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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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POPSFox News isn't even pretending anymore The boldest innovator, however, has been Fox News. Since President Obama’s election, the cable news channel has dropped all but the barest pretense of objectivity. Billing itself as “fair and balanced,” Fox has turned itself into what White House communications director Anita Dunn recently called “the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party.” Actually, that’s an extremely polite way of putting it. It’s closer to Orwell’s “Ministry of Truth.” Fox openly promotes “Tea Parties” and other political demonstrations; it portrays every perceived White House defeat, such as Chicago’s failure to secure the 2016 Olympic Games, as a victory for something called “Fox Nation.” “Doublethink,” Orwell called it: the ability to “hold simultaneously two opinions which canceled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them.” So it is with “Fox Nation” and “fair and balanced.”
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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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POPSBoston Plans Livestock-Type Flu Vaccine and Tag Program Mmmooo...People will be herded, shot, tagged, and treated like cattle. Welcome to the human plantation where the government is the proverbial Farmer from Orwell's dictatorial Animal Farm....in America. . This is phase 1 under the plea of "necessity" of course. More "experiments" will come later as the sheep get used to it.
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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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POPSObama and the Right: Shadow Projection
Racism makes Obama the Other, but shadow projection is an even more powerful (if interrelated) force than simple racism, and it is very susceptible to the mob mentality – think Goldberg in Orwell’s 1984. This will not end well. Now that Obama is carrying their shadow, only a dramatic event from outside could change it. (Or, they could gain awareness of their disowned dark side, and tolerating the inevitable pain of that experience, integrate into a healthy whole. This would require white, middle-class, middle-aged Americans - the primary protesters - to acknowledge that white middle class Americans are not all goodness and light and start taking responsibility for white privilege, their environmental choices, effects of class on economic status, etc. Don’t hold your breath.) The more those on the right deny their own failings, the more their internal unease will increase, the more the hatred to Obama will grow, and the more the need to do something will increase. No wonder the far r
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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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POPS[News] Britain To Put CCTV Cameras Inside Private Homes WOW, just wow. This is unbelivable! I had to read it a few times, a little late for april fools. Can they even DO that? Or are these homes AGREEING to it. Damn, was just arguing with my father about this a few days ago! Saying that that wont happen for a long while. I guess I owe him some cash.
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POPSTHE NORTH AMERICAN 'SOVIET' UNION Long article at source, this is very important information that affects us all. "Regionalism is communism no matter how you slice it. The sooner Americans get that unpleasant fact permanently entered into their brains, and process that information into appropriate action, the sooner we will be able to escape what Orwell described so well in his novel 1984:" "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on the human face--forever...and remember, that is forever."
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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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