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rkm website: http://cyberjournal.org
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Re: Steve Jobs: change agent extrodinaire
Allan Balliett wrote:
Thanks for this, Richard. It’s the best write-up I’ve seen so far, with the exception of painting Gates as a philanthropist when he’s really killing the future of African people. I love the quote that’s going around, but missing here, about Jobs telling Gates that he should have dropped acid at least one time. -Allan—
Hi Allan,
You might also enjoy “Pirates of Silicon Valley”, available on Youtube, which very accurately portrays the competitive drama between Jobs and Gates. And here’s an interesting bio on Jobs by Spiegel.tv:
rkm
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The illusion of freedom [in America] will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.
– Frank Zappa
Re: The elite agenda for social transformation
Sharon Almerigi wrote:
Hi RichardThis is an amazing article. Thanks for sharing it. Really scary and sad. These were things I was always thinking but your article gave it reality. I was hoping that at the bottom you would be telling us what we could do.I’m in the airport traveling back to Barbados. Saw a book by Noam Chomsky re ‘hope’ where he talks about the revolutions in Latin America and the Middle East. The book is ‘Hopes and Prospects’. Have you seen it?Glad to see you are still writing.Best wishes,Sharon
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Hi Sharon,
Thanks for your feedback on the article. Most of the comments I’ve received are similarly positive, both from our cyberjournal community, and from New Dawn subscribers. My appreciation to all of you who have written in.
I’m quite certain, however, that many readers don’t agree with the ideas, and don’t feel inclined to send in critiques. To them I say: “I hear you, oh sacred silent majority”. To them I also say, check out this well-documented background material:
You ask about hope, about ‘what we can do’. If you want to know my ideas on that, please take a look at my website ( http://cyberjournal.org ), or perhaps this concise summary ( http://www.governourselves.org/ ). Those are my best ideas, but in fact I’m not sure there’s anything we can do.
What I am sure of, is that none of the grass-roots initiatives or movements currently on the scene have any hope of changing anything. In fact, activist energy is increasingly being channeled and managed by the very system we are hoping to change. As with Obama, who managed to fool all of the people some the time, and even now is fooling some of the people all of the time. ‘Hope you can believe in’, if you’re dreaming.
But someone like Obama can only channel those who see hope in the political system. More and more people are realizing there is no hope in the political system. So we are getting things like The Zeitgeist Movement and Anonymous, that cater to those who have given up on politics, and give them something to ‘join’ or ‘follow’ so they can pretend they’re ‘doing something’. Here is a relevant posting on Zeitgeist:
The latest of these vehicles of co-option is the Occupy Wall Street movement. This one’s really a humdinger. It has all the right slogans, and an appealing internal process. Its success is not surprising, because it is the latest version of a formula that has been thoroughly tested and refined ‘on the ground’. We might call it the ‘twitter formula’, and we’ve seen it in the ‘colored revolutions’ that were used to bring about various desired regime changes, and more recently in the ‘Arab Spring’ movements, that soaked up lots of energy and prevented unwanted regime changes.
Four years ago progressives found hope in Obama. This time around they’re finding hope in the Occupy Wall Street movement. In both cases, this ‘hope’ became available all too easily, was accompanied by all the right mainstream publicity, and offered easy ways to join in and become not only a follower, but an active participant. This is what co-option looks like.
rkm
ps> several viewpoints on Occupy Wall Street can be found here:
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Brian Bejarano wrote:
As much as I’m excited about OWS [Occupy Wall Street], I couldn’t help but notice something. Ivan Marovic was there at OWS around 9/22 addressing the crowd, he is the co-founder of Otpor!. Otpor! is a group of professional revolutionaries trained and financed by the CIA, based on Gene Sharp’s manual of peaceful resistance, to foment the so called ‘color revolutions’ in Eurasia and the Middle East, and Marovic has connections with OWS. Otpor! was a key organization in the Serbian Wars in the 1990s which helped to overthrow Milosevic later, they were also very influential in the Egypt uprisings. They are in the business of exporting “revolutions”, peaceful, non-violent style. If you go to OWS’ website you’ll notice a “fist” symbol as an icon on top, this is important to pay attention to because the FIST symbol is the brand of OTPOR!, a symbol that was present at all color revolutions, including that of the anti-Chavez movement in Venezuela. Another thing, let’s not forget this OWS movement wasn’t started voluntarily here in the US, it was sparked and organized by adbusters,org, a Canadian publicity campaign magazine. We need to start paying attention and start connecting the dots.My take is this, the elites sensing (and logically so) that an uprising was imminent anyway giving the trends, it was just a matter of time before it arrived to the US, so why not spark “the uprising” themselves? Much more strategic, this way it would be much easier to control it and steer it, in any which direction they feel it will work in their own interests, ie, political gains, etc, while letting it blow off some steam, If this is the case, which to me it seems that way, I’d say: wow, genius! And the people don’t even realize they’re being played like a tune. The goal, of course, wouldn’t be in this case to overthrow the establishment as we know it, no way. Their goals might be to just gradually defuse the ‘uprising’ by different means, ultimately throwing a “bone” here and there to make everybody “happy” as if something of significance has been achieved.The next question would be, can the OWS committees recognize this and hijack it back towards a genuine grass roots oriented model?Brian—
Hi Brian,
I don’t know anything about Otpor!, so I share your words with that proviso.
We can’t really say OWS is not following a genuine grassroots-oriented model. Those are genuine, concerned people out there. The problem is that street demonstrations, regardless of their nature, cannot change anything in a nation where the government doesn’t give a damn about the people. There are three likely outcomes: (1) the energy dies out, (2) the energy is channeled to some lying politician, (3) some false-flag event (war with Iran?) comes along and removes the movement from the media (as 9/11 did with the anti-globalization movement).
rkm
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