from his page on Huff Post:
- Editor’s Note: The Huffington Post’s editorial policy, laid out in our blogger guidelines, prohibits the promotion and promulgation of conspiracy theories — including those about 9/11. As such, we have removed this post.
- Lawmakers working to craft a new comprehensive immigration bill have settled on a way to prevent employers from hiring illegal immigrants: a national biometric identification card all American workers would eventually be required to obtain.
- Under the potentially controversial plan still taking shape in the Senate, all legal U.S. workers, including citizens and immigrants, would be issued an ID card with embedded information, such as fingerprints, to tie the card to the worker.
- The uphill effort to pass a bill is being led by Sens. Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) and Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.), who plan to meet with President Barack Obama as soon as this week to update him on their work. An administration official said the White House had no position on the biometric card.
(“Your papers, please.”)
It was an experiment that didn’t set out to demonstrate how mind control techniques used by cult groups can work effectively in practice. But that’s one of the results from a behavioral study done to test whether elderly people isolated together could so completely convince themselves they were young again that their bodies actually would begin to morph ‘backward’ in resonance .
What Harvard University psychologist Ellen Langer wanted to know was whether the body clock of a group of men in their 70s and 80s could be re-set to 1959 by their collective mindset.
After just a week, those in this experimental group (compared with a control group of similar aged men) measured significant physical and mental changes in a range of areas:
—They had less arthritis;
—More joint flexibility;
—Improved posture and gait;
—Better hearing and eyesight;
—Sharper minds and better performance on mental tasks;
—Elevated spirits and optimism about life.
- The World Future Council was founded by the Swedish writer and activist Jakob von Uexkull in reaction to politics across the world being dominated by short-term, economic thinking. The idea for a global council was first aired on German radio in 1998. It hit a chord, with German TV immediately expressing an interest in broadcasting the Council’s sessions. In October 2004 the organisation was officially launched in London with funding from private donors in Germany, Switzerland, USA and the UK. Since 2006, the organisation is based in Hamburg, where the World Future Council is registered as a charitable foundation. Further offices are located in London, Brussels, Delhi, and Washington D.C. The Council met for the first time in May 2007 in Hamburg.
an interesting group of policy makers and social engineers.
- Hanks and Gary Goetzman will act as executive producers, and Hanks hopes the adaptation will air in 2013. He believes the public has been snookered into believing that Lee Harvey Oswald was framed. “We’re going to do the American public a service,” Hanks says. “A lot of conspiracy types are going to be upset. If we do it right, it’ll be perhaps one of the most controversial things that has ever been on TV.”
What can we expect? If he is already out to show alternative researchers they are wrong, then how can he do anything other than tow the company line? Hanks will probably pretend to be objective on the Warren Commission report’s findings to show he is a ‘tough investigator’, but there will be nothing ultimately that will make entrenched power structures/brokers look bad.
The disciplining force of society is at its most effective when its human origins are denied or covered up. The admission that society - with all its prescriptions and proscriptions, rewards for obedience and punishments for veering off the line - rests ultimately on man-made choices and decisions invites critical scrutiny, dissent and resistance: What has been done by humans can be undone by humans. No wonder that throughout the modern era, attempts were made and continue to be made to represent the grounds for the demands of power-holders as beyond human capacity.
The Century of the Self - Watch at Your Own Risk
Adam Curtis (in an interview with The Register)
At a time when there isn’t anything to give you confidence beyond yourself - you live in the “empire of the self” - then it is inevitable that you will seek those like you, because it will give you a sense of collective purpose. It will give you a sense of collective security.
And that’s exactly what the internet is about - “If you like this book, others before you have bought these books…” And it works to create those little circles. All those little radio stations which tell you, “If you played this, other people have played this…”
On the internet, you’re constantly monitoring other people’s choices to see what those people who you think are like you do, and they say, “OK I’ll do that to be like that”. And what that leads to, again, is Balkanisation.
And it’s what advertisers rather like, because it gives them a definition.
The Century of the Self, parts 1 - 4
Like Joe Stack and Amy Bishop, J.Patrick Bedell’s story goes deep into the weird. After Coleman’s mention of Bedell’s reading habits and interests he goes on to make the very important note of the ridiculous politicizing and right wing co-option of the shootings:
Philip K Dick’s FBI file and the bizarre story of a neo-Nazi plot to start a Third World War.
Speaking of speed freaks …
As Cashmore explains, the human brain acts at both the conscious level as well as the unconscious. It’s our consciousness that makes us aware of our actions, giving us the sense that we control them, as well. But even without this awareness, our brains can still induce our bodies to act, and studies have indicated that consciousness is something that follows unconscious neural activity. Just because we are often aware of multiple paths to take, that doesn’t mean we actually get to choose one of them based on our own free will. As the ancient Greeks asked, by what mechanism would we be choosing? The physical world is made of causes and effects - “nothing comes from nothing” - but free will, by its very definition, has no physical cause. The Roman philosopher and poet Lucretius, in reference to this problem of free will, noted that the Greek philosophers concluded that atoms “randomly swerve” - the likely source of this movement being the numerous Greek gods.
“Conditional Free Will” is likely a better way to put it. We do have to power to choose, but usually the options that are socially condoned whether we want to believe it or not.
The way to achieving a stable economy is along the path of peace. War and economic crises play off of one another, and are systematically linked. Imperialism is the driver of this system, and behind it, the banking establishment as the financier.
Peace is the only way forward, in both political and economic realms. Peace is the pre-requisite for social sustainability and for a truly great civilization.
The people of the world must pursue and work for peace and justice on a global scale: economically, politically, socially, scientifically, artistically, and personally. It’s asking a lot, but it’s our only option. We need to have ‘hope’, a word often strewn around with little intent to the point where it has come to represent failed expectations. We need hope in ourselves, in our ability to throw off the shackles that bind us and in our diversity and creativity construct a new world that will benefit all.
No one knows what this world would look like, or how exactly to get there, least of all myself. What we do know is what it doesn’t look like, and what road to steer clear of. The time has come to retake our rightful place as the commanders of our own lives. It must be freedom for all, or freedom for none. This is our world, and we have been given the gift of the human mind and critical thought, which no other living being can rightfully boast; what a shame it would be to waste it.
- LOPPSI - otherwise known as Loi d’Orientation et de Programmation pour la SÈcuritÈ IntÈrieure (pdf)- is a ragbag of measures designed to make France a safer place. Like similar UK legislation - most notably the various Criminal Justice acts brought in over the last decade - LOPPSI brings together a number of apparently unrelated proposals which would severely restrict individual rights in all walks of life.
- The bill also includes measures that would increase police spend on “security”, create additional penalties for counterfeiting and ID theft, increase CCTV surveillance, and widen access to the Police DNA database.
- However, it is in the online area that some of the most radical proposals are to be found, with the criminalisation of online ID theft, provision for the police to tap online connections in the course of investigations, and most controversially of all, allowing the state to order ISPs to block (filter) specific internet URLs according to ministerial diktat.
- It has also been suggested that the state should have the right to plant covert trojans to monitor individual PC usage.
- Whilst the latter measures are put forward on the grounds of child protection, critics have been quick to point out that, in the absence of any judicial oversight mechanism, this is a power just waiting to be abused.
- Cable news is not good for the soul. People make fun of Jersey Shore, but at least those randy kids don’t reinforce our deep-seated political biases. A new paper by Shawn Powers of USC and Mohammed el-Nawawy of Queens University of Charlotte looked at the effect of international cable news on the ideology of its viewers. Not surprisingly, they found that people were only interested in “news” that didn’t contradict what they already believed:
-
Powers and el-Nawawy show that global media consumers tuned in to international news media that they thought would further substantiate their opinions about U.S. policies and culture, and provide them with information on the international issues that they deemed most important. The study found a strong relationship between the participants’ attitudes toward U.S. policy and culture and their choice of broadcaster. Those who were dependent on BBC World and especially CNNI were overall more supportive of U.S. foreign policy.
- This shouldn’t be too surprising. As Ken Auletta recently reported in the New Yorker, cable news has grown increasingly partisan in recent years, seeking out an ever more balkanized audience. He cites a study of 35,000 viewers conducted by TiVo: for each Democrat who watches Fox News there are eighteen Republicans, and for every Republican who watches MSNBC there are six Democrats. It turns out that everybody wants their own set of facts.
- This is an old phenomenon that’s been exaggerated by new media trends. Partisan voters are convinced that they’re rational⎯only the other side is irrational⎯but we’re actually rationalizers. The Princeton political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels analyzed survey data from the 1990’s to prove this point. During the first term of Bill Clinton’s presidency, the budget deficit declined by more than 90 percent. However, when Republican voters were asked in 1996 what happened to the deficit under Clinton, more than 55 percent said that it had increased. What’s interesting about this data is that so-called “high-information” voters⎯these are the Republicans who read the newspaper, watch cable news and can identify their representatives in Congress⎯weren’t better informed than “low-information” voters. According to Bartels, the reason knowing more about politics doesn’t erase partisan bias is that voters tend to only assimilate those facts that confirm what they already believe. If a piece of information doesn’t follow Republican talking points⎯and Clinton’s deficit reduction didn’t fit the “tax and spend liberal” stereotype⎯then the information is conveniently ignored. “Voters think that they’re thinking,” Achen and Bartels write, “but what they’re really doing is inventing facts or ignoring facts so that they can rationalize decisions they’ve already made.”
(Now more then ever would be a good time to call to mind RAW’s refrain: “Whatever the thinker thinks, the prover proves.” - Go out and read Prometheus Rising asap if you haven’t already - or buy it for someone you know.)
