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POPSWe All Want To Know "We will probably never find that cosmic connection to our lost royalty. Someday I will visit Norway and look up those ancestors. They died not knowing the fate of the universe, and so will I, but maybe that’s all right." TN told me once she felt closer to knowing God through science. Well, she has her way and I have mine, but we all want to know :)
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POPSNineteen Eighty-Four As literary science fiction, 1984 is a classic novel of the social science fiction sub-genre, thus, since its publication in 1949, the terms and concepts of Big Brother, doublethink, thoughtcrime, Newspeak, et cetera, became contemporary vernacular, including the adjective Orwellian, denoting George Orwell's writings and totalitarianism as exposited in Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm (1945).
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POPSBig Brother Expands, Introducing Police Headcams Surveillance insanity. The Security merchandisers (who prey on fear and technological enthusiasm) are extracting huge profits from government, at the expense of both citizens tax dollars and privacy. Ironic how the Land of Orwell tolerates this surveillance insanity to buy the latest technological devices as if they are "necessary". Robocop is surely coming in the future, where "remote policing" will probably be the new fad. Watch for headcams to come to American soon....it always follows the UK's lead. national roll-out of head cameras after regional trials proved they were successful in fighting crime, the Government has announced. Of course studies have proven that the UK's CCTV cams DID NOT prove successful in deterring or fighting crime , but that did not prevent their continued and expanded use either.
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POPSHave you ever wondered what hope looks like? Meet Celeste Fleck The joy caregivers and donors feel is genuine and not of stuff or material gifts. It is in the smiles of the children they care for, a first spoken word, a glance or a step. Each little success is a miracle of its own making. And what happiness when someone is well enough to go home. There is much about ourselves we can learn here.
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POPSAmusing Ourselves to Death
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions". In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure.
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POPSBREAKING: ACORN’s New Orleans Office Raided by Louisiana Attorney General
According to NOLA.com: Attorney General Buddy Caldwell has served a search warrant at the ACORN office at 2609 Canal Street, according to Tammi Arender Herring, a spokeswoman with the office. Investigators in khaki pants and polo shirts loaded several dozen computers and other electronic items into an SUV. They are also carrying records out of the building on handcarts. The large office building sits at the corner of Dorgenois and Canal. ACORN staffers were given no notice that a search would be conducted today, Herring said. From WDAM in New Orleans: Caldwell said investigators will copy records and hard drives, then return them to ACORN. He said the original allegations of embezzlement were made last year by ACORN board members who were fired after they asked for a forensic examination of the group’s books. ACORN fired the longtime director of its Louisiana chapter last month, citing a lack of accountability. by Capitol Confidential Big Governm
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POPSFBI Demands Tattoo Shops Rat On Customers It is not merely “extremist symbols.” In addition, the FBI literature instructs tattoo shops to be on the look-out for people who change hair color, style of dress, or shave beards between visits. Suspicious people also include those with missing fingers or hands, chemical burns, strange orders or bright colored stains on clothing. Read the handout below for more absurd “extremist” indicators according to the FBI.
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POPSChicago to pay Cash Bounties for Informants on Business Cheats Depending on your stance on tax cheats, this could be good or bad. On the one hand, tax cheats should be made to pay their fair share of the tax burden. But it brings up the issue on what is the ‘fair share’ when it comes to taxes, but that is for discussion another day. On the hand, this enforces the whole Big Brother climate. Do we really want to spy on our grocer or used car dealer, etc? Would you do it for money? What are your thoughts?
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POPSBig Brother Monitoring Your Clipmarks, Blogs, Tweets "Visible", a very extensive and sophisticated CIA-based monitoring program is in effect watching online forums, blogs, twitters, and likely Clipmarks (where influential clips are easily tabulated). After all, it's all in the public domain, where whatever you post you must own. In-Q-Tel says it wants Visible to keep track of foreign social media, and give spooks “early-warning detection on how issues are playing internationally ,” spokesperson Donald Tighe tells Danger Room.
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POPSCrimespotting: the new way to make money on the Internet Tony Morgan, who set up the site, said: “This could turn out to be the best crime prevention weapon there’s ever been. I wanted to combine the serious business of stopping crime with the incentive of winning money. Users will be awarded one point for spotting a suspected crime and three if they see an actual crime. They can also lose points if the camera operator decides that the alert was not a crime.
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POPSWho's in Big Brother's Database? Thus it is possible that the agency scans all the e-mail of both and it may also eavesdrop on the telephone calls of both for targets on its ever-growing watch lists. According to a recent Justice Department report, "As of December 31, 2008, the consolidated terrorist watchlist contained more than 1.1 million known or suspected terrorist identities."
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POPSUK has 1% of world's population but 20% of its CCTV cameras
An old article but still pretty accurate. you cannot move in London without being seen by at least 3 cameras at any one point. It is the definition of a police state, the police also have sub-machine guns, (H&K MP5k's for anyone interested) while you can be arrested for carrying a penknife if its blade is more than an inch long, because of the laws now concerning blades and knives. as well as the other tricks like LRADs (not new) which are now common place around the world. All backed by by ignorant and dangerous attitudes of the police. Again as always don't take my word for it look it up. The report says: "It is not entirely absurd to imagine that supermarkets' loyalty card data might one day be used by the Government to identify people who ignored advice to eat healthily or who drank too much, so that they could be given a lower priority for NHS treatment". "We have supermarkets collecting data on our shopping habits and also offering life insurance services"
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POPSIreland to Hold Second Referendum on Lisbon Treaty Please reject the treaty, Ireland! Please, please please! They need this treaty to move ahead with their Big Brother / authoritarian plans for the EU. Just say NO!! The Lisbon Treaty, currently stalled after Ireland's referendum rejection last year, creates a secretive new Standing Committee for Internal Security, known as COSI, to co-ordinate policy between national forces and EU organisations such as Europol, the Frontex borders agency, the European Gendarmerie Force and the Brussels intelligence sharing Joint Situation Centre or Sitcen. EU officials have told The Daily Telegraph that the radical plans will be controversial and will need powers contained within the Lisbon Treaty, currently awaiting a second Irish vote this autumn. http://clipmarks.com/clipmark/5C286A9C-FF10-4261-BC14-EBC06382F28B/
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POPSAmazon Erases Orwell Books From Kindle
Amazon effectively acknowledged that the deletions were a bad idea. “We are changing our systems so that in the future we will not remove books from customers’ devices in these circumstances,” Mr. Herdener said. Customers whose books were deleted indicated that MobileReference, a digital publisher, had sold them. An e-mail message to SoundTells, the company that owns MobileReference, was not immediately returned. Digital books bought for the Kindle are sent to it over a wireless network. Amazon can also use that network to synchronize electronic books between devices — and apparently to make them vanish. An authorized digital edition of “1984” from its American publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, was still available on the Kindle store Friday night, but there was no such version of “Animal Farm.” People who bought the rescinded editions of the books reacted with indignation, while acknowledging the literary ironies involved. “Of all the books to recall,” said Charles Slat
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POPSCOERCIVE CARE: Real Concerns About the Health Care Bill, The Tyranny of Good Intentions
The health care bill is all about Federal control over every "free" American. Insurance would be mandatory and compulsory and the government gives you "options" through coercion, including the IRS leaning on you ("penalty") if you try to "opt out" and retain your basic human rights, i.e. private property (how you spend your own money), control of your body, and freedom of choice. Then your entire privacy is jeapordized as the Federal government becomes your legal guardian and Nanny, supervising, monitoring, and tracking (in real electronic time) every health procedure and examination of every minutia of your life. So much for "freedom" then. Moreover, information is power, and this personal information on you provides the government the means of coercing you into what Big Brother thinks is "in your best interest", i.e. really the interest of the Collectivist State. A Healthcare National ID card has been discussed. The principle is nothing other than Communism.
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POPSDirtbag Lashs Out at Legitimate Charities and Slimes Their Good Names When news was about to break that Pike helped hide the embezzlement of nearly $1 million by the brother of ACORN’s founder, the order was “keep your yaps shut.” That would have been good advice here, rather than lashing out at legitimate charities and dragging their good names into ACORN’s sordid story.
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