Short history lesson: Federal reserve started to inflate the money supply in early 1995 (blue line in the graph). The 'tech bubble' followed a couple years later. That trend wasn't sustainable, and the dot-coms bombed sometime in 2000/2001. The economy was well on its way to a recession by late-summer/fall 2001. The Federal Reserve responded to "9/11" by cutting interest rates to 1% (over several months), supposedly for the purpose of 'stimulating' the economy.
Newsflash: Mismanagement of the U.S. currency has caused half of the economic equation, production, to move to Asia and Mexico, either in search of lower wages or to flee rising U.S. costs. This is not a new phenomena, and has been ongoing since the 1970's, though it is only recently (circa-2001) that that trend has accelerated to a completely unsustainable level. Cisco assembled their wireless access points in the U.S., and Intel made motherboards in Silicon Valley up until 1999/2000 or so. What happened to the Americans who used to be employed assembling motherboards and other electronics? Perhaps some of them moved to finance, and some to auto sales. But I digress...
Thus, when the Fed slashed interest rates starting in 2001, instead of entrepreneurs borrowing money to set up new production lines, individuals borrowed money to buy a bigger house. And an investment house. And a condo in the mountains. The widely-proclaimed 'housing bubble' started to take off... circa 2002/2003, and reached its peak summer 2005. Crashes always follow bubbles, and the current real estate market is no exception.
Low interest rates also facilitated GM's 0% financing "keep america rolling" sales campaign. (don't remember what Ford & Chrysler called their corresponding 0% programs). But now Ford and General Motors are in trouble, because they can't sell new cars to customers whose credit line is maxed out.
Gonna get ugly, folks. The good news is that this coming transition marks the end of corporate wage-slavery. The economic system that will arise from the ashes will be founded with something along the lines of workercooperatives. This is the worker benefiting from their own labor. No more slaving away to pay the "shareholders" dividends (mostly rich dudes who sit on their lazy asses and parasitically live off the working class).
John Gatto's book about the 'massification' of America fits in here too. Gatto maintains that the original american ideal was an independent livelihood. Blacksmith, farmer, woodworker, wheelmaker, etc. Mass production / standardization required government schools to produce a populace who would accept working a repetive job where someone else ("shareholder") was the primary beneficiary. Fun while it lasted, right?:)
I needed examples of military actions to fill in the timeline between Vietnam and Gulf War I. I'm just an armchair historian, so there probably are better choices.
You name a country and a period of history when it was a major player on the world political stage, and I'll/guarantee/ you'll find that country was involved in military conflicts more or less continuously throughout that period.
I believe this is the contention of The Rise and Fall of Great Powers. Economic power leads to the use of the military to protect trade routes, and the use of the military grows like cancer until the power finally fails.
Military actions. I'm sure there are better examples, but those are what I remembered.
Yugoslavia? Wasn't the US criticized roundly for NOT getting involved until too late, and only then half-heartedly?
I don't think we'll ever know the full story on Yugoslavia. I'm inclined to believe the reports that Slobodan Milosevi was going to win his war crimes trial, and was executed to prevent him from calling Bill Clinton as a witness. Wikipedia has a good summary of people who defend Milosevi's actions.
There's also some rumor about the CIA using "al Qaeda" to stir up the Balkan war.
All are examples of U.S. meddling on the far side of the ocean.
Just part of the cycle of power. See The Rise and Fall of Great Powers, a 1987 book about said cycle (summary is last 7 paragraphs). Economic power fosters military power; military power creates special interests, who use their newfound power to accumulate more.
to more directly answer your question:
When exactly did corporate lobbyists BECOME our government?
Post-WWII, certainly, but perhaps earlier. Before then "lobbyists" had to be more secretive... A lot of companies became rich on the second world war trade, and the U.S. has been at war ever since - Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Gulf War I, Yugoslavia, Gulf War II (probably forgetting a couple).
There's also that perpetual "War on (certain) Drugs", which benefits some corporations greatly.
Isn't there a saying about a country with a standing army always needing an enemy to fight?
how the government spins the stats
on
The Engine of US Jobs
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
See Shadow Statistics for more on how the government cooks the economic reports.
US Trade Deficit: When the Sausage comes home to Roost has some good discussion on the coming consequences of the trade deficit, and how we got here. Particularly pertinent is the section at the end about the 1987 book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, and how the U.S. has definitively entered the "fall" stage of the power cycle.
But as you seem to indicate, few people seem to know that the federal reserve system is at the root of our poor nation's economic struggle. See the 1983 book The Misdirection Conspiracy: Or Who Really Killed the American Dream for a good history behind how the banking class (not your friendly neighborhood banker, but the Rockerfellers/Morgans/other globalist shysters) are sucking the lifeblood from the working class.
Also worth mentioning that Michael Mandeville, author of The Coming Economic Collapse Of 2006 (2003) says that the predicted collapse is well underway. The current trouble at Ford and General Motors marks an acceleration of the decline.
The present economic calamity was, of course, set in stone as soon as Nixon closed the gold window back in 1971, removing all incumbrances to out-of-control monetary growth (monetary inflation), or perhaps even as early as the establishment of the Federal Reserve system in 1913... See 1970's, redux for more on how globalization & the federal reserve bleeds america dry.
If a bottle of asprin results in her passing away but the bypass gives her 20 years more life, then (adjusting for inflation, etc) she merely has to generate $1,000 more wealth each year than she consumes for the operation to be "worth it".
Except for the fact that, more often than not, bypass surgery kills the patient. I clipped an article about a newspaper guy who died three weeks after his bypass surgery. One medical researcher says that bypass surgery belongs in the medical archives. Bypass surgery is so common not because it's effective, but because it's flashy (a real power trip to hold someone's beating heart in your hands), financially rewarding for the surgeon, and the patient doesn't have to pick up the tab (uninsured people don't have bypass surgery).
We're human beings; we take care of each other because we sympathize and empathize.
When my grandmother had cancer, I helped take care of her... Which included regular visits to the clinic for "treatment". By that time, my 87-year old Grandmother had lived her life, and was simply "going through the motions", pretending that she was trying to get better for the sake of her husband and children. Of course, Grandma didn't care what her treatment cost because Medicare and her supplemental insurance were paying for it. Mayo Clinic didn't care what their services cost either, because the federal government was picking up most of the tab.
Grandma's stint with conventional (pharmaceutical) cancer treatment lasted six months, exactly the time that her doctor said she would survive without his therapies. Perhaps the treatment gave her a few extra months, perhaps it killed her off even quicker (by destroying her immune system). Since I was around so much, I know she was miserable for most that time. Never heard a final figure, but it was probably between $50k and $100k - quite a bill for no benefit whatsoever.
Medicare picking up the tab was not compassionate, sympathetic, or empathetic. These are personal qualities, of families caring for each other. I argue that, because Medicare pays for high-tech medicine, and not "proper nutrition", the suffering of my grandmother was increased. (Grandma's doctor sent her to a nutritionist at the outset. "She wanted me to eat five servings of vegetables a day. She's CRAZY!").
My grandfather's in a similar situation: had a seizure/"heart attack" of some sort three years ago. Doctors decided he'd benefit from a defibrillator. His bill for that episode totaled around $100k... Three years later he's still alive, but now that Grandma's gone he's just waiting to die. His heart would've given out, if not for the artificial pacemaking functionality. He's anxiously waiting for the day that the defibrillator's battery is depleted.
Compassion is caring for your own familiy member when they're sick, or volunteering at a charity hospital for the poor. Charity took care of the poor's medical needs before the government stepped to the plate with Medicaid, otherwise known as "wellfare for doctors and medical equipment manufacturers" (an MRI machine costs $1-4 million).
Medicare is cruel to old people, and has made medical services for the rest of us exhorbitantly expensive. The high prices won't last forever, the healthcare system will collapse soon enough of its own accord, and we will return to a system that is affordable for most. Robert Zieve, M.D., has written some books on this coming transition to effective, affordable care.
I have to take special care of my upper back and neck since a car accident a few years ago.
this one's simple. Car accident induces "trauma" in the body's fascial (connective) tissue. If the body's stored trauma level is low, the new trauma is simply absorbed without any other symptoms. Every body has a carrying capacity for "trauma", and as long as that cup is less than full there are no problems. But as soon as the body's trauma carrying capacity is exceeded, symptoms will result.
The solution is simply to "empty the cup". All the crutches in the world (you mention mattress, pillow, MSM/glucosamine chondrotin, getting up every once in a while) are ineffective so long as the body is "stiffened" from traumas previously incurred. Cranial manipulation is the best method I've found... Either Cranial Osteopathy or Cranio-Sacral Therapy (from a Registered Cranio-Sacral Therapist [RCST]).
I've some comments on osteopathy in my comment history, so you might want to subscribe and browse the older ones (surely #'s 24-48 will have at least one, and the first one you find will link to even older comments...) for more on my experience thereof.
Your explanation seems to be that hundreds, or probably thousands of people in government got together to fake these attacks to scare the populace.
Only a handful in positions of control were needed in the U.S. government. Most all the military would not have been in on the attack, as even though soldiers are trained to obey the chain of command, the perpetrators could not count on widespread treason amongst soldiers sworn to protect and defend the nited states. The dirty work of seeting explosives was likely caried out by foreigners - perhaps the Mossad set the explosives. But I am getting into conjecture here. There are only a few people who really know what happened on 9/11 - the ones who planned and executed the attacks. The rest of us base our speculations on the reports we've read, or the information personally uncovered in their investigations. And even the investigators are working with an incomplete understanding of what went on that day.
I am well aware of the failings of objective reality
Objective reality has no failings, it just is.:).
Do you seriously believe that a few thousand of your own citizens got together to kill their own people with a bizzare method?
I believe it was a handful of traitors (GWB & his puppeteers) with foreigners to do the dirty work - setting the explosives, hijacking the planes, setting decoys/patsies, etc. You believe the entirety of the day in question was planned and perpetrated by "al Qaeda terrorists". Neither of us (I'm assuming something here...) has any personal evidence or direct experience one way or the other. Again, what do you want to believe? (The rest of this paragraph [unquoted] is speculation on the question quoted above... perhaps it is an example of the strawman rhetorical fallacy?)
At the very least I hope you watch the Penn and Teller episode. In fact, I hope you watch that show on a regular basis.
OK, Here's the deal. Penn Jillette says I can cure cancer. It sure didn't come from me, and when I was filmed for their show last year they didn't even interview me about health issues. To take it a sleazy step further, he claims that I tell people to STOP seeing their doctor when they have cancer and I take all their money as they lay on their death bed.
Quite a claim to make on my behalf. Especially for someone who is winning Emmys for a show that is supposed to expose the truth. If you make stuff up, that does NOT make it true, but people do believe what they see on TV.
Most magicians are skeptics because they make a living deciving people. And if you have an open enough mind, check out those books I listed too.
I will agree that James Randi makes a living deceiving people. That story has several comments from people who've met or have had other interactions with the man (I have not - my comment in that story was simply an amalgamation of several different reports I've heard & read from "people who can", to give voice to a minority view amongst slashdot readers). They report that Mr. Randi's game is rigged, and that the prize money is a publicity stunt.
Skepticism is not easy, and it can be really hard to have some of your most well founded beliefs turned on their head. It is not for everyone.
My personal experience makes "skepticism" (as a belief system rooted in materialism) an intellectually dishonest proposition. I've personally had several experiences which are inexplicable from a materialistic framework. On the other hand, they are quite logical when viewed with a vitalistic overview. Suffice it to say that Occam's Razor supports my vita
I believe what can be proven to me. Loose Change is easially disproven. Much of the "facts" put forward are done in a manner inconsistent with the real data. The author cherry picks the points that support his position, and neglects to tell you the stuff that counters it.
You brought up loose change, not I. Elements of Loose Change may have been discredited, but it is a logical fallacy to dismiss the proposition (9/11 was a conspiracy involving rogue elements of the U.S. government, among others) because of the presentation (a "swiss cheese documentary").
Science works by proving falsehoods, not by "proving facts". Correlations and anecdotal evidence alert us to the need to investigate. Because the perpetrators covered their tracks fairly well, the physical evidence which would definitively prove WTC 1, 2 & 7 were brought down by explosives has largely been destroyed (WTC steel -> india for recycling before analysis could be performed, etc). Careful analysis of video and photographic evidence, such as that undertaken in 9/11 Eyewitness and at wtc7.net, show that the official story is bogus, no matter whether you get it from Bullshitters, a magazine, or George Bush himself.
[note: I've only just discovered 9/11 eyewitness, because of your link to wtc7.net, and as of this writing, I've only watched the first 55 minutes or so. Thus far it has no conjecture, just analysis of video of the collapses taken from the New Jersey shore. Thanks for pointing it out for me.:]
and I come down on the same side as Popular Mechanics.
Like you said, "it is easy to pick and choose what fits you theory, and discard what does not."
The phenomenon is known as a Reality Tunnel, or the set of beliefs we filter our experience of objective reality through. I have believed the Federal Government had gone feral long before 9/11, and the actions thereof following that day have only served to confirm my belief. It is true that this belief predisposes me to the conspiracy proposition. From my perspective, the conspiracy is larger than the 9/11 attacks... Most of the major historical events of the 20th century fit into the conspiracy somehow, or so my readings seem to indicate... But that's another post.:)
The link above says this about PM: "The people at Popular Mechanics know how to manipulate media; they are Hearst Publications the creator of 'Yellow Journalism'." Recall that William Randolph Hearst used his newspaper to inflame the Spanish-American war. Now I'm not saying that the current editors of PM are tools, just that it seems like a possibility, to me.
"you know I don't go for the official story because it's got so many holes. And I can't really go to much for those radical stories because they got, they're so shocking it drives me nuts. So... but I know there's grains of truth in everything there, and..."
-Rick Siegel, 9/11 Eyewitness, 48:11
I spend my time looking for grains of truth, because tiny grains hold the keys to the puzzle.
If you actually read the site you've linked to, you'll find that while they do examine Loose Change "blow by blow", it can hardly be considered a "debunking". The authors of this page examine each of the points made in the movie, and categorize them with "lead slugs", "nickels" and "gold coins". Lead slugs are distractions from the truth (and the film gets a lot of them), nickels are points that are valid but could've been made better, and points given a gold coins are the ones that get to the heart of the 9/11 conspiracy.
Now you may prefer to believe the government's story. I don't trust "the government" (mainly because I resent being locked up in their school for 13 years, but that's another comment,here, for example), and therefore take anything a "government official" says with healthy grain of skepticism.
Let's look at some of the points from the film that are given gold coins:
00:03:12 1999. NORAD begins conducting exercises in which hijacked airliners are flown into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
00:03:20 June, 2000. The Department of Justice releases a terrorism manual, with the World Trade Center in crosshairs.
If the government had been planning for jets being flown into the towers and pentagon for years, how could the response when "the real thing" happened have been so... tardy?
July 24th, 2001. Larry A. Silverstein, who already owned World Trade Center 7, signs a 3.2 billion dollar, 99-year lease on the entire World Trade Center complex, six weeks before 9-11. Included in the lease is a 3.5 billion dollar insurance policy specifically covering acts of terrorism.
That's quite a turnaround in your investment... Put out two months of lease payments, and get $3.5 billion back.
Believe what you want. I think a conspiracy makes subsequent events make a lot more sense.
The two worst terrorist attacks in American history were carried out with 1) a couple of hijacked airliners (full of jet fuel) that were forced to crash into buildings and 2) a truck load of fertilizer.
What about the building that imploded without the assistance of an airliner? I think it's clear that pre-planted explosives brought down WTC7, and if that's the case, it's likely that explosives brought down the twin towers too. Especially considering that a 767 isn't much bigger than a 707, and the towers were designed to take a strike from a fully loaded 707.
There's also a good case that there were multiplebombs in Oklahoma City too...
Conclusion
The Murrah Federal Building was not destroyed by one sole truck bomb. The major factor in its destruction appears to have been detonation of explosives carefully placed at four critical junctures on supporting columns within the building.
The only possible reinforced concrete structural failure solely attributable to the truck bomb was the stripping out of the ceilings of the first and second floors in the "pit" area behind columns B4 and By. Even this may have been caused by a demolition charge at column B3.
It is truly unfortunate that a separate and independent bomb damage assessment was not made during the cleanup__before the building was demolished on May 23 and hundreds of truck loads of debris were hauled away, smashed down, and covered with dirt behind a security fence.
When the picture at Tab 4 was made, all evidence of demolition charges had been removed from the building site (i.e., the stubs of columns B3, A3, A5, A7 and the demolished junctures at the header with columns A3, A5 and A7.
All ambiguity with respect to the use of supplementing demolition charges and the type of truck used could be quickly resolved in the FBI were required to release the surveillance camera coverage of this terribly tragic event.
(from General Partin's conclusion at second link above, emphasis added)
There are also thousands of pictures and videos from the WTC site that are classified. If planes really brought down the towers, why would such classification be necessary? Also, just like in Oklahoma City, all the evidence from the WTC site was destroyed as quickly as possible. They could've saved the steel for analysis, and we'd know whether or not thermite (or some other explosive) was used to cut the core columns.
I'm starting to hear that approx 75% of the police and firefighters who were on scene that day now believe in a government coverup. Or maybe they're just bitter about being lied to by the EPA (toxic dust)...
p.s. liked your post about why chemical weapon warnings are fearmongering. thanks for sharing.
Glad to hear that you liked the essay. Gatto turned it into chapter 1 of his first book, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling. He's written several other books, including The Underground History of American Education, which is available for free at johntaylorgatto.com. I've A different kind of teacher too, and recommend all three.
There's also some videos available at www.edflix.org/gatto.htm
Nice to know that this morning's comment made a difference for someone. Thx.:)
The simple reality is that people have different interests, and if you want to encourage your children to put down their gameboys you have to find activities that they find interesting, not activities you find interesting and simply want to force them into enjoying. So lay off [d]espairing at their lack of interests when you don't even know what their interests are.
I think it's important to also note that the government's compulsory schooling system treats all children the same, no matter their interests. John Holt realized while team teaching in the 1950's that most of his students were bored and frightened - bored because they didn't care about the current lesson, and frightened because the authority figure was making demands of them. According to Holt, the children were intent only on trying to figure out what the teacher wanted, and whether they should try to give it to them.
Holt wrote a couple books - How Children Fail (1964!), How Children Learn, What Do I Do Monday?, etc. At first he tried to fix the schools. Then he gave up, and became an advocate of "unschooling", where the child chooses what and how they want to learn. Doesn't work for all children, but it does work spectacularly well for many.
I myself was tied down for years in "school" - 11 years of government schools, 2 years of private high school, 3.5 years at the university. On the one hand, I'm kinda bitter about all the time I was locked up, but on the other, I realize that it's hard to appreciate spring without a long, cold winter.
Also see Gatto's Seven Lesson Schoolteacher: "The third lesson I teach kids is indifference. I teach children not to care about anything too much, even though they want to make it appear that they do. How I do this is very subtle..."
people who deny the housing bubble haven't been paying attention to the real world.
That's why I gave the link to thehousingbubbleblog.com - so you could read reports from the real world that indicate the US housing market is in big big trouble.
it doesnt count as a burst if it simply a decline in the rate of growth (ie still a gain just less of a gain)
Frontpage at the above site right now:
"In the second quarter of 2006, one of every 66 households in the county was in some stage of foreclosure. 'Wages did not keep up with the appreciation of homes,' said Matt Revitte, a housing broker in Greeley. 'So many buyers bought into a multitude of loan products thinking the party wasn't going to end. But it happened. It always happens.'"
"'They can't pay it because they haven't received the promotions or raises they were counting on at work. They can't sell their house because too many similarly desperate people have also put their houses on the market, and at super-low prices in their rush to unload. 'Now panic starts to set in,' Realtytracs' Rick Sharga said. And with missed mortgage payments, here comes the bank."
I was refering to how children are historically indoctrinated in the government schools. Gatto says in one of his books that history used to be taught as a narative - this happened, which lead to this this and that.
But all I learned in the government school were random facts. "On July 4th, 1776 the declaration of indepedance was signed", and so on.
Maybe you can relate better to the present "war of terror". If most people understood the long history of western involvement in the middle east (In the last 500 years, there hasn't been more than 5 consecutive years without christian troops stationed in the area, according to Richard Maybury, who has seen the present WWIII/WWIV brewing for over 20 years), most of us in the united States couldn't have been tricked into invading Iraq and Afghanistan.
Their only drive is "usually" greed and self advancement and promotion.
But isn't that the nature of the corporate system? The officers of the corporation are legally required to maximize profits for shareholders, right? Let's see what Google says...:)
Hinkley explains, "Each of our fifty states has its own corporate law allowing corporations to be formed and establishing the rules for how such corporations are to operate. Each of these laws has something in common with each of the others. Each says that the only goal of corporations formed in that jurisdiction is to maximize profits for shareholders. In effect, each state does something for corporations that it does not do for its individual citizens--it dictates their purpose. This purpose, the pursuit of corporate self-interest, drives all corporate action. Every act carried out by a corporate employee can be traced back to this purpose established in the corporate law."
Thus the courts created entities that could acquire vast resources over an indefinite life span. They could use these resources as they see fit, for the singular purpose of maximizing profits, without an accompanying set of values or principles that an individual would likely have to guide his actions. "This lack of values," Hinkley writes, "is in evidence every time a corporation makes money at the expense of the dignity of human beings, the welfare of our communities or the protection of our environment."
It is a group of people who usually lack the passion to drive the company for its business model.
The successor managers usually aren't able to execute the founder's vision, and this is especially the case if the successors are not family. Didn't the Hewlett (or was it Packard?) family fight the Compaq merger? As the founders of the company, Hewlett and Packard had the influence to graft principles onto their corporation. But once their shares were dispersed at their deaths, the family lost the power (and perhaps the will) to stand up to the state mandate to maximize profits.
Also witness the long, slow decline of General Motors following the parting of founder Billy Durant.
This is, incidentally, why China is going to win. They make plans for the future based on their sense of several thousand years of history, whereas we in the west only have a couple hundred years, and anything older than two or three generations is largely forgotten.
Let me clue you in, pal... if everyone abstained from credit cards whose income was highly vulnerable, the economy would tank and your comfortable, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps universe would collapse anyway. Our economy lives and dies by consumer credit card spending: it is that huge a factor.
Ah yes, the fabled "consumer economy". Mainstream Media tells us that it's alright that the other half of the economic equation, production, has mostly moved to China in recent decades (... due to mismanagement of the economy by the Federal Reserve, but that's another post). They say this transfer of production is alright because we now have a "service economy".
The main problem, as I see it, is that China doesn't much need our "services", and the U.S. economy is now in the process of collapsing (beginning with the housing bubble). There are consequences for record budget and trade deficits, you know.
The collapse of Ford and General Motors will mark the acceleration of the trend, as hundreds of thousands of Americans depend on those two giants for their paychecks. General Watch also chronicles the decline and fall of General Motors.
I myself am slowly running up the balance on my credit cards. Used to pay 'em off every month, but I'll need supplies for when the banking system goes, and there will be so many "bad debts" that I expect no one will come collecting. I'm not buying frivolous crap, mind you, just some bulk food items and other "stuff" I think will be useful.
I fault the American citizens for their purchasing and voting decisions.
don't blame "us" - "we're" just the sheep. Blame the criminals who legislated themselves a banking monopoly - that'd be the quasi-public "federal reserve" system.
Federal Reserve "prints" money to pay for the budget deficit. Printing money (monetary inflation) causes price inflation, and price inflation causes producers of goods to cut corners to keep their costs down, hopefully just a little while longer than their competitor.
In recent decades, the most popular "corner" to cut has been the corporation's american workforce. First it was low skill workers - textiles, shoes, etc. Little by little, outsourcing has worked its way up the supply chain, and today most consumer merchandise is produced in Asia.
The "federal reserve note" dollar will crash, as all fiat currencies eventually do. It shouldn't be too long - no more than a year, I'm sure. There are consequences for running record deficits, you know...
The good news is that the dollar crash will take out the families with "old money" too, and we can return to a more egalitarian economic system. It'll be rough, for a bit, but definitely worth it.
They're simply the most successful victims of the government schools. The majority of students hate school, Klebold and Harris did something about it. Not a very productive "something", but something none the less. Every so often I see a report of some poor kid plotting to "pull a columbine" on his/her fellow inmates, so they've obviously been an inspiration to some of the more disgruntled of the lot.
The real shame in the Klebold and Harris event is that only a few got the message. They blame the videogames (look - ontopic!:), or the culture, but never the compulsory school institution itself.
America Is Massified
Older American forms of schooling would never have been equal to the responsibility coal, steam, steel, and machinery laid upon them. As late as 1890, the duration of the average school year was twelve to twenty weeks. Even with that, school attendance hovered between 26 and 42 percent nationwide with the higher figure only in a few places like Salem, Massachusetts.
Yet America had to be massified, and quickly. Since the end of the nineteenth century, American government and big business had been fully committed, without public fanfare, to creating and maintaining a mass society. Mass society demands tight administration, close management to an extreme degree. Humanity becomes undependable, dangerous, childlike, and suicidal under such discipline. Holding this contradiction stable requires managers of systematic schooling to withdraw trust, to regard their clientele as hospital managers might think of potentially homicidal patients. Students, men under military discipline, and employees in post offices, hospitals, and other large systems are forced into a condition of less than complete sanity. They are dangerous,[4] as history has shown again and again.
There are three indisputable triumphs of mass society we need to acknowledge to understand its strength: first, mass production offers relative physical comfort to almost all--even the poor have food, shelter, television as a story-teller to raise the illusion of community; second, as a byproduct of intense personal surveillance in mass society (to provide a steady stream of data to the producing and regulating classes) a large measure of personal security is available; third, mass society offers a predictable world, one with few surprises--anxieties of uncertainty are replaced in mass society with a rise in ennui and indifference.
[4] When I first began to write this section, another of the long stream of post office massacres of recent years had just taken place in New Jersey. Vengeance by a disgruntled employee. In the same state a hospital attendant has been charged with murdering as many as a hundred of his patients by lethal injection, also a more common occurrence than we want to imagine, and two rich boys at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, the site of a much-boasted-of scientific management revolution in 1994, had shot and killed thirteen of their classmates before taking their own lives. Human variation cannot be pent up for long in enormous synthetic systems without striving to somehow assert the "I" of things. Massified populations cannot exercise self-control very well since they depend on constant oversight to behave as required. When external controls are removed, anything becomes possible.
This dead zone is "most likely caused by underwater volcanism along the Juan De Fuca Ridge, which is about 20% volcanic along its 500 mile length. Occassional volcanic eruptions occur along the Ridge (Rift) which can create gigantic megaplumes of hot mineral water. Could be there is very little oxygen in the plumes, it most likely would have reacted with the minerals, leaving dissolved oxygen at nil."
This paper is notable in that the author says that the change in ocean temperatures is what's driving the climate changes we're starting to take notice of. As you note, he says that he/believes/ that the change is due to the boogeyman of the day, "greenhouse gasses". What's important is not his analysis of the data, but the data itself, which clearly shows that the world's oceans have been heating up over the last 50+ years..
[13] Our discussion here has not been to minimize the impacts of warming of the lower atmosphere due to increasing greenhouse gases, we are simply placing Earth's heat balance in perspective. The response of the Earth's climate system to changes in radiative forcing is often cast as the response of the Earth's surface temperature to these forcings. This is understandable because we live at the Earth's surface and there has been a lack of subsurface ocean data with which to conduct Earth system heat balance studies. Improved scientific understanding requires that we study the response of all components of the Earth's heat balance, of which the world ocean is the dominant term.
(from pg 3 of the pdf linked to in gpp, emphasis added)
Increased volcanic activity is all over the news, but only if you know to watch for it.
There were reports that Mount Fuji in Japan didn't have any snow last winter, a volcano in Alaska that was erupting off and on for some time, Mt. St. Helens has been especially active over the last year, the dead zone off oregon, etc...
from my recent mailing list traffic:
BULLETIN ITEM: Dead Ocean Area Off Coast Of Oregon Continues
MWM: This is most likely caused by underwater volcanism along the Juan De Fuca Ridge, which is about 20% volcanic along its 500 mile length. Occassional volcanic eruptions occur along the Ridge (Rift) which can create gigantic megaplumes of hot mineral water. Could be there is very little oxygen in the plumes, it most likely would have reacted with the minerals, leaving dissolved oxygen at nil. If so, these is a hardbinger of what is likely to happen with greater frequency and magnitude as the Earth Changes accelerate.
The author of that bit said in another recent email:
Global Warming is unequivocably being caused by underwater volcanism which is heating the bottoms of the oceans which is changing currents and radiation and reflection characteristics of the oceans which is changing the climate regimes.
In March I could make strong claims related to such, but by spending more time slogging through the obscure sources of scientific information and reading between the lines, I CAN PROVE IT BEYOND A SHADOW OF A DOUBT. The oceanographers, bless them, for the most part do not undersand how the immensely important data they are sitting on adds up. I do and all of this is sitting in rough draft form in a new title, some 280 pages of text and graphs, called
Major World Trends 1875-2025: A Strategic Brief on Global Warming & The Eight Geophysical Changes Which Are Profoundly Altering The Earth
I am VERY INTERESTED IN SEEING THIS BOOK TAKEN BY A MASS PUBLISHER, PRODUCED IN SEVERAL LANGUAGES, AND TOWARDS THAT END I WILL ENTERTAIN A RELATIONSHIP WITH AN AGENT. I VASTLY PREFER WEST COAST OR EUROPEAN RELATIONSHIPS, FRANKLY I AM ADVERSE TO DEALING WITH NEW YORK BUBBLEBRAINS.
As the book hasn't been published yet, I'm disinclined to share the source, as the materialist slashdot moderators will slander me for the messenger (who's definitely in the 'vitalist' camp), and not the message he's discovered...
Oil is still a dirty, dirty business, and we'll all be better off once we're free of the stuff. But better to crucify it on its real demerits, and not on false charges.
The dead zone off the Oregon coast, last season's record-breaking hurricane season, the 2004 super-quake in the Indian Ocean, changes in long-standing weather patterns (because of the change in heat distribution in the oceans) - all are signals of increased techtonic activity.
I don't see how it's possible today to argue that our children don't need exposure to computing to succeed.
Tacking "computers" onto the existing public school system will certainly prevent most children from ever becoming an expert in the field.
*ding* "okay class, time to put down your english books. We're going 'learn computers' now." 50 minutes later: *ding* "enough computers, time for History! Let's all get excited about History!"
(This is Gatto's third lesson: indifference. "Nothing important is ever finished in my class, nor in any other class I know of. Students never have a complete experience except on the installment plan.")
When you say that children need "exposure" to computers, that seems to indicate to me that you think they some kind of formal introduction. My computer learning experiences were a process of discovery; all the computer "lessons" and "classes" I had in the government's schools were mostly worthless. If all they did was "here's a computer, look what I can do with it, have fun" that'd be one thing. But that's NOT how the government "exposes" topics in their child-prisons. First there are lessons, and then there are tests to grade the student's intake of the material. Then the kids who don't care about the topic are put in remedial classes, and thus begins the downward spiral...
Computers are snake oil, offered by politicians as a fix to the structural problems in their schools. The only fix needed is to restore freedom to the educational process. Let the children pick what they want to learn about, and how they want to learn it.
Depression is frequently the pysiological result of unhealthy thought patterns.
In my experience, less-than-ideal mental health is the result of disrupted physiology in the brain.
To make a less-than-perfect analogy, suppose you have a DirecTV satellite dish, and it only works sometimes. You check the wiring, change the receivers, but still - nothing helps it to work all the time. So you call an expert out, and he takes a look at the dish itself. "Well, there's your problem. It's filled with metal shavings, and there's a huge-ass dent in the parabolic surface that further scatters the satellite signal." The expert sprays out the metal shavings, and pulls out his trusty hammer to put the dish back like it should be. Magically, the satellite receiver starts to work just like it should.
Drugs treat the physical symptoms and therapy treats the psychological problems.
But if you only treat the chemical symptom and don't Address the Physical Problem (disrupted brain physiology, which is what my post was about), the psychological problems are much more difficult to treat. When the physical problem is resolved (NOT "treated" with drugs), the undesirable behavior will frequently just go away, or at the very least, significantly decreases in severity.
I personally suffered from depression combined with panic disorder that set in approximately two years ago. Since then I have been taking Lexapro which effectively treated my depression and continues to treat my panic disorder.
So you were fine for years & years, and then two years ago everything changed and you've been on anti-depressants ever since? This is why us anti-pharmaceutical types get all hot under the collar when people say that some people are just broken, and need the benefits of modern drugs.
I myself have had great success controlling compulsive behavior with Cranial Osteopathic treatments (see case #10). After a few visits the doctor was like, "fixed your misshappen head" (I'd had a blow to the chin 7 years before, don't remember 2 weeks, and ever since I'd always thought that something didn't seem quite right about my head, but I didn't realize what it was), then a few weeks later, "finally got your head working right - when I first started working with you, it was like a disorganized bag of sand." Something about restoring proper cerebro-spinal fluid flow in the brain...
Met a psychologist years ago that said she had much, much better results with her clients when she sent them for cranio-sacral therapy (non-monopoly cranial osteopathic manipulation) and "Network Spinal Analysis" (a gentle offshoot of chiropractic) too.
Then there's always 'accupuncture' for emotions, which has worked mircales for hundreds of thousands of people.
And there's also the old standby, Hypnosis.
I'm of the opinion that antidepressants just cover up the actual problem, analogous to giving someone who's just broken their leg Morphine for the pain, but not bothering to set and cast it so the bones can heal properly.
Slashdot Mirror
Newsflash: U.S. economy is in BIG trouble.
... circa 2002/2003, and reached its peak summer 2005. Crashes always follow bubbles, and the current real estate market is no exception.
:)
Short history lesson: Federal reserve started to inflate the money supply in early 1995 (blue line in the graph). The 'tech bubble' followed a couple years later. That trend wasn't sustainable, and the dot-coms bombed sometime in 2000/2001. The economy was well on its way to a recession by late-summer/fall 2001. The Federal Reserve responded to "9/11" by cutting interest rates to 1% (over several months), supposedly for the purpose of 'stimulating' the economy.
Newsflash: Mismanagement of the U.S. currency has caused half of the economic equation, production, to move to Asia and Mexico, either in search of lower wages or to flee rising U.S. costs. This is not a new phenomena, and has been ongoing since the 1970's, though it is only recently (circa-2001) that that trend has accelerated to a completely unsustainable level. Cisco assembled their wireless access points in the U.S., and Intel made motherboards in Silicon Valley up until 1999/2000 or so. What happened to the Americans who used to be employed assembling motherboards and other electronics? Perhaps some of them moved to finance, and some to auto sales. But I digress...
Thus, when the Fed slashed interest rates starting in 2001, instead of entrepreneurs borrowing money to set up new production lines, individuals borrowed money to buy a bigger house. And an investment house. And a condo in the mountains. The widely-proclaimed 'housing bubble' started to take off
Low interest rates also facilitated GM's 0% financing "keep america rolling" sales campaign. (don't remember what Ford & Chrysler called their corresponding 0% programs). But now Ford and General Motors are in trouble, because they can't sell new cars to customers whose credit line is maxed out.
Gonna get ugly, folks. The good news is that this coming transition marks the end of corporate wage-slavery. The economic system that will arise from the ashes will be founded with something along the lines of worker cooperatives. This is the worker benefiting from their own labor. No more slaving away to pay the "shareholders" dividends (mostly rich dudes who sit on their lazy asses and parasitically live off the working class).
John Gatto's book about the 'massification' of America fits in here too. Gatto maintains that the original american ideal was an independent livelihood. Blacksmith, farmer, woodworker, wheelmaker, etc. Mass production / standardization required government schools to produce a populace who would accept working a repetive job where someone else ("shareholder") was the primary beneficiary. Fun while it lasted, right?
Also see my recent comment, how the government spins the stats.
I needed examples of military actions to fill in the timeline between Vietnam and Gulf War I. I'm just an armchair historian, so there probably are better choices.
/guarantee/ you'll find that country was involved in military conflicts more or less continuously throughout that period.
You name a country and a period of history when it was a major player on the world political stage, and I'll
I believe this is the contention of The Rise and Fall of Great Powers. Economic power leads to the use of the military to protect trade routes, and the use of the military grows like cancer until the power finally fails.
Grenada and Panama? War? Hardly.
Military actions. I'm sure there are better examples, but those are what I remembered.
Yugoslavia? Wasn't the US criticized roundly for NOT getting involved until too late, and only then half-heartedly?
I don't think we'll ever know the full story on Yugoslavia. I'm inclined to believe the reports that Slobodan Milosevi was going to win his war crimes trial, and was executed to prevent him from calling Bill Clinton as a witness. Wikipedia has a good summary of people who defend Milosevi's actions.
There's also some rumor about the CIA using "al Qaeda" to stir up the Balkan war.
All are examples of U.S. meddling on the far side of the ocean.
Just part of the cycle of power. See The Rise and Fall of Great Powers, a 1987 book about said cycle (summary is last 7 paragraphs). Economic power fosters military power; military power creates special interests, who use their newfound power to accumulate more.
to more directly answer your question:
When exactly did corporate lobbyists BECOME our government?
Post-WWII, certainly, but perhaps earlier. Before then "lobbyists" had to be more secretive... A lot of companies became rich on the second world war trade, and the U.S. has been at war ever since - Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Gulf War I, Yugoslavia, Gulf War II (probably forgetting a couple).
There's also that perpetual "War on (certain) Drugs", which benefits some corporations greatly.
Isn't there a saying about a country with a standing army always needing an enemy to fight?
See Shadow Statistics for more on how the government cooks the economic reports.
US Trade Deficit: When the Sausage comes home to Roost has some good discussion on the coming consequences of the trade deficit, and how we got here. Particularly pertinent is the section at the end about the 1987 book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, and how the U.S. has definitively entered the "fall" stage of the power cycle.
But as you seem to indicate, few people seem to know that the federal reserve system is at the root of our poor nation's economic struggle. See the 1983 book The Misdirection Conspiracy: Or Who Really Killed the American Dream for a good history behind how the banking class (not your friendly neighborhood banker, but the Rockerfellers/Morgans/other globalist shysters) are sucking the lifeblood from the working class.
Also worth mentioning that Michael Mandeville, author of The Coming Economic Collapse Of 2006 (2003) says that the predicted collapse is well underway. The current trouble at Ford and General Motors marks an acceleration of the decline.
The present economic calamity was, of course, set in stone as soon as Nixon closed the gold window back in 1971, removing all incumbrances to out-of-control monetary growth (monetary inflation), or perhaps even as early as the establishment of the Federal Reserve system in 1913... See 1970's, redux for more on how globalization & the federal reserve bleeds america dry.
If a bottle of asprin results in her passing away but the bypass gives her 20 years more life, then (adjusting for inflation, etc) she merely has to generate $1,000 more wealth each year than she consumes for the operation to be "worth it".
Except for the fact that, more often than not, bypass surgery kills the patient. I clipped an article about a newspaper guy who died three weeks after his bypass surgery. One medical researcher says that bypass surgery belongs in the medical archives. Bypass surgery is so common not because it's effective, but because it's flashy (a real power trip to hold someone's beating heart in your hands), financially rewarding for the surgeon, and the patient doesn't have to pick up the tab (uninsured people don't have bypass surgery).
We're human beings; we take care of each other because we sympathize and empathize.
When my grandmother had cancer, I helped take care of her... Which included regular visits to the clinic for "treatment". By that time, my 87-year old Grandmother had lived her life, and was simply "going through the motions", pretending that she was trying to get better for the sake of her husband and children. Of course, Grandma didn't care what her treatment cost because Medicare and her supplemental insurance were paying for it. Mayo Clinic didn't care what their services cost either, because the federal government was picking up most of the tab.
Grandma's stint with conventional (pharmaceutical) cancer treatment lasted six months, exactly the time that her doctor said she would survive without his therapies. Perhaps the treatment gave her a few extra months, perhaps it killed her off even quicker (by destroying her immune system). Since I was around so much, I know she was miserable for most that time. Never heard a final figure, but it was probably between $50k and $100k - quite a bill for no benefit whatsoever.
Medicare picking up the tab was not compassionate, sympathetic, or empathetic. These are personal qualities, of families caring for each other. I argue that, because Medicare pays for high-tech medicine, and not "proper nutrition", the suffering of my grandmother was increased. (Grandma's doctor sent her to a nutritionist at the outset. "She wanted me to eat five servings of vegetables a day. She's CRAZY!").
My grandfather's in a similar situation: had a seizure/"heart attack" of some sort three years ago. Doctors decided he'd benefit from a defibrillator. His bill for that episode totaled around $100k... Three years later he's still alive, but now that Grandma's gone he's just waiting to die. His heart would've given out, if not for the artificial pacemaking functionality. He's anxiously waiting for the day that the defibrillator's battery is depleted.
Compassion is caring for your own familiy member when they're sick, or volunteering at a charity hospital for the poor. Charity took care of the poor's medical needs before the government stepped to the plate with Medicaid, otherwise known as "wellfare for doctors and medical equipment manufacturers" (an MRI machine costs $1-4 million).
Medicare is cruel to old people, and has made medical services for the rest of us exhorbitantly expensive. The high prices won't last forever, the healthcare system will collapse soon enough of its own accord, and we will return to a system that is affordable for most. Robert Zieve, M.D., has written some books on this coming transition to effective, affordable care.
I have to take special care of my upper back and neck since a car accident a few years ago.
this one's simple. Car accident induces "trauma" in the body's fascial (connective) tissue. If the body's stored trauma level is low, the new trauma is simply absorbed without any other symptoms. Every body has a carrying capacity for "trauma", and as long as that cup is less than full there are no problems. But as soon as the body's trauma carrying capacity is exceeded, symptoms will result.
The solution is simply to "empty the cup". All the crutches in the world (you mention mattress, pillow, MSM/glucosamine chondrotin, getting up every once in a while) are ineffective so long as the body is "stiffened" from traumas previously incurred. Cranial manipulation is the best method I've found... Either Cranial Osteopathy or Cranio-Sacral Therapy (from a Registered Cranio-Sacral Therapist [RCST]).
See The Nature of Trauma and Osteopathic Treatment Questions. (Both these doctors use an advanced form of cranial manipulation known as the Biodynamic model...)
I've some comments on osteopathy in my comment history, so you might want to subscribe and browse the older ones (surely #'s 24-48 will have at least one, and the first one you find will link to even older comments...) for more on my experience thereof.
Only a handful in positions of control were needed in the U.S. government. Most all the military would not have been in on the attack, as even though soldiers are trained to obey the chain of command, the perpetrators could not count on widespread treason amongst soldiers sworn to protect and defend the nited states. The dirty work of seeting explosives was likely caried out by foreigners - perhaps the Mossad set the explosives. But I am getting into conjecture here. There are only a few people who really know what happened on 9/11 - the ones who planned and executed the attacks. The rest of us base our speculations on the reports we've read, or the information personally uncovered in their investigations. And even the investigators are working with an incomplete understanding of what went on that day.
I am well aware of the failings of objective reality
Objective reality has no failings, it just is.
Do you seriously believe that a few thousand of your own citizens got together to kill their own people with a bizzare method?
I believe it was a handful of traitors (GWB & his puppeteers) with foreigners to do the dirty work - setting the explosives, hijacking the planes, setting decoys/patsies, etc. You believe the entirety of the day in question was planned and perpetrated by "al Qaeda terrorists". Neither of us (I'm assuming something here...) has any personal evidence or direct experience one way or the other. Again, what do you want to believe? (The rest of this paragraph [unquoted] is speculation on the question quoted above... perhaps it is an example of the strawman rhetorical fallacy?)
At the very least I hope you watch the Penn and Teller episode. In fact, I hope you watch that show on a regular basis.
Penn and Teller have no credibility with me, because someone I respect was slandered by their show.
Most magicians are skeptics because they make a living deciving people. And if you have an open enough mind, check out those books I listed too.
I will agree that James Randi makes a living deceiving people. That story has several comments from people who've met or have had other interactions with the man (I have not - my comment in that story was simply an amalgamation of several different reports I've heard & read from "people who can", to give voice to a minority view amongst slashdot readers). They report that Mr. Randi's game is rigged, and that the prize money is a publicity stunt.
Skepticism is not easy, and it can be really hard to have some of your most well founded beliefs turned on their head. It is not for everyone.
My personal experience makes "skepticism" (as a belief system rooted in materialism) an intellectually dishonest proposition. I've personally had several experiences which are inexplicable from a materialistic framework. On the other hand, they are quite logical when viewed with a vitalistic overview. Suffice it to say that Occam's Razor supports my vita
You brought up loose change, not I. Elements of Loose Change may have been discredited, but it is a logical fallacy to dismiss the proposition (9/11 was a conspiracy involving rogue elements of the U.S. government, among others) because of the presentation (a "swiss cheese documentary").
Science works by proving falsehoods, not by "proving facts". Correlations and anecdotal evidence alert us to the need to investigate. Because the perpetrators covered their tracks fairly well, the physical evidence which would definitively prove WTC 1, 2 & 7 were brought down by explosives has largely been destroyed (WTC steel -> india for recycling before analysis could be performed, etc). Careful analysis of video and photographic evidence, such as that undertaken in 9/11 Eyewitness and at wtc7.net, show that the official story is bogus, no matter whether you get it from Bullshitters, a magazine, or George Bush himself.
[note: I've only just discovered 9/11 eyewitness, because of your link to wtc7.net, and as of this writing, I've only watched the first 55 minutes or so. Thus far it has no conjecture, just analysis of video of the collapses taken from the New Jersey shore. Thanks for pointing it out for me.
and I come down on the same side as Popular Mechanics.
Like you said, "it is easy to pick and choose what fits you theory, and discard what does not."
The phenomenon is known as a Reality Tunnel, or the set of beliefs we filter our experience of objective reality through. I have believed the Federal Government had gone feral long before 9/11, and the actions thereof following that day have only served to confirm my belief. It is true that this belief predisposes me to the conspiracy proposition. From my perspective, the conspiracy is larger than the 9/11 attacks... Most of the major historical events of the 20th century fit into the conspiracy somehow, or so my readings seem to indicate... But that's another post.
The link above says this about PM: "The people at Popular Mechanics know how to manipulate media; they are Hearst Publications the creator of 'Yellow Journalism'." Recall that William Randolph Hearst used his newspaper to inflame the Spanish-American war. Now I'm not saying that the current editors of PM are tools, just that it seems like a possibility, to me.
I spend my time looking for grains of truth, because tiny grains hold the keys to the puzzle.
http://911research.wtc7.net/reviews/loose_change/
If you actually read the site you've linked to, you'll find that while they do examine Loose Change "blow by blow", it can hardly be considered a "debunking". The authors of this page examine each of the points made in the movie, and categorize them with "lead slugs", "nickels" and "gold coins". Lead slugs are distractions from the truth (and the film gets a lot of them), nickels are points that are valid but could've been made better, and points given a gold coins are the ones that get to the heart of the 9/11 conspiracy.
Now you may prefer to believe the government's story. I don't trust "the government" (mainly because I resent being locked up in their school for 13 years, but that's another comment,here, for example), and therefore take anything a "government official" says with healthy grain of skepticism.
Let's look at some of the points from the film that are given gold coins:
If the government had been planning for jets being flown into the towers and pentagon for years, how could the response when "the real thing" happened have been so... tardy?
That's quite a turnaround in your investment... Put out two months of lease payments, and get $3.5 billion back.
Believe what you want. I think a conspiracy makes subsequent events make a lot more sense.
What about the building that imploded without the assistance of an airliner? I think it's clear that pre-planted explosives brought down WTC7, and if that's the case, it's likely that explosives brought down the twin towers too. Especially considering that a 767 isn't much bigger than a 707, and the towers were designed to take a strike from a fully loaded 707.
There's also a good case that there were multiple bombs in Oklahoma City too...
There are also thousands of pictures and videos from the WTC site that are classified. If planes really brought down the towers, why would such classification be necessary? Also, just like in Oklahoma City, all the evidence from the WTC site was destroyed as quickly as possible. They could've saved the steel for analysis, and we'd know whether or not thermite (or some other explosive) was used to cut the core columns.
I'm starting to hear that approx 75% of the police and firefighters who were on scene that day now believe in a government coverup. Or maybe they're just bitter about being lied to by the EPA (toxic dust)...
p.s. liked your post about why chemical weapon warnings are fearmongering. thanks for sharing.
Glad to hear that you liked the essay. Gatto turned it into chapter 1 of his first book, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling. He's written several other books, including The Underground History of American Education, which is available for free at johntaylorgatto.com. I've A different kind of teacher too, and recommend all three.
:)
There's also some videos available at www.edflix.org/gatto.htm
Nice to know that this morning's comment made a difference for someone. Thx.
Great story. Thanks for sharing it.
The simple reality is that people have different interests, and if you want to encourage your children to put down their gameboys you have to find activities that they find interesting, not activities you find interesting and simply want to force them into enjoying. So lay off [d]espairing at their lack of interests when you don't even know what their interests are.
I think it's important to also note that the government's compulsory schooling system treats all children the same, no matter their interests. John Holt realized while team teaching in the 1950's that most of his students were bored and frightened - bored because they didn't care about the current lesson, and frightened because the authority figure was making demands of them. According to Holt, the children were intent only on trying to figure out what the teacher wanted, and whether they should try to give it to them.
Holt wrote a couple books - How Children Fail (1964!), How Children Learn, What Do I Do Monday?, etc. At first he tried to fix the schools. Then he gave up, and became an advocate of "unschooling", where the child chooses what and how they want to learn. Doesn't work for all children, but it does work spectacularly well for many.
I myself was tied down for years in "school" - 11 years of government schools, 2 years of private high school, 3.5 years at the university. On the one hand, I'm kinda bitter about all the time I was locked up, but on the other, I realize that it's hard to appreciate spring without a long, cold winter.
Also see Gatto's Seven Lesson Schoolteacher: "The third lesson I teach kids is indifference. I teach children
not to care about anything too much, even though they want to make it
appear that they do. How I do this is very subtle..."
That's why I gave the link to thehousingbubbleblog.com - so you could read reports from the real world that indicate the US housing market is in big big trouble.
it doesnt count as a burst if it simply a decline in the rate of growth (ie still a gain just less of a gain)
Frontpage at the above site right now:
I was refering to how children are historically indoctrinated in the government schools. Gatto says in one of his books that history used to be taught as a narative - this happened, which lead to this this and that.
But all I learned in the government school were random facts. "On July 4th, 1776 the declaration of indepedance was signed", and so on.
Maybe you can relate better to the present "war of terror". If most people understood the long history of western involvement in the middle east (In the last 500 years, there hasn't been more than 5 consecutive years without christian troops stationed in the area, according to Richard Maybury, who has seen the present WWIII/WWIV brewing for over 20 years), most of us in the united States couldn't have been tricked into invading Iraq and Afghanistan.
But isn't that the nature of the corporate system? The officers of the corporation are legally required to maximize profits for shareholders, right? Let's see what Google says...
It is a group of people who usually lack the passion to drive the company for its business model.
The successor managers usually aren't able to execute the founder's vision, and this is especially the case if the successors are not family. Didn't the Hewlett (or was it Packard?) family fight the Compaq merger? As the founders of the company, Hewlett and Packard had the influence to graft principles onto their corporation. But once their shares were dispersed at their deaths, the family lost the power (and perhaps the will) to stand up to the state mandate to maximize profits.
Also witness the long, slow decline of General Motors following the parting of founder Billy Durant.
This is, incidentally, why China is going to win. They make plans for the future based on their sense of several thousand years of history, whereas we in the west only have a couple hundred years, and anything older than two or three generations is largely forgotten.
Let me clue you in, pal... if everyone abstained from credit cards whose income was highly vulnerable, the economy would tank and your comfortable, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps universe would collapse anyway. Our economy lives and dies by consumer credit card spending: it is that huge a factor.
Ah yes, the fabled "consumer economy". Mainstream Media tells us that it's alright that the other half of the economic equation, production, has mostly moved to China in recent decades (... due to mismanagement of the economy by the Federal Reserve, but that's another post). They say this transfer of production is alright because we now have a "service economy".
The main problem, as I see it, is that China doesn't much need our "services", and the U.S. economy is now in the process of collapsing (beginning with the housing bubble). There are consequences for record budget and trade deficits, you know.
The collapse of Ford and General Motors will mark the acceleration of the trend, as hundreds of thousands of Americans depend on those two giants for their paychecks. General Watch also chronicles the decline and fall of General Motors.
Other sites whose economic analysis I've come to appreciate include The Daily Reckoning and Mish's Global Economic Analysis.
I myself am slowly running up the balance on my credit cards. Used to pay 'em off every month, but I'll need supplies for when the banking system goes, and there will be so many "bad debts" that I expect no one will come collecting. I'm not buying frivolous crap, mind you, just some bulk food items and other "stuff" I think will be useful.
I fault the American citizens for their purchasing and voting decisions.
don't blame "us" - "we're" just the sheep. Blame the criminals who legislated themselves a banking monopoly - that'd be the quasi-public "federal reserve" system.
Federal Reserve "prints" money to pay for the budget deficit. Printing money (monetary inflation) causes price inflation, and price inflation causes producers of goods to cut corners to keep their costs down, hopefully just a little while longer than their competitor.
In recent decades, the most popular "corner" to cut has been the corporation's american workforce. First it was low skill workers - textiles, shoes, etc. Little by little, outsourcing has worked its way up the supply chain, and today most consumer merchandise is produced in Asia.
The "federal reserve note" dollar will crash, as all fiat currencies eventually do. It shouldn't be too long - no more than a year, I'm sure. There are consequences for running record deficits, you know...
The good news is that the dollar crash will take out the families with "old money" too, and we can return to a more egalitarian economic system. It'll be rough, for a bit, but definitely worth it.
The real shame in the Klebold and Harris event is that only a few got the message. They blame the videogames (look - ontopic!
I guess it's called the Juan de Fuca Ridge.
This dead zone is "most likely caused by underwater volcanism along the Juan De Fuca Ridge, which is about 20% volcanic along its 500 mile length. Occassional volcanic eruptions occur along the Ridge (Rift) which can create gigantic megaplumes of hot mineral water. Could be there is very little oxygen in the plumes, it most likely would have reacted with the minerals, leaving dissolved oxygen at nil."
Increased volcanic activity is all over the news, but only if you know to watch for it.
There were reports that Mount Fuji in Japan didn't have any snow last winter, a volcano in Alaska that was erupting off and on for some time, Mt. St. Helens has been especially active over the last year, the dead zone off oregon, etc...
from my recent mailing list traffic:
The author of that bit said in another recent email:
As the book hasn't been published yet, I'm disinclined to share the source, as the materialist slashdot moderators will slander me for the messenger (who's definitely in the 'vitalist' camp), and not the message he's discovered...
Oil is still a dirty, dirty business, and we'll all be better off once we're free of the stuff. But better to crucify it on its real demerits, and not on false charges.
... when it's really the increases in underwater volcanic activity that are mostly to blame.
See Warming of the world ocean, 1955-2003, published in the Geophysical Research Letters.
The dead zone off the Oregon coast, last season's record-breaking hurricane season, the 2004 super-quake in the Indian Ocean, changes in long-standing weather patterns (because of the change in heat distribution in the oceans) - all are signals of increased techtonic activity.
I don't see how it's possible today to argue that our children don't need exposure to computing to succeed.
Tacking "computers" onto the existing public school system will certainly prevent most children from ever becoming an expert in the field.
*ding* "okay class, time to put down your english books. We're going 'learn computers' now."
50 minutes later:
*ding* "enough computers, time for History! Let's all get excited about History!"
(This is Gatto's third lesson: indifference. "Nothing important is ever finished in my class, nor in any other class I know of. Students never have a complete experience except on the installment plan.")
When you say that children need "exposure" to computers, that seems to indicate to me that you think they some kind of formal introduction. My computer learning experiences were a process of discovery; all the computer "lessons" and "classes" I had in the government's schools were mostly worthless. If all they did was "here's a computer, look what I can do with it, have fun" that'd be one thing. But that's NOT how the government "exposes" topics in their child-prisons. First there are lessons, and then there are tests to grade the student's intake of the material. Then the kids who don't care about the topic are put in remedial classes, and thus begins the downward spiral...
Computers are snake oil, offered by politicians as a fix to the structural problems in their schools. The only fix needed is to restore freedom to the educational process. Let the children pick what they want to learn about, and how they want to learn it.
Depression is frequently the pysiological result of unhealthy thought patterns.
In my experience, less-than-ideal mental health is the result of disrupted physiology in the brain.
To make a less-than-perfect analogy, suppose you have a DirecTV satellite dish, and it only works sometimes. You check the wiring, change the receivers, but still - nothing helps it to work all the time. So you call an expert out, and he takes a look at the dish itself. "Well, there's your problem. It's filled with metal shavings, and there's a huge-ass dent in the parabolic surface that further scatters the satellite signal." The expert sprays out the metal shavings, and pulls out his trusty hammer to put the dish back like it should be. Magically, the satellite receiver starts to work just like it should.
Drugs treat the physical symptoms and therapy treats the psychological problems.
But if you only treat the chemical symptom and don't Address the Physical Problem (disrupted brain physiology, which is what my post was about), the psychological problems are much more difficult to treat. When the physical problem is resolved (NOT "treated" with drugs), the undesirable behavior will frequently just go away, or at the very least, significantly decreases in severity.
I personally suffered from depression combined with panic disorder that set in approximately two years ago. Since then I have been taking Lexapro which effectively treated my depression and continues to treat my panic disorder.
So you were fine for years & years, and then two years ago everything changed and you've been on anti-depressants ever since? This is why us anti-pharmaceutical types get all hot under the collar when people say that some people are just broken, and need the benefits of modern drugs.
I myself have had great success controlling compulsive behavior with Cranial Osteopathic treatments (see case #10). After a few visits the doctor was like, "fixed your misshappen head" (I'd had a blow to the chin 7 years before, don't remember 2 weeks, and ever since I'd always thought that something didn't seem quite right about my head, but I didn't realize what it was), then a few weeks later, "finally got your head working right - when I first started working with you, it was like a disorganized bag of sand." Something about restoring proper cerebro-spinal fluid flow in the brain...
Met a psychologist years ago that said she had much, much better results with her clients when she sent them for cranio-sacral therapy (non-monopoly cranial osteopathic manipulation) and "Network Spinal Analysis" (a gentle offshoot of chiropractic) too.
Then there's always 'accupuncture' for emotions, which has worked mircales for hundreds of thousands of people.
And there's also the old standby, Hypnosis.
I'm of the opinion that antidepressants just cover up the actual problem, analogous to giving someone who's just broken their leg Morphine for the pain, but not bothering to set and cast it so the bones can heal properly.