I don’t know about you, but I’m concerned with what’s happening in this world. I’m concerned with the structure. I’m concerned with the systems of control, those that control my life and those that seek to control it even more! I want freedom! That’s what I want! And that’s what you should want! It’s up to each and every one of us to turn loose and just shovel the greed, the hatred, the envy and, yes, the insecurities because that is the central mode of control— make us feel pathetic, small… so we’ll willingly give up our sovereignty, our liberty, our destiny. We have got to realize that we’re being conditioned on a mass scale. Start challenging this corporate slave state! The 21st Century is gonna be a new century, not the century of slavery, not the century of lies and issues of no significance… and classism and statism and all the rest of the modes of control! It’s gonna be the age of humankind standing up for something pure and something right! What a bunch of garbage— liberal Democrat, conservative Republican. It’s all there to control you. Two sides of the same coin. Two management teams bidding for control! The C.E.O. job of Slavery, Incorporated! The truth is out there in front of you, but they lay out this buffet of lies! I’m sick of it, and I’m not gonna take a bite out of it! Do you got me? Resistance is not futile. We’re gonna win this thing. Humankind is too good! We’re not a bunch of underachievers! We’re gonna stand up and we’re gonna be human beings! We’re gonna get fired up about the real things, the things that matter: creativity and the dynamic human spirit that refuses to submit!
When authorities fail to prosecute those who attack people for exercising their rights or exposing abuses, they subvert justice and undermine the people’s confidence in their governments
Hillary Clinton, criticizing how Russian authorities have reacted to protesters.
How very appropriate, Mrs. Clinton. How about you redirect your words to the administration you serve?
MSNBC on NYPD Police Brutality during Occupy Wall St.
“This weekend a few troublemakers turned a peaceful protest against Wall Street greed into a violent burst of chaos. The troublemakers carried pepper spray, and guns, and were wearing badges.”
This is incredible! MSNBC’s Lawrence O’donnell calls the American police force out for crimes against the American people, and brings it back to the 1991 beating of Rodney King. Powerful stuff.
This gives me the chills. This is real news reporting.
…sectors of the doctrinal system serve to divert the unwashed masses and reinforce the basic social values: passivity, submissiveness to authority, the overriding virtue of greed and personal gain, lack of concern for others, fear of real or imagined enemies, etc. The goal is to keep the bewildered herd bewildered. It’s unnecessary for them to trouble themselves with what’s happening in the world. In fact, it’s undesirable; if they see too much of reality they may set themselves to change it.
“A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself within. The essential causes of Rome’s decline lay in her people, her morals, her class struggle, her failing trade, her bureaucratic despotism, her stifling taxes, her consuming wars.”
Will Durant, American writer, historian, and philosopher (1885-1981), Caesar and Christ, Epilogue, p. 665 (1944)
Neal Gabler: ‘We are living in a post ideas world where bold ideas are almost passé’
“Ideas just aren’t what they used to be. Once upon a time, they could ignite fires of debate, stimulate other thoughts, incite revolutions and fundamentally change the ways we look at and think about the world. (…)
There is the retreat in universities from the real world, and an encouragement of and reward for the narrowest specialization rather than for daring — for tending potted plants rather than planting forests. (…)
We are certainly the most informed generation in history, at least quantitatively. There are trillions upon trillions of bytes out there in the ether — so much to gather and to think about.
And that’s just the point. In the past, we collected information not simply to know things. That was only the beginning. We also collected information to convert it into something larger than facts and ultimately more useful — into ideas that made sense of the information. We sought not just to apprehend the world but to truly comprehend it, which is the primary function of ideas. Great ideas explain the world and one another to us. (…)
We are inundated with so much information that we wouldn’t have time to process it even if we wanted to, and most of us don’t want to. (…) Few talk ideas. Everyone talks information, usually personal information. Where are you going? What are you doing? Whom are you seeing? These are today’s big questions. (…) The most popular sites on the Web, are basically information exchanges, designed to feed the insatiable information hunger, though this is hardly the kind of information that generates ideas. (…)
“This isn’t to say that the successors of Rosenberg, Rawls and Keynes don’t exist, only that if they do, they are not likely to get traction in a culture that has so little use for ideas, especially big, exciting, dangerous ones, and that’s true whether the ideas come from academics or others who are not part of elite organizations and who challenge the conventional wisdom. All thinkers are victims of information glut, and the ideas of today’s thinkers are also victims of that glut.
But it is especially true of big thinkers in the social sciences. (…) Because they are scientists and empiricists rather than generalists in the humanities, the place from which ideas were customarily popularized, they suffer a double whammy: not only the whammy against ideas generally but the whammy against science, which is typically regarded in the media as mystifying at best, incomprehensible at worst. A generation ago, these men would have made their way into popular magazines and onto television screens. Now they are crowded out by informational effluvium.
No doubt there will be those who say that the big ideas have migrated to the marketplace, but there is a vast difference between profit-making inventions and intellectually challenging thoughts. (…) Still, while these ideas may change the way we live, they rarely transform the way we think. They are material, not ideational.
