Here is a fantastic documentary of the failed attempt by powerful people backed by the CIA to overtake Venezuela and how the people didn’t let it happen, bringing Hugo Chavez back.
Chavez is clearly not the Bible thumping maniac the mainstream media would have us believe. From what I see in this film he seems dedicated to an open society. A free society. A society that benefits the majority but has a place for voices of the minority to speak up.
This documentary shows how crucial media is in our awareness and perception of reality. The message IS the medium and I am very happy that technology is leveling the field. The mainstream media networks could create a very convincing reality but I don’t know they could stand a chance against the mass of individual media ranging from twitter to blogs, vlogs, text messaging, image uploads, cell phones, and any number of yet undiscovered communication devices.
This documentary is a wonderful insight into the real workings of politics, something that is easily relegated to metaphors and abstractions. But in this film you see real people struggling with real decisions. It is a very heartening film and runs with a plot better than any Hollywood story because at each second you are acutely aware that it is real. This actually happened.
The film makers are consecutively flies on the wall and self conscious participants showing how media both records and shapes history.
I read a book once about how evolutionary events in the world happen at the same time but don’t seem to be connected. For example scientists might notice a group of monkeys in South America that out of nowhere start to clean their food in the river. Around the same time the same activity might be noticed in Asia.
Since the monkeys had no contact with each other the scientists could only speculate that there was some collective consciousness that allowed the monkeys to pass information to each other.
“Hey the food tastes better if you wash it! Tell the guys in Asia!”
You see this all the time with Humans. Right now everyone is on the green thing. But nobody stood up one day and said, “Ok, everyone put on your green hats!”
The green things started all over the place.
Anyway, here are 20 minutes of video that cover a couple thousand years of wisdom. So it only glimpses along the surface and thus the connections they make seem weak in some points. I think this is more because they are fitting so much into the clip rather than the weakess of their points, which I think are strong.
It would take a lifetime to understand what they discuss in this video. But then again, time and space are totally relative so it you are in the right time and place it might only take you a nanosecond to understand what they are saying. I’m not joking.
They talk about the year 2012. It is easy to get excited about these kinds of dates. But I’ve seen a couple of them come and go in my lifetime without any world shattering changes. It is important to not focus on the exact date. These things in my experience happen over time.
If the date 2012 is the end of a thousand year cycle, then the changes started a thousand years ago. Obviously in 2012 almost all the changes have already happened so you ain’t going to see much difference Jan 1st of 2012. People forget that.
have invented a water pump that pulls water from the ground (thus avoiding contamination) by using a pump that is powered by a children’s merry go round.
Living in America is a wonderful thing if you are lucky enough (for lack of a better qualifier) to have access to money and never get in the cross hairs of the police.
It is an idyllic world where there is abundance.
Money can get you pretty much anything in America. And even if you are not be happy at least you’ll be sad a lot more comfortably.
And the police will leave you alone as long as you don’t get noticed. You will experience a wonderful freedom without any large scale corruption or danger.
The only problem is that we are not perfectly bland mannequins and thus there is a chance you will get noticed.
Once the police notice you and you are unfortunate enough to be sucked into their grip there is no end to the absolute powerlessness you can experience.
Lets say you accidentally run a stop sign while driving. Or you forget to go for a walk with your ID and just happen to appear suspicious. Or it may be something more serious.
Whatever it is once you are in the grip of the police you no longer are in control of your life. They control you. It is a very scary feeling.
There is no check or balance to the interaction. They rule it. The police now treat the population are a hostile enemy at war. When they walk up to a car, any car, they have their hands on their guns. Every person is considered a potential dangerous assassin.
Why is it that the police need to act like that? I interact with hundreds of people a day and have yet to find one who has threatened my life. I’m certainly an easier target than an armed and trained police officer.
But then again I don’t go around behaving like police officers. The best way to get a dog to bite you is to kick it.
The US is a strange duality. One minute you may be walking along in the land of the free. And another you may be face down on the sidewalk in a bone breaking arm lock because they stopped you and you were stupid enough to argue with their logic.
Some people say we live in a police state and others point out all the liberties we have as refutation. But in my opinion we have both. As long as you follow the rules you have total liberty. If you don’t then the consequences are brutal.
That may be great as long as the rules are good ones. But rules are made by people and people are not perfect.
How about the rule that you can be kept without legal counsel if arrested under the suspicion of terrorism. The police have no obligation to cooperate with your family or a lawyer. You can disappear until they decide to make you reappear.
That is a great rule when stopping a terrorist from blowing up a building. But it is pretty sucky for the vast majority of people who get arrested under this rule and are completely innocent. It destroys their lives. There are thousands of people being held under these conditions right now. They in turn have families whose lives have also been ripped apart.
I question the logic here.
On the one hand the US government feels justified to perform genocidal campaigns against whole nations, then they use the animosity that these actions create to justify their “defensive anti-terrorist” rules and activities that are just as bad as their original actions.
Basically it is a circle where the US aggressively hurts people who get angry and in return want to hurt the US. Then under the pretense of “defense” the US justifies hurting more people.
It is pure stupidity. It is a low level of awareness that is narrow minded and ignorant.
Here are two clips, courtesy of Brasscheck.com. One shows a sixteen year old girl who is very pretty and clueless. The other shows the same but older.
The sixteen year old’s ignorance is pretty harmless. Unfortunately the older woman’s ignorance is incredibly dangerous since she is running for vice president of the united states.
If McPain and Co chose Palin because they hoped to get all the ex Clinton followers, then they are underestimating the intelligence of Clinton’s following. You just have to take one look at Palin and realize she is not capable of running the country.
I think it shows a sexist attitude on McPain’s part to think Clinton followers would be so dumb. But not only that, I think it is a sexist move for McPain to pick such a pathetic woman as vice president. It is like he is saying that if he picks a woman he needs to pick one that is never going to be a threat to him.
He’s setting himself up, though, because sexist men exist everywhere as they do in the democrat camp they and they are having a field day ridiculing her.
Bottom line, the world is getting more and more extreme. I live in the same world as every one else and yet there are people I feel to be galaxies apart from me. On one hand the world is getting smaller but in reaction to that, people are also becoming more extreme and entrenched in their besieged lives.
How can a Brazilian Indian protect his culture when his life and world is under attack by an army of bulldozers and chainsaws? The Dalai Lama has a long way to go before he gets his homeland back, if he ever does, which is unlikely. Wall Street is a mile away from my house.
I’m throwing these seemingly unconnected things out there because that is how the world is today. Unconnected things are connected by a single satellite call.
And yet there are eternal archetypes. And one of them is the woman who is ridiculed for her ignorance and cut down for her power. Palin is ridiculed. Clinton is cut down.
And so the story goes, round and round, like Mother Earth. There are more living organisms on the skin of each human than there are humans on the surface of the earth. The mass of mosquitoes outweighs the mass of humans on the earth….
I went to target yesterday and was bored. They have these electric powered golf kart like things for people who can’t walk. So for a laught I put my daughter in the front basket and took it for a spin.
It was too slow to really enjoy the ride. But what really was interesting was how people reacted to me.
They didn’t look at me! I didn’t exist!
When walking in public there is an acceptable time limit to how long you can look at somebody. You glance at them and then look away. Sort of saying, “I see you, but I’m not looking long enough to make a connection.”
But I had become a disabled person and I discovered that the rules had changed. Disable people don’t get looked at as long. People glance at you and immediately look away as if they hadn’t seen you. It is exactly what I do when I see a homeless person.
I totally didn’t exist. I was not part of the shopping crowd. I was a lone cripple.
And then when the undesirable is looking another way you stare at them as long as you want.
The only time people paid attention to me was when I tried to get into the elevator to go to another level in the store. Everyone got into a fluster trying to give me space. People gave me an unnatural amount of space. All of a sudden I had the whole elevator to myself and they squeezed up against the walls.
I just read an article called The Horror of It AllVan Wilder download by Robert Borosage, reprinted below, that was in response to a Wall Street Journal article, also reprinted.
Basically the Wall Street Journal is lamenting the possibility of a Democrat president and dem majority in house and congress. And Robert Borosage is saying, “Screw you, I can’t wait! Just think what we could do!”
He has some good visualizations of what could be possible!
They are:
Voters will be registered.
Workers organized.
Banks regulated.
Health care provided for all.
Government investment will drive a green revolution that generates millions of jobs.
The wealthy will pay more in taxes.
Guantanamo will be shut down; torture will end.
Net neutrality will be mandated.
Citizens may even be able to sue corporations that negligently do them harm.
Cut the military budget.
Forge a national strategy for the global economy.
Make college affordable for all.
Provide the basics in education, from pre-school to small classes, to lifelong learning.
Revive national service.
Rebuild trust in government.
Launch the unspeakable — a true war on poverty. Rhinestone divx
Read it again. Now close your eyes and see it. Feel it. Feels good, right?! Ah, what goes down must come up and we’ve been on a steady downward ride for many many years from Nixon to Bush. Now, soon, very soon, we may be in for a nice upward ride….Dust off your hippie clothes, you might need them after all.
Peering fearlessly into the increasingly likely terror of a Democratic President with larger Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, the Wall Street Journal editorial page sums up the stark horrors that could ensue.
Voters will be registered. Workers organized. Banks regulated. Health care provided for all. Government investment will drive a green revolution that generates millions of jobs. The wealthy will pay more in taxes. Guantanamo will be shut down; torture will end. Net neutrality will be mandated. Citizens may even be able to sue corporations that negligently do them harm. They don’t even mention the war in Iraq ending.
The horror of it all. Can the Republic survive? The editors hold out one slim hope. Perhaps Democrats will divide. Perhaps he entrenched lobbies, the interest of the corporations and the wealthy will buy enough support to stand in the way of the tumbrels.
And that defines our job pretty clearly: to organize engaged citizens to hold Democrats accountable to the promises that have been made and the agenda the country needs.
If we do that well, just maybe we can deepen the Wall Street Journal’s lamentations. Cut the military budget. Forge a national strategy for the global economy. Make college affordable for all. Provide the basics in education, from pre-school to small classes, to lifelong learning. Revive national service. Rebuild trust in government. Launch the unspeakable — a true war on poverty.
The horror, the stark horror of it all. Can Americans — after Iraq, Katrina, bankers run amok, gilded age inequality, Robber Baron corruption — actually have the gall to vote the bums out? Say it ain’t so, Joe the plumber, say it ain’t so.
A Liberal Supermajority
Get ready for ‘change’ we haven’t seen since 1965, or 1933.
If the current polls hold, Barack Obama will win the White House on November 4 and Democrats will consolidate their Congressional majorities, probably with a filibuster-proof Senate or very close to it. Without the ability to filibuster, the Senate would become like the House, able to pass whatever the majority wants.
Though we doubt most Americans realize it, this would be one of the most profound political and ideological shifts in U.S. history. Liberals would dominate the entire government in a way they haven’t since 1965, or 1933. In other words, the election would mark the restoration of the activist government that fell out of public favor in the 1970s. If the U.S. really is entering a period of unchecked left-wing ascendancy, Americans at least ought to understand what they will be getting, especially with the media cheering it all on.
The nearby table shows the major bills that passed the House this year or last before being stopped by the Senate minority. Keep in mind that the most important power of the filibuster is to shape legislation, not merely to block it. The threat of 41 committed Senators can cause the House to modify its desires even before legislation comes to a vote. Without that restraining power, all of the following have very good chances of becoming law in 2009 or 2010.
- Medicare for all. When HillaryCare cratered in 1994, the Democrats concluded they had overreached, so they carved up the old agenda into smaller incremental steps, such as Schip for children. A strongly Democratic Congress is now likely to lay the final flagstones on the path to government-run health insurance from cradle to grave.
Mr. Obama wants to build a public insurance program, modeled after Medicare and open to everyone of any income. According to the Lewin Group, the gold standard of health policy analysis, the Obama plan would shift between 32 million and 52 million from private coverage to the huge new entitlement. Like Medicare or the Canadian system, this would never be repealed.
The commitments would start slow, so as not to cause immediate alarm. But as U.S. health-care spending flowed into the default government options, taxes would have to rise or services would be rationed, or both. Single payer is the inevitable next step, as Mr. Obama has already said is his ultimate ideal.
- The business climate. “We have some harsh decisions to make,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi warned recently, speaking about retribution for the financial panic. Look for a replay of the Pecora hearings of the 1930s, with Henry Waxman, John Conyers and Ed Markey sponsoring ritual hangings to further their agenda to control more of the private economy. The financial industry will get an overhaul in any case, but telecom, biotech and drug makers, among many others, can expect to be investigated and face new, more onerous rules. See the “Issues and Legislation” tab on Mr. Waxman’s Web site for a not-so-brief target list.
The danger is that Democrats could cause the economic downturn to last longer than it otherwise will by enacting regulatory overkill like Sarbanes-Oxley. Something more punitive is likely as well, for instance a windfall profits tax on oil, and maybe other industries.
- Union supremacy. One program certain to be given right of way is “card check.” Unions have been in decline for decades, now claiming only 7.4% of the private-sector work force, so Big Labor wants to trash the secret-ballot elections that have been in place since the 1930s. The “Employee Free Choice Act” would convert workplaces into union shops merely by gathering signatures from a majority of employees, which means organizers could strongarm those who opposed such a petition.
The bill also imposes a compulsory arbitration regime that results in an automatic two-year union “contract” after 130 days of failed negotiation. The point is to force businesses to recognize a union whether the workers support it or not. This would be the biggest pro-union shift in the balance of labor-management power since the Wagner Act of 1935.
- Taxes. Taxes will rise substantially, the only question being how high. Mr. Obama would raise the top income, dividend and capital-gains rates for “the rich,” substantially increasing the cost of new investment in the U.S. More radically, he wants to lift or eliminate the cap on income subject to payroll taxes that fund Medicare and Social Security. This would convert what was meant to be a pension insurance program into an overt income redistribution program. It would also impose a probably unrepealable increase in marginal tax rates, and a permanent shift upward in the federal tax share of GDP.
- The green revolution. A tax-and-regulation scheme in the name of climate change is a top left-wing priority. Cap and trade would hand Congress trillions of dollars in new spending from the auction of carbon credits, which it would use to pick winners and losers in the energy business and across the economy. Huge chunks of GDP and millions of jobs would be at the mercy of Congress and a vast new global-warming bureaucracy. Without the GOP votes to help stage a filibuster, Senators from carbon-intensive states would have less ability to temper coastal liberals who answer to the green elites.
- Free speech and voting rights. A liberal supermajority would move quickly to impose procedural advantages that could cement Democratic rule for years to come. One early effort would be national, election-day voter registration. This is a long-time goal of Acorn and others on the “community organizer” left and would make it far easier to stack the voter rolls. The District of Columbia would also get votes in Congress — Democratic, naturally.
Felons may also get the right to vote nationwide, while the Fairness Doctrine is likely to be reimposed either by Congress or the Obama FCC. A major goal of the supermajority left would be to shut down talk radio and other voices of political opposition.
- Special-interest potpourri. Look for the watering down of No Child Left Behind testing standards, as a favor to the National Education Association. The tort bar’s ship would also come in, including limits on arbitration to settle disputes and watering down the 1995 law limiting strike suits. New causes of legal action would be sprinkled throughout most legislation. The anti-antiterror lobby would be rewarded with the end of Guantanamo and military commissions, which probably means trying terrorists in civilian courts. Google and MoveOn.org would get “net neutrality” rules, subjecting the Internet to intrusive regulation for the first time.
It’s always possible that events — such as a recession — would temper some of these ambitions. Republicans also feared the worst in 1993 when Democrats ran the entire government, but it didn’t turn out that way. On the other hand, Bob Dole then had 43 GOP Senators to support a filibuster, and the entire Democratic Party has since moved sharply to the left. Mr. Obama’s agenda is far more liberal than Bill Clinton’s was in 1992, and the Southern Democrats who killed Al Gore’s BTU tax and modified liberal ambitions are long gone.
In both 1933 and 1965, liberal majorities imposed vast expansions of government that have never been repealed, and the current financial panic may give today’s left another pretext to return to those heydays of welfare-state liberalism. Americans voting for “change” should know they may get far more than they ever imagined.
# 5,000 years - The span of recorded history
# 50,000 years - The length of time Homo sapiens has existed as a species
# 65 million years - The length of time dinosaurs have been extinct
# 200 million years - The length of time mammals have existed
# 3.5 to 4 billion years - The length of time that life has existed on Earth
# 4.5 billion years - The age of planet Earth
# 10 to 15 billion years - The suspected age of the universe since the big bang
So….lets play with these numbers…..
Dinosaurs went extinct about 65 million years ago (at the end of the Cretaceous Period), after living on Earth for about 165 million years.
Humans have been on the earth for 50,000 years.
Lets put things into perspective and use one year as the measuring stick.
Lets say that Earth time from the very beginning of the dinosaurs to today were compressed into 365 days (1 calendar year).
This means the dinosaurs appeared January 1st and became extinct the third week of September.
Since the earth is 4.5 billion years old, using this one year time scale, the Earth would have formed approximately 18.5 years earlier.
By comparison, people (Homo sapiens) would have been on earth only since December 31 (New Year’s eve).
To recap the one year time frame analogy:
If the time between the start of dinosaurs to today were one year, then…
The world is about 19 years or 6,840 days old.
Dinosaurs were on it almost 10 months, or about 114 days, and about two months have gone by since they disapeared.
Humans have been on the earth for the last day of the past 19 years….
I was sitting in the car listening to the radio of a guy who practices “Dandyism” which is basically an obsession with the way he dresses and behaves, a throwback to an idealized mythic time when “men had style” and when when men wore frock coats, petty coats, short coats, long coats and all sorts of other fancy clothing. They also had all sorts of customs and mannerisms that made them unique from others.
Basically he had recreated himself into this hyper stylized person. But then I started to think. As I listened to him I realized this was who he was. True he had recreated himself but the recreation was part of who he was. His recreation and his true self were one and the same. And then a little mantra came into my mind:
“We are what we are”
Who cares if you are pretending, if you are doing what your parents want, if you are doing what you think your parents want, if you are rebelling, if you are “just being yourself” whatever that means, if you are not being yourself or if you are dressing up in frock coats.
Whatever you are is what you are….and then you die.
Where people fail is that they think there is some pure true self somewhere inside and if they just search long enough they will find it. But it is much simpler. You are who you are. If you get rid of all the “non-you”, all outside influences (as if this was ever possible), then what would you have? You would have you. But you were you before that as well. “You” are you regardless of all the trivial things like what you dress, think, etc.
You are you are you are you are you are you and are you.
So what do people really talk about when they say I am me? I think it is a sense of being in control. This man “chose” to be a dandy - he felt in control of his choice. Versus somebody who was “forced” to become a dandy.
But this is a joke. Anyone who has ever had a near death experience knows that we are in control of nothing.
So on the surface, sure, you are what you eat, think, do, say etc. and you control that. Certainly you are a different person if you run around killing people vs. somebody who becomes a Buddhist monk. Practically this is true….if only life were always practical.
But parallel to this, is an alternate universe, there is an identical you who is not in control of anything. In that universe you are what you are. Period.
And guess what. These two universes might very well be happening at the same time in your body… a paradox? I think not. It is the yin and yang.
One one side you control your destiny. On the other side your destiny controls you…. go figure that one out…
And meanwhile we have this interesting but overly cynical take on who you are:
