This website, and all pages within this website, and all videos, tape recordings, podcasts, and other materials including photographic images and captions, offer, disseminate, convey and represent my opinions, hunches, suspicions, best recollections and editorial views.
Note late March, 2022:
Are we going Full Monty Commercial?
We're being pretty actively solicited to put all tapes, or at least most tapes, onto various official and commercial podcast disseminating websites and services. It sounds interesting. I, personally, am reasonably happy with my income to date. I would always "like" more money of course, but I don't "need" more money. I can feed myself. I can feed my cat (well, with the insane insistence on FRESH salmon (not canned and NOT farmed), threatening dire terrorist consequences if the demands aren't met, feeding the cat is becoming a bit more difficult financially), but overall, no problem. I can buy a new motorcycle every year. I have abodes to envy. Ok, MOST people would envy them. Putin wouldn't. Frank Burns-Biden wouldn't. Trump the Hump wouldn't. But I'm doing ok. My main motivation doing these podcasts is to (1) wake people up and help them think, and (2) make them occasionally chuckle. If that's my only reward, I'm good.
Still, I listen to the arguments in favor of going official and commercial. In one sense, it sounds potentially like fun. On the other hand, and this other hand is very G-damned big, fat, sweaty and greasy, there is the threat of irrational, ham-fisted, revenue-killing censorship. The insane, irrational social media censorship we're seeing today is the direct result of Spoiled Rotten Brat sillycon valley type moguls who were told by their mommies ad nauseam that THEY ARE RIGHT and if anybody ever tells you otherwise, squash 'em. Because YOU are right. And THEY are nothing more than Putin's gnats, to be crushed and then spit out.
I had been using Farcebook almost since its inception. I never thought anything about it. It was good for a few things, like finding old friends. But worthless, or even a minus value, in most every other area, mostly due to the stupidity of its design. I'd never experienced any kind of censorship on Fuckerbook, so I was dumbfounded one day when I logged in and found that I was blocked for 24 hours for "hate speech". I thought, WTF? The offending comment came about as follows:
I live WITH mainland Chinese here in SE Asia and over decades I have found them to be the filthiest people I've ever seen, anywhere in the world. As a small child my father used to take me aboard merchant ships in our harbor. He'd get permission and we'd just go walk the decks while they were moored. Great fun. After as much as a year of this, he asked me if I noticed any particular thing, like any pattern, as a result of our tours. I thought for awhile -- let's see -- some ships are big, some not so big, some green, some white, some black, some little more than rust buckets -- and then I thought of something. I said yeah, some ships are really clean and nice. But other ships stink and are filthy. They smell like poop. And when we walk around, the decks are piled high in garbage and rotting produce and fast food bags and wrappers and dirty diapers, rats the size of terriers, overflowing dumpsters that hadn't been emptied for YEARS, etc. I said I had noticed that. He said, uh huh. Let's go look at some ships.
So we went again that afternoon and mucked around on various freighters, some of which were clean, and some were reeking. He asked me why some are clean and why some are filthy. I said I didn't know. Maybe because the people who worked on them were filthy and stupid? He said yes. Then he asked me how I could tell if a ship was going to be shipshape, or a static catastrophe, like the Bog of Eternal Stench, before we even boarded. I said I didn't know. So he showed me a few ways to tell where a ship was from. The ones from China were just big floating rat's nests. And pretty much all others were clean. I started looking at their names and registrations and sure enough, it was perfectly true.
As I've roamed SE Asia and China for decades now, I see the same pattern in every aspect of their lives. The Chinese are filthy pretty-much wherever they go. In the US they violate health codes and so the law ends up stepping in. In China, there almost aren't any health codes, so the population, by choice and by default, remains filthy. Maybe in 500 years they'll still be filthy. I made the comment on Facebook that the Chinese were largely filthy. That was it. Only that. And I was blocked for 24 hours for hate speech. Imagine Facebook's chagrin when I simply deleted my decades old account with 112 gigabytes of content, all of which had made them money.
I deleted the account because I realized that, like the woman who made the joking comment to her friend, "All men are ugly", and got banned, I might -- hell, it was completely inevitable that I would -- sooner or later make another comment that would get me banned, and lucky I didn't have any financial interests depending on the insane whims of the little Farcebook Snowflakes policing the world for offensive content. I remembered I had once told someone the sky was blue. Nothing had happened. But only because the asinine little ferret-face perverts at Idiot-book didn't happen to catch it. But I realized that that comment COULD have gotten me blocked. Let's say some small group of people in Ketchikan, Alaska, took offense to that, because after all THEIR skies are almost never blue. So they began filing complaints against me with Facebook because they felt I was discriminating against them and insulting them and my words "made them feel bad and sad and singled out". Facebook would, of course, use any of the nebulous, nonsensical phrases in their TOS to block me again. I decided I wouldn't give them the opportunity. Account gone and my personal skies were instantly sunnier for that act.
So the thing is, the podcast hosting sites are showing just the slightest tendency to go that direction. Hell, YouTube is already an embarrassment to any sane, logical society and any website that advises new pod-casters about where to place their material will warn adamantly about getting too involved with YouTube, lest that carpet get yanked out from under them with zero warning and FOR NOTHING.
I had a YouTube channel once (not for podcasts). It was legally trademarked. Eventually I did a search and found around 25-30 YouTube posters had stolen my exact trademark for their own channels (not just copyrighted, mind you, but actually fully trademarked (R)). I instantly went to war and filed all manner of complaints and takedown demands. YouTube him-hawed around for months and took down maybe three or four but left the others, all of which were making them more money than mine, to stand. My trademark attorneys went to work on YouTube and stopped at the point where I would have had to pay $180,000 JUST TO FILE THE SUIT against YouTube. I dropped the trademark, abandon it completely, and pulled all the content, and happily X'd YouTube out of my life forever, just like Farcicalbook. YouTube is scum, bordering on criminal -- hell, maybe even spilling over completely into criminal. These are worthless human beings. These are very, very bad people.
Point is, maybe you build a whole financial life around your podcasts being hosted on a variety of casting services. And then, one by one, like the brain-dead, submissive little dominoe ball-less Snowflakes that they are, they all start going the way of Fuckbook and Stinkagram and Shitter. And your financial life disappears off the face of the earth literally overnight, unless you "come into line", just like any other good little Nazi, which means only saying what THEY want you to say. The fall off that precipice has happened to countless tens of thousands, many of whom never figured out how or why.
And I won't do it. I won't say what they want and only what they want. I won't do it.
So why even start down that path?
Sillycon social media has shown us what they're made of. They have the morals of a finless goldfish and the backbone of a bowl of warm diarrhea.
Yes, yes, it all might be fun as heck to "go commercial" -- right up to the point where it no longer was.
Better to skip the drama.
That's our thinking at this particular moment. Maybe it will change in time and with more research.
Read more by other folks, here.