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19.01.2025
Fahrenheit 24.8

I wouldn't call -4°C with moderate winds extreme enough weather to move Trump's inauguration indoors. As a resident of the Scottish Highlands, that kind of weather seems like a regular mild winter's day where an extra layer of clothing or maybe a pair of long johns and some mittens would keep the chill factor off.

Let's face it, the real reason they're moving the Orange Man inside is incase someone takes a pop shot at him.
 

13.01.2025
The General Public Are Thick As Pigshit

Why do so many people get bitchy when social media sites change their policies?

A social media site is nothing more than a website owned by some giant corporation. It is not a public service and it is not there to make you friends. Social media exist solely to extract your data and sell it on to third parties and/or to train their Large Language Models on. In other words, you are the product not the customer.

If you want freedom of speech set up your own goddamned website. Pay your small monthly bill and in exchange you can say whatever the fuck you want on the world wide web... like me here, for example.

Nobody is sensoring me. Policy changes are my own.

Wake the hell up people! You've turned the internet into the television - a banal mediascape serving the 'Lowest Common Denominator'... a phrase that actually doesn't make any sense since the correct term is clearly 'Highest Common Factor' or 'Greatest Common Divisor'.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is how fucking stupid the general public are.
 

10.01.2025
Western Double Standards

L.A. burns, some rich celebrities have lost their homes and ten people in total are dead. Meanwhile Gaza burns and at least 46,000 people have been slaughtered thanks to American Imperialism supporting a fascist settler-colonial state.

'Scuse me if I don't give a flying fuck about Los Angeles.
 

08.01.2025
Trump's A Fucking Idiot

Several months back, after the results of the US election came through, my dad asked me what I thought of Donald Trump becoming president again. After my initial response that I wasn't surprised in the slightest and that I fully expected it, I remarked "He'll probably never make it to the White House for a second term; and if he does, it certainly won't be for long."

"How come?" asked my dad.

"Well, somebody's sure to bump him off," I replied, "either just before January 20th or shortly thereafter. He's too much of a threat to the stability and the status quo of the entire planet, let alone his own country. The deep state know it and will sort it out."

Today, I stand by my analysis. Hell, the dumb fucker isn't even in the White House yet and already he's threatening military action against Greenland, Panama and the entire Middle East - not to mention his threat to the stability of the North Atlantic Treaty, trade with his nearest neighbour Canada, as well as the sovereignty and democracy of his closest ally the United Kingdom (via his whipping boy/personal gimp Elon Musk).

I've always thought that in order to be a politician you have to be on the sociopathic spectrum somewhere, and Trump - in my opinion - is quite possibly a fully blown psychopath.

In fact his ego is so over-inflated that even two recent assassination attempts didn't humble him in the slightest. And as I see it, there's really only one of two ways this ends. Either he'll have a huge well-timed heart attack or some Lee Harvey Oswald-type quiet loner, with a dubious history of defecting to an enemy state, will pop a cap between his eyebrows.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not wishing death on the guy, personally I find him rather amusing in a dark comedy kind of way - America gets exactly what America deserves. But he's clearly a fucking idiot unable to even remotely comprehend what the real 'powers that be' are capable of.

There. That's my prediction for 2025.
 

06.01.2025
Everything Is Manipulation

So now that Nigel Farage has remarked that "Tommy Robinson is not right for Reform and I never sell out my principles" regarding Elon Musk's recent erratic rants on the matter, it seems Nigel Farage is being applauded in the mainstream media for standing up to Musk regardless of the amount of money that the SpaceX CEO and Trumpian Gimp might have considered plunging in to Reform UK.

Now maybe I'm just deeply suspicious and a hopeless cynic, but did no-one consider that this might have been planned between Farage and Musk all along?

We live in a world that is chock-full of population manipulation. Modern threats like social media analytics and A.I. deep fakes are only some of today's concerns, but the history of propaganda dates as far back as the history of humankind itself. Powerful people have always manipulated the people powerfully - it's the way it is and the way it always has been. Pre-internet days it was Rupert Murdoch with his bullshit tabloid rags manipulating public opinion, and prior to that it was Edward Bernays - the American godfather of modern spin. Hell, we could go right back in history to 515 BC, if you want, and examine the Behistun Inscription detailing the rise of Darius I to the Persian throne.

The manipulation of public opinion is everywhere and everywhen. Your job, dear reader, is to identify it, navigate your way through it and avoid getting caught up in it - you might even feel so bold as to call it out wherever you see it. One thing you won't be able to do, however, is stop the gullible being duped. The vast majority of people are sheep and in today's modern world it is the Farages, Trumps, Netanyahus and Musks that are the shepherds of smoke & mirrors bullshit.
 

21.12.2024
Call It What It Is

I'm tired of the mainstream media's description of the horrors in Gaza as being a "humanitarian crisis". No it's fucking not! A humanitarian crisis is when people have been affected by a flood, or an earthquake, or a tsunami, or some other horrible naturally created shit. Just call it what it actually is: a goddamned genocide of indigenous people by a US-backed settler-colonial state.

Oh, and it's also not a war. As the late comedian Bill Hicks put it: "Well, a war is when two armies are fighting. So you can see right there, there never was a war."
 

16.12.2024
Death Cult Judaism

What the fuck is antisemitic about the ICC's arrest warrant for a genocidal maniac? "Liberal Democractic Nation" is not exactly how I would describe that settler-colonial fascist state. A bunch of fucking smug, self-righteous, land thieves is a more appropriate description. Besides, the term "Semitic" to describe Jews in Israel is inappropriate. Most of them are of European or American origin. "Semitic people" or "Semites" is a term for an ethnic, cultural or racial group associated with people of the Middle East, including Arabs, Jews, Akkadians, and Phoenicians. Judaism is not a race, it's just a religion (i.e. a cult, or more appropriately a "death cult").
 

14.12.2024
Wiped Out

I've never been much of a gamer. I had a PS1 back in the day and then a PS2 that I never really used other than as a DVD player (computer games seemed to me like a grand waste of time). Just over a year ago, however, I bought a second hand (mint condition) first gen PS4 off eBay - just for something to kill the odd hour or two of downtime with. I bought a bunch of games, GTA5, No Man's Sky and some other uninspiring rubbish but ultimately the only game I really ever play on it is WipEout Omega Collection.

You see, I remember playing the original wipE'out" back in the old PS1 days (circa 1997) and have fond memories of getting really competitive over it with my then girlfriend at the time (probably the only fond memories of that otherwise clusterfuck of a relationship I had). With weapons and speeds in excess of 400 mph experienced to a soundtrack from artists such as CoLD SToRAGE, Leftfield, Orbital & The Chemical Brothers, this antigravity racing game defined an era and a subculture that I was perhaps just a little too old to be part of.

WipEout Omega Collection stuck me right back in that hot seat and it's now the only game I play on the PS4. In short, I just fucking love it. Having completed all the levels and acquired the ultra rare platinum trophy several months back, it was time to take the matter to the next level and play online (which, I must add, ups the skill level by a factor of at least 10 when competing against other humans). In short, the game appears to be endless and manoeuvres that seemed completely impossible to achieve a year ago have now been well and truly locked into my muscle memory.

So join me if it interests you. I'm online for at least an hour most evenings under the username "Septimus_Keen" (named after the weird character in Gerald Suster's first novel The Devil's Maze).
 

12.12.2024
The American Wake

As a person living in Scotland I was initially perplexed why the Brian Thompson shooting was even a story. I mean, isn't this what Americans do? Shoot each other all the time?

If the guy who was shot was a bum living out of a dumpster at the back of McDonald's would this even be on the news? And therein lies my initial naivety: this was a CEO of a company ranked 8th on the 2024 Fortune Global 500, and therefore a very important person indeed apparently.

Money talks and bullshit walks.

As for the shooter, I haven't really been following the story that closely, but I guess he was someone who got fucked over by a corrupt health insurance company.

To me this is just box standard America: people shooting each other, fat folk eating too much, car chases, wars everywhere, idiots for presidents, corrupt companies... the kind of shit that's in every Hollywood movie.

As an outsider looking in, it's kind of fascinating watching the alleged most powerful country in the world fall apart.
 

10.12.2024
Decentralised, DeGoogled & Delighted

I've gone all out recently in an attempt to eradicate all forms of Big Tech and proprietary software from my life and the result has been surprisingly positive. My first step was about a year ago when I switched all my existing Windows systems over to Linux. Initially I only decided to install Linux Mint on a failing laptop just to see how far Linux had come since I last used it about 25 years ago (Mandrake I think it was) and I was blown away by how well the machine started functioning without Microsoft fucking everything up. This led me down a rabbit hole, installing Mint on my main desktop and girlfriend's PC before revitalising an almost twenty year old computer (that I use for playing music in my shed) with the lightweight distribution LXLE. On every occasion each machine started functioning way better than I could have ever anticipated.

Next on the agenda was to start fucking around with Raspberry Pis. About two months ago I build an ADSB live aircraft tracker (a sort of home personal radar system) and can now pick up planes flying overhead up to 180 Nautical Miles away - and all from a silly little rubber duck aerial that sticks out of a receiver dongle connected to the Raspberry Pi on my window sill. What the hell else can I do with these little single board computers, I thought to myself? So I bought another Pi (the model 5 this time) and turned it into a NAS/media server. With the discovery of Tailscale I can now access my files securely wherever I get a phone or wifi signal.

Which led me down another rabbit hole? With all this security conscious computing going on, what in the wild world of sports do I do about this Google Android phone in my pocket? It was the weakest and most vulnerable link in the whole system, and after running a DNS sinkhole on it, I confirmed my worst fear: Google are unashamedly spying on everything you do.

Time to deGoogle.

I tried removing everything Google-related on my Moto E7 mobile but things got fucky when I attempted uninstalling Google Play Services. Nothing would play ball... the entire system seemed to rely on it. Fortunately, the phone was on its last legs (having to twiddle around with the worn out USB-C connector just to get the damn thing to charge every night) so I bit the bullet and bought a brand new Moto G32.

I have to confess I was reluctant about attempting to flash the ROM with an alternative OS on a brand spanking new phone, but after performing first boot just to get into Developer Options, I realised it had to be done. The phone was virtually unusable with all the bloatware bundled up with it. So, one night, whilst a little drunk it has to be added, I followed the instructions as meticulosly as a drunk person could do, and voila, CalyxOS was now running my phone.

It's fucking genius! Hell, I'm a fucking genius. Why did I not do this before? A phone that actually works and comes bundled with a bunch of security features instead of a bunch of data mining, ad-infested, privacy extractors? Incredible!

If a drunk guy can flash a phone then anyone can, and so my point is this: you've got nobody to blame but yourselves if you don't deGoogle.

09.12.2024
Why I Hate Christmas

Christmas is a bit like football or A.I. inasmuch as people have invested a lot of time, passion, money and effort into the concept but ultimately, in the end - when you look at it objectively - it's just a bit shit.
 

27.11.2024
SSL Hell

So, I finally got an SSL certificate for this site - it was long overdue, even though there really was no need for me to have one. It used to be that you only ever needed a certificate for financial transactions or connecting to your bank, but then Microsoft and Google jumped on the bandwagon and before long browsers were setup by default to block sites without a certificate. Total bollocks!

There are no financial transactions here - there aren't even advertisements (and, believe me, I have been approached on many occasions over the last 24 years by some company or another wanting to advertise some bullshit on this site, and each and every time I have either ignored them or told them to piss off).

Anyway I thought it'd be easy to install a certificate (how hard could it be?). I contacted my web host, hinted that I was thinking of migrating the site elsewhere, and they offered me an SSL at a price I could hardly refuse (well relative to all the hassle of moving to another webhost that is).

Now, I register this domain with a different company to my host and this seemed to cause all kinds of problems. Maybe I'm a bit thick, but I couldn't quite figure out what I had to do to activate the certificate and after 3 hours of fucking about last night, I gave up and went to bed confused and non the wiser. Fast-forward to this morning and the certificate had somehow been magically activated. Still no idea exactly how this happened but I'll take it as a win. So now dear wander of the digital wasteland, media-underground.net is like every other website, complying with something complete unnecessary and conforming to a standard that never needed to be a standard in the first place.

I miss the old internet.
 

24.11.2024
Podcast Picks

As an avid podcast listener I thought I would take a moment to share with you here my Top 3 podcast picks at present. Feel rest assured, dear reader, that there will be no fucking Joe Rogan on my list. No siree! If I see another one of his boring, excessively long podcasts ever again - where he repeats himself every episode and interviews yet another unheard of comedian friend, or some right wing ZioNazi fuckwit like Ben Shapiro, or his CIA handler Mike Baker for the umpteenth time - I'll stick my boot through my monitor. He's dull, incredibly so, and amazingly ill-informed about virtually everything.

So, without further ado I'll start off with the wonderful Late Night Linux as my top choice. Whilst this might not be to everyone's liking, as a Linux user I find the show incredibly refreshing and informative. This isn't some computer geek's podcast however, as the hosts are pretty frank, swear a lot, and don't hold back with their occasional misanthropy. The Irish guy Felim is pretty funny yet rarely wrong in his assessment of things. Generally the Late Night Linux team seem like a good bunch of lads that really want to see the best for the Free & Open Source Software community as a whole.

Next up it has to be Media Roots Radio hosted by siblings Abby & Robbie Martin. With a critical eye on US politics and foreign policy, I confess that this podcast aligns pretty closely with my own geopolitical viewpoint. The podcast's coverage on the genocide in Gaza is second to none and their in-depth analysis of the way media manipulates the general population makes for serious reflection. My only criticism is that the podcasts are infrequently released.

Coming in at No. 3 it has to be Monster Fuzz Podcast for a not so serious take on the subject of cryptozoology, high strangeness and the world of the paranormal. Whilst I do think their show was way better prior to them setting up a video version of the cast on YouTube, Rob and Eamonn can occasionally have you belly laughing on the floor at their incredible Irish idiocy.

As for podcast players, I cannot recommend AntennaPod for Android highly enough. I've tried a lot of podcast players on my phone over the years, but this is a really sweet app which is free from ads and very intuitive. As far as the desktop environment is concerned, I recommend Kasts for Linux which is almost as good. If you're looking for a Windows or iOS recommendation, then I can't give you one as I don't give a fuck about either of these OSes.
 

22.11.2024
Construction Site

Please be aware that this site is, at the moment, generally under construction. It is not the intended final look for this website - if such a thing as a "final look" could or should ever be achieved. This was one of the main reasons for deleting the old site. It had become too stagnant due to it relying on the use of a third party web-based management system written in PHP.

At the time I thought that the use of such a system would be beneficial and make life easier for posting content. I was wrong. What it did do was limit my ability to be creative or to modify the website as it evolved, which is the reason I've returned to the basics of creating everything in HTML (since it is the box standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser). With HTML you are only limited by your own ability and imagination, giving you full control of the way in which you want  to present web-based information.

So please bare with me as I try to refresh my memory on how to code in HTML. Changes to the look and feel of this site will be ongoing over the next few weeks, if not indefinitely.
 

21.11.2024
Goodbye YouTube! Goodbye Google!

You may or may not have noticed that the media underground YouTube channel has been erased. This was something that was needing to happen for a long time having virtually deGoogled my entire life. Don't get me wrong there's still a few Google things I have still to get rid of, but for the most part my Android phone has been deGoogled along with my use of their shitty search engine and intrusive email service (well, other than using it as a kind of junkmail capturer). Basically, it's what I use when I need to sign up to something that requires me to enter an email address and that I don't give a shit about.

YouTube has become fucking horrible and boring anyway. All these clickbaity thumbnails of twats doing something or other really boils my piss (superficial pricks chasing the algorithm).

The final straw for me was when I accidentally logged in to YouTube without using an ad-blocker. To my surprise I discovered that they were advertising on my channel despite me having set up the channel specifically not to include any advertising content.

As you may be aware, here at media underground we don't do, and have never done, advertising.

That's not to say that I still don't occasionally go on YouTube to sift through the endless mounds of garbage in order to find out something practical, but when I do I use either SmartTube on my TV or FreeTube on my phone and computer (which filters out all the ads). Sadly, however, these apps won't filter out all the shit which makes up 99% of the content on YouTube.
 

20.11.2024
Welcome To Web 1.0

Alright you twisted freaks!

On October 5th 2001 media underground was born. Since that time the site has gone through many alterations and upgrades in an attempt to keep up to date with the latest advancements from Web 1.0 through to 2.0 and on towards Web 3.0.

This process has been completely fucking futile as big tech and social media have dominated the internet and turned it into an abominable shit show. So much so that over the last few years media underground practically went silent. Basically I couldn't be bothered trying to maintain a website when every fuckwit with a laptop or mobile phone jumped ship to Facebook and Xitter. Well, you all got what you fucking deserved.

I did try and warn you that it wasn't going to be good, but you all went ahead anyway... and now you've lost your freaking minds.

As a result - and as a statement that I don't give a shit about your modern internet - I've redesigned this site to be fully underground retro. Back to good old Web 1.0 when the internet was a wild west for everyone with a dial up modem and enough savvy and technical ability to get online and make a presence there.

So welcome weird wanderer of the digital wasteland to media underground. What you'll find here will be uncensored comments and links to shit that I find interesting (for my own reference and amusement) for no other reason than the sheer hell of it.