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the problem isn't them blowing it, the problem is that a right wing, pro corporate and anti-worker regime has been in charge since Reagan. It's not about too much or too little, they've always done a lot, it's just mostly been bad. Tax cuts for the rich, attacks on Unions, deregulation (especially of banks who gamble with trillions knowing full well their losses will be covered by you and me) trickle down economics, austerity for the working class and opulence for the rich and endless war to support the military industrial complex.

We've been trying right wing politics for decades, whichever party was in charge. Folks have been trying to replace "The Establishment" without being able to understand who the establishment is.

Go look up opensecrets.org. That's a good place to start. Watch Secular Talk and Shaun. Read A People's History of the United States. Listen to what Bernie Sanders says about healthcare and what Liz Warren says about the banks. Do these things and it'll start to make sense. The problem is a wealthy elite who's greed and power hunger knows no bounds. You can't just look at parties or politician or who makes you feel good about yourself. What matters is policy and who does and doesn't take corporate PAC money. Oh, and watch out for guys like Beto O'Rouke, who seems to have gotten his money from the wealthy and hide that fact by having them bundle small donations.

Howard Zinn talks about a possible revolt of the guards: http://www.historyisaweapon.co...
"However, the unexpected victories-even temporary ones-of insurgents show the vulnerability of the supposedly powerful. In a highly developed society, the Establishment cannot survive without the obedience and loyalty of millions of people who are given small rewards to keep the system going: the soldiers and police, teachers and ministers, administrators and social workers, technicians and production workers, doctors, lawyers, nurses, transport and communications workers, garbage men and firemen. These people-the employed, the somewhat privileged-are drawn into alliance with the elite. They become the guards of the system, buffers between the upper and lower classes. If they stop obeying, the system falls."

And here is the inequitable financial reality of that system given wealth is control under capitalism:
"Wealth Inequality in America"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

I wonder if the problem as seen by the ruling class may be that techies have their hands on the key infrastructure of modern society (including banking infrastructure)? If US techies were really well-off (e.g. all millionaires), techies might have some time and energy for creating alternatives. So, best to keep them down by making them insecure by importing cheap labor rather than train US Americans and provide them higher salaries, more benefits, and more equity. Techies may think they are doing well because they are doing better than the average US American -- but what they are paid in general does not reflect how key their contributions are these days to the digital infrastructure of control and surveillance.

I remember back in the 1990s when independent contractors got 2X to 3X what regular employees did. The H1Bs, even at prevailing wages for employees, also greatly undermined the earnings for contractors too. Many H1Bs don't really replace employees as much as they replace contractors.

It's not everyone. They're in a few categories:
- The entitled. Their greed is simply unchecked by any normal sense of decency, like a very young child's.
- The haters. They hate and want to hurt the people they hate by bullying and stealing. They might as well be Klan members.
- The useful idiots. They believe storytellers. Make up a story about robots taking all the jobs and they believe it -- even though there are a 1000 historical examples that prove these problems are temporary and almost everyone adapts and finds new, better work in a more prosperous society. It'll be different this time, just like they said all the other times.
- The community organizers. They make up the stories, feed the fires of hatred and try to blur the lines of decency. They want to divide us into warring groups so they can be powerful, wealthy political leaders. When you're at war, you need strong leaders. "War is the health of the state."

There may be others -- maybe even some that aren't evil (or foolish), though I haven't seen much sign of that.

"A People's History of the United States" by Howard Zinn (http://www.historyisaweapon.com/zinnapeopleshistory.html

If you use these seeds, you can't keep back seeds from your crops for next year's crops, a practice that is as old as agriculture itself.

1. Not true for all GMO crops. Golden Rice is patent free

Golden Rice is a loss leader. It's the same as the old Union Station scam used by the Robber Barons; a foot in the door. It's an obviously good thing that can be used as a front to hide obviously bad things (like the market manipulation through consumer misinformation, i.e. subverting labeling laws).

2. Keeping back seed died on most farms in the USA quite some time before GMO became a thing. Buying new hybrid seed each year has been around for a while because it's more profitable.

Because, again, of market manipulation. Nonetheless, hundreds of thousands of small farmers still do it (all my dozen or so farming relatives do it) and it's just the giant corporate food producers skewing the statistics that make it look like an unimportant issue. Those corporate giants are also the primary source of the problems with pesticide resistance - because of their vast monocultures - that made bug-resistant and "roundup ready" GMOs desirable in the first place.

It's all about increasing the wealth of the super-rich, who are too shortsighted to see that by sacrificing science and markets on the altar of corporate profits, they are crushing the middle class that pays the taxes.

If you're against GMOs, you probably aren't sufficiently educated to understand the scientific and economic issues. If you're against labeling, you probably aren't sufficiently educated to understand the scientific and economic issues. It's a battle pitting the ignorant against the ignorant to profit those who don't really care about anything but profit.

I guess it depends on how much everyone learns from history or example. Of course, it's been joked that those who study history are condemned to watch others repeat it... :-(
http://www.historyisaweapon.co...

Those changes to Germany came from the values of a 1930s/1940s USA.
http://www.salon.com/2010/08/2...
"How did Germany become such a great place to work in the first place? The Allies did it. This whole European model came, to some extent, from the New Deal. Our real history and tradition is what we created in Europe. Occupying Germany after WWII, the 1945 European constitutions, the UN Charter of Human Rights all came from Eleanor Roosevelt and the New Dealers. All of it got worked into the constitutions of Europe and helped shape their social democracies. It came from us. The papal encyclicals on labor, it came from the Americans."

But, sadly, that USA and its values effectively no longer exist 70-80 years later. Today's USA has different values -- some are better (less racism and sexism overall, more respect for the environment), others are worse (less respect for workers, the "two-income trap", policies that promote a greater rich/poor divide, and more meddling in other nation's affairs which may produce profits for some connected few but produces huge costs for the whole USA let along the disrupted countries).

The real issue may be, like Gandhi is claimed to have said when asked by a journalist: "What do you think of Western civilization?", he said, "I think it would be a good idea."
http://quoteinvestigator.com/2...

At this point, as US citizen, I'm much more concerned about what the US government does both abroad and at home (including stuff like supporting a repressive Saudi Arabia, other actions abroad that make terrorist blowback more likely, domestic cage-like "free speech zones", domestic rulings saying border patrols can operate in a constitution-ignoring way up to 100 miles inland, etc.) -- than what people in the Middle East cradle of civilization do. And I remain always aware there are large numbers of nuclear weapons still ready to fly on short notice...
http://politics.slashdot.org/s...
http://www.salon.com/2015/01/2...

So, what will it take to civilize the USA? A basic income might be a start...

You bring up an important issue. However, in practice, the most common way large numbers of people tent to become underfed, uneducated, and victims of slave culture ideology (religion being complex topic) is from things like colonialism and militarism actively destroying real abundance and healthy cultures in a quest for some dysfunctional imbalance.

For example, consider what happened when Columbus came to the Americas:
http://www.historyisaweapon.co...
"These Arawaks of the Bahama Islands were much like Indians on the mainland, who were remarkable (European observers were to say again and again) for their hospitality, their belief in sharing. These traits did not stand out in the Europe of the Renaissance, dominated as it was by the religion of popes, the government of kings, the frenzy for money that marked Western civilization and its first messenger to the Americas, Christopher Columbus. ... The Indians, Columbus reported, "are so naive and so free with their possessions that no one who has not witnessed them would believe it. When you ask for something they have, they never say no. To the contrary, they offer to share with anyone.... ... When it became clear that there was no gold left, the Indians were taken as slave labor on huge estates, known later as encomiendas. They were worked at a ferocious pace, and died by the thousands. By the year 1515, there were perhaps fifty thousand Indians left. By 1550, there were five hundred. A report of the year 1650 shows none of the original Arawaks or their descendants left on the island. ..."

Contrast with what Marshall Sahlins said about most hunter/gathers:
http://www.primitivism.com/ori...
"Hunter-gatherers consume less energy per capita per year than any other group of human beings. Yet when you come to examine it the original affluent society was none other than the hunter's - in which all the people's material wants were easily satisfied. To accept that hunters are affluent is therefore to recognise that the present human condition of man slaving to bridge the gap between his unlimited wants and his insufficient means is a tragedy of modern times. ... The world's most primitive people have few possessions. but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilisation. It has grown with civilisation, at once as an invidious distinction between classes and more importantly as a tributary relation that can render agrarian peasants more susceptible to natural catastrophes than any winter camp of Alaskan Eskimo."

Also related:
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
"Peace makes plenty.
Plenty makes pride.
Pride breeds dispute.
Poverty's the fruit.
Poverty makes peace."

But that poem from the 14th century (!) is a very different take on things than saying scarcity or want or ignorance is a natural state of being...

Still, even in such cases as you describe with billions of people under subjugation, people (in aggregate) are always thinking of new ideas about their situation and new ways of doing things, and improving their skills and sharing ideas. It takes a lot to shut that growth process down.

For a current example, consider all the effort of groups like by RIAA and similar groups through political lobbying to create more artificial scarcity (e.g. The Sonny Bono / Micky Mouse copyright extension act). These restrictive efforts now ensure people can in theory do more jail time and get bigger fines for sharing (copyrighted) information like a few inspirational songs than if they had committed murder. See for example:
"Seven Crimes That Will Get You a Smaller Fin

Yes, bad things are happening. But unless we remember and celebrate the past successes, we may more easily give way to despair.

Examples of problematical episodes from US history: The McCarthy era in the 1950s, the internment of Japanese-Americans in the 1940s, the US Eugenics movement in the 1930s and before -- where the Nazis got the idea, the lynching of black citizens in the South along with a US white supremacy movement (again, long before "Arianism" took hold in Germany), the tragic Civil War of the 1870s, and many more such things... Plus so much problematical foreign policy, including grabbing big parts of Mexico and invading Canada multiple times, not to mention the systematic genocide committed against the Native Americans to steal their land (the US Army's primary function in early years was taking part in all that). The USA may criticize China's "human rights" record, but the US past is filled with many horrors that may be far worse than things China is doing now (even in Tibet etc.).

Governments always demand to be respected in various ways. Those ways may change over time. Yes, there are bad trends, and bad episodes, some still ongoing and growing like you and others including me point to, but the USA has muddled through them in the past. Some wrongs have been righted decades later (even as "justice delayed is justice denied"); others have yet to be resolved. Generally, the successes are helped along by efforts from citizens, as in: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has. (Margaret Mead)".

I can urge you to read "A People's History of the United States" to get a broader perspective on all this regarding the USA. It is a perspective not taught in the past in most US classrooms or probably still in most civics classes for immigrants. It is the history of US citizens struggling repeatedly to control a government and industry (the two being intertwined), to keep them accountable to human needs. It is full of examples both of successes and failures. Here is an online version, but it is probably available in any major book store:
http://www.historyisaweapon.co...

Another good book is John Gardner's 1971 book "Self-Renewal: The Individual and the Innovative Society". Here I quote what he says and comment on it:
http://p2pfoundation.net/backu...
""As I was browsing in a university bookstore recently, I heard an apple-cheeked girl say to her companion, "The truth is that our society and everything in it is in a state of decay." I studied her carefully and I must report that she did not seem even slightly decayed. But what of the society as a whole? Decay is hardly the word for what is happening to us. We are witnessing changes so profound and far-reaching that the mind can hardly grasp all the implications. ... Only the blind and complacent could fail to recognize the great tasks of renewal facing us -- in government, in education, ..."
John Gardner goes on to say that every generation faces the problem of renewing itself to meet new challenges emerging from the very success of the old ways of doing things. And he suggests that social values are not some drying up old reservoir, but rather a reservoir of variable capacity that must be recharged anew in every generation. [He also suggests every generation must re-learn for itself what the words carved on the stone monuments really mean.]
Democracy -- use it or lose it.
Free speech on the internet -- use it or lose it.
Social capital -- use it or lose it?
P2P -- use it or lose it? :-)
Again, Gardner's book was written in 1971, so, about forty years ago. Although it's true the last thirty years in the USA has prett

Again: "The Native understanding is that there is always enough for everyone when abundance is shared and when gratitude is given back to the Original Source. The trick was to explain the concept of the Field of Plenty with few mutually understood words or signs. The misunderstanding that sprang from this lack of common language robbed those who came to Turtle Island of a beautiful teaching."

And it is just happening again with downmodding as "off-topic" of my post in response about a healthier alternative rather than planning for doomsday and war. :-(

Even now, different people in the USA speak a different "language", even if the words themselves is called "English". As shown in ST:TNG "Darmok", words acquire their meaning through references to shared culture and stories. If you don't know the culture or stories, the words may sound like they have no meaning. Thus, that was part of the "boat people" from Europe failing to realize the true wealth of the Americas in native culture.

Another, even sadder, example is Columbus and the Arowak of Haiti, as explained by Howard Zinn:
http://www.historyisaweapon.co...
"Arawak men and women, naked, tawny, and full of wonder, emerged from their villages onto the island's beaches and swam out to get a closer look at the strange big boat. When Columbus and his sailors came ashore, carrying swords, speaking oddly, the Arawaks ran to greet them, brought them food, water, gifts. ... These Arawaks of the Bahama Islands were much like Indians on the mainland, who were remarkable (European observers were to say again and again) for their hospitality, their belief in sharing. These traits did not stand out in the Europe of the Renaissance, dominated as it was by the religion of popes, the government of kings, the frenzy for money that marked Western civilization and its first messenger to the Americas, Christopher Columbus. ... The information that Columbus wanted most was: Where is the gold? He had persuaded the king and queen of Spain to finance an expedition to the lands, the wealth, he expected would be on the other side of the Atlantic-the Indies and Asia, gold and spices. ... The Indians, Las Casas says, have no religion, at least no temples. They live in "large communal bell-shaped buildings, housing up to 600 people at one time ... made of very strong wood and roofed with palm leaves.... They prize bird feathers of various colors, beads made of fishbones, and green and white stones with which they adorn their ears and lips, but they put no value on gold and other precious things. They lack all manner of commerce, neither buying nor selling, and rely exclusively on their natural environment for maintenance. They are extremely generous with their possessions and by the same token covet the possessions of their friends and expect the same degree of liberality." ... Now, from his base on Haiti, Columbus sent expedition after expedition into the interior. They found no gold fields, but had to fill up the ships returning to Spain with some kind of dividend. In the year 1495, they went on a great slave raid, rounded up fifteen hundred Arawak men, women, and children, put them in pens guarded by Spaniards and dogs, then picked the five hundred best specimens to load onto ships. Of those five hundred, two hundred died en route. The rest arrived alive in Spain and were put up for sale by the archdeacon of the town, who reported that, although the slaves were "naked as the day they were born," they showed "no more embarrassment than animals." Columbus later wrote: "Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold." ... Total control led to total cruelty. The Spaniards "thought nothing of knifing Indians by tens and twenties and of cutting slices off them to test the sharpness of their blades." Las Casas tells how "two of these so-called Chri

So true, sadly... See also: http://www.historyisaweapon.co...
"However, the unexpected victories -- even temporary ones -- of insurgents show the vulnerability of the supposedly powerful. In a highly developed society, the Establishment cannot survive without the obedience and loyalty of millions of people who are given small rewards to keep the system going: the soldiers and police, teachers and ministers, administrators and social workers, technicians and production workers, doctors, lawyers, nurses, transport and communications workers, garbage men and firemen. These people -- the employed, the somewhat privileged -- are drawn into alliance with the elite. They become the guards of the system, buffers between the upper and lower classes. If they stop obeying, the system falls. That will happen, I think, only when all of us who are slightly privileged and slightly uneasy begin to see that we are like the guards in the prison uprising at Attica -- expendable; that the Establishment, whatever rewards it gives us, will also, if necessary to maintain its control, kill us. "

"After all, that's what happened to virtually everybody else on Earth. Do you ever wonder why you have to work five days a week, until you're 67, and then you die within a few years of retirement? Who claims to own all the land in your country? When somebody sells a piece of land, how did they claim to own it in the first place? The people of the rainforest are being forced off their OWN land, where they have lived for tens of thousands of years, to be turned into wage slaves, working in factories. Wake up."

Insightful. It has been suggested the "Garden of Eden" story is really about the painful transition from hunting/gathering by tribes to agriculture managed by militaristic bureaucracies. Several groups of people have similar stories, some fairly recently as they were forced to convert to agriculture by being pushed off their native lands. This happened also in England with the "Enclosure acts".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...

Various pushed to "privatization" in the USA are the same old thing... And it is expanding to water rights, spectrum rights, endless copyrights, overly broad patents, and so on...

Related:
http://conceptualguerilla.com/...
http://www.whywork.org/rethink...
http://www.primitivism.com/ori...
http://www.amazon.com/Pandoras...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...
http://www.basicincome.org/bie...

And the amazing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Sle...
"A riveting account of the astonishing experiences and discoveries made by linguist Daniel Everett while he lived with the Piraha, a small tribe of Amazonian Indians in central Brazil. Daniel Everett arrived among the Piraha with his wife and three young children hoping to convert the tribe to Christianity. Everett quickly became obsessed with their language and its cultural and linguistic implications. The Piraha have no counting system, no fixed terms for color, no concept of war, and no personal property. Everett was so impressed with their peaceful way of life that he eventually lost faith in the God he'd hoped to introduce to them, and instead devoted his life to the science of linguistics. Part passionate memoir, part scientific exploration, Everett's life-changing tale is riveting look into the nature of language, thought, and life itself."

Howard Zinn wrote about what parts of America were like before Columbus began the conquest (backed by profiteering organizations run for "the love of money"):
http://www.historyisaweapon.co...
"The Indians, Columbus reported, "are so naive and so free with their possessions that no one who has not witnessed them would believe it. When you ask for something they have, they never say no. To the contrary, they offer to share with anyone...." He concluded his report by asking for a little help from their Majesties, and in return he would bring them from his next voyage "as much gold as they need ... and as many slaves as they ask." He was full of religious talk: "Thus the eternal God, our Lord, gives victory to those who follow His way over apparent impossibilities." Because of Columbus's exaggerated report and promises, his second expedition was given seventeen ships and more than twelve hundred men. The aim

The powerful (winners) have been writing the mainstream history for a long time. In addition history is hardly even taught anymore; and the bit that is has been done poorly. They take great people like MLK and turn them into a phrase and an icon while it seems to be purposely removing the aspects that made them truly great. Summation is necessary, but it has been harmful either by accident or by intent - the academics seem to do a better job so one wonders how that gets lost on the mainstream education of the topics.

My public history education was quite poor. The only good aspect is we didn't have to memorize and recall dates; but we didn't do hardly any reading. Reading is the primary method (and best) for learning history... and any reading assignments are hacked around by technology for the simple homework (the homework/exam being the only modern means to force reading, it has been circumvented-- it's weaker than a 4 digit password.)

http://historyisaweapon.com/

"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Only_the_Super-Rich_Can_Save_Us!"
http://onlythesuperrich.org/
"Just as Atlas Shrugged portrayed self-interested successful capitalists working to create a "Utopia of Greed" that is free from government, Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us! portrays an altruistic group of super-rich individuals working to "re-make government" and where "the rebellious rich take on the reigning rich."[4] The novel's protagonist is inspired by Warren Buffett. On August 14, 2011, Warren Buffett wrote an influential op-ed entitled, "Stop Coddling the Super-rich",[5] which argues that the super-rich should bear more responsibility and pay their "fair share" of taxes."

Daniel Quinn wrote about such cycles of collapse: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...

Other ideas: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...

Jane Jacobs suggested alternatives: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...

On self-renewal: http://books.google.com/books/...

Zinn on "The Coming Revolt of the Guards": http://www.historyisaweapon.co...

To do before collapse (1999 proposal to NASA): http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...

We have the highest incarceration rate in the world, and you're arguing that not enough people are being jailed? Poverty is causally linked to crime! Assault, rape, and robbery have been in decline for years, and prison sentences have been lengthening.

It should be a surprise to no one that statistics on the income level of incoming prisoners are heavily biased towards the lowest levels of income. Income statistics for released felons are even worse. We stigmatize prison to such a degree that it destroys people's ability to earn a living afterwards, and you wonder why we have a >60% recidivision rate. Our "corrections system" is fundamentally broken, and by all measures worsening. Isn't prison supposed to prevent people from returning to a life of crime?

I am appalled at your ignorance, and the idea of a higher incarceration rate is vile. If you have no human compassion, have at least the sense to see when a solution isn't working.

:-)

AC wrote: "Paul, referring to Disciplined Minds on Slashdot is like admitting that you are a predator alien. We're going to have to be much more clever than that if we want to convince people to question their ideologies. The subconscious will not cede its control unless you offer it something in return. The best way to deconstruct the subconscious is to study branding and market research. Learn about what happens when people buy stuff, and compare that to what people do when they try to evaluate claims about scientific models with limited information.
See my thread: http://www.thunderbolts.info/forum/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=14667 "

First, I probably can't in general disagree with your points on branding, advertising, purchasing, etc. Even if specific cases for specific individuals may differ, as in some people are more analytical than others (sadly sometimes meaning perhaps they are more easily bamboozled by "facts"?), some people may be in a stage of life looking for a new idea to try or an explanation for a past difficulty, etc.. I can wonder if that person to be so good at selling such ideas would be me though? But yes, in general, you are probably right. I liked the personal development diagrams in that thread (having only looked through the first page of 11 in the thread, need to read more later). Reminds me of one I've seen elsewhere with eight stages or so but generally overlapping.And I liked the line in Megamind where he says the difference between a villain and a supervilian (or by extension amateur and professional) is ... "presentation". "-)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dy2zB8bLSpk

The first ten episodes of the popular "Downton Abbey" provides examples of workers identifying with the system around them and not seeing much hope for change (although a war shows up and some things do start to change, and some do see potential for change). James P. Hogan echoes similar themes in Voyage from Yesteryear, as people cling to the old scarcity-based social hierarchies even when confronted with abundance. Historian Howard Zinn's take on that: http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncomrev24.html

BTW, you might also like some other quotes I've collected here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-james-randi-on-skepticism-about-mainstream-science.html#Some_quotes_on_social_problems_in_science

Also related (there are better links I've posted before, these are just top Google matches):
http://www.counterpunch.org/2010/02/26/peer-review-as-censorship/
http://landshape.org/enm/peer-censorship-and-scientific-fraud/

One thing Einstein got very right was the need to improve our ways of thinking given our new technological powers:
http://anwot.org/

I'd also agree we could use better communications systems to discuss science and reason together about it. My wife and I have taken some steps towards such things in terms of making free and open source software, but no big successes so far. This web page has a video related to a Kickstarter campaign I thought about doing to further those efforts a couple years ago, but I did not proceed with it (taking work doing more conventional stuff instead for sadly short-term reasons): http://twirlip.com/

At least I still have some time now and then to advocate for a Basic Income as at least one way someday to give people more intellectual freedom (among other things). But even that is a tough sell, although I am glad

A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn, for background

"The greatest threat to power is not violence but disengagement [from the grid network]."

Interesting point, AC. It relates to this, also by Howard Zinn:
http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncomrev24.html
"However, the unexpected victories-even temporary ones-of insurgents show the vulnerability of the supposedly powerful. In a highly developed society, the Establishment cannot survive without the obedience and loyalty of millions of people who are given small rewards to keep the system going: the soldiers and police, teachers and ministers, administrators and social workers, technicians and production workers, doctors, lawyers, nurses, transport and communications workers, garbage men and firemen. These people-the employed, the somewhat privileged-are drawn into alliance with the elite. They become the guards of the system, buffers between the upper and lower classes. If they stop obeying, the system falls.
That will happen, I think, only when all of us who are slightly privileged and slightly uneasy begin to see that we are like the guards in the prison uprising at Attic -- expendable; that the Establishment, whatever rewards it gives us, will also, if necessary to maintain its control, kill us."

Or this by Noam Chomsky:
"The Threat of a Good Example"
http://www.chomsky.info/books/unclesam01.htm
"No country is exempt from U.S. intervention, no matter how unimportant. In fact, it's the weakest, poorest countries that often arouse the greatest hysteria. ... There's a reason for that. The weaker and poorer a country is, the more dangerous it is as an example. If a tiny, poor country like Grenada can succeed in bringing about a better life for its people, some other place that has more resources will ask, "why not us?" ..."

And by Bucky Fuller:
http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/165737.Richard_Buckminster_Fuller
"You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."

So yes, withdrawing support is a powerful way of change, as Gandhi used:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satyagraha
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-cooperation_movement
"The Non-Cooperation Movement was a significant phase of the Indian struggle for freedom from British rule. It was led by Mahatma Gandhi and was supported by the Indian National Congress. After the Jallianwala Bagh incident, Gandhi started the Non Cooperation movement. It aimed to resist British occupation in India through non-violent means. Protestors would refuse to buy British goods, adopt the use of local handicrafts, picket liquor shops, and try to uphold the Indian values of honor and integrity. The ideals of Ahimsa or non-violence, and Gandhi's ability to rally hundreds of thousands of common citizens towards the cause of Indian independence, were first seen on a large scale in this movement through the summer 1920, they feared that the movement might lead to popular violence.
Among the significant causes of this movement were colonial oppression, exemplified by the Rowlatt Act and Jallianwala Bagh massacre, economic hardships to the common man due to a large chunk of Indian wealth being exported to Britain, ruin of Indian artisans due to British factory-made goods replacing handmade goods, and popular resentment with the British over Indian soldiers dying in World War I while fighting as part of the British Army, in battles that otherwise had nothing to do with India."

Or as a twist, would it really matter if most of India's wealth were exported to Britain or to a 1% of Indians who live in gated communities inside India?

Consider the US

So many questionable assumptions in your post... If you are referring to US American history around the time of the American Revolution, quite a bit of the Colonial population fled to Canada to remain under the rule of the British Crown (as "Loyalists"). Canada got rid of slavery about 40 years sooner than the USA, never had a terrible Civil War, treat their indigenous people better, and now have universal health care. In many ways, the British were more socially advanced than the rough colonists. See also:
http://www.historyisaweapon.com/zinnapeopleshistory.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loyalist_(American_Revolution)

Of those people who stayed in the American Colonies, at least one of his own officers (Colonel Lewis Nicola) asked George Washington to become their new King, but he refused.
http://www.pbs.org/georgewashington/classroom/rule_of_law2.html

The major reason for the Colonies' revolt was banking policy -- that the British wanted to prevent American colonies from issuing their own currency, which caused an economic depression in the Colonies. so, a bad economy and high unemployment caused the revolt more than anything else. The reason the British wanted to do this was to collect more revenue to pay back debts incurred for the recent war with France over western territories. So, the end result was that the American colonists got the French territories without having to pay for the war that took them from France (and the natives). Both Britain and France were destabilized by such war debts, although France was worse off, leading towards the French Revolution.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_and_Indian_War
http://www.chicagofed.org/webpages/publications/economic_perspectives/1981/ep_mar_apr1981_part4_wood.cfm
http://www.kamron.com/Liberty/colonial_script.htm

As for US interventions abroad since, most were just to ensure profits to specific wealthy investors, according to Marine Major General Smedley Butler:
http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/warisaracket.html

On the partisan politics of this disclosure and the Verizon one. Conservatives now are blaming Obama and Progressives. Liberals blame Bush and Republicans. Congress says it has been going on for seven years, so why worry now? What a mess. Somehow I don't feel much is going to change from this revelation though, because, to anyone paying attention, it is not that unexpected. Carnivore and Echelon did similar things over a decade ago, plus they are supposedly arrangements by US agencies to exchange data with other countries that can spy on US citizens without issues.

As is suggested here, gradual changes are rarely resisted:
"They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45"
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html
"To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it -- please try to believe me -- unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, 'regretted,' that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these 'little measures' that no 'patriotic German' could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in

Wake up, folks. We have been living in an authoritarian military oligarchy since World War I, when the finance-military-industrial-congressional complex got started in earnest.

What makes you think it got started in WW I? Read A People's History of the United States because Matt Damon was right - that book will knock you on your ass.

"When you think of it, with things like the Boston tea party and other disruption, I'm sure all the founding father's would be branded terrorists today."

Or as has been attributed to Benjamin Franklin at the signing of the Declaration of Independence: "We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately."

So, if they had lost, they would have been hanged back then, which is essentially the same thing as being branded a terrorist at the time. So, history is written (or rewritten) by the victors:
http://www.weeklyramble.com/culture/history-is-written-by-the-victors
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_hole

Still, the fact is, Canada never revolted against the crown, and they still got independence eventually, and it seems like a great country in a lot of ways. It has universal health care, for example.

British also were willing to free North American slaves during the Revolutionary war:
http://www.history.org/foundation/journal/autumn07/slaves.cfm

By the way, being able to print local currencies is one motivation for the US American Revolution that is rarely talked about:
http://21stcenturycicero.wordpress.com/fraud/how-benjamin-franklin-made-new-england-prosperous/
"Franklin, who was one of the chief architects of the American independence, wrote it clearly: "The Colonies would gladly have borne the little tax on tea and other matters had it not been the poverty caused by the bad influence of the English bankers on the Parliament, which has caused in the Colonies hatred of England and the Revolutionary War.""

Those taxes were to pay for the French-and-Indian war, whose costs ultimately proved ruinous to both the British and the French governments.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_and_Indian_War#Consequences

By revolting, the American colonists overall managed to shuck off that war-related tax burden (related to public debt incurred in the UK for empire and conquest) while still gaining the land benefits won in that war by the British from the French and Natives Americans.

Of course, some Native Americans might suggest that they have been fighting terrorism since 1492...
http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncol1.html
"But too many of the slaves died in captivity. And so Columbus, desperate to pay back dividends to those who had invested, had to make good his promise to fill the ships with gold. In the province of Cicao on Haiti, where he and his men imagined huge gold fields to exist, they ordered all persons fourteen years or older to collect a certain quantity of gold every three months. When they brought it, they were given copper tokens to hang around their necks. Indians found without a copper token had their hands cut off and bled to death.
The Indians had been given an impossible task. The only gold around was bits of dust garnered from the streams. So they fled, were hunted down with dogs, and were killed.
Trying to put together an army of resistance, the Arawaks faced Spaniards who had armor, muskets, swords, horses. When the Spaniards took prisoners they hanged them or burned them to death. Among the Arawaks, mass suicides began, with cassava poison. Infants were killed to save them from the Spaniards. In two years, through murder, mutilation, or suicide, half of the 250,000 Indians on Haiti were dead.
When it became clear that there was no gold left, the Indians were taken as slave labor on huge estates, known later as encomiendas. They were worked at a ferocious pace, and died by the thousands. By

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disciplined_Minds
"Disciplined Minds is a book by physicist Jeff Schmidt published in 2000. The book describes how professionals are made; the methods of professional and graduate schools that turn eager entering students into disciplined managerial and intellectual workers that correctly perceive and apply the employer's doctrine and outlook. Schmidt uses the examples of law, medicine, and physics, and describes methods that students and professional workers can use to preserve their personalities and independent thought."

See also:
http://disciplinedminds.tripod.com/
http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199710--.htm
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncomrev24.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Best_and_the_Brightest

Those links explain in part how can such "smart" people totally ignore the potential for "blowback" from the violent actions they endorse (actions which include the slaughter of endless innocents, the violation of national sovereignty and probably international law, the setting of an example of ironic misuse of advanced technology that could otherwise bring material abundance to the entire world, and so on)... These links help show why these academics are willfully blind to the idea that they are endorsing polices that may be creating 100 new terrorist for every one they think they might have killed.

Never forget what one of our greatest Marine Major Generals said:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket
"War Is a Racket is the title of two works, a speech and a booklet, by retired United States Marine Corps Major General and two time Medal of Honor recipient Smedley D. Butler. In them, Butler frankly discusses from his experience as a career military officer how business interests commercially benefit from warfare."

Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan were *supposed* to be expensive quagmires so somebody's buddies coudl get lucrative "defense" contracts. These conflicts were *supposed* to drive up oil prices so somebody's buddies would see the value of their domestic oil holdings increase. And so on...

See also:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marjorie-cohn/killer-drone-attacks-ille_b_1623065.html
"Christof Heyns, the current UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary, or Arbitrary Executions, expressed grave concern about the targeted killings, saying they may constitute war crimes. He called on the Obama administration to explain how its drone strikes comport with international law, specify the bases for decisions to kill rather than capture particular individuals, and whether the State in which the killing takes place has given consent. Heyns further asked for specification of the procedural safeguards in place, if any, to ensure in advance of drone killings that they comply with international law. He also wanted to know what measures the U.S. government takes after any such killing to ensure that its legal and factual analysis was accurate and, if not, the remedial measures it would take, including justice and reparations for victims and their families. Although Heyns' predecessor made similar requests, Heyns said the United States has not provided a satisfactory response.
Heyns also called on the U.S. government to make public the number of civilians collaterally killed as a result of drone attacks, and the measures in place to prevent such casualties. Once again, Heyns said the United States has not satisfactor

Howard Zinn: http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncomrev24.html "However, the unexpected victories-even temporary ones-of insurgents show the vulnerability of the supposedly powerful. In a highly developed society, the Establishment cannot survive without the obedience and loyalty of millions of people who are given small rewards to keep the system going: the soldiers and police, teachers and ministers, administrators and social workers, technicians and production workers, doctors, lawyers, nurses, transport and communications workers, garbage men and firemen. These people-the employed, the somewhat privileged-are drawn into alliance with the elite. They become the guards of the system, buffers between the upper and lower classes. If they stop obeying, the system falls. That will happen, I think, only when all of us who are slightly privileged and slightly uneasy begin to see that we are like the guards in the prison uprising at Attica -- expendable; that the Establishment, whatever rewards it gives us, will also, if necessary to maintain its control, kill us. "

I hope your insightful post and related predictions are very wrong, but I am hard pressed to find flaws in what you say other than trying to stay hopeful.

Links you might find of interest:

"They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45"
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html

"How Germans Fell for the 'Feel-Good' Fuehrer"
http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,347726,00.html

"Voyage from Yesteryear"
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/info.php?titleID=29&cmd=summary

My site with lots of alternatives to disaster:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/

On optimism and other things by Howard Zinn:
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1108-21.htm
http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncomrev24.html

Please make sure you are getting your vitamin D, eating lots of vegetables and fruits, and getting omega-3s to be in the best of health for any tough times to come.

Thanks for your comments. Glad you liked the post and I hope you look at some of the links.

On the theme you raise, I've also been wondering if many people in the past might have lived longer than we give them credit for, as well (in other words, maybe the infant mortality rates may be off?).

I've seen different estimates of how many people were in North America, so you are right, it might have been higher, although I would think 2 million to 20 million for North American (above Mexico) would be more likely, but I don't know for sure. One source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_Americans_in_the_United_States
"Estimating the number of Native Americans living in what is today the United States of America before the arrival of the European explorers and settlers has been the subject of much debate. A low estimate of around 1 million was first posited by the anthropologist James Mooney in the 1890s, by calculating population density of each culture area based on its carrying capacity. In 1965, the American anthropologist Henry Dobyns published studies estimating the original population to have been 10 to 12 million. By 1983, he increased his estimates to 18 million.[42] He took into account the mortality rates caused by infectious diseases of European explorers and settlers, against which Native Americans had no immunity. Dobyns combined the known mortality rates of these diseases among native people with reliable population records of the 19th century, to calculate the probable size of the original populations.[4][5]"

The general issue is that the further you go from the equator, the more land per person you need for subsistence for various climate and sunlight reasons. So, one acre might support a person by the equator, but you might need 1000 or more up around Northern Canada.

So, yes, I was going with the low end. Of course, our wilderness is more degraded now, as well. Also, if you add in Mexico and below, I think the total for both continents could have been 100 million or so.

Anyway, thanks for the suggestions:
http://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Columbus/dp/140004006X
http://www.amazon.com/Conquest-New-Spain-Penguin-Classics/dp/0140441239

Although another aspect of that is that the natural diversity seen in North America of animals during the 1700s and 1800s was also partially a recovery from previously heavy exploitation by natives, who, as you say, often died from introduced disease.

Another angle on that general theme of affluence in the stone age:
http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm

Another related book on the pandemic:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel

And more on what really happened during the invasion of North America, in the own words of the profit-driven invaders (as well as some accompanying missionaries) who saw the value of the land but not of the alternative society:
http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncol1.html

A related theme from Native Americans:
http://www.marcinequenzer.com/creation.htm#The%20Field%20of%20Plenty
"The Field of Plenty is always full of abundance. The gratitude we show as Children of Earth allows the ideas within the Field of Plenty to manifest on the Good Red Road so we may enjoy these fruits in a physical manner. When the cornucopia was brought to the Pilgrims, the Iroquois People sought to assist these Boat People in destroying their fear of scarcity. The Native understanding is that there is always en

The ACLU isn't remotely crazy. They are focused on the First, Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth amendments rather than the Second or Tenth, to be sure, and they take the absolute position on what "Congress shall make no law" is. That doesn't make them crazy. However, those who would like to get rid of those freedoms frequently portray them as crazy because they're a roadblock to their cause. For anyone who believes they're crazy, please present evidence of it, and I mean that absolutely seriously.

As far as government by, for, and of the corporations, that's been going on for at least 150 years now, and there's no reason to think it would stop anytime soon. If you want some idea of the history, I highly recommend A People's History of the United States.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/imf-bombshell-age-of-america-about-to-end-2011-04-25?pagenumber=2
    "Commentary: China's economy will surpass the U.S. in 2016 [based on PPP] ...
    This is the result of decades during which China has successfully pursued economic policies aimed at national expansion and power, while the U.S. has embraced either free trade or, for want of a better term, economic appeasement.
    "There are two systems in collision," said Ralph Gomory, research professor at NYU's Stern business school. "They have a state-guided form of capitalism, and we have a much freer former of capitalism." What we have seen, he said, is "a massive shift in capability from the U.S. to China. What we have done is traded jobs for profit. The jobs have moved to China. The capability erodes in the U.S. and grows in China. That's very destructive. That is a big reason why the U.S. is becoming more and more polarized between a small, very rich class and an eroding middle class. The people who get the profits are very different from the people who lost the wages."
    The next chapter of the story is just beginning. ..."

See also:
    http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
    http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
    http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncomrev24.html
    http://peswiki.com/index.php/OS:Economic_Transformation

What tinkerers related to science and technology can do though?
    http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/09/surface-area-required-to-power-the-whole-world-with-solar-power-wind.php
    http://pesn.com/2011/01/17/9501746_Focardi-Rossi_10_kW_cold_fusion_prepping_for_market/

"We have invaded places, but always with the idea of reforming that nation and giving it back to its RICH people."
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_United_States

FTFY. :-)

You can possess markets and extraction areas without saying you are going to move your people in there...

See also:
    http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncomrev24.html
"How skillful to tax the middle class to pay for the relief of the poor, building resentment on top of humiliation! How adroit to bus poor black youngsters into poor white neighborhoods, in a violent exchange of impoverished schools, while the schools of the rich remain untouched and the wealth of the nation, doled out carefully where children need free milk, is drained for billion-dollar aircraft carriers. How ingenious to meet the demands of blacks and women for equality by giving them small special benefits, and setting them in competition with everyone else for jobs made scarce by an irrational, wasteful system. How wise to turn the fear and anger of the majority toward a class of criminals bred-by economic inequity-faster than they can be put away, deflecting attention from the huge thefts of national resources carried out within the law by men in executive offices. "

And:
    http://archive.uua.org/ga/ga99/238thandeka.html
"First, 80 percent of the wealth in this country is owned by 20 percent of the population. The top 1 percent owns 47% of this wealth. These facts describe an American oligarchy that rules not as a right of race but as a right of class. "

And:
    http://www.capitalismhitsthefan.com/

What did I say about race? I talked about US vs. Japanese culture.

Consider:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9231926/ns/nightly_news-nbc_news_investigates/
"Some 200 New Orleans school buses sit underwater in a parking lot, unused. That's enough to have evacuated at least 13,000 people. Why werenâ(TM)t those buses sent street by street to pick up people before the storm? ... One huge bottleneck in the evacuation â" the New Orleans airport. Officials say flights were delayed while screeners and air marshals were flown in to comply with post-9/11 security requirements, and then further delayed because screening machines werenâ(TM)t working. ..."

The AC post can be seen as another example of US cultural problems. Shirley Sherrod was forced to resign for making a speech that ironically included mentioning how racism was being created by elite-pushed policies in the USA for centuries to cause poor blacks and poor whites to be at each other's throats to keep them all divided and powerless:
    http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2010/0722/Shirley-Sherrod-debacle-why-Obama-stumbles-on-race
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9NcCa_KjXk

See also:
    http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncomrev24.html
"How skillful to tax the middle class to pay for the relief of the poor, building resentment on top of humiliation! How adroit to bus poor black youngsters into poor white neighborhoods, in a violent exchange of impoverished schools, while the schools of the rich remain untouched and the wealth of the nation, doled out carefully where children need free milk, is drained for billion-dollar aircraft carriers. How ingenious to meet the demands of blacks and women for equality by giving them small special benefits, and setting them in competition with everyone else for jobs made scarce by an irrational, wasteful system. How wise to turn the fear and anger of the majority toward a class of criminals bred-by economic inequity-faster than they can be put away, deflecting attention from the huge thefts of national resources carried out within the law by men in executive offices."

That said, Japanese people can be pretty xenophobic, which is why they are creating a lot of elder care robots instead of importing "guest workers" from other countries like Western Europe or the USA.
  http://www.jref.com/forum/archive/index.php/t-7650.html
  http://www.globalaging.org/elderrights/world/2004/japaninvention.htm

So, soon Japanese-designed household and nursing robots are going to take a lot more low paid jobs in the USA... A Japanese anime about that complex issue:
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roujin_Z

Some other points on: "It's ridiculous to think we don't need self defense, in the same way that it's ridiculous to ban guns and weapons and tell people violence never solved anything (French taxation without representation. British taxation without representation. Slavery in America. Slavery in Haiti. Hitler. Stalin. Japan's expansionism. It goes on)."

History is tricky, because one can always pull out a situation where people have let things get really bad because they would not consider other alternatives and then say, see, violence was the only answer.

Egypt had a revolution without a war just now. India had one decades ago. Why not France eventually?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohandas_Karamchand_Gandhi

Canada secede from Britain without a shot being fired, has a better health care system than the USA, and treated its native people better. What did the US revolution accomplish in that sense?

The British abolished slavery without an internal civil war.

The British said they would abolish slavery if they won the American revolutionary war, so was it good that the rich white Americans won? Something like a third of the people left the country (mostly to Canada). (I'm not saying there were not legitimate grievances.)

If the South had been allowed to secede from the Union, could things have ultimately been better for the Blacks than the grinding poverty and economic abuse they got after the Civil War, since the South would have toppled eventually over slavery.? See also the previous point. Also, slavery might not have been possible without all the people making fancy weapons to use to enslave people like Columbus did.

Haiti was in a sense destroyed by capitalist ideology and greed more than weapons:
http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncol1.html

How are you going to ensure the weapons are not in the hands of greedy capitalists?

Nazi Germany was a pyramid scheme that would have fall apart pretty soon anyway:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,347726,00.html

It also was a reaction to reparations related to a previous war, and that war itself was related to compulsory schooling. Abolish compulsory schooling and maybe we would not need so much war machinery? From:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/7a.htm
"The particular utopia American believers chose to bring to the schoolhouse was Prussian. The seed that became American schooling, twentieth-century style, was planted in 1806 when Napoleon’s amateur soldiers bested the professional soldiers of Prussia at the battle of Jena. When your business is renting soldiers and employing diplomatic extortion under threat of your soldiery, losing a battle like that is pretty serious. Something had to be done."

The USSR crumbled in large part because of a people's revolution in the 1990s (even as the USA likes to take the credit). Still, had it not engaged in a foolish arms race with the USA (or had the USA not been so provocative) the country that put the first satellite in orbit, that put the first man and woman into space, that put up the first space station, that invented phage therapy, that country might have been a much happier place. But every time doves in the Kremlin said, maybe the USA people are not so crazy, the USA would push another round of weapons and the hawks would say, see I told you so, and the doves would get purged. Who was at fault there?

On Japan, well true they had a messed up culture in a lot of ways and did a lot of evil things in other countries -- but it was a militaristic culture of the kind you are celebrating (Samurai). The USA also attacked Japan economically (shutting of oil flows) before Japan attacked at Pearl

Some things have improved, some things have gotten worse. It's hard to say, overall, that most people in the USA are much happier than the Haudenosaunee (Iroqois) were 500 years ago, even living a bit longer perhaps on average. Are those alive now in the USA much happier or more physically fit than the Arawak in Haiti who Columbus and his successors wiped out?

See, for example:
http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncol1.html
"Arawak men and women, naked, tawny, and full of wonder, emerged from their villages onto the island's beaches and swam out to get a closer look at the strange big boat. When Columbus and his sailors came ashore, carrying swords, speaking oddly, the Arawaks ran to greet them, brought them food, water, gifts. He later wrote of this in his log:
"They ... brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks' bells. They willingly traded everything they owned... . They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features.... They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane... . They would make fine servants.... With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want."
These Arawaks of the Bahama Islands were much like Indians on the mainland, who were remarkable (European observers were to say again and again) for their hospitality, their belief in sharing. These traits did not stand out in the Europe of the Renaissance, dominated as it was by the religion of popes, the government of kings, the frenzy for money that marked Western civilization and its first messenger to the Americas, Christopher Columbus."

So, sure, we have fancy laptops and the internet, and that is great. But do most of us have real families, real communities, and meaningful work anymore?

See also:
http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm

We can't go back to those days and keep our big populations. But we can at least honor the memory of what was good about those times, and try to bring that goodness into the 21st century. Some people are trying:
http://www.blessedunrest.com/

Overall, I think Eric Schmidt was trying, too. I'm sort of sorry now I made fun of him and Knol here:
http://groups.google.com/group/openvirgle/msg/5bd385feed4127d7
"""
Gold Leader: Pardon me for asking, sir, but what good are semantic wikis and desktops going to be against Virgle?
General Dodonna: Well, the Empire doesn't consider a small cgi script on a shared server or desktop to be any threat, or they'd have a tighter defense.
-----
Commander #1: We've analyzed their attack on Knol, sir, and there is a danger. Should I have your Golden Parachute standing by?
Governor Schmidt: Evacuate? In our moment of triumph? I think you overestimate their chances.
"""

Still, if he had listened to the points I was trying to make about Google and Post-Scarcity, maybe he would have had more success?
http://www.pdfernhout.net/a-rant-on-financial-obesity-and-Project-Virgle.html
"This is an email I posted to the Project Virgle email list. Project Virgle was an April Fool's joke by Google and Virgin, which many did not see as that funny. ... Essentially, by focusing on "profit" (and so Empire to defend that profit and related "ownership" and "equity") this is the kind of deadly farce of the bubble of Empire that Google and Virgin are (in jest) proposing bringing to Mars. It's just the "uns

Four dead in Ohio. There's also the Civil Rights marches of the 1960s, the labor movement, the Trail of Tears, and a few other odd highlights. I'd suggest picking up a copy of Lies My Teacher Told Me or Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States.

"Again, you misunderstand. Having technology that makes your military more effective *does* make you safer, after a fashion. Look back at the interaction between the Spanish conquistadors and the Incas. The conquistadors had metal armor and guns. The Incas had wooden/hide armor, spears and arrows. A single conquistador was a more effective military weapon than a single Incan soldier."

Well, it was guns, *germs*, and steel (see the book with that title). And it was other things as well, like the Inca seeing the invaders as gods, and also being highly centralized and vulnerable to a centralized attack, otherwise millions of Inca would have wiped out a few hundred men with musketts, even on horseback. It's sort of like by the fourth airplane on 9/11 the strategy of the terrorists wasn't working anymore as the people began to fight back (and so that plane crashed in a field). Eventually, the Inca did fight back more, but by then the (mostly unintended) germs were wiping them out. There was also a civil war at the time the Spanish took advantage of, and other factors:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_conquest_of_the_Inca_Empire
"The situation went quickly downhill. As things began to fall apart, many parts of the Inca Empire revolted, some of them joining with the Spanish against their own rulers. Many kingdoms and tribes had been conquered or persuaded to join the Inca empire. They thought that by joining the Spaniards, they could gain their own freedom. But these native people never foresaw the massive waves of Spaniard immigrants coming to their land and the tragedy that they would bring upon their people."

So the Inca empire itself was unstable... If the Inca empire has been more stable, and had (unintentional) disease not been a major factor, I'd suggest the Inca would have easily kicked out the Conquistadors, despite guns and steel.

Columbus' destruction of the Arawaks on Haiti might be a better example of what you say... And a very sad one... They offered him gifts and friendship amd a better way of life, and he repaid them in death, justified in part by religion as well as his business obligations...
    http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncol1.html
But is that what you want to hold up as an ideal? Columbus only lived to age 54; might he have lived to age 100 if he and his men had just settled in Haiti and never gone back to Europe? All that violence must have been stressful for him, and what did that genocide for profit against the Arawaks get him? Beyond being remembered for it (plus being the last person to discover America)?

If you see my other reply, you'll see that all this military technology is ironic and, essentially, making us less secure in the 21st century because it is designed from the wrong paradigm of extrinisic unilateral security (not intrinsic mututal security). For example, having a loaded self-propelled Howitzer cannon in your suburban backyard does not make you safer from home intrusion in a small community (or cancer, heart disease, stroke, and diabestes, the real killers of most US Americans) -- it makes you seen as a nutcase and your neighbors start talking about how to deal with you and get rid of it in case it went off accidentally or kids took it for a "joyride". But if you insulate your house to keep it warm at low cost, use the savings to put solar panels of the roof to power a fridge full of cool beers for passerbys, and then grown an organic garden producing abundant veggies you share with your neighbors, then you are going to have a lot more security and health and prosperity for both yourself and your community for a lot less cost than buying and maintaining a Howitzer in your backyard.

And that's basically the previous poster's point.

My mother lived through the Nazi invasion of Rotterdam (and related firebombing) as well as the Hunger Winter.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotterdam_Blitz
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger_winter
To me, fascism is not entirely just an abstract point, like having private radios be illegal, because I grew up in the remaining PTSD shadow of it (my mother emigrated to the USA after the war, as did my father). These things happen, and in part for the social dynamics outlined in that article on the pre-WWII Germans. Anyway, when the original article by Eben Moglen is essentially about preventing fascism in the USA through technology, talking about the history of fascism is not off-topic. I provide links for references, to distinguish this from just one person's random opinion. Follow them or not if you want. As has been said, those who study history are condemned to watch others repeat it. If my post is tl;dr, I guess this site by someone else is really too long: :-)
    http://www.historyisaweapon.com/

Interesting link to the Kirwin Institute. One page from there:
    http://kirwaninstitute.org/research/talking-about-race.php
"At Kirwan, we agree that all too often implicit and explicit race talk has indeed been used to divide and alienate. At the same time, we believe colorblindness, though sometimes urged by people and organizations with the best intentions, is a mistake--one with profound consequences. The critical question is not whether to use race, but how to talk about race in a variety of contexts. That question is an empirical one we engage in through a number of projects. In some cases we specifically examine how people talk about race and how such conversations impact their behavior. In other work we look at how issue "frames" operate. And in still other projects we look at the efficacy of using class-based or universal policy approaches to racial matters."

Thandeka says something related to your point on policy, too:
    http://archive.uua.org/ga/ga99/238thandeka.html
"My point is this. Talk of white skin privilege is talk about the way in which some of the citizens of this country are able to avoid being mutilated - or less metaphorically, to avoid having their basic human rights violated. So much for the analogy. Here are the facts about so-called white skin privilege. First, 80 percent of the wealth in this country is owned by 20 percent of the population. The top 1 percent owns 47% of this wealth. These facts describe an American oligarchy that rules not as a right of race but as a right of class. ..."

As did Shirley Sherrod (in the later part of the video related to the controversy, suggesting that racism was invented as a systematic institution to keep poor people of any skin color from cooperating):
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9NcCa_KjXk

Howard Zinn says something similar in "A People's History of the United States":
  http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncomrev24.html
"How skillful to tax the middle class to pay for the relief of the poor, building resentment on top of humiliation! How adroit to bus poor black youngsters into poor white neighborhoods, in a violent exchange of impoverished schools, while the schools of the rich remain untouched and the wealth of the nation, doled out carefully where children need free milk, is drained for billion-dollar aircraft carriers. How ingenious to meet the demands of blacks and women for equality by giving them small special benefits, and setting them in competition with everyone else for jobs made scarce by an irrational, wasteful system. How wise to turn the fear and anger of the majority toward a class of criminals bred-by economic inequity-faster than they can be put away, deflecting attention from the huge thefts of national resources carried out within the law by men in executive offices."

On the general issues of "-isms":
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rankism

That's a rather materialistic view on "the good life".What happened to the value of singing, dancing, telling stories, eating food you enjoyed, having free time, not having someone bossing you around, time for communion with nature and the infinite, doing comprehensible work you enjoyed doing at your own pace, having time to raise children, and so on? The Sahlins article shows how most hunter/gatherers most of the time had no want for food. Would you trade, say, having time for singing and dancing and friendships for some hot water? You can always put hot rocks in a basket of water if you want hot water. And while you don't have hot water on tap, you also don't have property taxes to pay or dioxin in the food supply to digest.

Also, you've overgeneralized the point. There is a big difference between saying there were a lot of good things about a period in human history and saying *everything* about that period was wonderful or that we should just abandon other aspects of our current lives that we enjoy. But clearly, these game developers are not enjoying their lives. So, something is wrong. Looking to the past helps give us some perspective on that.

By the way, life expectancy after age five in hunter/gatherers may have been comparable to today. It is only in the last 100 years that human skeletons are now as tall as they were 10,000 years in the past (because agriculture was a big step backward nutritionally and culturally):
http://press.princeton.edu/titles/6812.html

Some things like sewage treatment are only needed because of high population densities today.

Many people don't have access to medical care, and even when they do, the for-profit medical system harms them compared to simpler approaches (whole foods diet, fasting, sunlight, meditation, good sleep, etc.). Many chronic disease today are caused by eating poorly or not getting enough sunlight (cancer, diabetes, heart disease, mental illness, depression, influenza, autism, etc.)
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
http://www.alternativeratreatments.com/eat-to-live.html
so it is not completely clear how much happier most people are now compared to people 10,000 years ago.

Also people back then did not know what was possible, so someone from now sent back to those times might feel different than people did who grew up then.

And young children in the USA spend more than a decade in prison, so that can't be happy for them compared to back then either:
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/2445404/the_war_on_kids_a_polemic_against_public.html?cat=9

So, sure, there are some good things about today (the internet overall seems to be a wonderful thing). But there is plenty of bad too, so the equation of how different times stack up is not so simple.

A little bit on what America was like before Columbus (describing Haiti):
http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncol1.html
"""
"They ... brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks' bells. They willingly traded everything they owned... . They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features.... They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane... . They would make fine servants.... With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want." ... The Indians, Columbus reported, "are so naive and so free with their possessions that no one who

To turn that around, advanced technology, sir, is walking a line dangerously close to communism! :-)

That's because we are seeing the value of most human labor slowly plummeting to zero (one reason why no one can afford health insurance anymore except the doctors and medical equipment manufacturer owners. :-) See:
http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-freedom.htm
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

So, as Marshall Brain suggests, the end point of capitalism is the starvation of all people who do not have a lot of capital (because, when their labor is worthless, they will not be able to pay for food, clothes, rent, medical costs, etc.). Everything from milking cows to doing genetic research is being automated:
"VMS robotic milking"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPqWpOxQmIs
"Robot Scientist Makes Discovery"
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2009/04/02/robot-scientist.html

Robots are making the leap from less coordinated than humans to more coordinated than humans:
"High-Speed Robot Hand Demonstrates Dexterity and Skillful Manipulation"
http://www.hizook.com/blog/2009/08/03/high-speed-robot-hand-demonstrates-dexterity-and-skillful-manipulation

More links to robot videos here:
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005926.html

The thing is, "ownership" is ultimately a political construction:
"The Mythology of Wealth"
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402

Propped up by millionaire wannabees and slightly privileged guards:
"The Wrath of the Millionaire Wannabe's"
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/47
"The Coming Revolt of the Guards"
http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncomrev24.html

Are you a billionaire? Otherwise, by capitalist standards, if your work can eventually be automated, your life will then be worthless in their eyes, and you should then logically starve once everything you can do of value to billionaires has been automated. And don't say you'll just get another job, because as Marshall Brain suggests, that one will be automated too once we pass some critical thresholds in AI and robotics. That's like saying you will hide under a tree to stay dry in a rainstorm and when that tree gets wet through you will go find another.

The only question is, do we put in place social reforms now, or do we wait until even more people are starving? Well, there's an obvious answer to that in a capitalist society, and as American financier Jay Gould said after hiring strikebreakers, it is "I can hire one-half of the working class to kill the other half."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery

So, ideally, we need to find alternatives to a society build around a conception of work:
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html

The real reason why violent (and other) games are evil in a way is just that they are a distraction from dealing with that very serious issue of rethinking our society on some better ba

The big media companies are still thinking in 20th century terms of creating scarcity and profiting from standing between people and what they think they want. The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity, as you gave an example of. The irony goes for media publishers, who want to be compensated every time someone enjoys themselves and prevent others from being happy, rather than everyone just help each other be happy through gifts. But it also goes for things like military robots, used ironically to enforce wage slavery and other related hierarchical social processes instead of building robots to do the work. Or it goes for nuclear missiles, ironically to fight over land with oil on it, instead of building habitats in space for more land, or building power systems on earth from renewables or nuclear energy.

So, this is all part of a widely unrealized irony now that we are in the 21st century of potential abundance, not the 20th of real scarcity anymore. Now that we have so much technology, so many networks, and so much knowledge about better design, we need an economics of abundance for the 21st century. An economy of abundance might involve things like a gift economy (especially for things that are easy to copy), improved local communities with local production (like 3D printing), a basic income for all (like in Alaska, from the shared bounty of collectively owned natural resources), and better accounting, planning, and regulation for resource use given externalities like pollution or social problems caused by various economic strategies.

The alternative is just more artificial scarcity and make-work, which overall seems immoral to me if we understand the alternatives. Of course, given that only some people see this, how do we survive as individuals with one foot in 20th century economics and one foot in 21st century economics (Wikipedia, Debian GNU/Linux, RepRap, etc.)? Coming up with a good transition path to a society built around the assumption of material abundance is the short-term problem we all face.

Humor on this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midas_World
""The Midas Plague" (originally published in Galaxy in 1954). In this new world of cheap energy, robots are overproducing the commodities enjoyed by mankind. So now the "poor" are forced to spend their lives in frantic consumption, trying to keep up with the robots' extravagant production, so that the "rich" can live lives of simplicity. This story deals with the life of a man named Morey Fry, who marries a girl from a higher class. She is unused to a life of consumption and it wears at their marriage."

Seriousness on this, from the (sadly) late Howard Ziss:
http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncomrev24.html
"""
However, the unexpected victories - even temporary ones - of insurgents show the vulnerability of the supposedly powerful. In a highly developed society, the Establishment cannot survive without the obedience and loyalty of millions of people who are given small rewards to keep the system going: the soldiers and police, teachers and ministers, administrators and social workers, technicians and production workers, doctors, lawyers, nurses, transport and communications workers, garbage men and firemen. These people - the employed, the somewhat privileged - are drawn into alliance with the elite. They become the guards of the system, buffers between the upper and lower classes. If they stop obeying, the system falls.
That will happen, I think, only when all of us who are slightly privileged and slightly uneasy begin to see that we are like the guards in the prison uprising at Attica -- expendable; that the Establishment, whatever rewards it gives us, will also, if necessary to maintain its control, kill us.
"""

If you look back at why unions starter (1920s, 1930s)[....]

Um, no. You got modded to 4: Insightful and you're just talking out your ear.

Unions peaked in their "power" in the 20's. Get it right.

The main tool (maybe the only real tool) that unions had in their "arsenal" was the strike. That is what hit the owners in the only place they had any feeling - the pocketbook.

Once that was off the table (made illegal), the whole arrangement was bought and sold, IMO.

You (and everyone else too) should look into it. It's actually a pretty interesting history. There's a lot out there to read on the subject, but a good, concisce place to start reading is this encyclopedia. I recommend the hardcopy - check your local library - but it appears there's a free online version available here. There's a Table of Contents, so start where you want, but this chapter would be as good a place as any.

A final set of notes with regard to the anti-union whining (from someone who's never been a member of one):
1) The company got saddled with a union for a reason - it's not something done on a whim
2) If there's a good reason, they can get unsaddled just about as easily.
3) For new employees, a) it's all voluntary (free to look elsewhere, right?) and b) there's a good chance the job they're applying for was only there (or only worth getting) due to past unionization.
4) A union is in theory supposed to be membership based. If your company is picking up part or all of your tab and you're not seeing all the benefits you'd expect, I'd stop wondering why and make the arrangements as a union to start paying all your own dues - I'm sure your fellow union-ites (or whatever you're called) could see the logic in that if i had to come to a vote.
5) Bad Analogy for the above: You pay $50/month for 50 channels of cable, but you're surprised that 1/3 of what you're paying for is not the content, but the advertisements between the content. Kinda like actually paying $50/month but only getting 20 days of service. On the other hand, pay $15/month for one channel (a la HBO, Showtime) you get the real deal, straight up - $15 for 30 days of service. Sounds to me like you have a "basic cable" union, but the propaganda in your head makes you expect a "real deal HBO" union.
6) One of my favorite sayings (that I think I actually coined): There's something wrong with everything that's popular. Unions and Capitalism are not exceptions.

Good luck!
-Matt

If you look back at why unions starter (1920s, 1930s)[....]

Um, no. You got modded to 4: Insightful and you're just talking out your ear.

Unions peaked in their "power" in the 20's. Get it right.

The main tool (maybe the only real tool) that unions had in their "arsenal" was the strike. That is what hit the owners in the only place they had any feeling - the pocketbook.

Once that was off the table (made illegal), the whole arrangement was bought and sold, IMO.

You (and everyone else too) should look into it. It's actually a pretty interesting history. There's a lot out there to read on the subject, but a good, concisce place to start reading is this encyclopedia. I recommend the hardcopy - check your local library - but it appears there's a free online version available here. There's a Table of Contents, so start where you want, but this chapter would be as good a place as any.

A final set of notes with regard to the anti-union whining (from someone who's never been a member of one):
1) The company got saddled with a union for a reason - it's not something done on a whim
2) If there's a good reason, they can get unsaddled just about as easily.
3) For new employees, a) it's all voluntary (free to look elsewhere, right?) and b) there's a good chance the job they're applying for was only there (or only worth getting) due to past unionization.
4) A union is in theory supposed to be membership based. If your company is picking up part or all of your tab and you're not seeing all the benefits you'd expect, I'd stop wondering why and make the arrangements as a union to start paying all your own dues - I'm sure your fellow union-ites (or whatever you're called) could see the logic in that if i had to come to a vote.
5) Bad Analogy for the above: You pay $50/month for 50 channels of cable, but you're surprised that 1/3 of what you're paying for is not the content, but the advertisements between the content. Kinda like actually paying $50/month but only getting 20 days of service. On the other hand, pay $15/month for one channel (a la HBO, Showtime) you get the real deal, straight up - $15 for 30 days of service. Sounds to me like you have a "basic cable" union, but the propaganda in your head makes you expect a "real deal HBO" union.
6) One of my favorite sayings (that I think I actually coined): There's something wrong with everything that's popular. Unions and Capitalism are not exceptions.

Good luck!
-Matt

The US censor doesn't like these sites at all but right now they're still legal
(even though they're information terrorists, you know).

I wonder though what the Ayatollah Al Censori makes of these here:

Unwelcome Guests
Alex Jones Infowars
Disinformation gateway
Alan Watt's site (do watch Reality Check)
alternate thought, psychodelic substance experimentation
Learn about Astrotheology
History _is_ a weapon

Most of the stuff you can download with a 128kbs connection, okay, so instead of a minute a 20Mb
mpeg like "Reality Check" you will have to wait half an hour to get it. So what. Most of the
stuff out there is text anyway and you could even re- or rather de-educate yourself with a
16Kbps connection.

Btw... don't visit these sites in internet cafes etc, especially in countries where they have
execution buses in the parking lot (China) or whip and hang you in public (Iran, I suppose) or in
countries where somebody peeking at your screen will surreptiously take out his mobile phone to
call Homeland Security (you know where that happens, don't you).

Happy self-deprogramming!