A QUARTER CENTURY

I find it a bit daunting to get my head around this, but in one form or another I've been blogging since the start of 1999. Back then we seriously thought there was going to be a massive computer crash on the last day of the year/century, and took care to save decent backups of everything offline.

This particular incarnation of the Sift blog only goes back two years, but my "Sift" blog has been around for over a quarter of a century, and the logo was a remix of the Shift motocross clothing brand from the from the 90's.

For most of that time my posts have been totally random, and I averaged only about two posts a week for 25 years, but for some reason I became more anal at the start of 2024 and decided to start aiming to do a post of some sort every day.

I'm not trying to make them all great masterpieces or anything, some are just stuff like one liners with a meme, but it has been a strange ambition at the back of my mind to match the number of blog posts with the number of days each month. Why?, I have no idea...

So the two months this year (May & July) where I skipped posting for the month were actually unusual breaks in a very long running habit. Those months off were experiments to test two things:

Firstly I wanted to see if I missed blogging? - Yes, I did, and by the end of a month I was definitely hanging out to post something.

And secondly I wanted to see if not posting had any effect on the number of "hits" my blog got. I expected that not posting would reduce the number of hits, so was quite surprised in May when they went up. And that was why I repeated the experiment again in July. Again, the hits went up when I stopped posting. Odd.

This post: "MY AI AUDIENCE" goes on about that subject further.
 

My best theory about what is going on is that most internet traffic is now AI, and traffic flows are being used to shape the entire internet. If I'm not posting anything on my Blogger blog, Google (who own Blogger) want to encourage me to keep the blog alive, so they increase my traffic to make posting seem more worthwhile. 

But if I am regularly posting, Google, who I'm sure would actively dislike my content, might reduce their AI hits, in the hope of either driving me away altogether, or in a misguided attempt to motivate me to post more approved content. Neither option seems to have worked out for them, but yes, that really is all I came up with...

Now when I look over my posts for the year, those two months with only one post are blots on my blogging landscape, and I have an urge to go back and fill them out. It's very unlikely that many actual people will ever look at anything I retrospectively post way back in May or July, so this will be entirely just for my own anal perfectionism.

I'm going to look back over my old posts, attempting to find some that I haven't already updated or re-posted here on this current Sift blog, that I still think are relevant and interesting in 2025.  And if I find any, I'll stick them into the empty days of July first. 

If it doesn't all work out well, that may be the end of this somewhat odd plan, but if I do find heaps of suitable posts, I'll fill out July, and then maybe even go back further and do May as well.
 

THE MARTIAN ANAL DIVISION

In times gone by, we used to read fiction to explore imaginary realities. Now we live in a reality so bizarre even Philip K Dick probably would have needed to up his drug intake to deal with it...

I once read a short story by Philip K Dick. It was called “The Martian Anal Division”, and it was about a parallel version of our world in which everything was run by and for the benefit of small but cunning Martian invaders.

“They live in tiny spaceships which they insert into their subjects anal passages. From deep within human anuses they emit their instructions, which their followers hear as a voice in their anus telling them what to do. These people are known as the Martian Anal Division (MAD).

One of the key symptoms of people who are controlled by Martians up their arses is that they not only want to do what the Martians tell them to, but that they also want to force everyone else to do it as well. They often revert to the phrase “for the greater good”, and want to bring in “laws” in the hope that they can force other people to “conform” to the wishes of the voices in their arses.

In an attempt to get a better handle on controlling the non-MAD population, they introduce social engineering such as water fluoridation (make the population sick and obedient), vaccinations (make them sick and infertile), fear of “terrorism” (submit to more laws and surveillance), fear of viruses, fear of various “global apocalypses” (submit to more restrictions and taxes), and wars (the ultimate control system)

They also direct everyone with an anal implant to watch more TV, where they can obsess over misinformation called “news”, listen to angry black men making guttural rhyming noises about hoes, yos, and bros, become jealous over the size of the breast implants of women who sing the things that the voices in their arses are saying, and enjoy watching stocky men in tight shorts battling each other over leather balls.

Luckily, for all their cunning, the Martians have some serious flaws in their evil plan. When they insert their micro spacecraft into their victim’s anal passages, it tends to block their elimination of waste matter. So their victims slowly fill up with shit.

Already pressurized to bursting point, when they are confronted by people who refuse to conform, they start to turn purple and run around in circles making squawking noises like a chicken having an epileptic fit. Sometimes the backed up gasses start to escape from their arse like a loud rumbling fart, while sometimes they just blow up like an American false flag terrorists bomb”

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EXTINCT MOTORBIKES

HAVE MOTORBIKES BECOME EXTINCT – LIKE FAX MACHINES?

THE SAD DEMISE OF MOTORCYCLES

Does anyone still ride motorbikes, or are they just an old timers fantasy, like knights in amour or horses and carts?

As a teenager I was obsessed with motorbikes, and as well as using them to get around I used to race motor-cross as well. Motorbikes are awesome.

But the New Zealand government decided that like marijuana, and cures for cancer, motorbikes needed to be outlawed out of existence.

They did it by making it so expensive to register a motorbike that nobody would be left who could afford to do it.

Cars are fairly economical in NZ, because we are a right hand drive country (like England and Australia), but we have no car industry that government needs to protect (unlike England and Australia), so we get all the second hand cars from right hand drive Japan shipped over here and sold nice and cheap.

Back in the old days, it used to be about the same cost for the annual registration on both motorbikes and cars. But in more recent years, motorbikes have gone up. A LOT! Now the annual registration for motorbikes is $586 (so motorcyclists mostly just gave up and bought cars).

Yes, in NZ it costs more to register a motorbike each year than it does to buy a cheap Japanese car.

Like an intrepid African lion hunter, I went exploring the streets in search of retro two wheeled iron horses – do any still exist?

A few still do, but we are not talking regular A to B transport here – anyone paying $586 a year for a number plate wants two wheeled exotica!

Here are 10 styling motorbikes that got tangled up with my camera:

BACK IN 2003

 

Wayback Machine is Fully Going Off

Using Wayback Machine  I can check out my websites from more than 20 years ago! This is what my original Sift homepage looked like 22 years ago

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I Sift, therefore I am sifty Sifting can potentially cultivate a much more aware state of mind than, say, mindless consuming and generalised believing. Hidden underneath all the worthless misinformation that flows freely out to us everyday, are some rare gems of truth. But you have to sift for them. Sifting about on the net, I’ve found myself drawn to some seemingly diverse subjects such as nutrition, health, marijuana, hemp, consumerism, capitalism, chaos theory, organics, censorship, drugs, doctors, warez, hacking, advertising, corporations, chemicals, GE, computers, free trade, and of course the USA and it’s uncontrolled world domination fetish. That’s a wide range of subjects and I’m too lazy to get into all of it, so a lot of the stuff on this site relates to health issues, as lately I’ve been spending a lot of my time working on my health, and researching diet and nutrition, But the thing I have found repeatedly, is that once you start digging around, everything starts to follow a similar pattern. Basically, it seems that if something is widely reported, it is probably false, whether it’s about healthy food, or terrorist attacks. The way these things tend to interlink, and the patterns they each repeat, open up a clearer way of looking at things. An alternative perspective, distilled through sifting. A bigger picture. There are many people on the Internet who are trying to distribute quality information. But most punters are not ready or willing to even consider it – they are too thoroughly indoctrinated. So it stays submerged. One of my friends responded to this site with “I just maintain a state of apathetic cynicism and avoid thinking about all this stuff” And that’s a reasonable reaction, there’s no point getting stressed about it all. But on the other hand, we are getting shafted and lied to so frequently that it’s hard to just ignore it. And I think that right now there are enough people becoming aware of what’s going on to start fighting back. Knowledge is power. For example, if enough people are aware of the real reasons that America attacked Iraq, or of America’s history of world domination and how taking over Iraq fits into that, or that the “war on terrorism”, like the “war on drugs” is a complete scam, intended only to increase America’s power, then maybe that will help to make the actions of the US backfire on them. Every aware person is only a drop in the ocean, but every drop can help dilute the tide of oppression that’s coming from the likes of the US government, and the overbearing evil of multinationals such as Monsanto. The Internet is still a place where the individual can fight back. Let’s keep it that way. As I find interesting new stuff, I’ll post some bits of it along the way, and make a sort of documented sifting scrapbook. Siftings from the sifterhood. As a rough guide, the text in red is generally stuff I have slapped together myself, while the blue text is stuff I have shamelessly ripped off wholesale from other sites and books, with as little editing as possible. I am a firm believer in the motto “information wants to be free” Once something is posted on the net it’s like tossing a bottle in the sea – who knows where it will end up… So feel free to recycle anything on this site – if it’s in red it may even be original and a credit to www.sift.co.nz would be much appreciated. Wherever possible I have left in credits for the sources of all the material I have ripped off, and that to me is cool – I realise not everyone agrees with that, but as I am trying to show on this website, there are generally two sides to most arguments. (And the other side are generally a bunch of idiots!) Much of this site contains personal opinion. But I believe the factual content is accurate. If you have clear evidence that would dispute or add to any of the statements on this site, feel free to send it to me. I have just added a feedback page for responses to the site. The most popular page on this site has been the Coca-Cola one. It’s my theory that is was getting the most hits because I had put the link to it as “coke”. That’s now been changed to Coca-Cola, so if it becomes less popular, I’ll take it as a sign that people really want to read about drugs. That they want to read about Colombian drug dealers hoovering up mountains of coke off glass top tables in expensive nightclubs. Maybe they want to look at porn and read about coke. There’s certainly some good sifting material in those subjects, so who knows… People keep paying me to do stuff for them. It takes time and interferes with my sifting. Sometimes it’s a problem. Sometimes I just sift anyway, and things I was going to do remain undone. This site still hasn’t got much stuff on it yet…. But it’s on my list. It’s number 186. I’ll be back.
What’s New (Site last updated July 2003) Marijuana – The Oppression of Hemp and Marijuana SARS – Disease or Global Scam? Purple – The Colour Purple – is it Gay? Apricot Kernels – Toxin or Superfood? September 11 – did George Bush know? Microwave – Carcinogenic Convenience Food…

MORE SUNDAY LOLS

Here are another dozen LOLPICS I've shared online this week: