Britain has become one of the most surveilled societies in human history. Its network of spy cameras and snooping devices makes Orwell's Oceania look downright primitive. Now, snoopers are being recruited to spy in the comfort of their own homes. You can even win prizes spying on your neighbors, strangers, anybody. How long before we're hearing about the snooping addiction? And strangely enough, hardly anybody in Britain is alarmed about becoming a nation of snoops. Next step: a nation of snitches.
Fact: Read about it here
Fiction: Outer Limits OBIT (1963) Part 1
Outer Limits OBIT (1963) Part 2
Outer Limits OBIT (1963) Part 3
Outer Limits OBIT (1963) Part 4
Outer Limits OBIT (1963) Part 5
Outer Limits OBIT (1963) Part 6
There is nothing wrong with your television set. It's just looking at you while you're looking at it!
Friday, October 30, 2009
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Well, wouldn't you?
Let's be generous. We know that Andre Agassi did not write his own "autobiography;" he hired somebody to wrangle those pesky words for him. We know that Andre Agassi's biography isn't really important in any way, shape, or form. We know that Andre Agassi's life could be encapsulated in a moderately long Sports Illustrated article replete with lots of pictures. We know that celebrities and their "autobiographies" are exercises in vanity.
What we don't know is why, if you're going to all this trouble to draw attention to yourself, would you put a picture that for all the world looks like a police line-up photo on the cover? Did he just wake up from an all night bender? Couldn't he have shaved? Or used some eye drops to clear up that glazed vacuous stare? Or shaved? Or smiled?
If you were yelling to the world "Look at me!!!!", wouldn't you at least try to spruce up even an itsy bitsy bit?
What we don't know is why, if you're going to all this trouble to draw attention to yourself, would you put a picture that for all the world looks like a police line-up photo on the cover? Did he just wake up from an all night bender? Couldn't he have shaved? Or used some eye drops to clear up that glazed vacuous stare? Or shaved? Or smiled?
If you were yelling to the world "Look at me!!!!", wouldn't you at least try to spruce up even an itsy bitsy bit?
Thursday, October 15, 2009
A decade disappears
According to John Williams at ShadowStats, inflation-adjusted retail sales have receded to the level of 2000. The first decade of the 21st century has been repealed. This follows data I've previously posted that all American jobs created in this decade have been lost, and all income advances in the decade for 80% of Americans have been lost as well. As I've posted before, we're trapped in the Time Machine and it's stuck in reverse!
Also, this tidbit from a recent interview with Paul Craig Roberts: New York City's Fifth Avenue, the world's prime retail space, has a 15.3% vacancy rate! This in an economy that until recently was 70% devoted to consumption and retail sales.
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Sparta, Prussia, America
First amendment watchdogs often complain about lowering the "wall of separation" between church and state as the government bribes and entices more and more "faith based" organizations to accept government money with the inevitable government control to follow. That's bad news, but defenders of the Constitution should be shouting from the rooftops about the rapidly dissolving barrier between the civilian and the military. It seems that the Army, blessed with countless billions of civilian tax dollars, wants to create a national junior ROTC (JROTC) program--for middle schoolers!
Seventh graders won't be students any longer; they'll be cadets. They'll march and wear snappy dress uniforms on special days and learn about weapons and adopt military values that will save them from being "at risk" (so says a JROTC booster in the article below). What would entice a school system to accept such a monstrosity? Money, lots and lots of military money. Everything's for sale nowadays in America, so shouldn't dead-broke school boards auction off their students for bucks?
The generation that fought the Revolutionary War despised standing armies so much that they refused to create one for the new republic and instead insisted that citizen militias defend the country. That's the historical meaning of the 2nd amendment. Until the eve of World War II, America had a minuscule military and an army of not much more than 100,000 men. There was no "military-industrial complex" to speak of. National life was entirely civilian with hardly any military presence in any way, shape, or form.
Now we'll have the military in the nation's public middle schools. They've been in the high schools and colleges for decades. They're funding and training police forces all across America; they're organizing joint law enforcement exercises with city police and country sheriffs. The posse comitatus act of 1878, which prohibited the military from taking part in any form of civilian law enforcement, has been nullified. At the instruction of the president or attorney general, the military can arrest and detain any American citizen and hold that person incommunicado for at least three full years and no civilian court can interfere. The military today is more widely deployed both in America and across the world than at any time in our history. The military has access to more than $1 trillion annually, and every year that sum increases. The division between civilian and military is essentially non-existent; our civilian authorities defer to the military, facilitate it, and support it without question.
How far away is the day when the military dispenses with the civilian nuisance altogether?
Read it here
Seventh graders won't be students any longer; they'll be cadets. They'll march and wear snappy dress uniforms on special days and learn about weapons and adopt military values that will save them from being "at risk" (so says a JROTC booster in the article below). What would entice a school system to accept such a monstrosity? Money, lots and lots of military money. Everything's for sale nowadays in America, so shouldn't dead-broke school boards auction off their students for bucks?
The generation that fought the Revolutionary War despised standing armies so much that they refused to create one for the new republic and instead insisted that citizen militias defend the country. That's the historical meaning of the 2nd amendment. Until the eve of World War II, America had a minuscule military and an army of not much more than 100,000 men. There was no "military-industrial complex" to speak of. National life was entirely civilian with hardly any military presence in any way, shape, or form.
Now we'll have the military in the nation's public middle schools. They've been in the high schools and colleges for decades. They're funding and training police forces all across America; they're organizing joint law enforcement exercises with city police and country sheriffs. The posse comitatus act of 1878, which prohibited the military from taking part in any form of civilian law enforcement, has been nullified. At the instruction of the president or attorney general, the military can arrest and detain any American citizen and hold that person incommunicado for at least three full years and no civilian court can interfere. The military today is more widely deployed both in America and across the world than at any time in our history. The military has access to more than $1 trillion annually, and every year that sum increases. The division between civilian and military is essentially non-existent; our civilian authorities defer to the military, facilitate it, and support it without question.
How far away is the day when the military dispenses with the civilian nuisance altogether?
Read it here
Friday, October 9, 2009
Peace prize? What?
Did you react the way I did when I learned that Mr. Obama had won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize? "Say what??!!??" How can a man who is prosecuting a war and an occupation in Iraq, a war and occupation in Afghanistan, a covert war in Pakistan, covert military interventions in Sudan and Somalia win a "peace" prize? Hello? Who's running the Nobel prize committee these days? Characters out of George Orwell?
Paul Craig Roberts asked the same questions below and concludes that, yes indeed, George Orwell's 1984 is now the reality of the day. We Americans live in Oceania; Big Brother surveils us night and day; our news media are torrents of Newspeak; our minds are full of Doublethink. War is peace. Slavery is freedom. The Nobel prize committee is full of you know what.
Not only have these Norwegian dimwits disgraced themselves and degraded both the prize they award and the principles its founder wanted to honor and encourage; these dimwits have totally undercut any opposition to these wars.
How can you oppose Mr. Obama, our officially recognized Prince of Peace, now? He's the champion of peace; the Nobel prize committee says so.
How can you oppose Mr. Obama's policies--which are indistinguishable from Mr. Bush's--now? This is peace. The Nobel prize committee says so.
So what if Muslim men, women, and children are being slaughtered everyday by American forces? This is peace. The Nobel prize committee says so.
So what if Mr. Obama is stirring up the world to wage war against Iran? This is peace. The Nobel prize committee says so.
War is peace. Slavery is freedom. The year is 1984. Big Brother has won the Nobel peace prize.
Read Paul Craig Roberts here
Paul Craig Roberts asked the same questions below and concludes that, yes indeed, George Orwell's 1984 is now the reality of the day. We Americans live in Oceania; Big Brother surveils us night and day; our news media are torrents of Newspeak; our minds are full of Doublethink. War is peace. Slavery is freedom. The Nobel prize committee is full of you know what.
Not only have these Norwegian dimwits disgraced themselves and degraded both the prize they award and the principles its founder wanted to honor and encourage; these dimwits have totally undercut any opposition to these wars.
How can you oppose Mr. Obama, our officially recognized Prince of Peace, now? He's the champion of peace; the Nobel prize committee says so.
How can you oppose Mr. Obama's policies--which are indistinguishable from Mr. Bush's--now? This is peace. The Nobel prize committee says so.
So what if Muslim men, women, and children are being slaughtered everyday by American forces? This is peace. The Nobel prize committee says so.
So what if Mr. Obama is stirring up the world to wage war against Iran? This is peace. The Nobel prize committee says so.
War is peace. Slavery is freedom. The year is 1984. Big Brother has won the Nobel peace prize.
Read Paul Craig Roberts here
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
Signs of the times
When a former assistant of the treasury in the Reagan administration who was one of the designers of supply-side economics approving quotes Marx and writes that Marx and Lenin knew what they were talking about when it comes to late stage finance capitalism, then you know we're in it up to our necks.
Paul Craig Roberts gives an astonishingly grim assessment of the present situation. To paraphrase Churchill: apropos the Great Depression of the 21st century, this is not the end of it nor even the beginning of the end of it; it's just the end of the beginning. There's much worse yet to come.
Read Paul Craig Roberts here
Paul Craig Roberts gives an astonishingly grim assessment of the present situation. To paraphrase Churchill: apropos the Great Depression of the 21st century, this is not the end of it nor even the beginning of the end of it; it's just the end of the beginning. There's much worse yet to come.
Read Paul Craig Roberts here
Monday, October 5, 2009
Conservative Bible?
Apparently a gang of zanies at Conservapedia (a toxic waste dump of right-wing, wing-nut, ultra-right, fringe-right, and to-the-right-of-fascism "conservatives") want to "translate" the Bible into conservative-friendly text because, they claim, too many translated Bible passages sound "liberal." Evidently not only "liberal" translations irk these nuts; they view askance passages like "Father, forgive them for they know not what they do" in Luke (maybe it's not "authentic" but was inserted by some ancient liberal).
Conservative Bible? Liberal Bible? The Bible used to be God's word. Did he sell the copyright to somebody? Soon it will be the Republican Bible belonging to the Republican National Committee (RNC). Perhaps the "conservative Bible" will revise the opening of John's gospel to read "In the beginning was the RNC, and the RNC was with God, and what God was the RNC was..."
If you follow the link in the post below to the article on Conservapedia and read it, you quickly understand what these crack-pots are up to. They care not an atom about the actual text of the Bible or scholarship. They merely want to paraphrase (not "translate") the text and thus change it into a version replete with modern politically loaded terms wherever they want to insert them. The aim, in short, is to turn the Bible into a propaganda device for a particularly obnoxious American political faction. And given the present state of the know-nothing Christian right, they'll succeed. They have plenty of precedent. Millions have read at least part of the "Living Bible," another paraphrase from a generation ago, and thought that they were getting the real stuff when all they were getting was one man's distortion of the text mixed with a huge amount of unspoken theological biases and hidden agendas.
The alternative, of course, is to devote years to learning ancient Greek and Hebrew, studying ancient history, mastering the history of Bible textual criticism, and learning about the principles and practice of honest, scholarly translation. Who's gonna do that these days? So look for the "Conservative Bible" in a Christian bookstore near you soon.
Read about it here
Conservative Bible? Liberal Bible? The Bible used to be God's word. Did he sell the copyright to somebody? Soon it will be the Republican Bible belonging to the Republican National Committee (RNC). Perhaps the "conservative Bible" will revise the opening of John's gospel to read "In the beginning was the RNC, and the RNC was with God, and what God was the RNC was..."
If you follow the link in the post below to the article on Conservapedia and read it, you quickly understand what these crack-pots are up to. They care not an atom about the actual text of the Bible or scholarship. They merely want to paraphrase (not "translate") the text and thus change it into a version replete with modern politically loaded terms wherever they want to insert them. The aim, in short, is to turn the Bible into a propaganda device for a particularly obnoxious American political faction. And given the present state of the know-nothing Christian right, they'll succeed. They have plenty of precedent. Millions have read at least part of the "Living Bible," another paraphrase from a generation ago, and thought that they were getting the real stuff when all they were getting was one man's distortion of the text mixed with a huge amount of unspoken theological biases and hidden agendas.
The alternative, of course, is to devote years to learning ancient Greek and Hebrew, studying ancient history, mastering the history of Bible textual criticism, and learning about the principles and practice of honest, scholarly translation. Who's gonna do that these days? So look for the "Conservative Bible" in a Christian bookstore near you soon.
Read about it here
Sunday, October 4, 2009
21.4% and rising
John William at ShadowStats has examined and corrected the government's latest unemployment data. The result: the effective unemployment/underemployment rate in this country is now 21.4% (that's the blue line in the graph). The government's own U6 index (the gray line--which the government claims to be the broadest measure of unemployment/underemployment) has risen to 16.8%. This index omits millions of people who have given up searching for jobs that don't exist; the government claims that they are "out of the work force" and ignores them.
In the meantime, the commercial real estate crack-up proceeds without let up, a new round of mortgage resets will begin in the new year (this time it's Alt-A mortgages--millions of them), and credit card defaults continue to reach unprecedented heights (unprecedented since last month when they reached unprecedented heights, and the month before when they did, and the month before that, etc). And sometime in early 2010, half the homeowners carrying mortgages will find themselves underwater--i.e., the balance on their mortgages will exceed the value of their homes. Gerald Celente of Trends Research is predicting the worst commercial Christmas in history, the aftermath of which will wipe-out countless marginal businesses that are at present hanging on only by their fingernails.
So in the final quarter of 2009, we are trillions of dollars in debt because of "stimulus" programs and bail-outs (the Plan A of both the Bush and Obama administrations), yet have absolutely nothing to show for it. What's Plan B?
A world run by fools and tyrants
How do students often raise money for their school organizations? A bake sale. But not in New York City. The cabal of tyrants who rule the city have decided (a) too many fat kids is a problem and (b) banning bake sales in public schools is a solution. As if buying a brownie at a back sale explains why half of America is fat.
So now students who for some reason still care about their failing public schools and who want to do something positive to improve them will no longer have a useful and effective way to raise funds. So much for school spirit!
Similar regulations are enforced in various school systems across the country. "Schools around the United States, including throughout California, have banned bake sales or put a limit on the sugar and fat content of the goodies. But New York’s regulations are among the strictest in the country..." And exactly what do these regulation accomplish? Apparently nothing because "Roughly 40 percent of the city’s elementary and middle school students are overweight or obese, according to the [NYC] Education Department." In other words, these policies in NYC schools and else where have no positive effect; they are failures; they serve no demonstrable purpose. They are merely exercises in petty tyranny by useless busybodies who claim the right and duty to police what people eat for as long as those unfortunate people are within their jurisdiction.
Just another reason why abolishing public schools altogether is looking more and more attractive as time goes by.
Read it here
So now students who for some reason still care about their failing public schools and who want to do something positive to improve them will no longer have a useful and effective way to raise funds. So much for school spirit!
Similar regulations are enforced in various school systems across the country. "Schools around the United States, including throughout California, have banned bake sales or put a limit on the sugar and fat content of the goodies. But New York’s regulations are among the strictest in the country..." And exactly what do these regulation accomplish? Apparently nothing because "Roughly 40 percent of the city’s elementary and middle school students are overweight or obese, according to the [NYC] Education Department." In other words, these policies in NYC schools and else where have no positive effect; they are failures; they serve no demonstrable purpose. They are merely exercises in petty tyranny by useless busybodies who claim the right and duty to police what people eat for as long as those unfortunate people are within their jurisdiction.
Just another reason why abolishing public schools altogether is looking more and more attractive as time goes by.
Read it here
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