It's Worse Than Alvin Predicted

Alvin Lee was a rock-and-roll singer, guitarist, and songwriter of some note.

Anyone who has seen the “Woodstock” movie surely remembers him and his band, Ten Years After, performing “I’m Going Home.” It didn’t impart the sense that Lee was high in the intellectual hit parade.

But he was at least a talented predictor of future events, as I was reminded this week.

Graham Anthony Barnes (his real name), died more than 11 years ago. His band’s greatest hit had charted 42 years earlier. Yet that song, written by Lee nee Barnes described perfectly this year’s Democratic National Convention.

Here’s the first verse:

Everywhere is freaks and hairies\ Dykes and fairies\ Tell me, where is sanity?\ Tax the rich, feed the poor\ ‘Til there are no rich no more

Pretty well sums up the cast of characters and the policies they articulate, don’t you think?

I’m not picking on the Democrats. They’re just the current entry in this summer’s string of distracting irrelevancies. The Republicans had as a convention speaker an Only Fans sex worker (as it is now styled; I think Eddie Murphy was more accurate in another prescient moment, this one from 1981). Not everyone was happy about it — tell me, where is sanity?

In between those clown shows were the summer Olympics in Paris, which introduced new categories that included man beats woman, swimming through sewage, and whatever this was.

Let me confess that I watched none of it live. I was and am happy to settle for the “highlights,” used in the sense of, say, “9/11 highlights.”

There has been actual news this summer, almost all of it alarming and some of it posing a real threat to your personal way of life.

Not that you’d notice it. The media have devoted themselves to the manifestly inconsequential events of the season, CNN doing its best to highlight the gaseous Democrat ticket, Fox “News” Channel devoting hour upon hour to every eruption of verbal flatulence from Donald Trump. (Example: His Orangeness began speaking, if you can call it that, at about 1 p.m. today. As I write this it’s quarter past three and he’s still going and FNC continues to carry it live, even though he is saying absolutely nothing newsworthy, nothing new, when you get right down to it nothing at all. It could be criticized as a campaign contribution from FNC, except that Trump’s speaking does his campaign no good; he’d grow in popularity if he would shut up. Ah, now at 3:20 p.m. he just finished, and FNC has switched to reaction, primarily from Trump retainers.)

It is rumored though not confirmed — it might even be true — that Fox “News” Channel has some viewers whose homes were actually built on-site. Most of that channel’s staff is entirely incapable of understanding anything they are “reporting.” For instance, as I write this there is a story being broadcast, unironically, about how much the presidential campaign resembles last summer’s movie competition between the “Barbie” movie and the fictionalized biopic of atomic bomb scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer. I did not make this up. If the nation’s fate hangs on this kind of thing, we’re due for ruin.

The closest to news that’s being reported is an interview in which the running mate of noted wild game chef and brainworm host Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Nicole Shanahan (who apparently is primary financier of the campaign), says she and RFK Jr. might drop out and endorse Trump, increasing his total vote by approximately zero. Tell me, where is sanity?

Certainly not on the Democrats’ ticket, which has at its top a vapid communist with an old Chinese communist hack disguised as the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man in the second position.

Day before yesterday a big sailboat ran into a waterspout near Sicily and sank. Most of the beautiful people aboard were rescued, but some were killed. This has received enormous coverage, especially overseas, and we can be sure there are movie treatments already in the works. But what struck me was how “news” readers invariably add that “our thoughts and prayers are with the survivors and the families of those lost.” This from people who have never sincerely prayed and whose next thought will be their first. Please imagine those words coming from the lips of Walter Cronkite or David Brinkley. You will laugh aloud, it is so improbable. They covered the news, not the virtue allegedly signaled in their opinion of the news.

What have you missed while all this meaningless nonsense from inconsequential events was unfolding? Well, this morning we learned that the federal government was off by nearly a million in its reporting of newly created jobs. That’s an item of great economic significance — it means that all you’ve been hearing about all the new jobs being created in our roaring economy was, charitably put, incorrect.

I’ve mentioned it before, but it’s getting worse: your very television set is spying on you. Now we’ve learned — if we do the work of looking for it, because television “news” sure as hell won’t report it — that it has gotten worse and will get even worse still. (I’m several months into exclusive use of my homebrew televisions and am completely satisfied, and shall have to publish the full directions soon. It preserves privacy and, as a bonus, misleads advertisers.) In a proper republic, which we claim to be, there would be a possibility that unauthorized surveillance would get prohibited. But that ideal has long ceased to be.

Huge, largely unreported, news: You can kiss any sense of your own personal privacy goodbye, and it puts you and everything you own or love at risk. This is due to a theft disclosed in recent weeks. If there were anything important being covered in news reports, it would be the lead story, night after night, until a solution is found — if, indeed, it can be solved at all.

Have you ever heard of National Public Data? No? You’ve just proved my point.

National Public Data is the name under which a company with the sketchy name of “Jerico Pictures, Inc.”, does business. It is a “data broker.” It collects information on . . . everybody. Yes, you. It sells it, legitimately (perhaps) to those seeking to conduct background checks on potential employees, that sort of thing. Or so it says; we have no way of really knowing.

What we do know is that its data were stolen. It happened in December (or, according to some accounts, in April) but we’ve learned about it only this month. How many people’s information was taken? 2.9 billion!

(How can there be so many? Not all are Americans. Some are dead.)

You can be sure you are among those whose data got not compromised but out-and-out stolen.

What was included? Well, your name, address, phone number(s), banking information, Social Security number, employment history, connections and transactions with others, subscriptions, passwords — everything. (If National Public Data received information from the companies who spy on you via your television, then also when you hit “pause” to get another beer or go to the bathroom as a result of the last beer.)

This disgraceful company stored its data in plain text, with exposure to the internet. Its security system is what your grandmother would cook up, if your grandmother had the mental faculties of Joe Biden. (You’ll notice if you go there that the company reported the theft in almost-white text on a white background, to make it very difficult to read. And they didn’t otherwise inform the billions of people put at risk. Nor did the “news” media — why cover this when there are important comparisons between Kamala Harris and a Mattel doll to make?)

It is impossible to overstate how serious this is. Your bank balance and home ownership, your credit cards, your accounts of all sorts — all are in jeopardy. We’re talking identity theft many orders of magnitude greater than anything that has happened before.

What can be done about it? As a practical matter, just about nothing. The picture/data company said the usual stuff: freeze your credit, change all your passwords and credit cards, and so on. (Your Social Security number, which was never meant to be used as identification but is always used that way — how can we deal with that? Change everybody’s numbers? That would require precise action by a government which cannot count the number of job openings to within 800,000.)

So. Nearly three billion people freeze their credit, order new credit cards, contact the (themselves suspect in my opinion) credit reporting firms, all at once. There’s a recipe for economic collapse. (I believe I’d short Amazon shares, but with accounts frozen I couldn’t.)

I’m not exaggerating. This is an enormous disaster.

How did some flaky outfit in Coral Springs, Florida, a recently built, formerly developer-owned suburb of Fort Lauderdale, come to have these data? What other doing-business-as companies have them, too? (Not that it matters anymore.)

This will grow to be an enormous story, bigger, even, than the comparison between Julius Robert Oppenheimer and Donald John Trump (not including, presumably, their common affinity for Russia). It is potentially to our personal economy what COVID-19 was to our personal lives, and we can count on the government response to be just as inept and be sure only that it will grant the federal government even more control over us.

All while we decide whether we’d rather be ruled by Oppenheimer or a malevolent communist Barbie.

Alvin Lee was right: Tell me, where is sanity?