Google Chrome Has Blacklisted This Site

Turns out I can't pull up this blog on the computer I use anymore.

I get this warning from Google Chrome:


"Danger: Malware Ahead!
"Google Chrome has blocked access to this page on exiledinhollywood.blogspot.com.
Content from www.directorship.com, a known malware distributor, has been inserted into this web page. Visiting this page now is very likely to infect your computer with malware.
Malware is malicious software that causes things like identity theft, financial loss, and permanent file deletion."





I have no idea who "Directorship.com" is, nor why this site should have anything to do with this site, a Blogger (and, therefore, a Google) site.

Here's an example of a page with instructions on how to fix this.


In addition to other things, the site says:




The majority of blacklistes sites are in reality legitimate websites into which hackers have inserted malicious content. Often, the site owners are having difficulty, both in cleaning up their sites, as well as in removing malware warnings that seriously impact their sites' traffic and reputation.






It looks like I'm going to have to start a new blog, if I want to write at all.

But how easy would it be for computer gremlins to shut down any other site I put up?
Real easy. I'm not a technically savvy person.

To me, this is just another reason the Net is turning into something it once was not. At one time it was a superior research tool. It is still good for research. However, in my years
of scanning the net for information (since 06) daily, I have mostly used Google, and I have seen Google's results change dramatically. I have written about this before here.
At one time, if you entered a set of words in quotes, you would get pages and pages of results: other pages that carry those exact same words in the order you wrote them in the quotes.

However, this is not the case now. If I do that, I'm lucky to get two or three results. What this means is that Google is not returning the number of results it once returned. Google is also favoring media sites and sites that get linked to more than others. Previously, they would return a result for you even if it were a simple site maintained by an individual recording observations, much like this blog.

Because of this, people can access sites that get accessed a lot (ie, that are linked to by other sites, or which are media sites affiliated with an already-powerful information purveyor).

But sites like this will not come up in searches so readily.

And if they do, Google Chrome will be blocking them, as they are blocking this site now.

It's almost funny someone would bother to block this site, since no one reads it anyway.

On Moving...Living...And Belonging

It's Sunday and I'm here in Hollywood, home.

But it's not really home anymore. It's just a place with walls where I lived and where he lives (not for long) where we had a life, with birds, with neighbors, with campers in the carport, with the night sounds I still miss (because no matter what the downtown Long Beach people think, downtown Long Beach has nowhere near the energy level or life level that Hollywood does).

So one of my favorite things to do is order a BLT from Yummy.com.

And I've got one, right here. Yummy.com makes a mean BLT and they bring the heavy groceries right to your doorstep. I'm not a big spender on luxury items but getting heavies delivered has been my thing, in Hollywood, for the simple reason that it's a few extra bucks and saves a whole lot of time, parking, lugging, walking, etc. So......grocery deliveries were a thing for me here. But not in Long Beach they won't be. I will miss the cute young friendly Yummy.com kids who show up 20 minutes after I hit "submit." They're always really cute and some of them give me really nice smiles because I'm a good tipper.

That's why you leave good tips, by the way..it's also why you sometimes give a ten to the guy standing on the corner with a sign, because in return---he'll give you a smile, or a compliment, worth way more than ten bucks. And you'll have an actual human experience. When the majority of people you encounter in your day are focused intently on machines and the communications that come through machines. So it's some guy, some vet, someone you'll never see again, who's seen hell, who's lost everything, who has to beg, who gives you a smile when you give him a ten dollar bill. And he says "Oh my god, thank you. This means I don't have to stand here anymore. You have no idea how much you've made my day."

And the smile in his eyes will stay with me long after I've pulled out of that intersection.

And that's why I give the guys whatever I have with me. Not always. Sometimes I look at them and think "fuck it..I have no money..I'm in a bad mood....why should I...." Whatever.

But if I have some cash in pocket, and I don't always---If I have it, and if they look a certain way.....and I can't explain what it is that makes me roll down the window for one person and not another.....I'll give him a damn ten. Or even a twenty. Or a five. Or whatever. BECAUSE WHAT I GET BACK feeds my soul somehow. It's for me, not even really for them. But I know they'll feel it.

They'll feel it, more than the person sitting in the car listening to my voice on Sirius/XM. They'll feel it. Because I looked at them, helped them, and was there. And at the end of the day, that counts as much or more than me recording traffic accident lists into a computer. At the end of the day, I saw the eyes of someone whose life I made a momentary difference in. And that's worth it.



I don't live here anymore. It is just a place with walls. The front yard where I've sat out on the wall for so many years now, I don't live there either. I don't really live anywhere. There is a really nice place with a nice view that I can call mine for a while. And I look out at the giant cranes and the Gerald Desmond Bridge and I think, where am I? What am I doing here?

Long Beach is as good a place to be, as any. The rent is certainly more affordable than Hollywood. The neighbors...well, we'll see.

Maybe I'll get to meet the woman who was standing in front of the building yelling for 45 minutes last night that she was locked out. "RALPH!! RALPH!!! I NEED THE KEY!! RALPH! ANYBODY THERE! I GOT TO GET IN THE BUILDING!"

I met Ralph the other day. He was standing out front and did not have a key. I was carrying a picture in a frame and he offered to carry it for me if I would let him in. I said OK. Ralph is a little overweight. OK, more than a little. I'm on the fourth floor. We weren't even to the top when he was thrusting the picture at me (and it was actually pretty light) ...saying, "here you go!! Nice meeting you!!!!" I saw him go into an apartment down the hall.

He's nicer than the neighbor who yelled at me for sitting on the 4th floor fire escape, anyway.


So I'll probably start a new site just for continuity's sake...because I'm not exactly inland any more. "Inland Night Lights" was actually inspired by the fact that I was focused for a long time on the Inland Empire, Riverside and San Bernardino. But I never did get readers from those areas, only one occasional follower. So, what the hell. I have one regular reader now, Calico Blackie from PrairieFireNews.com. Maybe he can apply his California sensibilities and help me come up with a name for the new site.

Journalism On Trial In Ft. Meade: Mass Media Yawns (Brad Manning/KPCC's coverage in Los Angeles)

img source: troyjurimas.wordpress.com



Brad Manning's court martial is officially under way.

Here's KPCC's "coverage" of it.

To give them a little credit, they did have one guest who was a strong advocate for Manning.

They had another guest, some 'professor' in Texas, of all places, who said Manning is a traitor because "you go through your chain of command."

He harped on this again and again and Larry Mantle, the host, never said a word about Manning having done that. So I left the following comment. Let's see if they leave it up.











Remember 'what you say is what you are'? Well--knucklehead is too kind a word for this so-called "professor" in Texas (I lived there for 12 years, and if you think someone from Texas represents the rest of the country in any way, you guys are crazy).

Manning DID go up his chain of command REPEATEDLY. And he got shut down REPEATEDLY. Everything this guy said went unchallenged by Larry Mantle. What's more, Brad Manning is by far not the only solider who leaked information to Wikileaks. WL had information on the Iraq War Logs years before Manning was in Iraq.

And there's no reference at all that I heard (as long as I listened) to the fact that there's a grand jury trying to collect dirt on Julian Assange, who is imprisoned in an office building in London for committing..JOURNALISM.

When your organization is not responsive to reports of wrongdoing, people turn to the press. That is the meaning of the fourth estate that this fool of a "professor" thinks our country can do without. We're talking years and years and years and years of war that no leaks and no soldier and no books (and there are hundreds of books) could stop. How many years are we supposed to continue to believe a press that will only bend over for warmongers? And will only reject the efforts of a Manning or an Assange? (Manning tried to get the Washington Post and the NYT interested, they rejected him. Fine upstanding bastions of journalism, those two.)

It's absolutely unbelievable how little coverage of this trial there is, and has been---right from the very beginning, THIS has been where journalism is on trial, and except for a brief blurb here and there, here on KPCC and everywhere else, we're getting not even half the story.

Manning upheld his oath to serve THE PEOPLE of the United States of America---the taxpayers who fund these wars and who were not getting anything near the truth.
Manning upheld his oath to serve THE CONSTITUTION.

He is an American hero and without people like him, we are nothing. We are a totalitarian, authoritarian, fascistic fool's waste of a 'country' where cruelty and insanity rule the day rather than the law.






Two psychiatrists said Manning shouldn't be sent to Iraq. So where did the Army send him? Iraq.







img source: Occupy Marines




I checked out NPR's coverage of Brad Manning and it's so slanted, it's not even funny.

But they did leave my comment up. Five people gave it a thumbs up in three hours, so I guess that's good. Here's my comment:





Brad Manning is far from being the first or only soldier to leak to the press. Wikileaks had the Iraq war logs years before Manning was even in Iraq.

Who threatens the well-being of soldiers? Brad Manning, or the top of command warmongers who sent our young men and women into illegal wars while lying to American taxpayers and co-opting the press? Brad Manning, or the Army commanders who sent soldiers into war without body armor?
Who is the real war criminal here?

The answer is embarrassing and it's not even as embarrassing as the answer to the question, "Where is NPR's coverage of the debate about Building 7?"
And that's not even touching the fact that Manning upheld his oath to the Constitution and the American people. This is the oath broken by those who committed
war crimes or stood by and did nothing to stop them.
Without people like Brad Manning and without the press, which whistleblowers SHOULD speak to, we would be a fascist country.
Since he has spent, and is facing many years in prison for his courageous contribution, many would argue we already are.




My note: NPR did leave up my comment (for now). However, I can't vote down anyone else's comment. Nor can I leave another, or reply and further the discussion there.

When I try, the computer tells me I must sign in.

However: I am already signed in there.

Jon Rappoport on TV: "Fantasy Time In The Land Of Mind Control"

Source: JonRappoport.Wordpress.com

NoMoreFakeNews.com



Recognize that every message television imparts is a proxy, a fabrication, a simulacrum, an imitation of life one step removed. It isn’t people talking in a park or on a street corner or in a saloon or a barber shop or a meeting hall or a church.

It’s happening on a screen, and that makes it both fake and more real than real.


...Therefore, the argument that television can impart important values, if “directed properly,” is specious from the ground up. Television tells lies in its very being. And because it appears to supersede the real, it hypnotizes.





I would argue that computer-screen communication does the same thing, but since it is a two-way communications device, an individual can seek out his/her comfort level. He can find those who say the things that resonate properly with his sensibilities, and engage in "belonging" ---through the machines. Without the hassles, misunderstandings, hurt and joy that can come from actual human contact. Eye-to-eye contact, body language contact, actual contact that comes from touching another person on the shoulder, say. The five senses are relegated to a back burner, and with them go the things that make human relationships powerful.

More:




When, for example, television promotes “family,” it’s all on the level of fictitiously happy, desperate, yearning, last-chance, problem-resolving, melted-down, trance-inducing, gooey family.

This isn’t, by any stretch, an actual human value. Whether it’s the suburban-lawn family in an ad for the wonders of a toxic medical drug, or the mob family going to the mattresses to fend off a rival, it’s fantasy time in the land of mind control.




I would argue, here, that computers are also a psy-op, also mind-control. Every person who interfaces with a computer for eight hours a day, 40 hours a week, is undergoing behavioral conditioning.

One performs the same repeated movements with the mouse and the keyboard. One also ingests artificial light on a continual basis, which has nutritional effects on the body and can affect hormone levels, which in turn impacts mood and thinking.

The important thing is that attention, which has natural limits, is diverted from the immediate world of the five senses, where people live and work right around us. It diverts our attention from the possibilities embodied by those people right in our environment. This might be what doomed Occupy---it made it appear that all one had to do was find the right people, show up, and the rest would happen naturally. The part that was left out was the part where collective outrage grew over commonly experienced injustices, among people in the same locations. People who--without computers, tv or other proxies for actual experience, would form bonds of friendship, trust ....and a common interest in actually helping each other and connecting in lasting, non-superficial ways.

The Gerald Desmond Bridge

.....was replaced.



I can see it from my window.



It has its own Facebook page.



Here's what the FB page says:





The Gerald Desmond Bridge is a through arch bridge that carries four lanes of Ocean Boulevard from Interstate 710 in Long Beach, California, west across the Cerritos Channel to Terminal Island. The bridge is named after Gerald Desmond, a prominent civic leader and a former city attorney for the City of Long Beach.

The bridge was designed by Moffatt & Nichol Engineers and was constructed by Bethlehem Steel. Intended to replace a pontoon bridge that had been in use since World War II, ground-breaking for the construction of the new bridge occurred on October 19, 1965, and it was completed in 1968. It has a 410-foot-long (120 m) suspended main span and a 155-foot (47 m) vertical clearance over the Cerritos Channel, and connects Terminal Island on its east side to downtown Long Beach.

Replacement [edit]

This bridge has developed various maintenance problems and the Port of Long Beach has suggested it would be more economical to replace the bridge with a new cable-stayed bridge with 200 feet (61 m) of vertical clearance. The new bridge will allow access to the port for even the tallest container ships and will be the first long-span cable-stayed bridge in California. In order for the bridge to be so tall, long approaches will be required to allow heavy trucks to cross the structure. A joint venture of Parsons Transportation Group and HNTB performed preliminary engineering for the main span and the approaches. The project is estimated to cost $800 million and is scheduled for completion by 2016. The project is to be completed as a design-build in contrast to the traditional design-bid-build used typically in infrastructure improvement. The replacement bridge was approved in 2010.

In March 2012, the 155-foot (47 m) vertical clearance of the bridge proved insufficient to allow passage of the 12,562 TEU MSC Fabiola; the largest container ship ever to enter the Port of Long Beach. The height restriction prevented the ship from docking at the Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC) dock; it docked at the Hanjin terminal instead.





The fourth floor is just high enough for a bird's-eye view of the street, but not so high that people don't look like people.

In other words, a perfect view.

Gray Davis Takes On The Power Racket --Conspiracy of Fools, Pt. 2

We know now, long after the fact, that Enron was essentially a criminal conspiracy (at the top) that sucked billions out of California customers and taxpayers.

But back when Grey Davis, then Governor, was sorting things out, he got shut down by Alan Greenspan and "Treasury Secretary" Lawrence Summers. Kurt Eichenwald describes the conversation between the three men when Davis met with Greenspan and Summers to try to understand what was happening, and gain support for Californians.


In a meeting room down from his Washington office, Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve Chairman, took a seat at the head of the conference table. To his left sat Lawrence Summers, the Treasury Secretary, and a few staffers. On the right was Gray Davis, the California Governor who had flown in that day, December 26, to discuss his state's power crisis with the country's two most influential economists (sic).

"Mr. Chairman, Mr. Secretary, thank you for meeting with me. I'm hoping that we can find some solutions to the troubles facing my state. The thing is, if deregulation fails in California, it will fail in the United States."

Greenspan placed his hand on a thick briefing book in front of him. He and Summers had met privately minutes before and decided to throw a splash of cold water on Davis. The man needed to understand there were limited answers to California's problems, all of them unpleasant.

"Truthfully, Governor, California hasn't deregulated," Greenspan said. "The state simply replaced one form of regulation with another. It's become a system of central planning run amok."

Summers joined in. "You have a fixed price set by the state for selling electricity to the public. But you have a variable, floating price when you buy electricity."

"That's not sustainable," Greenspan said. "The problem is your regulatory system. And there are a very limited number of solutions. But the first step is that prices for consumers are going to have to go up."

Davis showed no emotion. "I really feel the problem is the energy producers," he said. "They're manipulating the markets and forcing up prices."

"They may be," Greenspan said. "But that's beside the point. That's not causing the problem; that's making it worse. The real problem is a supply-and-demand imbalance."

Davis objected. There was plenty evidence, he said, that energy producers were withholding power from the market. Greenspan and Summers didn't argue the point, stressing that it made economic sense for power to be withheld. The utilities weren't making good on their bills already. With the utilities now careening toward bankruptcy, it would be folly for power companies to keep pumping electricity into the state without limits. It would just increase their exposure to the likely bankruptcies.

Gently, the two economists suggested that the state government hadn't helped matters. By attacking power companies, accusing them of crimes and refusing to meet with them, Davis and other politicians had signaled an unwillingness to deal with the structural problems. In a market, perceptions could be as important as reality. Until California took a more realistic approach, power companies would continue to be reluctant to do business with the state.

"Governor," Summers said, "this is classic supply and demand. The only way to fix this is ultimately by allowing retail prices to go wherever they have to go."

Davis's face hardened. He didn't like being lectured from the ivory tower. "Fine," he said. "You two live in your world of economics, supply and demand and pricing."

He leaned in. "Let me tell you about my world," he said. "About California politics. About referendums, where anybody with enough signatures can take a ballot initiative to the voters and overrule anything that we're doing."

Greenspan and Summers listened as Davis laid out his political dilemma. The words made it obvious that that power problems in California would become much worse. Economics and politics were in conflict. And for now, politics would rule.


So that's part one. Next, the doomed Governor Davis, who doesn't know Enron is far more powerful than he or California consumers are, meets with Enron CEO Ken Lay (also doomed).

"Governor," Lay began, "as you know, Enron is a major participant in the California market. And clearly the state has some serious problems."

Lay broached the next subject cautiously. He understood the politics and---Republican though he was---suggested that Davis shift the blame for all the troubles onto his Republican predecessor.

"Governor, you didn't cause this problem, you inherited it," he said. "But you can solve it by giving the state true competition and consumer choice."

The advice he gave could have come out of the mouths of Greenspan and Summers. Supply had to be increased and demand cut, he said. The market had to see the state was serious. Announce plans to build power plants, with temporary waivers from environmental regulations. Allow for pricing models that would result in lower costs during nonpeak hours. Then let the consumers feel the effects of higher prices, in order to change behaviors.

"I can't do that," Davis said sharply. "I'm not going to raise rates."

"Governor," Lay said, "it's going to be very difficult to get consumers acting rationally if they're paying five cents a kilowatt hour for electricity that costs twenty-five cents."



We know how this all ended for Gray Davis. Recall fever gripped the state and Californians voted in Terminator.

Appearing stiff, Gray Davis stood in the Assembly chambers at the state Capitol, delivering his third state of the state address.

"We will regain control over the power that's generated in California and commit it to the public good," he said. "Never again can we allow out-of-state profiteers to hold California hostage."

Davis listed a series of hard-nosed solutions: forbidding generators from conducting unscheduled maintenance, making it illegal to withhold power from the grid, expanding his emergency authority, prosecuting evildoers.

"The remedies I am proposing tonight are reasonable and necessary," Davis said. "There are other, more drastic measures I am prepared to take if I have to."

After all the advice from the free-market evangelists, Davis had chosen another path---all-out war.


Kurt Eichenwald, Conspiracy of Fools

Conspiracy Of Fools (The True Story of Enron)--Kurt Eichenwald

Here's a gem from page 301:


In a few hours on the last day of 1999, in a borrow-buy-sell frenzy that a child could understand, Enron generated more than 40 percent of the 1.2 billion in operating cash flow it would report for the year, almost all of it in money that would be returned to Citibank in a couple of weeks.

With interest.



I bought this book last year on Amazon and just now got around to reading it. It's Enron's story written novel-style. And it's not a bad job on a novel for an investigative journalist. For someone like me, Wall Street (and the world market) is a mysterious machine of proportions so massive that even if I stretched my brain for miles and years, it still wouldn't wrap around. I need help understanding anything with numbers.

And Eichenwald is brilliant at explaining what went down. It's a really fun read.


An interesting nugget about 9/11 and Enron:

Late 2001 was the time of “the height of the investigation into Enron, so the majority of Enron’s SEC filings were likely destroyed when World Trade Center 7 came down.”6




Back to Eichenwald. Here's another good one.


.....the hedging scheme had become far broader than most anyone knew. Raptor I and Raptor II were already up and running. Another vehicle had been presented to the board as Raptor III in August, and again the directors approved it. Despite the name, Raptor III wasn't the third Raptor, it was the fourth. The real Raptor III had been created without board approval. And it was the most irrational structure of all.

The third Raptor was designed to help Enron hedge one asset---its investment in the New Power Company, a business Enron set up to sell electricity and natural gas to residential customers, both directly and over the Internet. New Power was about to go public, and executives feared its potentially volatile stock price would whipsaw Enron's bottom line. So the third Raptor was used to lock in the New Power share price. Of course, to hedge, the third Raptor needed capital it could arguably use to repay Enron if the New Power shares fell in price.

The finance group found the capital they needed in the most unexpected of places: the New Power shares themselves. The stock being hedged was contributed to the third Raptor; again LJM2 (controlled by Enron CFO Andy Fastow) was the outside investor, putting in thirty million dollars and getting back just under forty million dollars one week later, before any hedging took place.

Still, hedges are supposed to go up in value as the price of the stock being protected goes down. But here, Enron had taken the irrational Raptor structure to its absurd extreme. New Power shares were backing the hedge of New Power shares. There wasn't even a pretense at economic sense.

But the Raptors would get still worse.