Denmark Vesey: Remember Where You Heard It First ... Remember Where You Heard It Best

Monday, March 21, 2011

Remember Where You Heard It First ... Remember Where You Heard It Best

1 comment:

makheru bradley said...: The civilian death toll in Tripolitania is about to increase b/c here come Slim Shady’s drones.

[Pentagon officials are looking at plans to expand the firepower and airborne surveillance systems in the military campaign, including using the Air Force's AC-130 gunship armed with cannons that shoot from the side doors, as well as helicopters and drones.]

Now that oil-rich Cyrenaica has been secured, and the exaggerated threat of a civilian massacre can no longer be used as an excuse we see what this UN military operation is really all about—naked imperialist aggression straight out of the Bush playbook.

The Russians, Chinese and South Afrikans need to shut the hell up. They gave a western diamondback teeth, and didn’t expect him to bite?; Mar 27, 2011, 9:17:00 PM

"There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized."

The founders of the American state understood that the proper functioning of a democracy required an educated electorate. It is this understanding that justifies a system of public education and that led slaveholders to resist the spread of literacy among their chattels. But the meaning of "educated" has changed beyond recognition in two hundred years. Reading, writing, and arithmetic are no longer sufficient to decide on public policy. Now we need quantum mechanics and molecular biology. The knowledge required for political rationality, once available to the masses, is now in the possession of a specially educated elite, a situation that creates a series of tensions and contradictions in the operation of representative democracy.

Margaret Sanger. Woman, Morality, and Birth Control. New York: New York Publishing Company, 1922. P

Lord Bertrand Russell, The Impact of Science On Society (Routledge Press: New York, 1951).

"At present the population of the world is increasing at about 58,000 per diem. War, so far, has had no very great effect on this increase, which continued throughout each of the world wars.. War has hitherto been disappointing in this respect, but perhaps bacteriological war may prove effective. If a Black Death could spread throughout the world once in every generation, survivors could procreate freely without making the world too full. The state of affairs might be unpleasant, but what of it?"