[conspire] (forw) The fastest vaccine development ever

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Josef Grosch (jgrosch at gmail.com):

> You have had the advantage of spending large portions of your adult
> life surrounded by sane, rational, thinking people. The magic
> thinking people have always been here its just that in the past the
> only way for these people to spread their madness was a mimeograph
> machine and standing on a street corner. Then came the Intertubes.
> The great thing about the Internet is every man is a publisher, the
> downside to the Internet  is every man is a publisher.

It's what I call the Global Village Idiot Problem.

Every village always had idiots, and there was always a base level 
of background psychosis, but that amounted to small factions of crazy
people and weird little crazy subcultures that were mostly disconnected
from sympatico crazy subcultures.  

In the glory days of Usenet, we had a rising faction of global village
idiots, but going big required effort and competence.  Even the
September That Never Ended was fairly manageable.  The global village
idiots built nests to reproduce on blogs, and then sprang forth after a
few years to populate instant messaging, Twitter, and AOL^W Facebook.
Et voila.

> In 1973 my family moved from New York to Norfolk, VA., home of Pat
> Robertson and Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and the 700 Club started
> out on a bankrupt low power UHF TV station in Portsmouth, VA. The
> signal barely covered the area. He somehow managed to talk the local
> cable TV company into carry the 700 Club and he became just another
> crazy on local cable access. It was only when  one of the big cable
> providers picked up the 700 Club did his influence grow.

A bunch of my father's family have been (and presumably are) somewhat
dim whack jobs, but, again, them holding forth in genuine frontier
gibberish[1] over the Super Bowl broadcast or the Thanksgiving family
meal was different in kind from them putting out the loon mating call on
AOL^W Facebook and agglutinating.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNC3OciAF3w