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POPSGoogle Latitude, now with Location History & Alerts Good news... I no longer have to pay for anti kidnapping implants. Bad news... Not only do they know where I live, they no know when I'm home. Worst news... a recent 60 minutes segment featured an automated way of establishing my "intent". George Orwell (like H.G.Wells) really under-estimated what comes next.
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POPSQuotes "If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy." - James Madison "Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented notas a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac." – George Orwell "A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny." – Alexander Solzhenitsyn "War should be made a crime, and those who instigate it should be punished as criminals." – Charles Evans Hughes "Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people's brains and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead." - Arundhati Roy "Children learn more from what you are than what you teach." - W.E.B. Dubois, 1897 "Nonviolence doesn't always work-but violence never does" - Madge Micheels-Cyrus
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POPSBand rejects Glenn Beck's endorsement Click through for the audio clip from GB's show. With 19 more advertisers dumping beck and the GB-show-death-watch continuing, nobody wants to be associated with GB's "circling-the-drain kooties". I dig that the band's landsharks got on it before the broadcast was even over.
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POPSThe Politics of Lying When lying and deceit become normalized in a culture, they not only serve as an index of how low we have fallen as a literate society, but also demonstrate the degree to which language and education have become corrupted, tied to corporate and political power and sabotaged by rigid ideologies as part of a growing authoritarianism that uses the educational force of the culture, the means of communication and the sites in which information circulate to mobilize ignorance among a misinformed citizenry, all the while supporting reactionary policies. Especially since the horrible events of 9/11, Americans have been encouraged to identify with a militaristic way of life, to suspend their ability to read the word and world critically, to treat corporate and government power in almost religious terms and to view a culture of questioning as something alien and poisonous to American society.
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POPSUp is Down, Peace is War, Love is Hate - Huh? When you look at how we have made being at war seem nothing more than a video game, is it any wonder that people think the war in Iraq is over, that we are not really at war in Somalia, that Afghanistan is a "good war" like WWII was? I am not sure anymore what it will take for people to wake up to the facts that our economy depends on war, climate suicide and agriculture-based cancers (our steady diet of pesticides and fertilizers in food and water - what do you think is driving pancreatic cancer epidemic?). I do hope that sharing via Amplify helps to dirve real change in not just hand wringing.
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POPSThe solution We may not reach a new age of thinking and peace before we enter into a new age of oppression and war
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POPSGeorge Orwell 1984 Truth will be stranger than fiction...And more frightening! Unless we all wake-up! Could Obama's geopolitical stance be the mirror image of Bush's?
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POPSDemocrat Plan: Make the IRS the Internal Medical Service (a)TAX IMPOSED."In the case of any individual who does not meet the requirements of subsection (d) at any time during the taxable year, there is hereby imposed a tax equal to 2.5 percent of the excess of" (1)the taxpayer’s modified adjusted gross income for the taxable year, over (2) the amount of gross income specified in section 6012(a)(1) with respect to the taxpayer. The Senate version is similar, although the tax is called a "shared responsibility payment" not a tax. Wow, a "tax" isn't as scary " but a "shared responsibility payment"? That's when you know you'll get hosed. House, kid, you were good, real good, but the Senate receives the 2009 George Orwell Award for Outstanding Achievement in Government Euphemizing. Of course, "shared responsibility" sounds good to many, but the reality is that it won't truly be shared. For one thing, this burden will only fall on those who work on the books and actually file a tax return.
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POPSSmart grid that controls utility use comes to KC This is so open to abuse by the powers that be it is insane, if you are considering getting of the grid now is the time to do it, particularly if you disagree with the governments position on... well pretty much anything at all.
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POPSSystem of Lies... What happened to us? Yep, I'm a leftest loony. But I'm also an idealist, and I believe in American democracy at it's finest, where a free press challenges government assertions. This perversion of the press as marketing tool is depressing and disgusting. The fact that it is a long-term strategy for political dominance makes us little better than other totalitarian regimes...Russia/USSR comes to mind as does Orwell's 1984... How pathetic. Get the word out!
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POPSBritain to put CCTV cameras inside private homes Britain seems to be taking George Orwell’s depiction of a future nanny state to heart. That book, 1984, was supposed to be taken as a warning of what might happen, not a blueprint. The apparent intended goal of reshaping ‘problem’ families into more socially acceptable behavior by constantly monitoring them is absurd. Yes, children do need a more stable home life in order to become more responsible citizens, but thinking that by simply monitoring their every move and having them sign a “behavior contract” is ridiculous and indicates a ‘controlling’ mentality that is poisonous to a free society.
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POPSAmazon Erases Orwell Books From Kindle Amazon appears to have deleted other purchased e-books from Kindles recently. Customers commenting on Web forums reported the disappearance of digital editions of the Harry Potter books and the novels of Ayn Rand over similar issues. Amazon’s published terms of service agreement for the Kindle does not appear to give the company the right to delete purchases after they have been made. It says Amazon grants customers the right to keep a “permanent copy of the applicable digital content.”
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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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POPSSome E-Books Are More Equal Than Others As one of my readers noted, it’s like Barnes & Noble sneaking into our homes in the middle of the night, taking some books that we’ve been reading off our nightstands, and leaving us a check on the coffee table. You want to know the best part? The juicy, plump, dripping irony? The author who was the victim of this Big Brotherish plot was none other than George Orwell. And the books were “1984” and “Animal Farm.”
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POPS25+1984 =2009 The film 1984 was a frightening prophecy of a Nazi-esque Totalitarian society, but the reality we live in today is far worse and is only going to continue to get worse unless WE take a stand.
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POPSWriting Through Rejection What is the difference between George Orwell, C.S. Lewis, Margaret Mitchell and the authors whose work never sees the light of day? Published authors don’t give up. They know that editors aren’t always right. They keep on marketing and writing, driven by the passion to tell their stories to the world. very true!
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POPSSixty years since Orwell wrote 1984 4,000 words a day, seven days a week – mostly done propped up in bed.The effort produced excruciating pain and high temperatures. A week before he finished typing he was still unsure what to put on the title page: ‘I am hesitating between Nineteen Eighty-Four and The Last Man In Europe.’ Orwell died six months after publication, aged 46.
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POPSGeorge Orwell's Birthday Today is George Orwell's Birthday. Eric Arthur Blair was born on 25 June 1903. Nearly everybody in the English-speaking world has at least heard of, if not read, the iconic books 1984 and Animal Farm , or has at least heard of Big Brother. Less familiar is his work as journalist, essayist, poet and critic. Our language has acquired the adjective orwellian to describe a situation nobody wants to be facing. When I taught writing, my students' first assignment was to write an in-class essay, then read Orwell's essay Politics and the English Language , which is the source of the material in the clip above, then rework their own essay using the rules Orwell recommended. It usually improved their work. However, rereading Politics and the English Language finds me thinking that in the sixty-three years since it was first published, that, firstly, in all this time, few people have taken its advice to heart; (continued in comments)
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