Dead Man Blogging

I have not posted anything since June. I expected to be back doing this in a few weeks, when I got my health situation under control. I had no idea how severe things were going to get.

I have now gone into hospital six times. I have been turned into a human pin cushion and subjected to every type of medical test imaginable. The results have not been good.

I have a rare condition called Amyloidosis, Specifically, the type which goes after your heart and major blood vessels. It is destroying my heart. I now have congestive heart failure.

I was put on an infusion of a fairly new drug which goes after Amyloids. It does not work with many people. It did not work well with me. It had only a limited effect on the Amyloids but the infusions were painful and the side effects of the drug were severe.

So, the doctors have pronounced my condition to be terminal. The more pessimistic ones gave me a few weeks to live. The most optimistic thought I might hang around another year or two.

I am a little annoyed with doctors. I did not like being kept in the hospital against my will. They seem to have been trying to force me into a hospice. I was determined to get back home, where I could finally get home care organized.

They seemed to have the idea that home care based on the hospital system had collapsed due to funding cuts. That is partly true but there is now an alternative. The city social services and various “third sector“ agencies are organizing their own home care system.

So I am now under the care of “Team Peach”. They are wonderful people but under organized and under supplied. They are at my home three times a day to change my diapers and get me in and out of the power wheelchair with the Hoyer lift. I have become good friends with most of them.

We are all going to get old, folks.Someday at the end of your life you will have somebody wiping your ass and helping you out of bed. In Canada, most of this is paid for by a still functioning health care system. I hope I am dead before the neoliberals succeed in destroying it.

Now that I have my basic needs arranged once again, I will be turning my attention back to writing. I am not going to shut down the substack blog just yet. It is definitely time to end the Ghost blog. There are still seem to be quite a few people on it. I do not know how many are ghosts.

I have downloaded all their email addresses. I will be careful about transferring you to substack. This article will be your notice that I intend to transfer you. I will give it a couple of days before I start moving you over. I moved two of you over just to test the process.

Substack takes several days to manually review each transfer, in case I am loading people I harvested from promotions. If you do not want to be a substack person, let me know and I will remove you.

Some people are hostile to substack because its membership policy is very tolerant. It has allowed nazis to remain and publish their stuff. I have blogged before about how I am okay with substack’s policies.

You will notice that right wing extremists on social media have no real support. They are created by the owners of the platforms through manipulation of algorithms. When they try to get themselves established on media where the owners do not support them, like Bluesky of Substack, they get nowhere. They get a handful of supporters, or just talk among their friends, and then they disappear.

Thus, I am not concerned about a few Nazis on Substack. I am concerned about private platforms arrogating the right to censor. That should be done by governments, which can be made to explain what the criterion for censoring is.

Everyone is moving to substack. It is getting impossible to run a blog anymore. Most blog platforms have decided they do not want to monetize writing. They want to make the money themselves through their own media. All these big bloggers are seeing the algorythms steer their following to news sites. Sometimes they get offers to write for these publications instead.

The owners of the platforms are still willing to let creators of podcasts monetize their work, for now. I do not do podcasts. I am not interested in buying the equipment and I would not be very good at it. I am certainly not starting anything new when I have only a short time to live.

For now, social media seems to have shrunk back to where it all began, with e-mail. Most of what I read now comes to me through e-mail lists.

So the age of social media has come to its end. A rebirth will require a complete reorganization of the net. I can say much about that. It will mean that those who once fetishized the net as some kind of free space will have to get of these libertarian ideas.

The internet must become a public utility for those countries which have broken free of American hegemony. There is some talk of this now. These countries must form their own internets or federations of internets. Content coming from outside these federations must be monitored. Content from countries where the net is still a “wild west” must be blocked.

In these new internet countries, there must be no anonymity. It is, one person, one account. Each account must be based on a stationary machine, usually just a desktop. Any mobile device, a cell phone or lap top,, must be connected to this fixed base. Nothing goes through cell phone towers or wifi or these other things, except straight to the base and then out through the regular system.

This will, of course, end almost all forms of misuse, abuse, and outright crime on the net. Every message has a return address.

As for all these sites, no one should be able to just start a new web service and throw it up there. They should have to get aporoval and a license. Their site must have been properly designed by people who are trained in programming, and also licensed. Government must reserve the right to take the service over of shut it down if it starts to be shittified, concerned with making money instead of providing a service.

The Australians have another good idea: bar anyone under 16 from the net.

The net, and especially social media, needs to be monitored. This should not be done by private firms. All censoring must be done by a government agency. People trying to run disinformation campaigns over the net should find police knocking on their doors. This, dear friends, is because creating misinformation is criminal and must be treated as criminal.

But to do this requires a government which is based on the cardinal laws of thought. This would require a true democratic government, which we have never had. It would require the reeducation of at least a part of the population.. But that is getting too far off from my topic.

Until then, the net will keep getting harder too use. That will be a problem for you people. I will soon enough be out of it. I will leave behind my work for as long as it stays up there.

Thus I encourage people to copy and down load my stuff. You should be building your own searchable archives and putting them on backup drives. Never, ever, put anything on “ the cloud”.

Own your own desktop and backup drive, prefereably a MAC. Keep control over it. This means, of an application performs a specific talk on your computer, download it, for free, or a reasonable fee, and own it. Whatever you want to keep, you do not go to another site each time you want to view it.

If it involves a stream of information, you do not want it on your desktop. You go to their site, read, download what you want, and leave the rest.Try not to let other people use your transfer capacity or your computer processing capacity and drive space.

These are problems you will have to deal with as the net gets worse. I no longer maintain any kind of web site. I do Not know how long substack will keep my stuff up there.

I have a considerable archive of material. It is not well organized. I am thinking of putting together a small web site of some of my best material. I will send it to some of my relations who also maintain small sites. I will ask them to keep it up there for a few years.

Maybe the revenues from the e-book will fund that. One thing I really want to live after me is my novel about basic income.So I should end this here and turn to finding out how to format the text as an e-book and get it up there.

End.