Go Pelaton Team Go! Please Go!

Indeed it is motivating when a disembodied head you’re looking at on a screen says ‘JoeJones1234′ keep it up you’re doing great’! Yet I ask all my readers who’ve ever walked, ran and cycled in residential neighborhoods was that more motivating than when you saw a Rottweiler the size of a small horse break full speed for you at 25-50 paces. Go Pelaton Team Go! No, you wish your Pelaton team was there so they could prove the old adage created by African Wildebeasts. It says, ‘when the lion is chasing you, you don’t have to be the fastest Wildebeast in the world; just faster than everybody else around you.

Remember when they told us Nintendo Wii was the latest greatest thing? It was going to revolutionize sports, revolutionize senior citizen activity levels and increase our children’s hand eye coordination. But none of those revolutionary promises came true and Wii is on the ‘scrap heap’ of history just as Pelaton and all that shit will soon enough be. After all those promises older Americans still suffer from chronic heart disease and high blood pressure and our children are still overweight and suffering from juvenile diabetes and furthermore they eventually just get bored with Wii.

Granted your child can get bored walking, running and playing basketball but it maintains your active attention while you do it because stumbling, getting hit by balls, getting hit by cars can happen at a moments notice if you don’t pay attention. But on the Wii if you go to the bathroom when you’re doing it you’ll only lose a life or two in the process and can simply come back to the game. That’s why our children’s attention span is so low. When you’re in the world doing shit, you have to pay attention but when you are sitting in front of a screen you don’t. That is the exact same reason we zone out in ‘Zoom’ meetings in ways you could never do in a real meeting.

Ladies and gentlemen stop the technological insanity. I love technology. I’m just as amazed by the latest scientific discoveries and technologies as anyone else but I’d be a fool to think they were inherently good or inherently beneficent. For instance, we keep telling ourselves the solution to crime is getting more cameras and big data computer equipment that reads 100 license plates per minute. Wrong. Crime is a spiritual and socio-economic problem largely not a technological one. If the argument were true that technology itself solves crime, crime would have been worse in the past because of the technological differences and we know from anecdotal evidence that is not the case. The creators of the gun said it would solve crime; nuclear weapons were thought to deter war(s); computer databases are thought to solve crime. I remember when Atlanta had the crime prediction technology and would staff accordingly. That was 5 or 6 years ago. Now crime is so prevalent, widespread and out of control predicting it is irrelevant. Quit fucking around and just letting IBM’s Watson supercomputer beat the brakes off ninjas playing chess, ‘Go’ and UNO. Let Watson solve and ‘predict’ crime and while it’s at it let Watson find our mates, find us our perfect dream careers and our perfect hobbies…..all by its genius computer algorithms and machine learning.

Ladies and gentlemen if we are not careful we might accidentally find ourselves a new ‘god’. All wise; all powerful, a ninja has to push buttons and use computers to shoot a nuclear weapon; why not just let the algorithm pick the time and target for us. The computer knows when the traffic volume is high on the streets and automatically adjusts the timing and sequencing of the traffic lights accordingly.

We be in public, our children bout to get hit by cars because we as parents have our eyes glued to our phones. Ophthalmologists say our generations are getting progressively near sighted because of our penchant for looking at small screens, disembodied from the rest of the visual existential world. You can forget to put on any underwear and leave home without clean underwear on but you better not leave home without that cell phone. And truth be told, most of us would rather someone see a pair of our ‘skid marked’ draws than have someone go scrolling willy-nilly through our text messages, the websites we’ve visited, our online personas and comments, etc.

Adolescents and young adults are literally committing suicide because of the amplified nature of online criticism and vitriol. National elections in multiple countries, not the least of which is the United States have been swayed at best, completely manipulated at worst by social media, foreign government agents, trolls, plants, hacks, unemployed intellectuals and young people. The one thing all of these countries and corporations have in common is an over reliance on on technology and over dependence on technology and overly trusting in technology’s benign and beneficent ends. If nothing else by no means should the benign and beneficent ends of technology and science be assumed as an a priori fact.

The solution to humanity’s problems is not necessarily more or better or faster and/or cheaper technology. Has that proven so yet? Jobs it took 20 muthafuckas to do are now being done by robots and computer algorithms. If these grocery stores could go all digital and robots, and had nary a human employee they would do it. That is, they would justify firing thousands of employees in the name of increasing share holder value but that is not how they would rationalize it. That would be politically incorrect. They would rationalize by saying that by firing thousands of employees they are bringing savings to consumers. On the surface indeed they may save Americans 50 cents on the price of a bolt that was made in China as opposed to the United States. The problem comes in when that bolt company in you name it small, medium or large city goes out of business and instead of jobs where they got a healthcare and benefits and a good wage, they are now expected to drive for uber, lyft and to flip houses with no money in their spare time…that is…if they want to get rich and make it.

Yes indeed that is a national trait. Americans love to save money. To requote Nikita Khrushchev, and argue a point I think the Chinese premier Deng Xiaoping learned well; “Americans will not only sell you the rope that you are going to use to hang them, if you play your cards right they will buy the rope you are going to use to hang them from you too! Americans love to save money. They love the idea of the deal, the charismatic salesman selling you the deal (Donald Trump). You can always get them on the very reality of being penny-wise and pound foolish. The vacuum cleaner has 12 different functions? Yes, but you need a degree to configure the vac to use all of the functions. Someone sold you that and you presumed it was better for you than an old fashioned vacuum cleaner or yes, even a broom for where you are living.

That is precisely how we ended up with Trump in the White House, except the wise are noticing what the Proverbs say over and over again, when you see ‘mean men’ rising high and good men, wise men being shamed, that is a particular kind of social dysfunction. Kings and princes, CEOs, Captains of Industry and Finance Magnates theoretically you would want to be nobler and smarter than you, end up simply being greedier and they sued their way to the top or were more willing to abase themselves and anybody else to get the power and the money.

Hot is being called cold. Pee warm is being called room temperature. And we are justifying it simply by arguing it’s a sign of people’s freedom. And freedom in itself must be a good thing, right? You will se my fellow Americans where absolute freedom gets us. We are going to get just what we are looking for. You will see and here I want the reader to say those words aloud in your Yoda voice imitating that scene where Luke with 6 months of worth of Jedi training tells Yoda that he isn’t afraid. And Yoda looks at Luke like he’s mutha fuckin crazy and says slowly, dramatically ‘you will be, you will be’.

A day is coming where the cameras at every corner and intersection won’t save you and will just be a means for law enforcement to collect money and crueler means for the kind of voyeurisms that makes Americans more interested in filming one another on their cell phones get eaten by a bear than actually helping you out of the bears clinch. A day is coming when the effects of a gun crazed culture where stores can’t sell enough ammunition and ammunition makers can’t make enough come due. Hustlers on the street can’t steal enough guns or sell enough guns fast enough to meet demand. On the strength of these trends a terribly painful day is coming for America that makes ‘stand your ground’ and open carry laws look more like the wild, wild west.

What is altogether worse for America is that in these trends there are racial overtones, class overtones and geographic overtones; if America does not really get back to religious truth and not some kind of liberal and conservative fantasy land where absolute freedom is a rational goal we are bound for a violent and hellish future. Conservatives think absolute gun freedom is good idea and are wedded to it and liberals think things like absolute sexual freedom and freedom from religion are good ideas and both parties and sides see these issues in zero sum absolutes! Beloved American brothers and sisters of all races, this is not the answer. How long do we want to fight and put each other down as fellow Americans and how long can it go on before we weaken ourselves in front of foreign enemies and the international friends that depend on us for Democracy, order and stability? January 6th was confidence building only to the far right and our foreign enemies. Our friends in the international community and other lovers of democracy are deathly afraid of where they see America transitioning. For the who raison d’etre behind Democracy is keeping down conflict not starting, accelerating or intensifying them.

Can you count the dead bodies of our human ancestors going back 80,000 years that were killed at the hands of other men over family rivalries, clan rivalries, tribal rivalries, state rivalries, national rivalries and national bloc rivalries? Can you hypothesize when it will end and does anything trending in the world today signify that it might end. This river of human blood sacrificed for clans no one remembers anymore, tribes and nations long on the scrap heap of history and far, far from the post-modern person’s conscious mind. Do we have any reason to believe the things we are willing to kill each other over now will be looked at any differently to the people alive 300 years from now. No, it’s as simple as the future will look back on us 500 years from now and say those dummies killed and maimed each other for shit that doesn’t mean a hill of beans today. Yeah ninja, all our ancestors were some ride or die ninjas and yes it worked for some but for the most part we humans took all that liberty to feed the vultures of the air and scavengers of the land off the bodies of our fellow humans without establishing anything permanent that we said would result from our atrocities! Seemingly we humans are desperate to prove that ‘might does indeed make right’ and we want the spoils.

I’m always amazed at how liberals and conservatives use the phrase “what would Jesus do” about the same way Conservatives quote Martin Luther King Jr. Conservatives argue their Jesus would be against homosexuality, against abortion and against socialism (he never argued against rich landowners just that the poor and the leasees should have a fairer relationship). Liberals argue that Jesus (and by extension God) are defined by ‘love’ and Jesus would appreciate all ‘love’. Liberals argue that Jesus (and by extension God) gave human being freedom of choice and God would not give us anything he didn’t expect us to exercise thus once it became technologically possible for human beings to self-abort their children it was simply a choice for humans to make like being in the line at McDonalds like do I want Fish filet or a big mac today; a simple a relatively harmless choice excepting your diet and cholesterol levels. Liberals also want to abolish landowners and socialize everything (everything that is except their shit which they want to retain full control over). Note the Black Lives Matter ‘leader’ who resigned after netting 3.2 million dollars worth of real estate.

Ladies and gentlemen Jesus was an arch conservative. He was so conservative I’d argue that the best way to understand his ministry was that he was a ‘counter revolutionary’. When in the name of National freedom you forgot that God owned the Vineyard and thus you can’t expropriate it in your own name and hog the results of the increase. When you get so free you married and start lusting after others he tell you in no uncertain terms that just the thought is adultery. When you want to worship great men and women and call them gods and stamp their name on coins, buildings, consumer products and monuments Jesus says if that’s what they are interested in render unto ‘Elon’ what apparently is his (for his image and name and leadership are all over it) and render unto God what is God’s! Render unto God the things that belong to him. Jesus was a non-violent counter revolutionary.

When money got too important he turned the tables in the temple. What would he do in our megachurches today our governments that have forgotten to prohibit the bad (sin) and now just think to tax it. 30 years of lottery funding for school systems and few governments or school systems have anything to show for it relative test scores and other metrics. 30 years of Hope scholarships and the drop out rate amongst the very population it was intended to help is consistent or higher and by God the pandemic didn’t help any of those trends. Would not Jesus remind us that money is not the most important thing, or even in the top things that are most important in the education transaction.

Pista 4.5.1

But let me go back to Pelaton and that other one where you run in a more or less full length mirror with connectivity and digital functions. I feel like a jackass jogging in place for too long, I can’t imagine doing that shit with my fake ass internet runners that I can see as little squares in the corner of my ‘mirror’. Get the fuck outa here. JoeJones291 push hard they yell at me. I see you Pat5000. Really. And then we wonder why we crave authenticity and nothing feels real anymore and you have to bungee jump and get tattoos to make yourself feel real. You have to take antidepressants to feel like is real. I don’t give a fuck what they invent or have invented in the exercise realm American obesity has gotten worse and if you think the internet can change that trend you are out yo muthafuckin mind. And to think we ‘about to start having self-driving cars; the level of trust in technology such that you have to have to ride along in a self driving car at 85 mph in traffic is damn near religious (which is to say as the atheists say – damn near blind). I don’t know how biblical miracles work but I don’t know exactly how my computer and the cloud work either but I’ve put all of my baby pictures and historical family mementos on it.

They believe in a Pelaton community. Really? Someone yelling fitness banalities and platitudes at you through a video screen and headphones constitutes a community? Go Team! Give it all you’ve got! Push Hard (insert your name)! Go for it! Just do it! Finish strong! Dig deep (insert your name)! Give it your all! Balls to the wall guys! Good effort you hit your personal best (insert your username)! Way to go Karen1235 in Atlanta, and my personal favorite and that actually comes from the commercial “take the lead here (insert your username).” Take the muthafuckin lead? On what!!!!!! Cyber ninjas riding imaginary bikes, on an imaginary course, with an all but imaginary leader and it yells out for you to take the imaginary lead! What the fuck is wrong with us people! Look how technology is demeaning and degrading us at the same time it is supposed to be the distinguishing factor is setting us above the animals and raw nature. Bah Humbug, get your head out of ass post-modernity!

Amazing. 10,000-12,000 years of more or less recorded history, intellectual pursuits and technology and there is a man thinking the ‘works of his hands’ can save him from the scrap heap of history. I don’t give a shit what these nations and societies and technologies and the vehemence with which they waged war; they all eventually ended up on the scrap heap of history. The technology changes but the man and the primate mammal that is within him even though graced by God do not. The vanity, the arrogance, the pride and the consistent willingness to put others (from other humans to animals, plants and the physicality of nature itself) down in the name of raising oneself; about man this does not change. And yes, I am precisely arguing that if America doesn’t grasp the handhold of faith and a revivalist more religious atmosphere in the society we are not only bound for the scrap heap of history but the hellfire as well.

I can sum it up and paraphrase it no better than Jeremiah somewhere around the 51st chapter but he echoes these thoughts elsewhere in his Book, ‘

KJG Jeremiah 51:13 O thou that dwellest upon many waters, abundant in treasures, thine end is come, and the measure of thy covetousness

KJG Jeremiah 51:14 The LORD of hosts hath sworn by himself, saying, Surely I will fill thee with men, as with caterpillers; and they shall lift up a shout against thee.

KJG Jeremiah 51:15 He hath made the earth by his power, he hath established the world by his wisdom, and hath stretched out the heaven by his understanding.

KJG Jeremiah 51:16 When he uttereth his voice, there is a multitude of waters in the heavens; and he causeth the vapours to ascend from the ends of the earth: he maketh lightnings with rain, and bringeth forth the wind out of his treasures.

KJG Jeremiah 51:17 Every man is brutish by his knowledge; every founder is confounded by the graven image: for his molten image is falsehood, and there is no breath in them.

KJG Jeremiah 51:18 They are vanity, the work of errors: in the time of their visitation they shall perish.

KJG Jeremiah 51:19 The portion of Jacob is not like them; for he is the former of all things: and Israel is the rod of his inheritance: the LORD of hosts is his name.

Let God use you America. Restore the ancient landmarks. I find it interesting ninjas nor the KKK, nor Easter sunrise service Christians ever took the time to wonder what the Native Americans thought about Stone Mountain. Did they think it had a religious or spiritual significance. I doubt if they ignored it. But southern white folk blasted Lee, Jackson et al on the face of it and Black people hate that and what it symbolizes and we ninjas and white folk are fighting over it and what it represents like either one of our opinions on the matter is or should be decisive in any regard!

I ain’t seen nobody talking about going to the latest Native American festival and fundraiser for Native American arts. I’m sure of the hypocrisy but maybe they do have a Native American part of Stone Mountain. I just wish it was as pronounced as the fight between Confederate symbolism and Black misdirected and angry and resentments. I call it misdirected anger and resentment if for no other reason than I haven’t seen a single Robert E Lee statue jump its hinges and go around around terrorizing Black people and discriminating against them. It is like being robbed blind everyday by neighborhood thugs, foreign business owners, Mexican gangs and living white racists but whenever you call the police you blame it on a statue of Robert E Lee. Is that not absurd? Yet that is the state of Negro politics right now.

Pista III

Everybody thought Wii was going to revolutionize sports and similarly everybody thinks E-Sports is going to revolutionize sports (eventually). Like muthafuckas en mass going to start paying $50-$500 to start watching people play ‘Call of Duty’? Maybe. In real sports somebody might get hurt and in the case of football and even auto racing people get paralyzed and die. Watching an Asian kid give his teenage friends high fives as they killed their 1000th enemy or made it to level 627 in version 1.15.1 I am not so sure how long that appeal can last. Right now it is not the sport, the porn or the socializing itself that is addictive it is the technology that facilitates it that is addictive and creates in the human an artificial sense of power that like shopping feels good to people.

It’s the very same reason I can’t bo-hog and solicit my way as an individual into picking up people at the airport for money willy-nilly but Uber and Lyft can. I can’t bo-hogg my way into certain neighborhoods but Airbnb can. Why? Technology itself in our society is it’s own legitimization and thus has advantages individuals don’t. If I pay a woman to sit behind a door and give men hand jobs for 8 hours a day the world would call me a pimp and her a whore. But if I put her in a room with a camera and ecommerce algorithm emailing her loveliness to old lonely men I’m an internet genius. Or if I give her minimum wage and model (literally) and assemble fake vaginas based on her and other women’s pussies in a factory that is high tech and use the latest synthetic skin technology and uses algorithms to control the speed and tension of the strokes of the fake pussies you’d call me a genius not a pervert; and her a worker not a sex worker and the only difference is technology (or the lack thereof).

That is hypocritical and is why one man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter. If you don’t have the technology and military history to take up arms in a respectable way like white people do it, but you still want to kill people (and even then you will kill far less than your European counterparts) you can kill people the ‘old fashioned’ way not with drones, computers and technology but sheer force of will, which is essentially what a suicide bomber of any stripe represents. Robots and drones against humans and the robots and drones eventually against each other and whole economies and nations will be destroyed as machines we’ve programmed after Goebbels and Hitler’s version of ‘Total War’ wreak havoc not just on armies and countrysides but towns, cities and entire peoples. All controlled autonomously and anonymously or by a 17 year old kid allergic to grass and peanut butter fucking off with a joy stick that controls millions of dollars worth of weaponry and ordinance a day.

I used to think exercise videos and DVDs were bad. Not as bad as Pelaton and these cyber-social type exercise videos. Videos and DVD’s just lie to you about results and time lines, Pelaton adds to that the insult of thinking you have a Pelaton community or family. No, you have a community of people with the fact that they have wi-fi access in common and spent the money for the hardware and software and maintenance in common. So now you are in your house riding a fake bike, ignoring your very real kids talking to your fake assed Pelaton community when you could be out riding a real muthafuckin bike with your real family instead of ignoring your kids while you compliment David0138 from Ohio on how good he’s doing today. Get the fuck outa here.

Some of y’all have dedicated exercise rooms with adequate ventilation and sanitation but most of y’all are just stinking and humidifying up your houses with all that sweating as you listen to Pelaton classics which seem to revolve around pounding techno beats like I am at a rave in Berlin but instead of dancing I’m riding a fake ass bike with 10,000 muthafuckas riding fake ass bikes on camera going nowhere. And that is a perfect metaphor for the post-modern existential reality. We obsess ourselves with fake reality and then wonder why nothing ever satisfies us. When our online friends hurt our feelings it’s still better (more acceptable) to you than your ‘real’ living and breathing family and friends hurting your feelings because of the technology involved. And the hurt is amplified as people join in like. Trolls know this and capitalize on it. Apparently one of our psychological traits as humans is that we like to join in on criticism all the more passionately and expressly if we share similar criticisms to the person doing the criticism.

We are completely sold out on the power of technology to shape and reshape not just our lives but our sense of sexuality and sexual practices, what we consider normative and thus the ethics and the morals and religious codes behind those practices (or lack thereof). I’ll leave all of that there for the time being and go on to other matters.

It’s no better but I stopped being concerned with video games when I started smoking weed and hustling as a lifestyle. Once I bought and started buying weed and alcohol I didn’t have enough left to get video game equipment or software or however they are delivering it these days. And I had even less incentive to fool with it when I started selling weed. Even still I’d run across it from friends and later the children that were around me when I met my 3rd wife. In those times I always found something peculiar. I ran track, played football, played tennis, swam competitively and starred in the 1984 Olympics when I entered the Decathlon and pole vaulted, did the shot put, the discus, and threw the javelin with my penis. But nearly every time I played video games children and nerds would beat the brakes off me. I assumed that because I really played football I’d naturally be good at Madden 2000 football. Children and nerds destroying me on the Wii; trash talking and destroying me.

Always be suspicious when someone is selling anything. Secondly, always be suspicious when someone is selling something that you can actually get for free or a tiny percentage of the price of what they’re selling at retail costs. Parents, don’t get em no Pelaton community put em in a real community of of doing real physical skills. In addition, always be suspicious when when someone sells you something exotic basing its effectiveness on something completely standard. For instance. Many, many video gaming enthusiasts and the psychologists that the gaming and corporate community they have bought off for one reason or another (some quite well intentioned), argue that video games promote hand eye coordination. Skeet shooting promotes hand eye coordination. Wiping your ass promotes hand eye coordination! The point is beware when someone sells you what you don’t have to do by arguing that it’s as good as what you do have to do because it is similar. Better than video games or wiping your ass, real tennis, real baseball, real football and other ball oriented sports promote hand eye coordination better than video games. Furthermore they promote spatial reasoning and understand better than video games but a tennis racket and some balls is $100 and some kind of console or gaming package is $500. ATT, Comcast or nobody else got to supply you with wi-fi to physically play tennis, run, walk, bowl, etc,. Notice that video game enthusiasts sell hand eye coordination when actual sports are the very definition of hand eye coordination. Do you think Michael Jordan can beat a 16 year old in NBA 1994 the video game? But even with arthritis the Juice could kill a couple a couple people and I have no doubt Michael Jordan would beat the shit out of me in pick up basketball even today. Do you think it matters that I could beat either one of them in a sports video game. But this is what insults to humanity video gamers and techno enthusiasts offer us. The imitation of something real compared to something real, but downgrading real things. Get the fuck outa here.

Liberals use that some argument and circular logic in terms of sexuality too (some new sex(s) and understanding(s) of sexuality(s) are better than the old ones), but I don’t want to get bogged down in that right now. We will stick to the technological argument.