Thought for the day

CNN asks "When did Facebook become so uncool?" - Duh....The day it was created

I've said it here numerous times....FACEBOOK is not cool, never has been. It was created by a guy who wanted to extract revenge on other Harvard types that wouldn't allow him to be one of the "cool kids". This is NOT the kind of thing you want to be involved with.

Now, Facebook is becoming " Big Brother " and people are finally waking up to the real insidious nature of what Zuckerberg created and profited from...People admire him - I see nothing but a geeky kid who created his own world and got many "sheep-ple" to follow him.

Not me. Not now, not ever. Do yourself a favor and kill your Facebook account.
Really, you'll thank me later.

CNN ? - They are as clueless as the other sheep-ple who gave Zuckerberg $$$ for getting people to follow his unethical website which is now being seen for what it really is....worthless. To think that people feel this sham is worth $$$ is unbelievable to me and proves what P.T. Barnum knew 100 years ago:

" There's a sucker born every minute"


When did Facebook become so uncool? By John D. Sutter, CNN

(CNN) -- Something strange happened Monday on the Internet.

Facebook -- the once-underdog social network founded by a kid in a hoodie in a dorm room -- may have officially cemented its status as a titan of the tech establishment it once challenged.

What changed? Facebook -- no longer a feisty startup but a 3,000-person, soon-to-be-public corporation with $3.9 billion in cash and an $85 billion to $100 billion valuation -- spent $1 billion to gobble up a much-smaller competitor, the photo-sharing app Instagram.

When it did so, it stirred up a caldron of ill will that the "People of the Internet" have been harboring toward Mark Zuckerberg's once-hip company. Some Instagram users said they were downloading all of their photos and then deleting them from the app just so Facebook couldn't get its hands on them.

Pundits weren't kind to Facebook, either. David Horsey of the Los Angeles Times, writing about the Instagram purchase, noted that the company is looking more and more like "Big Friend," a gentler variation on George Orwell's all-seeing Big Brother. Data indicate others share that view, too. A new poll, conducted before the Instagram news, found that 28% of Americans have an unfavorable view of Facebook -- twice as many as disapprove of Apple and nearly three times as many as Google.

This backlash highlights a new reality: As a technological juggernaut, Facebook is more Microsoft than Tumblr. To use a musical analogy employed on Twitter, it's the Nickelback to Instagram's Bon Iver.

Facebook and Instagram's images couldn't be more different, so it's tempting to say that this Goliath-buys-David event is a turning point for Facebook. But people have been writing about Facebook losing its mojo for years now. In 2009, AdWeek ran this headline: "Is Facebook getting uncool for 18-24s?" A year later, mainstream news websites noted the phenomenon of parents and grandparents joining Facebook, scaring off younger people.

"It's official, Facebook is becoming uncool," CBS declared.

It's hard to pinpoint the moment when Facebook's image problem started. Maybe it was when users realized how much data Facebook was collecting about them. Maybe it was when CEO Zuckerberg started to seem less like that geeky, counterculture college kid and more like a run-of-the-mill billionaire.

But it is possible to take a look at the conversation and tease out a few factors that seem to have led to Facebook's current status as an inescapable, perhaps Orwellian, Internet giant.

First: Money. Nothing leads to public skepticism quite like a few billion dollars in pocket change. Compare that kind of situation at Facebook to Instagram, which as CNNMoney notes, hadn't monetized its product. It didn't support advertisements and apparently didn't sell its users' data.

Facebook, on the other hand, is accused of profiting wildly on the backs of the 850 million people who share personal details about their lives on the social network. For more on that, see The Wall Street Journal's recent feature "Selling You on Facebook," which analyzes the info that Facebook apps collect.

Second: Size. As companies get bigger, people tend to question their motives. Google is a good example of this view. The Silicon Valley company once was the darling of the Internet -- the search engine that didn't have ads on its homepage and declared its company ethos was "Don't Be Evil." As the tech blog Gizmodo writes, Google "built a very lucrative company on the reputation of user respect."

That was easy enough when Google was small. As it grew, however, some people started to lose faith in the company -- and to question its motives.

Gizmodo: "In a privacy policy shift, Google announced today that it will begin tracking users universally across all its services -- Gmail, Search, YouTube and more -- and sharing data on user activity across all of them. So much for the Google we signed up for."

People never talked that way about Instagram, which only had 13 employees and 33 million users. It's the kind of company journalists love to use the word "scrappy" to describe.

Third: Trust. As the company has grown, some people have come to trust Facebook so little that they're pulling photos from Instagram in advance of the takeover.

According to Megan Garber at The Atlantic, 25,000 people visited Instaport's site in six hours on Monday after the news broke, compared with 400 people on a normal day. Instaport is a service that helps people pull photos off Instagram for home storage.

"You could read that spike, on the one hand, as a mass freak-out on the part of users who don't trust Facebook -- despite Mark Zuckerberg's promises -- with their networks and memories," Garber writes. "You could also read it as an insurance play, a just-to-be-safe move on the part of people who want to feel sure that their photos are secure."

Mistrust of Facebook stems in part from concern about its privacy policies, which have been described as overly confusing. Facebook itself acknowledges that privacy concerns could trip up the company in the future.

In its initial public offering filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the company wrote: "We have in the past experienced, and we expect that in the future we will continue to experience, media, legislative, or regulatory scrutiny of our decisions regarding user privacy or other issues, which may adversely affect our reputation and brand."

Finally: The cool factor. Maybe it's less that people see Facebook as evil and more that the site just isn't as cool as it used to be -- partly because it's so popular and also because it's not the new kid on the block anymore. Zuckerberg launched Facebook in 2004, which is eons ago in Internet time. MySpace and Friendster -- all of Facebook's predecessors -- didn't survive (or didn't continue to grow) for this long.

Instagram, meanwhile, was founded in late 2010 and was only in recent months becoming part of the zeitgist. iPhone-toting hipster types liked the app for its mobility -- you cold post photos easily from your phone -- and filters that gave their pics a retro, vintage vibe.

"Instagram is, in a word, cool. Facebook is losing its 'cool', rapidly," wrote Allan Swann at the Computer Business Review.

Instagram managed to create a cache in part from its status as an underground hit. Even with tens of millions of users, the app was praised by reviewers as intimate -- a place, true or not, where it was safe to post personal photos and share stories with a relatively small network of friends. (Just to throw in some data: I have 815 Facebook friends but only 67 people whom I follow on Instagram, and I actually know almost all of them.)

It's not clear that any of that will change for Instagram. Zuckerberg says the app will continue to operate as a product that's independent from Facebook and that people won't have to post Instagram photos to Facebook just because the company owns the app. But the backlash helped crystallize the idea that Facebook no longer is seen as the always-cool company that everybody implicitly trusts.

"Some Instagram fans are acting as if this is a tragedy," Horsey of the Los Angeles Times writes of the acquisition. "They liked the idea that there was a little corner of the online world where they could gather and be outside the reach of the Zuckerberg empire. ..."

There was a time when people clamored to be part of Zuckerberg's network, which launched at first only for Harvard students. But now, as the Instagram backlash shows, Facebook has long stopped being an exclusive club. It's seen as the big, bland company that the app's users worry will ruin the cool thing they had going.

Ted, White & Blue.....Or how to make a Liberal Weenie Scream....

On a regular basis, I like to post something like this just to hear the sound of the Liberal Tree-huggers screaming....Ted is like a cartoon character but he does actually make sense....not that I would support all the things TED does but the man makes a few good points here and there....

So for all you Lefty Looney Liberal, (Progressive)Spotted Owl tongue kissing, Al Gore loving, Prius driving Greenie, PETA worshipping, Nancy Pelosi SF Voting, Obama supporting freaks -

This bit of "Ted, White & Blue" is for just for you !


NUGENT: You have the right to remain stupid
Fedzillacrats are oblivious to self-evident truths
By Ted Nugent

The Washington Times
July 13, 2011

You have the right to remain stupid, and what you say and do can and will be used against you in the court of public opinion. Unfortunately, the court of public opinion is expanding into a stupid-is-as-stupid-does joke. And it has a president and gang of thieves in the United States government to represent it.

So goes the sheeping of America. Welcome to Euro II.

With the level of dishonesty, fraud, abuse of power, corruption, rampant irresponsibility, downright criminal behavior and vehement refusal to be accountable, our government has clearly lost its collective mind - and its soul.

The brain-dead, zombielike nonsense blurting out of Democrats' pie holes is mind-boggling as they feebly attempt to rationalize raising the debt ceiling, scrambling mindlessly to explain how increased runaway, criminal spending on gluttonous, wasteful, superfluous stuff is a good thing.

"Honey, we're in debt up to our asses. Let's go shopping and increase our gluttonous indulgences. Yeah, that's the ticket."

Is there a Dr. Phil or an Oprah to counsel psychotic bureaucrats? Somebody has to put a halt to this insanity as quickly as possible. We the people of the Tea Party are trying with all our might but there must be somebody in government that can stop this. Somebody?

The separation of legislative, executive and judicial branches of government has turned into one big gang of complicit goons, scratching each other's backs and scheming to increase their own dishonest assault on we the people. Oh, how they have forgotten their oath to the U.S. Constitution. Oh, woe are they.

A nasty, unclean gaggle of Americans read the nonstop reports of mass graves in Mexico, the mountains of dead bodies, the unending exhuming of slaughtered innocents and decapitated citizens and public officials at the hands of evil drug cartels, then nonchalantly purchase another load of the mind- and life-destroying dope that these subhuman heathens peddle. You have to be on dope in order to fail to admit how your illegal or "medical" marijuana consumption creates wanton death and mayhem in your own communities and country. Thanks for nothing, idiots.

Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae and their complicit gang of America-hating snake-oil salesmen represent the most clear and present economic raping and pillaging in our country's history. Instead of ending the tragedy, the perpetrators are given bonuses and hired by our already-criminal-infested government. And they call it "creating jobs." Mao Zedong and Al Capone would be proud.

In the American West, where inhabitants have been raising hell for 20-plus years about how grizzly bears pose a serious and constant threat to people's lives and livelihoods, inept, ignorant bureaucrats enforce dangerous policy by calling these overpopulated bears an endangered species. A hiker gets killed by a grizzly again and these geniuses respond by reminding people to whistle and bang on pots and pans.

In the middle of a war on terror, invaders infiltrate our southern border with impunity and instead of living up to their oath to protect America, soulless Fedzillacrats erect signs on American soil not warning the invaders to leave but rather warning American citizens to stay out of the invaded territory. Meanwhile, the feds sue Arizona for enforcing American laws.

Charlie Rangel, Tim Geithner, Tom Daschle and God knows how many other criminal tax cheats get caught red-handed, and none of them are brought to anything resembling justice. Are you kidding me?

Former Chicago Mayor Richard Daley and current Mayor Rahm Emanuel, along with New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, forbid their subjects to protect themselves but charge their subjects higher taxes to pay for their own heavily armed security detail.

Texas rightly decides to execute a convicted murderer-rapist of an innocent little girl and the president and secretary of state side with the murderous, rotten-to-the-core United Nations goons instead of with their own country. Are you kidding me?

I end up in a state-of-the-art emergency room at a Canadian hospital with a serious blood-gushing dog bite and wait 6 1/2 hours to see a doctor. In Waco, Texas, I wait less than a minute. Our fearless community-organizer-in-chief wants to fundamentally transform American health care into Canadian health care - unless, of course, you qualify for a crony-payoff waiver of this diabolical scam shoved down the throats of we the people. Are you kidding me?

Food stampers increase their fraud and criminal abuse of an already-failed welfare slavery system, and our numbnut politicians let President Obama increase it fourfold. Are you kidding me?

Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven write the ultimate America-hating guideline on how to bring down the greatest quality of life in the history of mankind, and the Obama administration puts their ideas on the fast track in broad daylight, yet no one stops him. Are you kidding me?

Unions continue to demand more compensation for less productivity or quality control. The list of jobs Americans are not willing to do gets longer by the day as soylent-green foreigners continue to kick our butts because they don't allow such a list. Are you kidding me?

With another glaring, smoke-and-mirrors defiance of the pledge to government transparency, the No. 1 cop in America, aided and abetted by the vehemently anti-gun president, knowingly breaks the law and his oath to the Constitution by running illegally begotten guns to Mexican murderers, then tries to blame legitimate American gun dealers. Nothing like a good backfire to spotlight the cockroaches.

I could go on, but I'm getting sick to my stomach, as are an increasing number of American citizens sickened by the flagrant criminality of our government. I would like to go on record that the U.S. government is now more offensive and in violation of self-evident truths and God-given individual rights and liberties than the British government was in 1775.

Make note, bureaucrats. We have had enough, are completely fed up with the insanity and we officially put you on notice: You're fired. When we go to the polls in 2012, we are committed to give most of you a good dose of what unemployment feels like. And from now on, you will have to create your own jobs because governments - especially a bloated, criminally abusive government like we have in America today - is unforgivable, unsustainable and will not be tolerated any longer.

I would highly recommend you all seek treatment for your allergies to logic, truth, good will, decency, accountability and the American Way. If you don't get help soon, God only knows what will become of you.

Ted Nugent is an American rock 'n' roll, sporting and political activist icon. He is the author of "Ted, White and Blue: The Nugent Manifesto" and "God, Guns & Rock 'N' Roll" (Regnery Publishing).

Facebook is for fools....and I refuse to be one.

I don't like Facebook and I refuse to ever have a Facebook account.

Coming from a guy who writes a Blog that sounds odd but I think each blog is unique...no one sets the form or content here but me....NO " Big Brother" setting up the landscape...just me expressing my thoughts on the page.....you can comment or not....it is up to you.

While I understand that makes me out-of-step with the accepted trend of the day, I feel that this is the right thing for me. The idea of what Facebook represents is unsettling. The whole idea of "oversharing" every little detail of my life with anyone else who wants to see it is NOT something I want to participate in....I share somethings here but no one knows where I am or what I am doing...my posts here are like news stories and are edited to make sure I only state my mind not share every little detail with everyone.

I know, on Facebook, you only have to "friend" those you want to, you can limit my access, yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry to burst your bubble BUT the minute you upload some data (pictures, names, etc.) it is out of your control and is on a server somewhere. If you believe for one minute that any data on any server is "secure", you are living a fool's fantasy. it CAN and WILL be hacked if someone wants it bad enough.

" I just like to share stuff with my friends." - Who in turn will share it with all their friends, and so on, and so on.....This has got to be one of the dumbest things people do....Updating my status !!
"I'm off to NYC for the weekend !" - Great, you just let everyone know they should come over to rob your place.

The idea of groups of people getting together online sounds great in principle but are you really sure you want to allow so many people easy access to you, your family or your life?? It has NOT been the best course to pursue....

Let's look at a few headlines, shall we??? This is the SHITE I am talking about:


Facebook picture leads to sex assault bust
UPI.com - ‎1 hour ago‎
15 (UPI) -- A Chicago-area man was charged with sexually assaulting a teenage girl after her mother found a picture of the couple having sex on Facebook

Calif. man admits using Facebook to hack e-mail accounts
Washington Post - Don Thompson - ‎16 hours ago‎
A California man has admitted using personal information he gleaned from Facebook to hack into women's e-mail accounts, download nude....

Girls target former high school friend with lewd Facebook profiles
10 Connects - ‎4 hours ago‎
Two Florida girls have been arrested for creating fake Facebook pages and putting pictures of their former friend's head on prepubescent girl's bodies....

Teenage girl arrested after alarming Facebook postings
WTEN - ‎1 hour ago‎
... a teenage girl with a misdemeanor of Aggravated Harassment in the 2 nd degree, after she used expletive words on her Facebook page regarding.....

Minister gets five years in sex sting
Kansas City Star - Glenn E. Rice - ‎18 hours ago‎
A minister was sentenced Friday to five years in prison for using Facebook to entice someone he thought was a 13-year-old girl to meet him ...


And on and on and on. Not that "social media" is inherently bad BUT the preoccupation that people have developed with Facebook and the narcissistic nature of it has driven obsession to a point where Goldman Sachs recently valued Facebook at $50 BILLION Dollars.....$50B...Are you F&*king kidding me?? They don't "make" anything and the innovation they have created is dysfunctional....I am not against progress but not all "new" ideas are good or should be this integrated into our lives.

Zuckerberg is not visionary as he purloined the idea of Facebook from something different.

" An earlier inspiration for Facebook may have come from Phillips Exeter Academy, the prep school from which Zuckerberg graduated in 2002. It published its own student directory, “The Photo Address Book,” which students referred to as “The Facebook.” Such photo directories were an important part of the student social experience at many private schools. With them, students were able to list attributes such as their class years, their proximities to friends, and their telephone numbers."

They also had student directories at Harvard called " Face Books" that gave you info about who lived in the different dorms at Harvard.

Like Bill Gates, who didn't invent Windows (Gates bought DOS off another engineer and copied a system like Windows from a demo system he saw at Xerox) Zuckerberg is only a salesman. Gates is the same....they may be entrepreneurs, BUT they are not visionary.....they used others ideas and try to pass it off as if they were like Edison building the first light bulb.

In this celebrity obsessed society, the media and others push things like Facebook onto people. They prop up the story, promote people like Gates & Zuckerberg as geniuses and try to make it more than it really is. They are really good salesmen but I am not buying it.

Too many people have the "sheep mentality" and allow themselves to be dragged along by the crowd...What many call "quality" and "revolutionary" will soon fade...Facebook will not always be so attractive and it has a shelf life (Like Myspace and AOL, etc.)....people will look back at this from the future and wonder what all the fuss was about or how they could have been stupid enough to indulge in it.....Like a hangover, they will have had their fun and have to pay for the stupid behavior of when they were "drunk" on Facebook ....Like any other hangover they will look at their behavior and wonder why they posted something that cost them a job, a friend (a real friend in real life) or a marriage......stupid is forever and the stupid things people put on the web will be there forever as others copy it and send it along.....

Don't be a "sheeple".....chart your own course and live a purposeful life. Make real friends and if you need to reach someone, send them a e-mail. then, get together in person and speak face-to-face....you'll enjoy that much more. Trust me.

When you resist the temptation to join this stupidity, don't post the pictures of you and your friends getting drunk or doing something stupid (which in turn your new perspective employer WON'T see because they are not on Facebook), you'll thank me.

Really....why would you share details about all these things with 500 million other Facebook users you wouldn't like to tell your Mom??? Think about it..... and if you don't believe me, type "anti facebook" into Google and see what you get back.