Send in the Scoops!

In the dystopian world of Soylent Green, protesters and rioters are scooped up by garbage trucks.

The protest and rioting thing has gotten out of hand.  Yes, we get it, some injustices have been done - some moreso than others, of course.   But not every person ever killed by a police officer was killed unjustly, and in some cases, the facts are murky and it isn't clear whether deadly force was justified.  In other cases, it is little more than murder.   However, this doesn't mean that deadly force is never justified, and we are finding out the hard way that when you say "fuck the police!" that the criminal element takes over.   Crime rates are soaring in this country - jails are releasing prisoners because of Covid, and many arrested are merely given appearance tickets.  The movement to "abolish bail"is gaining steam, and people let go prior to trial are often caught doing the same crimes - or worse - again and again.   Word is out on the street - do the crime, you do no time, and the police are too afraid of a lawsuit or bad press to do anything.

This is how Trump might get re-elected.

The problem with these protests is that they have no strong national leader and what's more, a lot of people are piling on - just showing up to cause trouble and smash things.   Oddly enough, although the issue stated is "Black Lives Matter" many of the troublemakers are young white people, often college-educated or in college.   Hey, white folks have stolen and monetized every other aspect of black culture (I'm looking at you, Marshall Mathers!) why not steal the protests and injustice as well?  WOKE LIVES MATTER!

So why are these protests going on for week after week?   I think there are a number of reasons:

1.  College is out:   School is out for the summer, and young people can't find summer jobs.  Under normal circumstances, if someone said "Hey, let's drove 200 miles to a riot!" their friends would say, "Well, sounds like fun, but I have an exam tomorrow" or "I'd love to go, but I have to work!"   Lots of kids with nothing to do equals trouble, in any culture, in any era. 

2.  The Consequences of Woke Culture:  College professors have been indoctrinating our young people for years with ever greater sorts of communist nonsense.  My elder siblings came home from college in the 1960's spouting all sorts of Marxist bullshit and touting Chairman Mao's "little red book" - and actually reading from it!   They talked loud and long about the rights of the "workers" or the plight of soldiers in Vietnam, but of course, never worked a day in a factory and thanks to college deferments, were at no risk from actually serving in Vietnam. 

Today, we see the same pattern, except that young white and privileged college youth have latched onto current causes which don't affect them personally.  These kids have a lot of theories about what it is like to be black, but of course, no experience.  But hey, they have a black friend in college! Well, they know a guy, anyway.  He was in their Chemistry class.   Only a few rows away!

All this nonsense about cultural appropriation and micro-aggressions has come home to roost.  The professors who push this nonsense have convinced an entire generation of privileged youth that they are aggrieved - if not because of these various social issues (which largely don't affect them, as they are indeed privileged) then because of the student loan debt they took on voluntarily. 

It doesn't help any that the media amplifies this, such as a recent Washington Post article claiming that millenials are "the unluckiest generation in US History!"   All those soldiers who died in the Civil War trying to abolish slavery - they were lucky! Those lucky bastards during the depression!   The dead at Anzio - dumb luck!   We tell people they have it so bad - pretty soon they believe it, and text it to you from their iPhone while driving the new SUV their Mom and Dad bought them.   Hey, it's last year's iPhone, right?  The shit they have to put up with!

3.  Paying people not to work:   While a lot of people are suffering and struggling with this epidemic - particularly small businesses who don't qualify for "PPP" loans (or are struggling to get them) many people are yet to suffer financially as a result of the epidemic.   Thanks to a generous $600-a-week bonus on unemployment, many are making more money not working than working.  If you throw in the "stimulus" check (or checks) it adds up to a pretty comfortable living for doing nothing. 

Granted, some are struggling to get their benefits, and others, such as independent contractors, might not get any benefits at all.  For example, when I was self-employed, I would not qualify for unemployment benefits of any sort.  But others are pulling in money, without having to work.  It is Andrew Yang's dream-come-true, and now we are seeing what happens when you pay people not to work - they loot and riot.  It is ancient Rome, complete with bread-and-circuses.

4. Lack of leadership:  No national leader has emerged of this BLM movement - not on the level of Dr. Martin Luther King.  Not even Jesse Jackson, or even a Rev. Al Sharpton. There is no focus to these protests, no goal, no organization, no control.  As a result, these suburban white kids, looking for a cheap thrill (or to cause trouble) have hijacked these protests and turned them into riots.  Others - on the far right - have gone so far as to murder police officers, hoping to start a race war.   This was the same "strategy" employed by Charles Manson.  When folks like that start showing up, the legitimate protesters should go home and let the Police use the scoops on the rest.

It is a shame this movement is so undirected and rudderless.  It could be turned into something, but instead, will just fall apart over time.  As I noted before, it seems every time there is promise of change for black folks in America, the law-and-order faction kicks in, often because of rioting and unrest such as we have seen, and these movements are set back by decades.   There's a conspiracy theory for ya, right there.

Don't get me wrong, there are real grievances here.  But today, it seems the grievances are just piling on top of one another.   People show up to protest peacefully and a few people hijack the protest and start looting and burning.   Setting fire to things is no joke, by the way - in addition to the millions in damages is the real risk of people - many people - being horrifically burned or killed.

The police need to restore order - and only the police can do this.   But to restore order, more people are injured and even killed (in many instances, the police themselves).   So each injury or killing becomes a new justification for more violence and the process feeds-back upon itself.

It is time to pack up the protests and go home.  When the rioters take the field, the only real option is to walk off the field.   You can't have a protest that is "mostly peaceful" because as soon as the fires start, the looting begins, and the violence occurs, well, all bets are off, and whatever point you were trying to make is lost - and in fact, negated.  The tide of public opinion will turn against you - strongly.

And as I noted before, public opinion was in favor of the "BLM"movement.  People who I thought would be for "law and order" were sympathetic to this cause.  Make no mistake about it - you need the support of the majority if you want to see real change.  The abolition of slavery was accomplished not by slaves, but by the millions of whites who went to war and laid down their lives in furtherance of that cause.   The vote for women was granted to them by men.    The Civil Rights act was passed by a mostly white, male Congress.   Yes, protests and activism are important in convincing people of the need to change.   But the people you need to convince are not the ones you see in the mirror.

America will eventually lose its patience with lawlessness - every culture does.   It is why, thousands of years ago, we banded together into city-states and had Kings rule over us.   A King and his army of knights protect the people, who in turn, pay tribute (literally, in taxes) to the King.  It may have been an imperfect system, but it illustrates to what lengths people will go to preserve order and structure in their civilization.   Without some form of civilization and protection, a town or city can be ravaged by pirates, Visigoths, Vikings, or whoever is raping and looting this week.

The few loud voices of anarchy and violence will be shouted down.  History tells us this is so.  It is only a question of when and where. Unless the Democrats can put a lid on this - and strongly condemn it - their chances of winning in November will evaporate.  It is 1968 all over again.  Only this time, we have something far, far worse than Nixon to contend with.

Ad Experiment Fails

Just a quick note. I pulled the ads off the blog. I saw another ad for Fox car rental this morning and when I clicked on it it went to the "5 Billionth Google Search" scam page. Again, this is a scam designed to harvest banking information and commit identity theft.

When this popped up before I thought it was a mere fluke, but it appears that someone is advertising with infolinks claiming to be Fox car rental but actually some overseas scammer trying to insert this phishing scam into a fake advertisement.

What sort of tipped me off is that the ad itself was very pixelated. It looked like somebody had scanned in an ad for Fox car rental and then enlarged it badly.

I was pleased that some of the advertisers were for legitimate products and actually products that I had used. But to have even one scam ad in there is not acceptable.


Also, the a revenue was about one-sixth that of Google AdSense. Why have scam ads with such low results?

Infolinks was easy to use in the people were very nice. But they need to vet their advertisers better.

Covid and Internet Ads

If the world is going to hell, it certainly is taking its sweet time!

First a word about ads.  Most people are not even seeing them, as they use adblockplus or some other form of ad-blocking software or browser.  This begs the question, why would advertisers even pay for ads then?   And it struck me that like the Nigerian scammer e-mails, this acts as a filtering agent.

Many have wondered why Nigerian scam e-mails (or craigslist scams) are so poorly worded.  After all, won't people spot these as cons from 1000 yards away?  And it isn't that the scammers are poor in English skills, either.   Inadvertently or not, they discovered that the more poorly worded e-mails generated better response rates.  That is to say, the people responding were far less skeptical and thus better "marks" for the "con".    A well-worded e-mail might snare a smarter person, but once they got the pitch to send money, they would drop out, wasting the scammer's time.  Poorly worded pitches result in better responses and more efficient use of their time.  It is a way of filtering out skeptics.

Similarly, with internet advertising, most people who are fairly astute install adblock plus or some sort of browser with these capabilities built-in.   As a result, they never see the ads.   Maybe right there is why so many internet ads are for scams or lousy deals - the only people seeing these ads are those lurching across the Internet, changing lanes on the information superhighway without signalling, and jamming on the brakes randomly (and spelling it "breaks" - ugh!).   So adblocker and the like end up as filtering agents - filtering out the more clever readers, and as a result, the ads are aimed at people not smart enough to install adblock, and thus are pushing scams.  Perfect feedback loop.

As for income, well, it is negligable, which may motive me to end this experiment early.  $1.24 a day?  To whore my readers?   I don't think so.  Not even enough to buy a cup of coffee at the gas station (but enough to make five cups at home!):

Income isn't squat with Infolinks - at least so far.

At this rate, the most I will make is maybe $500 a year at this - far less than the $2000 a year I was making with Google AdSense - with far less intrusive ads, to boot!   So I may pull the plug on this experiment, as poor Joe Biden will end up with only $50 to add to his campaign coffers, at the rate we are going.

Some of the ads, as I noted, are for some odious deals.  I was pleasantly surprised to find Eyebuydirect on the site today.  I did a piece on them (and no, I am not paid for that!) and they did deliver good glasses for the money.  Some readers point to other places with better prices and without all this BoGo nonsense couponing that Eyebuy uses.  But I have had several people ask me, "say, those are nice glasses, they look good on you!  Where did you get them?" which rarely - if ever - happened to me before, with glasses from Walmart or the wholesale club.   So I am pleased at least one ad is from a "legit" company, anyway.

By the way, I turned OFF adblockerplus on my browser, for my own site, so when I review the site (which I have to do, as HTML does weird things and you think you are typing one thing, and it comes out in a weird font when it appears online, or the formatting gets lost, or images go bonkers).   I figure if you have to look at the damn ads, I should, too.

But getting back to the Corona Virus, are things really going to hell as the media says they are?  The politcal cartoon below is typical of the media attitude as to how things are going - to hell in a handbasket and it's all Trump's fault!

Never get statistical data from a cartoonist!

People are talking about cases of Covid-19 "spiking" in America.  Is this really happening?  The charts above in a political cartoon would seem to be damning.   And yet, that is a politcal cartoon.  Other sources differ.

This chart shows that infection rates have been fairly level over time, increasing slightly in the last few days.

The recent slight increase in new cases is indeed cause for concern, but hardly a "spike" just yet.  And as President Trump says (throw up in mouth a bit) when you increase testing, you get increased reported cases.   He is right about that, but then again a stopped clock is right twice a day.

Meanwhile, the death rate declines:

This chart shows the death rate steadily declining, reaching a new low today.

What is going on?  The death rate today (256) is almost the same as when this whole thing first started.   What is going on, I suspect, is that treatments for this disease are improving.  Blood thinners are reducing the blood-clot induced heart attacks and strokes, as well as lung blockages.   Certain steroids are showing promise as treatments.   Doctors are not sitting idly by and doing nothing (which was pretty much all they could do, early on) but are trying new treatments, and they do seem to be working.   Maybe also, the very old and infirm have gotten the word and are isolating and the infection rate, while rising among the young and healthy, is declining among the elderly and infirm.

Now granted, all of this data could be suspect.  We had "free testing" here on the island, but only a handful of people went to get tested.  Given that those who test positive are treated as pariahs (even weeks later, after they recover and test negative) you can see why.   So there may be a lot more cases out there - in fact it is certain - than are reported.  Similarly, the death rate, particularly the historical one, may be higher, as many people dying from this had blood clots in major organs (heart, lungs, brain) and dropped dead suddenly, but were never tested, so we have no way of knowing whether they were killed by the virus or not.  Many people argue the increased death rate over the historical levels should be used to track the virus.  Maybe that is another good metric, too.

All these things are possible.  What is certain is that the media is discussing none of this.   You don't see these charts in the news.  All you see are cumulative infection charts and death charts (which always are going up, up, up by their very nature).  Where the cartoonist is getting his numbers from is hard to parse - are those infection rate charts?  Death rate?  Testing?  What is the X-axis?  Y-axis?  The scale?  Have infections in Germany, Spain, and Italy really dropped off to zero?  I doubt it.

Why the media refuses to discuss this is obvious.  Well, first, complex information is hard to communicate - people find it boring and they turn away, which pisses off advertisers.   Second, bad news sells, and if you put up an article saying "Corona Virus infection rate is spiking!" it sells newspapers.  If you put up a headline saying "Corona Virus infection rate spiking in irresponsible red states that are relaxing restrictions!" it sells a lot of copies of the New York Times, the readers of which consider New Jersey to be the far, far lands.

The sad thing is that we are at a time in our history when people really need hard, accurate data - about everything.   We live in an information age, and yet some people sincerely believe the earth is flat, vaccines cause autism, aliens are being kept prisoner in area 51 (and not illegal aliens, either) and so on and so forth.    Truth has been replaced by truthiness, facts with alternative facts.   And both the left and right seem to indulge in this alternate reality.

Obviously, my monetizing the blog is what caused this latest Covid "spike" as the two events were nearly simultaneous, and as we all know, correlation is causation!  For the current generation of journalists, this makes about as much sense as anything else!

5 Billionth Google Search Contest Pop-Up Scam

No, you haven't won a contest you never entered.

I may end this latest monetization experiment very early.  I was looking at my blog to see what the ads were like.  At the bottom was an ad for "Fox Car Rental" which is a legitimate but unloved car rental company - rated as one of the ten worst.  The ad was odd, in that it was kind of low-resolution and pixelated.  I clicked on it and when I tried to click back, I got the screen above.  I tried to back-page to get out of it, but no luck.  I had to dump Chrome on my phone and start over.

I tried it again, and got the same deal - from this same Fox car rental ad, which may have been illegitimate.  I noticed next that the ads from Infolinks were BLANK - maybe they spotted the problem and X-ed out the ads, I don't know.

This article explains the "redirect" scam, and claims it can be caused by a PUP installed on your computer.  But what about your phone?  I ran a scan on the phone and no corrupt software was reported.  I did remove a couple of apps I had recently installed (but didn't use) and tried again - the problem seemed to go away.  The article, of course, is an ad for malewarebytes, which I used to use, but frankly Microsoft Security Essentials, which is free, does a better job and is less intrusive.

If you have seen this "You Have Won!" screen, please let me know.   It is one thing to monetize a blog, another thing to rip people off.  And yes, it is a ripoff.  If you do see this screen, don't click on it, close your browser!   You did not win a television or a new smart phone.  Google doesn't have a 5-Billion search contest.  Wake up!

Internet advertising is pretty sketchy as it is.  I wrote a blog entry about this a long time ago, wondering why Facebook - supposedly a "legitimate" company with billions of users - would resort to accepting ads for "one trick of the tiny belly" or "Obama wants Moms to go back to school!"   Where are the ads from the big car companies?  Proctor and Gamble?  General Foods?   Or those funny ads for car insurance?  Disney?   Why weren't the big boys playing in Facebook's sandbox?

Well, the answer is, they are now, once Facebook was established as a going concern.   They still have some crappy ads, though.   And with Infolinks, it is interesting - they have "legit" ads for things like bottled water and particle-board furniture, but also sketchy ads for online MBAs from for-profit universities.

Then again, this is a trend that started with television, particularly cable television.   If you watch the old television shows from the 1960's, they had sponsors like Ford or Kelloggs or other mainstream companies.  It wasn't until the cable era when advertising on off-channels got cheap that you saw things like ads for invention brokers or "how to buy ugly houses" or whatever.  And of course, the infomercial was born - a television program that was all advertising - followed closely by entire channels that were nothing more than ads - calling themselves "shopping channels".

So I guess when advertising started to invade the Internet, it just started where it left off in television.  And since a lot of mainstream advertisers were skeptical of this new world of online advertising, maybe they held back, leaving the field open for the fraudsters, who now have an established toe-hold in the online world.

Look Before You Leap!

Moving in a panic might not be such a good idea.

After 9/11 things got weird in Washington, DC.   There was a smoking hole in the side of the Pentagon, and no, it wasn't  a "missile" but a commercial aircraft - thousands upon thousands of commuters on I-395 saw this happen, so 9/11 "truthers" please go fuck yourselves.  With a stick.  A sharpened stick.

They closed the airport - no airplane noise for a week, except for the sound of fighter jets.  It was weird - about as weird as this virus thing.   Then we had the Anthrax scare - someone mailed anthrax to Congress.  They had to shut down a postal distribution center.  People died.  It was awful.

And to make things worse, some idiot decided to go around shooting people for no reason whatsoever - the "beltway sniper" shot people at gas stations and the Home Depot.  An opportunistic Police Chief took charge and screwed up the investigation, delaying the arrest of the perpetrators by nearly a month - by which time they had killed even more people.   Chief Doofus then writes a book about the whole thing, making himself out to be a hero.

We spent a lot of time in Florida around that time.  Flights were cheap (no one wanted to fly - sound familiar?) and we were able to buy some condos for cheap as well, and rent them out when we weren't there.   The real estate market went bonkers, and we sold out when a developer offered us $700,000 for our run-down two-bedroom home, so he could tear it down and put up two mini-mansions.  We escaped from Fairfax County.

We also sold the condos - again, people knocking on our door and asking us to sell at nearly twice the price we paid for them only a few years before.  So we did, and bought the house on Jekyll Island.

But where to move?  Before we settled in Georgia, we made the mistake - yes a mistake - of buying a house in Central New York.  I was from the area and we enjoyed vacationing there.  For two weeks a year, after mosquito season and before black fly season, the weather is pleasant and most of the snow has melted.   What we didn't realize (and what I had forgotten) was why people leave that State - the high taxes and low expectations.   Places to go on vacation are not always places you want to live.  Key West is fun, but if you want to ruin your vacation, read about the insane local politics in the paper, or look at the Real Estate section.  Just enjoy it and leave - you'll notice few of the people who actually live there are all that happy.

In recent weeks, there has been a movement by some folks to move away from the city.  I can understand this - we had the same feeling after 9/11.   We had made our fortune (so to speak) in the big city and maybe it was time to move on.   You go to the city to seek your fortune - sometimes it is a good idea to leave the city to spend it.   But you need to think carefully about where to go, lest you end up somewhere you are not happy.

We had fun in Central New York, but the costs were pretty staggering.  We never bothered to think about the cost of owning a home there, much less the cost of having two homes, which turned out to be enormous.   Yes, prior to that, we owned several properties, but all but one (our home) was rented out and made a profit for us.  We went from that model to having two homes, both of which were just expenses that never generated any income.   And the house in New York had a staggering tax bill, not to mention maintenance and repair costs.

Was it fun?  Well, yea, for a while - having two homes, boats, cars, and lots of time to explore and visit wineries and whatnot.   But in retrospect, we could have done this with less home, or rented out portions of the property - or all of it when we weren't there - and made money and lived for free, basically.   It was an expensive lesson.

I see people doing the same thing today.  Spooked by the virus, they are buying properties in outlying areas willy-nilly, often paying asking price or getting into bidding wars, and then throwing a hundred grand - or two - at remodeling.  The problem is, of course, if you pay the $500,000 asking price for a house, it is basically worth $500,000.   Throw $200,000 into it, and it ain't worth $700,000 - maybe $550,000 to $600,000.  So you are throwing away money by rushing into a purchase.  And that is what happened to us in New York, and what is happening today.  I saw a fellow plow a million bucks into a house in a $400,000 neighborhood.   He has a long wait before he gets his money back.

We are seeing this here on our island, which makes us wonder whether we should be selling.   The Island is changing - more people, and more younger folks from the city, who drive fast, talk fast, and are impatient and have a sense of entitlement.  Karens and Kevins, or as we call them, "Fuckheads from Buckhead" (Buckhead is a pretentious suburb of Atlanta).   Maybe it is time we moved, too.

Or maybe not.  Look before you leap.  Think carefully about where you want to end up, because moving to the wrong place can be an expensive mistake.  And moving because of transient conditions (a virus) may be short-sighted.   One couple, profiled in the Atlantic piece above, claimed they were going to move to the Berkshires to raise chickens.  Sounds idyllic and all, until you realize the price of a dozen eggs these days is less than two bucks, and land in the Berkshires ain't cheap by a long-shot.   I learned the hard way that life outside "the big city" isn't that much cheaper than in it - and in tax-rich New York and New England, there may in fact be no savings at all.

It is funny, but despite the higher cost of living, a lot of stuff in the big city is cheaper than in the country.  Want to buy a car?  There are plenty of dealers competing for your business, as well as the hundreds of thousands of individuals selling their own cars.  In the country?  You have to hope Old Clem has the car you want at his tiny dealership, or buy your neighbor's clapped-out Jaguar or his Geo Metro.  All that shit on Green Acres was based on real life.  And I hated that show, too.

If you are looking for a job, well, the city has them, hands down, while in the country, you have to hope the one place that is hiring people with your credentials will hire you.   Life in the country is fun - once in a while on vacation.  But it is not a very productive place to live.

So we sold the vacation home.  It was fun, but in retrospect, we should have rented a place, or at most, bought the small cottage we were looking at - as opposed to the large house and acreage.  It was fun, but it was expensive fun.  We should have looked before we leapt!

Panic buying and panic selling never end up being good bargains.