Joe Biden (Larry King Live - 2010)

• “We focused on the terrorists and Al-Qaeda is on the run.” Barak Obama (2012)

• "The world is less violent than it has ever been. It is healthier than it has ever been. It is more tolerant than it has ever been. It is better fed then it’s ever been. It is more educated than it’s ever been." - Barak Obama (2014)

The Iraqi government is stable in the sense that it is losing ground and crumbling at a nice steady rate.

The president actually could say that the world is a more peaceful place, if by that you mean that as the bad guys are winning they are slaughtering more and more of their "enemies". There is nothing quite so peaceful as piles of dead people. Large numbers of those dead people were poor and ignorant so percentage wise that would mean more of us are now well-fed and better educated. Also, tens of thousands of the dead were Christians, so, by definition, we are now a more tolerant world because everybody knows how intolerant Christians are.~

And he does have a point about Al Quaeda. They are indeed on the run - with an Army straight toward Baghdad. Reminds me of an old Russian saying that was popular during the Communist era famines. "If you want milk, take your pail to the radio." In totalitarian nations, the news reports always paint a rosier picture than what is reality.

We could update that Russian observation for today's America this way.

• "If you want peace, take your palm branches to MSNBC."

"And that's all I've got to say about that."  - Forrest Gump (1994)

© 2014 by Tom King

* I use a new punctuation mark you may have noticed:  .~
 It's called a "snark mark" and is used to indicate sarcasm. I use it to help some of my more critical readers to recognize that I'm not being serious when I say things like "Everybody knows how intolerant Christians are.~"

An Open Letter to Demand Studios

I got a curt e-mail today from Demand Studios, a notorious content marketing company I worked for back when I was trying to get my freelance career off the ground. The pay was abysmal and the pace brutal. It was crap content and I wrote close to 2000 articles for them over a year.  I knew I was being taken advantage of, but it gave me enough to squeak by while writing other things that would eventually pay considerably more.

DS was informing me that the quality of my work forced them to revoke my writing "privileges".  They've been thinning out their writing stable out for some time in favor of writers that produce dull copy without complaint and without arguing with editors. As nearly as I could tell their "editors were mostly 20-something communications majors fresh out of college.  The DS editorial staff was arrogant, irritable and often almost illiterate. They frequently had no idea what they were asking you to write about, but confidently ordered changes that made no sense.

The note came from a no-reply e-mail box and the company offers no way for you to contact them or return a reply. This is also how the communication between writer and editor goes - one way, editor to writer, lord and master to peasant. Therefore, I decided that I'd post an open letter to them in the hopes that some day one of this modern day pulp nonfiction publishers' staff members might read it and know what they think.

Anyway............

________________________________


Dear Demand Studios:

I haven't written for you guys in more than two years. The fact that it's taken this long to get around to flushing me from your author list, says something about your management of the folk who write for you.

I wouldn't write for you guys in any case. Your reasons for removing me are immaterial and more than a little insulting given the hundreds of successful articles I wrote for you. The only rejections I ever had with you were the result of mistakes your editors made in the assignment of topics.

Since leaving DS behind, I've found other outlets to write for. I'm doing independent commercial freelance writing and I'm the top writer with a new company for which I've ghost-written 20 some odd books in the past 18 months. It's actually kind of nice to make a living wage writing copy I can be proud of.

There's no need for the intimidation routine. I get it. You use up writers and toss them aside and feel you need some kind of lame excuse. Writers to DS are a commodity. If that's what you want to do, you are perfectly free to do so. As writers we are perfectly free not to work for you.

It was a learning experience mostly of the sort that you don't wish to ever repeat. I do know what I'll tell any new writer if they ask about DS as a web-publisher.  Good luck with your business model. You'll need it.

Respectfully,

Tom King




© 2014

Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics*: Just Say "NO" on "Equal Access to the Internet"

© The Hacker News

They are doing a survey on SurveyMonkey asking the deceptively simple question "Should everyone have equal access to the Internet?"

Instinctively one wants to answer yes. It all sounds very liberty, equality and fraternity (the motto, by the way, of the French Revolution).

I'm sure that the survey will show Americans overwhelmingly support Internet equality. It is, after all, rigged to do so. Any day now we'll see a headline saying 85% of Americans support Internet Equality. What the survey doesn't say is that, by equal access, the proponents of the legislation behind this survey mean government control over private enterprise on the web. Under this so-called Internet Equality Act, Internet providers could be forced to block large users of bandwidth from paying extra to insure their content is unaffected during peak use time. Streaming video providers and media sites like, oh, I don't know.....Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, PJTV and other pesky conservative media could be seriously damaged through site slowdowns. In addition, denial of service attacks would be much easier to carry off.

What's even more troubliing is that if so-called "Internet Neutrality" laws go through, we would be giving to the FCC the same sort of hunting license this administration is handing the IRS through Obamacare.  We would open the door to government agencies selectively blocking or at the very least slowing down the sites of opposing opinion content providers to unwatchable levels, especially if they are at odds with the current administration, given that the administration runs agencies like the FCC and IRS.

Before you guys on the left start hopping up and down, remember this. It doesn't look too good for you in this upcoming election and if, horror of horrors, a Republican were to get into power with a Republican congress............well, what's sauce for the goose! If you like your Huffington Post, you may not be able to keep your Huffington Post if the next election goes against you.

I said, "NO" to the question on the survey because the strength of the Internet is that it is perhaps the last free enterprise zone in the world save the black market. Let private enterprise handle it. If you don't like the way your provider doles out access to its customers, the solution is simple. Get another one. If I were a leftist, I'd start my own Internet provider and provide preferential access to liberal content providers. I'd probably go broke doing that, but President Obama would probably save me with some nice grants or government contracts like he gave Solyndra. At least I'd be able to retire with a nice fat golden parachute after I went bankrupt.

*"There are lies, damned lies and statistics." - Benjamin Disraeli, British Parliamentarian

© 2014 by Tom King