James Hood

It was only a matter of time but we now have a villain based out of the "occupy movement". He calls himself James Hood as a nod to his alleged inspiration, Robin Hood, and I'm assuming his real first name. He has just appeared on the crime scene and neither my parents nor the police have been able to identify him yet. he has adopted the language of the occupy movement and become something of a folk hero among the news media and the public. It probably also doesn't hurt that he has been giving away half of the money that he has been stealing.

It's actually a pretty ingenious plan. He for example steals twenty thousand dollars from a bank and then he donates ten thousand dollars worth of food and blankets etcetera to a local homeless shelter. The big banks and other corporations don't want the bad publicity from asking the charities to return the donated items and meanwhile James Hood not only gets away with the ten thousand dollars that he stole but he gets credit for giving back to the 99%. The dude is a friggin' genius. He's stolen hundreds of thousands of dollars and politicians and police chiefs are reluctant to even call for his arrest.

The majority of his crimes have taken place via the internet and therefore are considered non-violent which has endeared him even more to the public but every once in awhile he seems to need to stretch his legs and commit his crimes in person. So when he decided to come to St. Christopher and carjack an armored truck at gunpoint   he raised the ire of my parents. Despite driving the truck into Garden Basin (the worst slum in the city) and tossing thousands of dollars to people on the street as he drove my Dad says that "crime is crime" and he says that we are going to track down James Hood. I'm not sure who is going to be more sorry when we catch him, James Hood or my parents, when the public backlash occurs.

FACEBOOK IPO

While my parents are concerned about me searching for humpbacked, scatological, bondage porn with a cup on the internet I just came across something far worse. I found a site completely devoted to showing people fighting. Then to my horror I realized that it wasn't the only one. What in the world is wrong with this country? It seems that everyone has too much time on their hands and nothing to do. Facebook is going to make tons of people instant millionaires and Facebook doesn't do anything. Sure its fine for maintaining pseudo contact with a lot of people you hardly know or for trying to hook up with some girl you wanted to date in high school twenty years ago (that's what Dad says his friends use it for) but what does Facebook actually produce? Nothing. It's not a steel mill or the Ford company rolling out Model-T's.

Facebook provides nothing but the opportunity to spend hours being non-productive at work. It's no wonder that they want us to start learning Chinese in school. Might as well start planing for our future know.

As opposed to the Stone Age or the Bronze Age we are now in the Information Age (I personally believe that we are in Hesiod's Iron Age) and instead of great human advancement we get constant updates on our acquaintances' every random thought on Facebook. Newsflash, most people's thoughts aren't that interesting and I certainly don't need to know that they are at the mall or having dinner at a restaurant.  There is something to be said for the effort of making a phone call that limits the inane amount of "information" that we are subject to. Imagine calling someone on the phone to say, "I'm at the mall". Not only would you not want to make that call you would quickly find out how many of your "friends" truly don't care what you are doing every minute of the day. Personally, I'm all for bringing back letter writing. If forced to communicate via pen and paper people would save their efforts for only truly interesting events.


I don't begrudge Mark Zuckerberg. I think that he should make as much money as he can. I just think that Facebook is stupid, like the Dutch Tuilp Mania of 1636-1637. Ultimately, Facebook is a sign that as a society we have too much time on our hands and when civilizations have too much leisure time they fall. The populations get fat, lazy, indulgent and self-important. Right now there are tens of thousands of people "occupying" cities while tweeting and IM'ing from their Iphones and Ipads while some guy in some country I have never heard of is working his tail off to make life better for him and his family.

Instead, in America we have people video taping fights and placing them on the world wide web. What a great use of technology that is and a waste of the head-start everyone was given in this country over the rest of the world simply by being born in the U.S. We have You-Tube "stars" and every kind of porn imagined and unimagined. People aren't any smarter in this Information Age. The opposite is true because there is no incentive to learn anything because one can instantly receive the answer on their phone. Some might argue that rote memorization is a waste of time, well I would agree if people were instead learning "how to think", but who is teaching that? Not the schools. Thinking creates controversy and schools hate anything controversial. Television has always been a wasteland and newspapers (what's left of them) are not that far behind.

Although, I whole heatedly believe in theory in the First Amendment maybe "for profit" news may not be the way to go. Yellow Journalism is real and has been forever. Hearst and Pulitzer (yes, that "Pulitzer", would be Woodward and Bernsteins) just gave it a name. Newspapers are in business to make a profit not to inform and that is why we are inundated with information about Kardashian's, Jennifer Aniston's love life, Pippa's butt instead of genocide currently occurring in the world. In a time when so much information is literally at our fingertips we waste our time with the inane and the trivial. What Americans want is to be entertained not informed.

So good luck Facebook. May you last longer than Myspace, Napster, Sega and the Pet Rock or said another way  我们就来为你