Copy of "Vladimir Mozhenkov: an Overview"

Unlike my sources, I don't want to get in too deep with Mozhenkov, whom I will mostly refer to by the Russian diminutive "Vova" (though he deserves the title "Prestupnik") because it's shorter. On Wikipedia he was Beta m, then Beta M, signed things "VolodyA! V Anarhist" - as far as I know, he is the only anarchist child porn enthusiast on Wikipedia. Or possibly besides Hakim Bey, who has never been a Wikipedian so far as I know.

Background

Vladimir Mozhenkov is a Russian national who once attended Montana's Carroll College in the late 1990s; in 1999 the exchange student was arrested for collecting child pornography using the college computers he was lab monitor over. He was sentenced to 51 months in 2000, but only served 23 months, a fact that shocks my source, but my response is: the Feds were far more worried about Islamic terrorism than a Russian nonce they were going to deport anyway, which they did in 2002. Vova had left the Motherland under the bleary-eyed Boris Yeltsyn; he came back to the new Russia of the other Vova, Vladimir Putin. In 2003 he was writing about his prison time on a forum called PrisonTalk (he made 73 posts), in 2006 he was a fan of the defunct "Pedologues" podcast run by Rookiee (Damian Roberto Andres Cole; we will get to that guy, don't worry.) Then came his time on Wikipedia....

Living in Jimbo's Jungle

Vova started on Wikipedia in 2004, three years before the "Essjay affair" badly wounded the Project. Like at the Catholic college, he began packing WikiMedia Commons with all the non-copyrighted porn (possibly because he was afraid of starting legal issues between the WMF and the claimants, or between the claimants and himself) he could suction off the 'net. He also constantly propagandized for allowing child pornography on Commons, besides importing tons of anarchist podcasts and recording himself pronouncing names of Russian historical figures into Ogg Vorbis sound files for various Wikipedia articles. After involving himself in a number of "Wikipedia cannot be censored" anti-deletion/change fights (Sukumizu Girl image, Donkey punch image, Simulated Forced Fellatio in Bondage Scenario* images, etc.) Geni (true name unknown) blocked him on the 6th of March, 2012 because Tarantino (ditto) leaked Beta M's history on the Wikipedia Review forums. There was a lot of drama that spring, in the middle of which Vova created the "Hot sex barnstar" (NSFW) for his friends who supported his pornification of Commons, along with asking if Wikpedia could expand it's BDSM coverage. I kid you not.

The end came on the 16th of March with a "global lock" handed down by the WMF office and posted in ANI/U by Robin de la Motte (Rd232), who had been involved since Tarantino's disclosure (there was some side-stupidity involving mattbuck.) After the decision came down, there was a lot of squealing and screaming and teeth-gnashing, but it went nowhere. In 2015 the lock became a global ban, and Vova was truly exiled. He joined Demiurge1000, Dcoetzee, Amarrow, Leucosticte, Poetlister/Quillercouch, Russavia, Meco, Irada, Francis Kaswahili, and Scalhotrod as part of the list of globally banned users, the ten people not even Wikipedia could stomach anymore.

Don't cry for me, children in kiddy porn....

Unlike Daniel Brandt, Mozhenkov has been able to make his case unhindered online, he has two YouTube channels, one where he teaches people computer software tricks in Russian, the other with this rant on it from 2011. He also has a porn site called "freedom porn" (dot org), and he is involved in the anarchist wikipedia, Anachopedia. Speaking of which, the following is something he wrote on that wiki in 2008:

Pedophilia (or paedophilia, originally Greek παιδοφιλια; paidophilia) is a sexual attraction to pre-pubescent children. While the exact definition varies by context, it commonly refers to the medical definition defined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders published by the American Psychiatric Association. The correct term for an attraction to adolescents is ephebophilia.

Those who meet the criteria set above are classed as pedophiles. Common usage do not follow the strict medical definitions of an adult or teen who is attracted to prepubescent children, but often refers to any adult who is attracted to, or has sexual contact with, any person under the age of consent, or the age of majority (often 16-18 in most western countries).
In many societies and cultures, the term pedophile is highly stigmatized and represents an image of an evil, callous monster. This spurs many self-identified pedophiles to adopt names such as boylover, minor-attracted adult, girllover, and childlover, among others, to assist in differentiating themselves and their values from this stereotype.

While pedophiles have made great contributions to past societies, their influence is often ignored or their attraction to children is greatly played down.

One of the dearest fantasy held in the paedophile sub-culture is that of the fantasy island - the secluded island community where paedophiles and children roam free, enjoying total sexual freedom. The idea behind this fantasy is the suggestion that away from the oppressive teachings of these organised religions, those who feel a sexual attraction towards the pre-pubescent can indulge their basest desires and, in doing so, also achieve some form of enlightenment... that the freedom to establish their much maligned and negated altruism will result in some kind of mass overhaul of opinion amongst the general population.

However, that's why it's called a fantasy. Because it'll never happen. The irrational hatred felt towards paedophiles is something that few are prepared to even acknowledge as being irrational, let alone try to combat.

He always was single minded.

Completely off topic, but this website has now had 30,215 views. My thanks to the readers within the Russian Federation, who kept the views up in January. Спасибо товарищи!

 ________________________

* Actually from a  dot net website called "Adorable Teens", this was a photoset of a young-looking actress and actor doing what the title describes. The images are no longer available from that website, they probably leaked onto Tumblr if they were pleasing enough to the bondage-lovers.

Yes, that last section title is a mockery of that song in Evita.

Copy of E.A. Barbour's "There are Only Three Kinds of Website, Dammit!"

This came to me out of nowhere, unbidden. The author knows about the subject deeply, having seen the changes that have barreled through the online world from the 1990s to now.

THERE ARE ONLY THREE KINDS OF WEBSITE, DAMMIT!

by Mr. Barbour

So, as Jimboob would say . . . . . the World Wide Web (which is a horrible and outdated name for the damn thing) is a vast place, with billions of sites and hundreds of billions of "invisible" pages. No one understands it all and no one ever will, it is all the drivel and nonsense (and some useful information) of humanity distilled into a very large and smelly bottle of volatile chemicals.

Leave the lid off and it will dissipate rapidly, since the only real archive (archive.org) is very damn far from being comprehensive. Plus there are uncounted billions of pages that can't be auto-crawled or indexed. All quite ephemeral and prone to disappear. Consider what happened to the millions of personal pages that were hosted on Geocities.com before they were bought out and everything was shut down. There is a tiny and miserable selection of backed-up pages, so you can get a slight idea of the width . . . . of the river of utter crap on Geocities. Shreds of it were useful and most of it wasn't, like the Web in general.

Many academics have tried to study the Web and almost none of them have distilled any useful facts from their studies. Yet as it has shaken out since 1991, by becoming a commercial and corporate institution, the Web has already started to develop "hardened arteries" of its own unique type. It is now a deeply conservative and rigid structure. Internet libertarians still think they "control it" and "keep it free", but they are only kidding themselves. It's actually quite easy to chop almost the entire Web down into three crude categories, not counting minor incidentals like government and "overhead". Note that I'm leaving out smartphone-app-based "communities", because they are specialized; even so, they are usually profit-related and thus can be categorized as click magnets.

1. OUTRIGHT CLICKBAIT

Like television in its "Golden Age" of 1947-1970, the commercial Web has solidified itself around one crude goal: traffic. TV was all about raw ratings and advertising dollars in its early days, and that is how the profit-making parts of the Internet are structured. And the primary model is, of course, BuzzFeed. As time goes on, each and every "news site" or "outlet" increasingly resembles BuzzFeed, or its even-sleazier copycats like Upworthy and ViralNova. Calculated to keep morons clicking from one insipid feel-good or gawking "story" to another, on site as long as possible and without "offending them" into leaving.

Nearly all major newspaper websites; nearly all major TV news sites; major newsmagazine sites; Net-only publications like Salon, Slate, Gawker, TMZ, Digg, etc.; and even retail websites (walmart.com, kmart.com, amazon.com. etc., etc.) are increasingly BuzzFeed-esque. They grind out the shallow "You Won't Believe What Happened Next!!" and "Isn't This Awesome!!!" crap because all that matters are mouse clicks. And most people are stupid and shallow, and the marketers depend on it. Even if they're selling hard goods, they also play the clickbait game. The "affiliate marketing" deals many of these firms make, with sleazy outfits like Taboola putting boxes full of incredibly-stupid clickbait on "news" sites, ends up making them look more BuzzFeedy. And above it all sits the largest search engine, Google. Which also happens to be the world's largest advertising company. This might as well be the Big Three networks of the 1960s, grinding out moronic sitcoms ("Mister Ed", anyone?) and variety shows like toothpaste and filling the gaps with shrieking ads for guess what: toothpaste, cigarettes, liquor and gas-hog cars. Politics are incidental, "facts" are incidental. Choose your poison: sappy liberal clickbaiting (Salon, Mother Jones), sappy conservative clickbaiting (too many to list here), sappy whatever. They all look the same.

I recently explained to Strelnikov that Newsmax.com, a so-called "conservative news site", is far more concerned with turning a profit than with actual conservative political ideals. They grow and expand and try to compete with Fox News. Yet Newsmax remains a BuzzFeed click factory at basis. Founder Chris Ruddy sought out funding from right-wing organizations, and succeeded strongly, because he promised he would make a profit (unlike most of his pathetic competitors). If there were sufficient money in running a website full of lesbian furry torture videos, Ruddy would be doing that instead. For all we know, he IS doing that right now. Thanks to the Web's libertarian and ephemeral nature, Ruddy would have no difficulty covering up his association with websites that don't fit well with the Newsmax "creed". Politics mean nothing, just a click magnet. And nowhere in any of this is there any talk of "truth" or "accuracy".

And I have to mention the massive irony that Alexa.com, the major website that rates other websites for traffic, increasingly resembles an advertising conduit itself. It was bought by Amazon and turned into just another "business-to-business" money fountain. They even have a browser toolbar. And their website now hides their most important product, the top-500 website page. We must be in a deep recession; everyone has their hat out, begging for spare change, maaan.

2. BLOGS

Pure distilled ego in a can. It doesn't matter what a blog is about, it's always a pissing contest. While large blog platforms like Blogspot fade out, up pop even crazier versions like Tumblr. I run a Tumblr blog, and most of Tumblr has revealed itself to be a bizarre little sub-universe of dull-witted snivelling emo-ridden teenagers trying to "post something positive". To get attention, not because they have anything to say. Blogging somewhat overlaps with item 3 below, thanks to "group blogs" like Boing Boing, which merely have multiple dullards talking about their insecurities and obsessions and rubber fetishes, rather than a single dullard. Not to mention "amateur art" sites like Deviant Art. They end up looking like shitposting blogs anyway -- with bad cartoons.

Plus, Twitter is increasingly starting to resemble a deeply twisted giant group blog, in which nitwits hurl hashtags at each other. And it was hard-built into that pinnacle of traffic-chasing and privacy violation, Facebook. The more a site takes on multiple false fronts and functions, the more popular it gets. No wonder Facebook is either #1 or #2 in the Alexa rankings, locked in eternal mortal combat with those little pussies Larry'n'Sergey.

3. "FREE AND OPEN COMMUNITIES"

There are no such things as "free and open" communities online, since they almost inevitably end up censored to keep their neurotic members happy. One should ALWAYS put the word "open" in quotes when talking about the online world. Example: look at a sports forum sometime. Yet the libertarian cant about "free and open"-ness that drives them continues to falsify their actual nature. And keeps people coming back. The most successful of these take on features of all the above, plus putting on that essential "uncensored" false front; Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Vine, Pinterest, MySpace, Livejournal, Flickr and many competitors and also-rans. And what would you call the sewer of millions of dull potato people blathering their usually-half-baked opinions on YouTube and other video sites? Those, too, are carefully castrated for your protection, while no one is actually admitting to the censorship. It's all a big game of pretend.

Forums also fit into this definition. Whether general or specialized, they often start out as "bastions of free speech" and always end up becoming screwed-down, insecure, and dull places. I've been bitching for years about Reddit and Metafilter, two of the most famous versions. People just go right on loving them, despite their massive flaws and lack of transparency. Go to reddit.com/r/redditcritiques if you want to see summaries of Reddit's dirty dealings over the years. (You won't find it anywhere else on Reddit.)

Open-source software sites? If they have forums or comment areas, they turn into "open communities", meaning not actually open. Meaning paranoid shriek-fests. Have you seen SourceForge's front page  lately? The resemblance to a profit-making, click-sucking corporate site is amazing. Because guess what, bunky, it now belongs to a profit-making corporation. The same outfit owns that "magical place of freedom" called Slashdot. Github looks much the same. I fully except to see more of this in open-source land in the future. "Free" software isn't truly "free" because most open-source programmers work on their projects on their employer's paid time, especially programmers in Europe; the vast majority of Linux projects are developed like that. Buying for-profit software has the costs of some open-source software built into the price. Everything has hidden costs, whether people in IT admit it or not.

And then we have that ultimate libertarian-lie freakshow called Wikipedia. The weirdest outlier of all -- full of random lunatics "pretend-writing an encyclopedia", and sometimes actually writing something. While other lunatics use it as a giant and deeply-ADHD Facebook clone in the background. Read the AN/I noticeboard or Jimbotalk and tell me that isn't a Facebook, I dare you. Because it's "free and open" (read "badly designed and chaotic"), anyone wanting to edit for pay, that terrible wiki-crime, can usually get away with it easily. And if you want to use it to step on people, just suck up to the insiders for a couple of years and they'll hand you the keys. Sick fun for the whole family. Well, the young male asshole members thereof, mostly.

Or better yet, go and look at Wikipedia IRC channels. They make ideal examples of the sickness of IRC communitarianism. Even though it's as "obsolete" as all hell and not part of the Web, IRC continues to be popular with Web and IT professionals and hackers. Who are often one and the same. Important subjects are quite predictable: video gaming, porn, "warez", fucking one's enemies over, whining about politics, and so forth. Few popular channels could conceivably be called "free speech", as in: you say anything on a channel that a few moderators don't like, and you're gone in an instant. That's censorship. And it's easy. So, IRC continues to operate.

GO AHEAD

Please, prove me wrong. Find a popular website that doesn't fit into at least one of the above categories, if not all three, apart from minor info/propaganda outlets like government sites. Yahoo is admittedly a giant mess and not easily pigeonholed. Yet it is trying to become another Facebook, mostly because it's declining. There are some various obscurities that don't fit, but they are almost never "popular" in any wild stretch of the term. (Encyclopedia Dramatica is just another "fake free community". And has been down for a week now anyway. Oops.) [Dramatica came back to life less than a day after this piece was sent - Strelnikov.]

Whereas weirdness and chaos made up most of the Web's structure in 1996, twenty years later the vast bulk of the traffic is money-making, ego, and/or "phony free speech" oriented. I've been predicting since 1996 that the Web would end up being heavily taxed, regulated and censored, and it happened. But the government didn't do it. The users did it to themselves. Huzzah.


Response by Strelnikov.

To me, the early Internet looked like it did because it came out of academia and the think-tank culture, which was using it for communication, weapon simulations, other hard-science stuff with military applications and then the network was opened to Joe Public, and a lot of those guys came from the BBS (bulletin-board system) culture of the 1980s; many of them were amateur radio ("ham") operators and ex-CBers and they brought those mentalities to computers. The other sort of notable "content providers" were 'zine publishers taking their publications and converting them into html. That model of running a website is still around in the more basement-y parts on the Internet; James Moseley of Saucer Smear (formerly Saucer News and Saucer Glues) used to have a man retype his typed, photocopied newsletter into html format, until Moseley died in 2012 and the entire online archives (1994-2012) were snapped up by a junk UFO publisher and sold on CD. All of his pre-Internet stuff from the 1950s to the 1980s is in the hads of collectors. So the first five or six years of the Internet were like living in a giant dorm (because all the servers were university owned) that also housed techies, old people, the religiously-insane, Klansmen (the extreme Right got online early, believe it or not), etc. I miss those years because the thing wasn't as formulaic; we no longer have sites like "Grandpa's House of Pee", "Hell.com","Fat Chicks in Party Hats".....the last of that sort of website had to be Gene Ray's "Time Cube" and now that's defunct.

As for the rest of Mr. Barbour's argument I agree with it only with the addition that the Internet has been a mirror of the globalized Neo-Liberal economic model, and that way of doing business is not very healthy right now. I get the feeling that we are on an edge of an implosion online because the business model is built around adverting, and if that goes away, this little "Web 2.0"  world we live in will disappear like GeoCities and Pets.com.

Defunct Private Schools of San Diego County, 1970-2015

Because it's near the end of the year and I feel in the compiling mood, here are some information-transfer stations for biologically immature units.

St. Alban's Episcopal School: This is now just St. Alban's Episcopal Church (490 Farragut Circle, El Cajon, Calf.), but from the polyester part of the 1970s until 1987-ish, it was a working K through 6th grade elementary school alongside a functioning church. Laid back atmosphere, partially screwed-up neighborhood, people willing to do daycare on Saturday mornings (!), and yet it still died fast when one parent thought his or her child was being under-educated and they called everybody else on the mimeographed list of parent's telephone numbers and suddenly an entire grade defected. They used the buildings for a short-lived ACE ("accelerated Christian education") school in the 1990s, but ACE is a memorization scam using workbooks and not a real education so it went under.

Clairemont Christian: This was a monster two-campus school that could teach children from preschool to high school Seniors; the elementary school was at 3520 Mt. Acadia Boulevard, the junior high/high school at 3811 on the same street. Most of the combo church-schools in Southern California had anywhere from 50 to 150 students; these people had at least 300 students between the two campuses. Was killed off sometime in the 1990s after existing since the 1970s, probably during the post-unRapture of the G.H.W. Bush administration or the "give up on the Rapture, join a Militia" fervor of the Clinton Era. Did I mention these people were Evangelical?

La Mesa Christian: As with St. Alban's, this was a school with an attached church on the same property (9307 Jericho Road near the La Mesa-El Cajon border), so some of the classrooms were used for Sunday school. As it was an Independent Fundamental Baptist outfit, they had the ripoff Boy Scout "Awanas" group along with a massive paddle for hitting children who broke the rules. The church was founded in 1963, the school in 1974; through most of its existence it was a Kindergarten to Junior High; though it did try to have a tiny high school at one point. They went through three or four Pastors* who were not also the school principal before the organization was purchased by a Philip Sherwood who oversaw the slow death of the place in the 2000s.....the number of students dropped to the point where they had to rent rooms to another Christian school, they changed the name of the mother church from Jericho Road Baptist to Shiloh Baptist, while the buildings needed refurbishing. Around 2013 the buildings were sold to Calvary Chapel of El Cajon, while Pastor Sherwood found a defunct Lutheran church in Lemon Grove (2770 Glebe Road) to move his Shiloh church and "academy" - which is around 40 students if we can trust the Internet, though Google Maps claims LMCS is on Glebe now.

Mt. Helix Elementary: A secular private school set up around 1970 by a husband-wife team of ex-public school instructors in a custom-built two-story school built into the side of a hill at 3317 Kenora Drive in Spring Valley. Not to be confused with the existing Mount Helix Academy in the mall on the corner of Severin Drive and Amaya Street in La Mesa. They offered art classes, had an Apple ][ computer room (other schools on this list had two or three machines), and a goat in a paddock. Unfortunately they started experimenting on the school structure, which was bizarre for a San Diego-area K-6 school; they instituted a homeroom system which I think they later abandoned. Mt. Helix Elementary died in the late 1980s, was turned into a Waldorf School (i.e. using Rudolf Steiner's theories of education), is now a Christian Fundamentalist institution where the students are half-homeschooled.

Southport Christian Academy: An ACE school run on the very cheap (and for an ACE that's something), Southport was a Foursquare church that doubled as a school, what ex-fundamentalist blogger Darrell Dow calls a "basement Bible school", with the high school upstairs in the nave, the lower grades in separate rooms in the basement. All the grades higher than first or second used those combination folding chairs with built-in writing boards. ACE was started in 1970 by Texas pastor Donald Howard, and it has become one of a number of ways to educate homeschooled children. It's also chintzy, one-dimensional, and punitive as one blogger pointed out. The only difference between Southport and other ACE schools was that keeping students in seperate cubicles was not done; instead a teacher was used as a docent, watching everybody in the class, and everything had to be done silently. The church is still at the same location (216 E 16th Street, National City) but the school appeared and disappeared within less than two decades.

Apple School: Mentioned in our list of Scientology outlets in San Diego County; I can only add that they did not tell non-Scientologists that they were sending their children to a school based on Hubbard educational philosophies until the winter open house, because there were no framed pictures of L. Ron Hubbard on the wall. Still would love to find out about that prototype Apple School in Del Mar and their previous Chula Vista "nunnery" location.

Lutheran High of San Diego when it was on Orange Avenue: This is now Faith Lutheran (5218 Orange Avenue) which shares space with a "Church of the Nations" that does English and Amharic (Ethiopian) services. Doubling up two churches in one space is becoming more common in San Diego county, as are churches in strip mall storefronts. Lutheran High operated from this location from 1988-1999 before moving to 2725 55th Street and operating out of the Sunday school buildings of  Holy Spirit Catholic Church, and then moving on to their present space on the outskirts of Chula Vista.

When it was at Orange Avenue location the student body and the neighborhood clashed horribly; there were a few muggings and attacks on students in the park across the street in the early 1990s for clothing items, sports equipment (a basketball); a massive fight by students from a nearby public school was witnessed, an abandoned car parked near the school was burned to the ground over the Christmas break. Beyond the neighborhood, the rooms were tiny and the freshmen and the seniors did not get along. It didn't help that the instructors thought square-dancing practice was a morale booster on rainy days.

Fairhavens Christian School: Last but not least, this was the model of the Independent Fundamentalist Baptist K-12 school; very basic. High School Seniors forced to do gym, candy sales (World's Finest Chocolate), begging at local businesses (!?), other piddling nonsense alongside the other grades. Fairhavens the church had been around since the early 1970s; Fairhavens the school lasted from 1993 to 2001, sunk by replacement Pastor/spiritual dictator Preston Bunnel who had come** from the Leningrad oblast' where he had been trying to convert Saint Petersbergers to the wacky religion of Fundamentalism (and probably failing.) Bunnel had talked Pastor Lawrence "Larry" Gibson (now running a church in central California) into signing over the church and school for a missionary gig allegedly in Japan (though Gibson spoke fluent Spanish.) Bunnel then had an affair with the church/school secretary for an unknown period of time (possibly with other women as well), was found out, then put the control of the church in the hands of the deacons while he would still preach. It was unknown if everybody in the church knew at that point. The preaching got wild, according to witnesses; he would have his son lay as if dead in the aisle to illustrate some point, and he rambled more than usual. The school became this rule-bound crazyhouse. Finally he tried to seize control back and the deacons and other senior church members decided to kill the church before Bunnel dragged it in the mud more. Bunnel went back to the deep South, worked at a car dealer for a few years before befriending a man named Eric Capaci, who is the "Senior Pastor" of "Gospel Light Baptist Church" in Arkansas. Even though extramarital affair(s) are ground(s) for defrocking an IFB preacher, Capaci did some mumbo-jumbo and Bunnel was back as a pastor, first at GLBC, then at another, smaller church.....who found out about Bunnel and failed in their bid to throw the guy out.

***

Things to look out for in IFB schools:

Kindergardens are huge. They will take up nearly one-third of the student body. Most will not carry on into that school's first grade because many parents use IFB Kindergarten as an extended Sunday school before sending their children to public school.


Public school students using the IFB school as a one-semester escape. They are a minority of students, but they do appear and disappear from time to time. Author saw this happen numerous times, most were troubled boys, though one was a girl fleeing cliques at some junior high.

Always keep your records - they won't. These schools die quick; if you send your children to one, keep photocopies of school transcripts for college (even community college.)

They do a miserable job of teaching science. Too many use Bob Jones University or A Beka (Pensacola Christian College) textbooks, which are shot through with Creationism, Young Earth or otherwise. If you have to send Johnny or Janey to an IFB school, make them take science classes for HS credit at the local community college.

They will hit your kid with a cricket bat. They call it a paddle, and some people love doling out the harshness to grade schoolers.

They love appearances. The genius rough-looking kid will always be graded down, while the clean-cut mediocrity will be showered with awards.

They are making a cult out of the King James version of the Bible. You can't show up with anything but a KJV as your school Bible. Some nuttier pastors think the King James version is the "easiest to comprehend" - which is a statement only a fanatic or a blowhard could make.

_________________

*The Pastor-Principal was named Walt Lindquist, possibly either the original Associate Pastor or the head man. One of the pastors was named Frank Williams, his wife died and he left the church, possibly returned his collar. One of their later pastors (or was that a youth pastor?) was a younger Filipino man. There were a lot of youth pastors who blew through; one guy nearly got mangled on his overpowered Kawasaki motorcycle.

** Bunnel blew in unannounced and just hung around. Most previous missionaries came to collect funds (after showing the congregation an interminable slide show of their doings "in country") and then left "for the field" after attending to religious and family business. If they performed, they would show up for special chapels attended by the entire school. One school had a "missionary week" where you would go from room to room looking at their "acts." It was like the "entertainment market" club in Dallas, Texas Bill Hicks describes here, except it would always lurch back into conversion no matter the angle.

List of Defunct Chain or Independent Stores and Restaurants that Operated in Southern California, 1979-2015

Just because I like making lists, here are a number of stores and restaurants I remember that are now dead.

Doodleburgers (possibly also "Doodle Burgers"): Wonky chain of San Diego hamburger restaurants with tables that had Converse shoes on their feet and other late-70s/early-80s gimcrackery. Had a restaurant on India Street and one on Alvarado Road in La Mesa; possibly others. Vanished sometime in the mid-1980s. Decent hamburgers.

Fedmart: What Target is now, Fedmart was in the 1970s; big-box store that sold all the big-box stuff. The ones I saw had green exteriors with a white stripe and an "auditorium" staggered-half cone opening instead of the crappier overhangs you would see during the '80s.

Food Basket: Yeah I know they were always Albertsons, but the one I would go to as a child was stuck in the 1970s deep into the 1980s, before it was remodeled and renamed. The cheesy wall clock in the back never worked, they sold Mexican food out of racks with cheap flowery metalwork, they tried to sell women's clothing in a corner that later became a deli, they sold the generic food later featured in Repo Man (1984).

Carlos Murphy's: Part of the miasma of '80s/'90s chain restaurants where the food was OK but all the real effort was in the decor. Fake wooden Japanese Zeros "smashed" through the walls, tin ceilings painted oddly, a space for a live band, joke photos - Buca di Beppo does the same thing now, but it's all Italian instead of '80s mishmash. The one I mostly went to has now become Casa de Pico in La Mesa.

Federated: Never went there (because all the stores were in Los Angeles), but I saw all their ads on KTLA. Those spots were where a young Shadoe Stevens got to show off his alleged weirdness; Federated was a chain of electronics stores.

Fotomat: We had a number of the little photo dropoff-pickup booths, and more then one became a keygrinder shop afterward.

Crown Books: Very much the Borders of the 1980s, Crown Books (mocked as "Clown Books" on Larry Himmel's San Diego at Large TV show) was a stock '80s bookstore selling paperbacks, maps, role-playing games on a back shelf, etc. Weirdly, the name was recycled to liquidate books years after the chain died in the 1990s; in the early 2000s they took over a number of locations in San Diego with the Crown Books logo on a plastic tarp sign hung outside and on a back wall. The liquidator Crown sold framed posters and classic music CDs on top of the coffee table tomes and softcover "serious" books.

Home Federal Savings and Loan: Yes, we had a number of those after the chain went under in 1992. A two-building set (banking and loans) remain as ruins in the "Mad Max mall" on the corner of Austin Drive and Sweetwater Road as of this writing. La Mesa had one that was later a barbecue grill store and a preschool after that.

Family Foods: The reason why the "Mad Max mall" went south (beyond negligent management); this was the other supermarket in that stripmall. They had a Vons that became a church, but this supermarket remained open as part of the "Family Foods" mini-chain until they went under in 2008. After that, the mall began to look more and more ragged because the only goods stores were a liquor store/bodega and a pizza parlor. Some of the storefronts are now storage for costume places. It's less like a mall and more like a tenants' hotel for non-commercial spaces.

California Electronics & Industrial Supply: Wonderfully dirty electronics surplus place in El Cajon. Tube sockets, transformers, automation equipment, cable, nuts, bolts, washers, boxes, etc. Died three our four years ago. Down the same street is Murphy's Surplus, which does much of the same thing, but with a lot more of a military-surplus communications angle.

Waldenbooks: They morphed into Barnes & Nobels, which sells the same stuff. Every mall had one in the '80s and early '90s.

Tommy McGees: A "comedy restaurant" where the waiters wore goofy costumes and made wisecracks. Came and went in the mid-1980s. Another short-term La Mesa eatery.

Short-Term Rummage Stores: A phenomena that seems to have vanished, these were storefronts that sold cheap used clothes and other secondhand crapola, but only for a month or two. I saw one in Casa de Oro (in a since-demolished storefront.) During the Bush II years, there were a number of short-term overstock sellers pushing suitcases and umbrellas, all nameless and gone in three months.

Haggens/Vons: The reason why this list was made; these douchebags bought up all the functioning Vons stores in San Diego county, renamed them, then decided to shut everything down after a poor summer. Screw these guys!

Copy of "Addendum to the last post....."

Some things I forgot to tack on:

Deleting stuff. Just like with creating unpersons, you can't completely obliterate information. Somebody somewhere has a html copy of some blog you thought you deleted in 2000 just because your description of GAZ 21 Volga cars gives him a weird erection. I've seen it time and again where the information on a website was scraped from another, closed, website which may itself have come from another dead page. Now that you can do screenshots instead of printing it off and then typing it up, the image of whatever catches the collector's fancy is there in his/her hard drive. The way we deal with much information on the web is now like a mosaic, and what was on certain missing pieces can be inferred by references to the missing bits on the surviving components. Jimmy Wales has tried this a lot on his Wikipedia talk-page, burying the times he's stuck his leg into his mouth, but the sheer act of repeated deletion means people will be there taking "before" and "after" screenshots just for laughs.

Wiki-communism. There is a lot of back-and-forth about how Wikipedia is the second coming of Communism because it's a collective organization, with a hierarchy, and lots of rules, and a "beloved"leader-figure....and I have to laugh, because those terms could also describe the American Continental and Militia forces during the American Revolutionary War (or American War of Independence if you are British.) Like the Wikipedists, the soldiers and sailors weren't paid either. Jimbo Wales is not a Marxist; from everything I've read, he is a hard-core fan of Ayn Rand. He wanted ads on Wikipedia and that created the friction between Wales and Larry Sanger (the only guy with a Ph.D [as far as I know] at Bomis, Wales' original company.) In truth, if Wales could charge for different levels of information at Wikipedia, he probably would.....which is why he has tried to capitalize on his leadership/creatorship of Wikipedia in as many ads as possible.

                                         (You knew the reference above had to appear.)

Copy of "The Things Wikipedists and Wikipediocratists Don't Seem to Understand....."

.....could fill another set of encyclopedias. To keep things short I will mention two, at least this time.

Point One: Wikipedia is doomed to failure

A real encyclopedia is written, edited, published - and thus finished. You can write yearbooks to add information or new, updated editions every decade, but a published encyclopedia is done. Wikipedia, conversely, is never finished; it must always keep up with current events (for reasons beyond me), and it never tries to limit what it covers, so Pokemon character lists exist on the same site as the biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Certainly it's nice to have all this information together somewhere, but the end result is an unwieldy, incoherent mess. And then there's the issue of article fidelity; how many articles have hoaxed or malicious material? How many articles are hoaxes, like the fictional Soviet director Yuri Gadyukin?

A friend of mine, "Stierlitz", once called a plan to make a display encyclopedia set out of the English-language Wikipedia "[p]ure derp", but I think he had it wrong. To actually hold one of the 2,050 volumes in your hands, to see how lumpy many of the articles would look on the printed page, notice how the style can shift from paragraph to paragraph, that would dissuade people far more that Wikipedia is a worthwhile endeavor than anything I could actually write here, even without talking about MONGO.

So this is what Wikipedia really is, a giant tumor-filled shark swimming through a sea of information. A real shark would stop growing, but Wikipedia is an unnatural technological being which grows as it moves, and has no instructions to stop growing or shed unnecessary parts of itself. Such a thing is destined to die badly once it stops moving, and so it is with Wikipedia. `Bots have replaced content writers, editors are dropping, more and more articles have "hats" from years ago asking for the article to be re-formatted or merged with another article. If there had been a limit to the amount of information possible to display, or if each Wikipedia had been designed to be broken up between arbitrary categories (a History Wikipedia, a Science Wikipedia, a Pop-Culture Wikipedia), it wouldn't be the fiasco it is now. It would be a different fiasco, but possibly one more manageable.


Point Two: Banning people and deleting their work doesn't end "the problem"

Seriously, kicking people out DOES. NOT. WORK. Either they start up revenge blogs, or revenge messageboards, or they are just lazy and sockpuppet the site they were banned from. Take the example of "ScienceApologist" (now QTxVi4bEMRbrNqOorWBV); he started on Wikipedia in 2004, got into argument over argument over "fringe science" articles, blocked multiple times, was "permanently banned" in 2011. Spent from early 2011 to the summer of 2013 as a Wikipedia unperson, finally let back in under that bizarre handle. During his exile, became "iii" on the Wikipediocracy messageboard when it appeared in 2012. It should be said here that the man who runs the Wikipediocracy messageboard blog is none other than "Herschelkrustofsky", who was thrown off of Wikipedia against the site's own rules a decade ago, because people like "SlimVirgin" and "Cberlet" hated his articles on Lyndon LaRouche and the LaRouche Youth Movement. "Cberlet" is (shock! horror!) Chip Berlet, who may still be with Political Research Associates; back in 1989, his associate Dennis King wrote an expose titled Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism, which gives the reader an idea of where Berlet and King saw LaRouche going. 

It should be pointed out that the ban/delete culture slowly creates paranoia about sockpuppets, which beget a plethora of "rules" (which are repeatedly bent), which creates this inquisitor/commissar class, and before you know it the website begins to resemble the Imperium of Man in the Warhammer 40,000 gaming universe, aka what would happen if the Spanish Inquisition, an S&M parlor, and Frank Herbert's Dune were mashed together while everybody was out of the minds on LSD. This is why people quit (unless they like the abuse), and why this sort of thing is ultimately fatal for a free labor project like Wikipedia: nobody likes a creeping police state.

Copy of first post "Why This Blog?" of the other blog, "Wikipedia Sucks!"

Good question. Pretty much Jimmy Wales' baby has gone from the "hot shit, website of THE FUTURE" to a crumbling, `bot-filled wreck in less than twenty years. It's also full of outright fabrications, spastically myopic coverage of certain topics, edit wars, super-trolls (Willy on Wheels, anyone?), and paid corporate spamming....but we will get to that in time.

The other kludge we will be examining is Wikipediocracy, mainly its message board. The problem here is that many of the Wikipediocrats are ex-Wikipedians, including some of their most monomaniacal editors and content providers like "ScienceApologist" (who posts as "iii"), or "Afadsbad" (who under the name "enwikibadscience" could not stop writing about Cwmhiraeth's Wikipedia idiocy), and the Ukraine-supporting "Kiefer.Wolfowitz." It doesn't help that the guy who is mainly considered to be the supremo of the board, "EricBarbour" actually is only a moderator, and not an administrator, so the poor user is left to the tender mercies of  "Zoloft" (a certain Mr. Burns of San Diego, California) and the master do-nothing "greybeard" (allegedly one of the old-timey Usenet guys from the era of cocaine spoons and leisure suits.) Much like with sausage, if you like Wikipediocracy's blog, you definitely don't want to see how they come up with ideas for it on the message board.

It's going to be a bumpy ride.....