A note from the blog “hostess:”
Today’s blog is a “guest post” by Reggie Black.  Reggie, after conducting extensive genealogical research, discovered he’s descended from the Livingstone clan.  I suggested he hyphenate; he flatly refused.

Even without a hyphen, Reggie Black Livingstone doesn’t miss much news; he’s able to sift and sort information and process it quickly.  He’s practically an anaerobic news digester!   I can’t keep up with him (what is this “twerking” thing?) and some of the stories he sends me don’t even seem real.  Following is his response to the recent viral story of a young woman who twerked herself on fire.    Enjoy–Julie-Ann

I’m a pretty cynical guy.  Not much surprises me.  A lot of “been there, done that, washed the car with the tee-shirt.”  I expect the worst from people, and am rarely disappointed.

So I sent our hostess a little GIF picture derived from a YouTube video that became instantly popular (viral, they call it, a telling metaphor for social media).  A young woman listening to patently offensive music tries to shake her butt in a grotesque fashion in front of a camera while standing on her head.  A bottle of liquor, shot glasses and candles are visible on the table in the foreground.  Her roommate enters, knocking the woman over.  Crashing through the glass table, the alcohol and open flame mix on her yoga pants, and the video ends with her backing up, on fire, into the center of the camera’s field of view.

I sent it because, in words I proudly steal from gun-toting Republican lesbian Florence King, I will not suffer fools gladly, but I will gladly watch fools suffer.  Thanks to the wonders of modern social media, a lot of fools are captured suffering.  I gladly watch them, and send our hostess those I deem the most enjoyable. Well, not all of them.  Our hostess has sensitivities I try not to inflame.  For example, the practice of women shaking their posteriors in public (whether on fire or not) was just too much like the practice of primates presenting.

Our hostess asked me to not send any more of those, thank you.

I discovered the day after that the whole thing was an elaborate hoax perpetrated by the ne’er-do-well Jimmy Kimmel.  The woman on fire is actually a stunt woman.  Go look it up yourself, it’s not hard to find.

From the beginning, I questioned whether this was a stunt.  To me, the biggest giveaway is that she completely made a fool of herself, and then posted it on line.  A normal person would have, after extinguishing the flames, buried the yoga pants and otherwise eliminated all the evidence.

But the viral vectors of our social media are full of people making a mockery of this criteria.  Idiot after fool after knucklehead not only films himself being a moron–with no witnesses!!–but then posts online the proof of his idiocy, incompetence and knuckleheadedness.  And they are not even getting paid for it.

To which our hostess posed this question to me:  if this little video shows how easy it is to fool so many of us, why are so many people so sure of themselves that they get angry when shown the great frauds of our time?

Here are just a few fraudulent examples:

• tens of millions of property titles clouded by a taxpayer-funded financial fraud worth trillions,
• the near worthlessness of the baccalaureate degree and the way college itself has become an industry built around stealing borrowed money from students,
• the slow-burning theft of inflation, and
• the Federal Reserve Bank creation that made our current dollar worth less than one cent was in 1913, the year the Federal Reserve Bank was created?

Not to mention that the Federal Reserve Bank is neither Federal, nor a Reserve, nor a Bank.

Things like this don’t go over well in general discussion.  People would rather discuss women shaking their butts in public, as if blatant exhibitionism to boost failing record sales actually matters.

Me, I chalk it up low expectations.  I expect the worst, and am rarely disappointed.  Our hostess, however, has higher expectations.  We would all be better off if hers were met and not mine, but I know where I’m placing my bet.