The Journal

Serving the Metropolitan Area

Since 1872

November 29th

THREE CHEERS for REACTION!

By Jack Parnell - retired Congressman and Independent Presidential candidate

Syndicated by Acme Features

"I have a telephone, I use a typewriter, I have electricity. I take airplanes. But not wantonly. I travel for work."
	-	Chellis Glendinning, Squeamish-American Futurwurster

There's good reason to suspect e-con'micks... some information therein’s damn useful but, when time presses its owner to the wall, still not worth a tank of gas, a grapefruit, a roll of toilet paper – even a pair of Chinese sneakers. To reiterate, as has been reinforced by the Facebook IPO boom that busted, the bitcoins that 95% of their value and all of those non-fungibles as required fungitation: you can't eat information. Information helps us utilize resources as already exist, but... though it may help locate them and extract them with greater degrees of efficiency, the occasional BP or Wells Fargo blundering and plundering aside... it cannot create what doesn't exist in the first place. (Namely the human intelligence to acquire data and apply it soundly.)

A great many wise men of the Dark Ages, as were called Alchemists, strived to transmute lead into gold, or vouched that just the right proportion of potions and incantations could generate life in bottles out of twigs, powders and vile jellies. It would take Renaissance science... specifically, microscopes... to prove the life they'd seemingly created… molds and maggots and fungi for the most part… was not born of magick, only from the spores and eggs too tiny to be observed by the unaided eye. So the smarter of the Alchemists shuffled off to buy and sell tulips.

And then, after a few more centuries, the lead-into-gold cryptocrowd discovered NASDAQ, which led to BITECOIN and a whole regatta of retired pugilists, policemen and paper pushers... pensions purged... peddling their blood to pay for necessary blood pressure pills!

A while back, before that breakup and reconstitution as MicroTime^TM and WarnerSoft^TM, the company then known as Microsoft crashed, crushed under the death-stare of Googly Eyes. Texting techsters blamed the courts as held up that Star Wars JEDI contract just a little too long and then got boggled down over all them Coronavirus lawsuits. The last fifty million users of its e-mail service, Hotmail (remember that?), were bounced off the Net. Expensive bearded wizards with seven-figure mortgages and teenage geeks with noserings, six-figure debts, tats and acne poked, prodded and probed the system and finally determined the failure was due to Microsoft's thirty-five dollar delinquency to a creditor.

Systems analysts, entrail diviners and public relations flunkies leaped into action, opening doors and sniffing drainpipes to determine the source of catastrophe. Meanwhile, the fifty million soldiered on, rediscovering the communications stratagems of antiquity: the telephone, the post office and, for all we know, pigeons, owls and, even, smoke signals.

Today's Futurwursters keep crying out: sky's falling, and we'll all be kilt unless immediate 'n total power's handed over to the UN's blue berets, enforcing WHO (World Health Organization) officiousness - the only regulatory regulators able to keep our geeks and spies in line now that we’ve kicked ourselves out of the conferencing room where decisions get made. Some were on the money... the sort as said the Japanese economy was headed down the toilet, and they were right. But they also said that: "By the year 2000, the average car will be mostly plastic and will last an average of 22 years."

The East Germans had been there, done that... their plastic cars were called Trabants, and the Ossies buried 'em, soon as that wall came down.

MicroTime^TM marched on to develop new interactive gear to "allow TV viewers to watch anything they want at any time", you can program your wristwatch to download tiny, blurry, jerky episodes of "Mannix" and "Gilligan" and hundreds of cheap, homemade knockoffs of the "Blair Witch Project" as excruciating to watch, almost, as the original! Cities like Austin, Palo Alto and the newest high-tech mecca, LaGrange, Georgia, offer 24-hour on-line connectivity to such as meetings of the County Wastewater Management Board; even let busybodies pretending to be Fox-TV producers snoop through arrest records and property tax files to check up on and harass delinquent neighbors. Since interactivity has given mediasurfers the option of zapping commercials, look for widespread growth in product placement, even within hitherto off-limits premises as the news, classic literature, public urinals, them Aflac and Geico duck and lizard animation shows and airline in-flight barf bags, one of which would come in handy in case either of those Jodies from the Sonic commercial sitcom get nominated for an Emmy..

I really despise ex-candidate turned climate czar Kerry's revenge on us for his Presidential thrashing: not the risible Iraniac nuclear deal that President Trump cancelled, only to find our so-called allies ignoring the sanctions to keep their lights on once he got plucked from the dumpster and named Climate Czar, but that new WarnerSoft^TM version of "Casablanca" where the Hump tells Ilsa that their problems aren't worth "a hill of Heinz baked beans." But "...the culture we live in is carried on the back of advertising," acknowledges media critic James B. Twitchell. "If you cannot find commercial support for what you have to say, it will not be transported."

The plane crash as killed Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper did hurt some, but the day the music really died was the day someone... I disremember who, some memories are too awful to retain... sold the rights to their provenance to Madison Avenue.

I also worry mightily that Big Science and gumment meddling will, someday, collaborate to replace the grease in fast-food fries with brain-eatin' viruses, too! The biotech's already advancing by leaps and bounds... Dolly, the progeriastic (prematurely geriatric) cloned sheep joined by Priscilla, the pig, Duke, the donkey, Frankie the Frankensalmon and a whole coop of chickens and Thanksgiving turkeys without names. Now, clonesters up in Massachusetts think there's a world of improvement to be applied mixing firefly genes into possum; I guess so roadkill will glow in the dark, get picked up and 'et sooner, and result in less fire in some hound dog, buzzard or Chris Christie's belly.

The scientists and Squeamish are working hard to make us live forever, or nearly so, but all they've done so far is to encourage more unfriendly neighborhood busybodies to call the police on neighbors who let their children play outside, or nursing homes, like the Vencor people, to wheel their Medicaid patients out onto the sidewalk with a fool's gold dollar to phone relatives to come and pick 'em up once the money's gone. No matter say Entropians - those who live long enough to exhaust their ability to afford healthcare can still be diagnosed by special computer programs from Wuhai, China as contain three gradations of senile dementia filters, to be lovingly eased into narcosis, then death, in the Dominican Republic. O brave new world!

For a few years, now, we've seen news reports, even made-for-TV movies about identity theft Cybervampires. At least we (mostly) agree that they're criminals... but those sweet-smelling perfumed debit cards from Amsterdam as report the brand of and quantity of smokes, drinks and videocubes we've chosen to obtain back to databrokers who market their lists to employers, insurance companies, divorce lawyers and the media - they're just good business! So those of us who like to kick people around gape at the Chinese “social credit” scam with naked envy.

Jeremy Rifkin, famous liberal Futurwurster, mentions this hormone cocktail as the chicken people up in Wisconsin discovered, back in '93, that quashes the mothering instinct and keeps brooding hens producing eggs. With the biotech, now, I have no doubt some white coat's working on sports action drinks as completely eradicate those human qualities as inhibit performance... compassion, reason, foresight. Full Republican beverage, in other words... I can see stockbrokers and lawyers by the milliards slipping into phone booths to pop a top and glop down their daily dose of whup-ass tonic though, I suppose, we'd inevitably develop such a tolerance, requiring more and more, and that some bad side effects would inevitably surface. Like feathers...

"All technology," presumed the late ecologist and uber-Futurwurster David Brower, "should be assumed guilty until proven innocent."

Remember that breakdown as caused fifty million Microsoft users their e-mail? There's a happy ending... an impatient computer consultant out in Tennessee, the name of Michael Chaney – no relation to that heartbroken, shotgun-fondlin’ former Vice President or his POThead-ejected daughter – took the Einsteinian mental leap of paying that thirty-five dollar bill as held service up out of his own pocket. So Bill Gates’ ex-lover… the company, not Melissa, staggered on but now, so sources say, it’s pulling the plug on its netware, leaving Google/Chrome with that blissful bounty as Karl Marx dreamed would lead to world domination… monopoly.

Eight bucks to troll and be trolled by the blue imposters on Twitter? Sorry, Muskie... “X”? Get ready for your $24.95 per month g-mail tab.

Astonished Microwizards held a press conference to announce they'd reimburse Chaney. They didn't go nearly far enough... if he wants the job, I'll appoint Mike Chair of the Fed when Jared Pettigrew's term is up, or earlier, should Petsome meet an early, untimely hunting accident.

If you do have debts, pay 'em... and keep adequate, paper records of your payments in a fireproof, Russianproof container. That's reaction for you, so reactionary that it's become a truly revolutionary notion for the 21st century... for individuals and for gumment!

CLICK the CATFISH to go to PAST and PRESENT EPISODES of "BLACK HELICOPTERS" and to OTHER JACK PARNELL COLUMNS

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