Interesting JMS Facebook Posts & Tweets

[phazedout]

Since our Jan is still (hopefully) asleep and Joe doesn't seem to, thought I would post this letter by him as read by Bruce.

"Since you can't come to the convention, Joe, perhaps you can write a letter for Bruce Boxleitner to read in your absence." Always a mistake. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhAnillHeWw

Phaze
on the "Coffee and sleep deprivation lead to dizziness, not the funs but I will feel better in time" ID

[babylonlurker]

Since our Jan is still (hopefully) asleep and Joe doesn't seem to, thought I would post this letter by him as read by Bruce.

Phaze
on the "Coffee and sleep deprivation lead to dizziness, not the funs but I will feel better in time" ID

Yes, that was a fun one ! Being there is more than half the fun.

[Jan]

Not a post but bound to be interesting. The Archive of American Television interview that JMS did several months ago is on line now. All I can access right now is part two but that may be because I'm at work.

http://www.emmytvlegends.org/interviews/people/j-michael-straczynski#

ETA: I just watched the part I linked to and JMS talks about Michael O'Hare's illness at about 45:45. This was only a week or two before he told the fans at Phoenix comic-con.

Jan

[Jan]

One wonders what brought this on:

@straczynski
Have decided New York is a communal farm dedicated to growing eccentrics to feed the needs of a growing nation.

Jan

[Jan]

There's quite a bit of interaction on this thread but here's a cool post from JMS that started it:

It's a funny old world....

Back in high school, I couldn't afford to go to the prom (and even if I could've afforded it, I had no one to go with, being the resident nerd and social outcast)...like most geeks I was invisible to the cheerleaders and a target of opportunity for the bullies...I lived at the bottom of a food chain whose pinnacle was occupied by athletes, gymnasts, and student body caporegimes...I passed through the experience so thoroughly absent any kind of visible wake that, as noted way the hell downstream, at the two reunions I attended, only a few people (most of whom are here) remembered me at all (the rest stared blankly at the name tag and said "what crowd were you with?" "nope, sorry, the name doesn't ring a bell" "who are you again?" and my all-time favorite, "Nancy says you're famous, what is it you do, exactly?" so I ended up doing what I did back then, holding up the wall as the usual cliques re-formed with the usual suspects)....

After all *that*...I received a call today from a very nice fellow who informed me that I had just been inducted into the Chula Vista High School Hall of Fame. The award will be presented at homecoming in October, and they will put my photo on permanent display (which should traumatize the hell out of students and lead to a big upswing in opportunities for future psychology majors).

I must state for the record that despite paragraph one above, I am and have always been a big fan of the school; this is where I first cut my teeth as a writer, and was encouraged to continue by two teachers whose guidance and support was the very first validation of my work, and I've praised and celebrated those involved in print in many places over the years...leading to the formation of the Massie/Terry/Straczynski Scholarship for the best writer to come out of CVHS every year. So I have a great respect for both the school and the staff.

I mention this here because it's fun news, a nifty turn of events, and as encouragement to all of the other nerds, geeks and outcasts out there swimming around at the bottom of the high school food chain...don't be discouraged: the wheel turns, and amazing things happen.
All things considered, it's a good life, if you have a dream and you don't weaken.

Jan

[Jan]

And on Twitter (discussion to Off Topic, as usual):

"Yes, I, Dianne Feinstein want Americans to relax about CIA and NSA spying, they're not intrusive WHAT DO YOU MEAN THEY'RE IN MY COMPUTERS?"

Jan

[Jan]

Brrrr! JMS is on a whirlwind trip right now, scouting locations for Sense8 and other other show-runner-y things. He's sent along some pictures and a video:

From London:

https://www.facebook.com/139652459402959/photos/a.141141352587403.20034.139652459402959/732540766780789/?type=1&stream_ref=10

On the road in Iceland:

https://www.facebook.com/139652459402959/photos/a.141141352587403.20034.139652459402959/734910726543793/?type=1&stream_ref=10

Windy video of coastline (Brrrr!):

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=735498989818300&stream_ref=10

Next stop, Mumbai.

Jan

[Jan]

Photos from Mumbai:

https://www.facebook.com/139652459402959/photos/pcb.740207296014136/740201269348072/?type=1&theater

https://www.facebook.com/139652459402959/photos/pcb.740207296014136/740201272681405/?type=1&theater

https://www.facebook.com/139652459402959/photos/pcb.740207296014136/740207106014155/?type=1&theater

https://www.facebook.com/139652459402959/photos/a.141141352587403.20034.139652459402959/747038308664368/?type=1&theater

And now for something completely different...

Was thinking tonight about "dark matter," because that's just the kind of hairpin I am, and I wonder if what it actually is, is "transitional matter." All other kinds of matter are set in one state of another, energy or matter, particle or wave. But there has to be something that bridges the sides, that act as a kind of transitional force. Maybe the energy generated by dark matter produces one decaying and one non-decaying particle (which cancel each other out for observational purposes), but the non-decaying particle goes on to be used for other purposes. It is not a thing unto itself, it can only be seen by what it produces, or what it leaves behind, more by what it *isn't* and what it *does* than what it *is.* A shadow-factory constructing particles that go on to be used in one state or another.

On the other hand, maybe it's just the universe's answer to butterscotch pudding.

Full discussion is here: https://www.facebook.com/permalink.p...&stream_ref=10

And on twitter:

@straczynski 3h
But why *can't* I do a comic book called The Walking Bread? You're not the boss of me.

Jan

[Jan]

As ever, discussion to the Off Topic Forum, please:

THE RULES OF THE NEW ARISTOCRACY

It doesn’t matter how much food costs increase, doesn’t matter if you can only afford fast food, we will always be able to buy steak. And we will invest heavily in fast food stocks to ensure we make money off this. Doesn't matter how much gas costs, we will always be able to afford it.

In addition to poor food choices and health coverage, your kids will grow up without proper nutrition which will cause them problems on every level, from physical to educational difficulties. Our kids will grow up straight and true and healthy.

It doesn’t matter how much an education costs, doesn’t matter if your kids can’t afford to go to college or come out with massive debt, we will always be able to send our kids to university. And because a lot of our income is derived from tax incentives and taxpayer-financed bailouts your taxes are sending our kids to school. But you do not have the right to any of our money to send your kid to school.

If you or your kids want to start a business, you will find that because we’ve sucked all the money out of the economy, there is simply no available cash around to help you finance your startup. (Unless you want to go to your friends online at sites like Indiegogo, and isn’t that just cute?) We just cut our kids a check and tell them to go have fun.

Your kids are born with a glass ceiling above which they will almost certainly never have the opportunity to rise. Our kids are born with a marble floor beneath which they will never be allowed to fall.
If you accidentally provide incorrect information on your tax return, you could lose your house, your possessions, and your livelihood. We lie all the time on our tax information and none of us ever have to deal with this. We squirrel away trillions of dollars in overseas accounts and do all we can to ensure that your money never leaves our control because we'll doubtless need to scoop out more of it soon.

You live in a Company Town; we pay you to work for us, while making sure that we own all the stores in town that sell our goods, the doctors offices where you go in town, the restaurants where you eat, and that we charge you just enough to make sure that at the end of the week you don’t have any leftover money to squirrel away, so you can never leave the company town, can never get ahead, and can never risk criticizing the company town. You work for us. We own the town where you live. We own you.

If one of you takes a hundred dollar bill from the cash register, you will go to jail. If we take billions out of the savings of ordinary people then crash the economy, costing thousands of jobs, not one of us will ever be prosecuted. Because the New Aristocracy is above such things. So we’ll just keep on doing it. Enjoy the ride.

Your local police belong to us now. We have militarized them into soldiers who treat you like terrorists. If you speak against us, we will ensure that you are tear gassed and beaten and handcuffed and caged into “free speech zones” designed to make you forget that the whole country was supposed to be a free speech zone. But now you have free speech only when and where we say you can have it. Meanwhile, we can say and do pretty much anything we want, to you or anyone else, and get away with it.

If you happen to figure out our game and talk about it, we will accuse you of Class Warfare, in order to distract anyone from realizing that yes, there was a class war, that it was against you, that the war is over, and we won.

Yes, you get a chance to vote for congresspeople and senators and presidents. But only after we’ve decided, long before the first ballot is ever cast, which candidate we will finance. Those we like, those who will give us what we want first and foremost, we will finance and you will get to vote on one of the two pre-screened candidates we have given you. If we don’t like them, if we think they will challenge us, we will not finance them and you will never have the chance to vote on them. Because you don’t get a real vote in the New Aristocracy.

We own the White House. We own Congress. They pass the bills we write for them. They make the laws we want them to make, and make sure that they only limit you, never us. We own the courts. We own the lawyers. They are the club we use to beat you into submission.

There are no Democratic or Republican Senators, or Congresspeople or Presidents. Those parties have not existed for decades. There is only the Party of the New Aristocracy. The rest is Kabuki theater. It is Mexican Wrestling. It is the illusion of choice, of difference, of democracy. This is not a democracy. It is a monarchy of money. In that monarchy, we are the Aristocracy, the royalty, and what we say, goes.
If you dump trash illegally, you will be fined and potentially arrested. If we dump hundreds of tons of toxic waste into rivers and streams, none of us will ever be arrested and if we are fined, we will simply raise our prices so that you are the one to actually pay for what we did.

We are the New Aristocracy, and we do not pay fines.

We are the New Aristocracy, and we are immune from prosecution.

We are the New Aristocracy, and we find your poverty and your powerlessness and your struggles disgusting. You are beneath us.

Understand something: we don’t want you to succeed. We don’t want someone coming along to slice the pie into smaller pieces. We want to own all of it. If we really wanted more of you where we are, do you think we would have spent the last thirty years consolidating every major company into smaller and smaller groups owned by fewer and fewer people?

We are the New Aristocracy because we were born into it. We got our money the old fashioned, Medieval way: our parents gave it to us. We were born into the wealth that we stole from you and your family over the last fifty years. You were not born into anything other than poverty and struggle. You will never be us. You will never have our advantages. And we like it that way.

We like that you peer through the bars of your cage to all that we have. We like that you think you can have it yourself one day. Because that illusion keeps you on our side. But you will never have those things. We’ve made sure of that. Because what you’re looking at is ours, and we do not share.

The world we have carefully constructed for you is like one of those boardwalk games of chance where if you knock down the big pins with a baseball, you win a huge prize. But the pins are weighted and positioned so that you will never, ever knock them down. Yet you’ll keep paying anyway, and keep throwing, until you exhaust yourself and your wallet. And we like it that way.

We don’t want you to have opportunities, we don’t want you to have an education, we don’t want you to have a voice in what happens to you, we don’t want you healthy, we don’t want you to do anything but be frightened, helpless, docile consumers who will eat and watch and buy what we tell you to eat and watch and buy while we keep all the good stuff to ourselves.

Because you’re not in our club.

Because we are the New Aristocracy.

And you are the New Peasants.

And we very, very, very much like it that way.

Lots of good conversation in the thread which can be found here: https://www.facebook.com/permalink.p...&stream_ref=10

[Jan]

Continuing with JMS' comments in the thread:

Somebody commented about armed Americans having something to say if the Second Amendment was repealed.

And what, pray tell, are you defending with that second amendment, Joe? Is it a goal unto itself? Or is there a reason for it? Because the other provisions under the Bill of Rights provide for safety against breaches of privacy, which the right gave away for safety after 9/11...it prohibits being held without trial, which the right also gave freely away in fear of terrorists (Jose Padilla among others)...it provides for free expression and the right to assemble, which the right allowed police and the government to extinguish during the occupy movement, which whether you agreed with them or not were still legal until suddenly the government decided that there were free speech zones, and I don't remember you or anybody else on the right complaining about that... the freedom of an unencumbered press has been destroyed by whistleblower prosecutions and you folks on the right seemed okay with that...and we won't even get into the extent to which the Bill of Right's separation of church and state have been savagely attacked by the right, which seems totally okay with that as well.

I could go on and on and on...and mind you I'm not saying one thing for or against the gun issue, I'm just asking the question: what are you keeping them for since you freely and almost gleefully gave away everything you're supposed to be using them to protect? You're guarding a house that has burned down behind you.

There was a comment about 'oligarchy' being a more fitting word.

Nobody knows what the fuck an oligarchy is. Aristocrats, we get.

In response to a comment that it's not just the right that's at fault, it's both sides and indeed, all of us:

Colin: I don't disagree. Nor did I mean the right to the exclusion of the left. Both sides did it. But the hypocrisy, for me, is to see the right screaming bloody murder in defense of one right when they've happily, willingly and in some cases even gleefully given away the rest. Joe stands among that august company.

And though both parties acquiesced, it was the right that led this, make no mistake. Lots of folks on the left said, when warrantless wiretapping was discovered, "you can't do this, the Bill of Rights prohibits illegal search and seizure." And the right said "shut up, we need to be safe!"

When the left complained about American citizens being arrested without warrant and held without charges, it was the right, far more than the left, who said "shut up, we need to be safe!"

Time after time, the right led the battle to surrender the rights that the guns are supposedly there to protect.

Which is why there's no need in the long run for anyone to come for the guns...and why this won't happen (needless to say there is no one in congress actually saying "let's repeal the second amendment," that hasn't happened, let's not get into the gun discussion per se, that's another topic for another time).

The point is that there's no need to come for the guns to get our freedoms...because they've already been given away.

What I'm thinking is that as long as there are armed citizens, they at least probably feel that they have some control over their own destinies.

Not that I expect you to have all the answers, JMS, but I'd be interested in your thoughts: So, stipulating all of the above is true, what can be done about this?

Jan: what can be done about it? Honestly, nothing. That's the damned misery of the thing. It's now fully entrenched in the system. It's like getting a diagnosis of stage four cancer. What can be done about it? Nothing. This is the new system for the next hundred years.

A comment about how rights have been stripped away gradually over time and a reference to 'how to cook a frog' anecdote (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog)

Casey, actually - Jan[/I]): the problem with the analogy, of course, is that while there may be a few exceptions, the average person is smarter than the average frog, so it doesn't quite apply.

The problem is that we've gone through the stage when this should have been debated and fought, and now this has all become part of the new Status Quo. It's accepted. It is that it is.

I do a lot of conventions, and I get to talk to lots and lots of folks in their 20s who believe, honestly and sincerely believe, that they will never have the same opportunities as their parents, that their lives will not be better than their parents and in fact may be worse. Many of the polls out there reflect a similar perspective among the young people who have grown up in the soil prepared for them by their parents and our collective bad decisions and cowardice.

That resignation, that quiet despair, will persist for a very long time because it carries with it the perception that you can't change anything. It will take another couple of generations at least before that generation down the road asks, "wait, WHY can't we change it?" Then something will be done. But I doubt very much it will happen in my lifetime.

And furthermore...at risk of frogging out the conversation...my point was that the analogy (and I don't think there's actual science behind this, btw) works only if we are as stupid as a frog.

Meaning: the frog is not smart enough to sense the change in temperature, and as a result is boiled alive. It doesn't know what's going on.

The body politic of Americans -- we the frog -- contained factions that DID know what was going on, or DID know that this was wrong, and went ahead and did it anyway.

The frog can be forgiven for not knowing what was happening.

We did...and did it anyway...and as a result, in the frog conversation, it is the frog that suffers by comparison to us, not the other way around.

And apparently I am full of frog. Or something with four letters.

To a comment about how religion is creeping into politics in all of the conservative states:

Mark: good point, as nearly every aristocracy in human history has held onto its power by merging religion and the state. The Divine Right of Kings with a modern spin.

Somebody commented that JMS might get a reputation as being a Tea Partier who wants a smaller, less intrusive government.

Too bad that's not what the Tea Party actually is...given its intrusion into women's bodies, the rights of other people to civil weddings, the intrusion of religion into the state, backing repressive surveillance tactics and warrantless wiretapping...if you happen to see that Tea Party, let me know, because the one you're talking about ain't that.

[Jan]

Okay, than. I'm neither qualified now equipped to have an opinion on this.

Joe's Theory of Button Fly Jeans: When hitting a restroom urinal, one only *needs* to pop the top three buttons; the fourth is just for show

Jan

[phazedout]

Well it certainly solves the fasten/zip debate 😁

[Jan]

Don't know how I managed to miss this one but it looks like this was a precursor to the 'Rules for a new Aristocracy' essay. From back in March:

https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=553089294725938&id=139652459402959

March 10, 2013 •

The other day, in testimony, Attorney General Eric Holder said what may be one of the most astonishing and deeply disturbing things said about the current financial system. The quote follows:

"But I am concerned that the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them when we are hit with indications that if we do prosecute — if we do bring a criminal charge — it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy. I think that is a function of the fact that some of these institutions have become too large."

In particular, this clause "if we do bring a criminal charge it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy."
Mark down the date in your journals, because the moment this was publicly admitted was the day that the presence of the New Aristocracy was officially confirmed and given status above the rule of law.

If you or I or anyone else embezzled a few grand, or laundered a few grand, or committed any other kind of crime, they'd throw us under the jail for years. But like the aristocrats of long-ago England and France and other nations who could commit any crime they so chose and go without blemish because it would upset the Natural Order of Things, the New American Aristocracy cannot be prosecuted, cannot be indicted, cannot be brought to trial because if they do it will bring down the world economy. They are immune. They are above the fray. Untouchable.

It's Mafia logic. "Nice world economy you got here. Be a real shame if something...happened to it."

A congressman, senator or sitting president can have criminal charges brought against him or her, but not someone in a large financial institution?
For over two centuries, what made this nation a shining beacon on a hill was the absolute certainty of its citizens that we were a nation of laws, and that no one was above the law.

That world no longer exists.

Say hello to the New Aristocracy.

Jan

[Ubik]

Thanks Jan, that does help add an additional layer of context.

[JoeD80]

Okay, than. I'm neither qualified now equipped to have an opinion on this.





Jan

I didn't know they still made button fly jeans