No place affords a more striking conviction
of the vanity of human hopes
than a public library.
Samuel Johnson,
March 23, 1751,
the Rambler
Amazon Lemmings Effect
In no way one can blindly rely on Amazon ratings (or any similar ratings). Amazon rating
while providing interesting information often are subject to so called "Lemming Effect" when people
rate highly a book that is mediocre at best (just look on reviews of JavaScript: The Definitive Guide
or Learning Perl. In this case several good reviews incite conformists to say a couple of nice words
about the book that they probably own but that they either never read or they lack the ability to compare
books on the subject due to some other factor.
Bad books from a respectable publisher or a known author sometimes
have many excellent reviews on Amazon (Lemmings effect )
At the same time many really good books (for example Learning Korn Shell) are underrated
on Amazon with a lot of reviews that belong to the category described above, only with minus sign.
You also need to understand that the value of the book depends on the level of the reader
and only really brilliant books (for example TAOCP) can bypass this vast
diversity of experiences of the readers.
Evaluating a book before buying
If you are still thinking about buying a book, do yourself a favor, when you're at the book store
look in the index or table of contents of this book and then browse the book and read at least one,
important for you, chapter before spending any money. If you still have the same level of understanding
as before the reading and the chapter does not contain interesting ideas or badly written then probably
this is not the book you are shooting for. Then take another book and keep doing this until you find
one that really excels in explaining this important for you concept.
If you cannot browse the book yourself in a bookstore, then you should try to grade the book indirectly
using other sources (this is less reliable but at least helps to avoid blunders):
Reviews -- You can start with Amazon reviews as they are the most available. Here
I recommend you read negative reviews if the book is rated highly on Amazon and positive reviews
otherwise (see also Lemming Effect) above). You can usually spot one or two non-conformist reviews
that five you some assurance that the authors really read the book before writing the review and
they understand the subject enough to be able to objectively rate the book. Other approach is to
look on the books that have at least 3 reviews and ignore the first review (often from the author
friend ;-) and too glaring or too negative reviews.
Good books have usually good review from Amazon readers, but you need to ignore trashing reviews
as well as too positive (or false-positives; the first review for the book often belongs to
this category ;-). Bad books sometimes also have good reviews, so good reviews from Amazon.com are
not sufficient for making a right decision about the value of the book.
You can also take into account (but do not believe completely) reviews from other sources like
DrDobbs Electronic Reviews of Computer Books (ERCB),
but your mileage can vary. Sometimes they recommend very weak books.
Association of C & C++
Users book review section contains a lot of reviews and probably you can dig out a useful information
about the value of the book in comparison to a similar books on the subject ( I checked several reviews
about average books that I own -- and found that most were too positive, so beware). The site
also contains a good
publishers
index.
The sample chapter (that's why parallel publishing is so important, especially for readers
outside US -- I do not recommend to buy a book without a sample chapter available form the Internet
-- that's too risky if you are outside US). Availability varies from publisher to publisher,
but now almost all publishers provide one chapter on the WEB. You can find publisher WEB site using
my page Computer Books Publishers. In addition
one can check information about the book at
www.fatbrain.com. This is a specialized computer
bookstore and it often have more information about the book than
www.amazon.com. Among publishers:
O'Reilly usually provides one sample
chapter for the book and that is big advantage and big plus for O'Reilly as a publisher. They
provide all examples via the WEB site too. Also they sometimes produce CD ROM with older
editions of less important books, but later this activity almost stopped as even in this moderate
form it does undermines their core business.
Wrox Press also does a great job of providing
readers with a sample chapter and all examples from the book through their Web site. They see
readers support as important as the quality of the product, but they seldom provide a full text
of the book electronically or on CD (I know only about one such book: Deiter Lange noted in a
comment about this page " at least for Wrox's publication "JavaScript Programmer's
Examples from the book. If examples are unavailable do not buy the book. Period. If examples
are available download and analyze them: they can say a lot about the quality of the book. One problem
with writing good programming texts is finding good examples. If the examples are both fun and insightful
that's a very good sign. You can try to analyze the correctness of examples by running them. As you
encounter problems you might deeper understand the real level of the author.
Table of contents (TOC). TOC can gives a general impression of the quality of the book.
Not only the titles of chapters and chapter divisions are important. Number of pages for devoted
to each topic provides a very valuable information too: you can see if the book contains enough information
about the things that you expect to learn and you can compare the level of coverage with the
other book, if any. For example if one book covers some tool in 10 pages and the other book
in 50 pages the value of the second book will be higher, if this tool (say, Sendmail) is very
important to you.
Books with titles that includes the word Bible
are often pretty weak and belong to the "make money fast" category . No respectable author
would consider himself to be a God :-) Every time I see a book named "XXX Bible" (Unix
Bible, Java Bible, Javascript Bible, etc). I think that such name is misleading as for the
level of complexity and weirdness of the subject and from marketing standpoint it might be
better to replace this title with a title "XXX Kamasutra." :-)
Errata. If the book is not very recent, it's interesting to check the errata. The work
authors/publishers did in this area is directly proportional to the value of such a book. If there
is no errata one year after a book publication I would abstain from buying the book unless there
is no alternatives or all alternatives are equally bad.
The name of the publisher. It still has some validity and other things equal books
from O'Reilly of Prentice Hall might probably be better than Sibex ;-). But that's only on
average. Each of the major publishers published a lot of junk (book inflation). For example Prentice
Hall now regularly publish extremely weak books like
Solaris Security. McGraw-Hill published real junk like
Tcp-Ip Complete. Some O'Reilly's books like
Learning Perl on Win32, JavaScript The Definitive
Guide are suspect. Newcomers like Wrox Press, Manning are generally
worth a look, but as they became more entrenched, the natural process of selling junk on the strength
of the brand name "unleash" itself...
O'Reilly remains one of the top publishers (Essential System Administration,
Learning Korn Shell, and some others are really worth
their money). But for example in Perl they face strong competition: the best introductory Perl book
published (Beginning
Perl ) is not from O'Reilly.
All-in-all the publisher name now means less that before
Now the publisher name now means less that before.
Availability of the e-text. Often a mediocre book with e-text available is as useful as
a good book because you can benefit from the availability of the electronic text is many way (search,
ability to modify chapters, add your own examples and actively work with the book in many ways).
If two books have approximately the same quality then the book that has a full electronic text available,
is preferable (scanning of the book is a very time consuming activity unless you destroy the book
and use a scanner with an automatic feed -- some HP scanners have that capability) ).
Sometimes a publisher does not provide a copy of the book on CD, but it sells a separate CD with
the full text of several books including this particular book. For example most O'Reilly older books
on Perl, Unix and networking have electronic version available
on separate CDs. That's great and some faults can be forgiven.
But in most cases you always can find a better book.
Availability of the author web-site. Good authors care about their readers and provide
some form of the web-site support. Errata and examples are usually are available form such sites
too.
Hardcover $39.38 18 Used from $11.17 4 New from $39.38 1 Collectible from $547.00
Paperback $17.99 13 Used from $9.99 14 New from $13.20
Mass Market Paperback $15.01 4 Used from $9.91 4 New from $10.05
Antonio García Martínez talks with Steven Levy Steven Levy is the editor-in-chief of Backchannel.
Steven Levy (SL): Antonio, why did you write this book?
Antonio García Martínez (AGM): You know, that's a good question because many would think that I'm committing career suicide by
writing it. One of the most notable things about Silicon Valley is that nobody is writing those histories. Everyone in Silicon Valley
lives in what I like to call 'the eternal present'. It's the urgent now of the next start-up, or the next cool technology or the
next fundraising round or the next media event. No one ever pulls back and thinks: "What are they going to think of us in ten years
or a hundred years?" So at the very highest, noblest level, recording that history is why I wrote the book.
SL: You did it, as you mentioned, in a pretty unmediated fashion, one which is probably going to ruffle some feathers. We were
talking at one point earlier about doing pieces of this on Backchannel, and I was going to call this series 'You'll Never Eat Free
Lunch in This Town Again'. Do you think you are going to be blackballed?
AGM: Oh, yeah. I think there are going to be one of two reactions to the book. One is from the Facebook founder, early employee,
or anyone really vested in and part of the Silicon Valley establishment, who are going to be extraordinarily antagonistic to it.
And then I think there's going to be the reaction of the mid-level or junior-level Facebook employee (what I was at Facebook), or
the scarred veteran of many a start-up who is not believing in the fairy tale anymore -- they are going to read it and see what is
basically a portrait of their own lives and laugh like hell.
SL: Your view of Silicon Valley seems to be a kind of den of scoundrels, and you don't exempt yourself from this. Yet there's
a moment late in the book where you drop that pose for a second and say how you were drinking the Kool-Aid yourself. How swept up
did you get in the Silicon Valley ethos while at the same time looking at a lot of things around you with a jaundiced eye?
AGM: Like I say in the book, "Inside every cynic lives a heartbroken idealist". So if I look at the Silicon Valley world with
such a jaundiced eye, it's precisely because I at one point believed in it. I've definitely hammed up this persona of the swaggering
rapscallion running amok through the Silicon Valley world, which I kind of did for a number of years. But that rapscallion did believe.
I wore a little Facebook fleece every day, I lived at Facebook, I believed in the mission, I was as much a rank-and-file trooper
as anybody else. Of course, I was disabused of that opinion as I saw the reality. But I absolutely was a believer at one point, no
question.
Editorial Reviews Amazon.com Review An Amazon Best Book of July 2016: If you think you know the back-story of the founding of
Facebook because you saw The Social Network, think again: Antonio Garcia Martinez's Chaos Monkeys tells a more complete and sometimes
darker story about the founding and development of Mark Zuckerberg's multi-billion-dollar invention. This is not a whodunit (we know
who did – Zuckerberg, those rowing twins, and assorted Harvard frenemies) so much as a procedural, a chronicle by the data-guru who
was eventually forced out of Facebook (he went to Twitter) – but not before gathering some pretty interesting social data of his
own: about Zuckerberg, about other Silicon valley "chaos monkeys," and about the culture that spawned all of them. Others who have
toiled in tech will recognize some universal truths: for example, that despite the great wealth, most are not in it for the money
so much as the mission; Facebook, Garcia Martinez asserts, was a "church of a new religion," its practitioners true believers. While
there may be a little TMI for the casual reader, there are enough specific scenes and characters – Sheryl Sandberg included, of course
-- that, geek or not, you can't help but be fascinated. Me, I can't help but wonder how many "likes" you'd get if you posted about
it on your FB page --Sara Nelson, The Amazon Book Review Review "An irresistible and indispensable 360-degree guide to the new technology
establishment.... A must-read." -- Jonathan A. Knee, New York Times
"Reckless and rollicking... perceptive and funny and brave.... The resulting view of the Valley's craziness, self-importance and
greed isn't pretty. But it's one that most of us have never seen before and aren't likely to forget." -- Washington Post
"Michael Lewis was never a top Wall Street bond salesman, but in Liar's Poker he captured an era. Chaos Monkeys aims to do the
same for Silicon Valley, and bracingly succeeds." -- New York Times Book Review
"Brilliant." -- Financial Times
"This year's best non-business book about business.... Garcia Martinez is a real writer.... A classic tale, well told." -- Techcrunch
"There are some books that are just too good to miss.... In his insider-tells-all book, García Martínez discusses everything from
goofy stories to cultural secrets about some of the country's most powerful and influential businesses." -- Atlantic
"Incisive.... The most fun business book I have read this year.... Clearly there will be people who hate this book -- which is
probably one of the things that makes it such a great read." -- Andrew Ross Sorkin, New York Times
"[García Martínez] is, by his own account, a dissolute character.... He is nonetheless, by the end of his account, a winning antihero,
a rebel against Silicon Valley's culture of nonconformist conformity.... The reader can't help rooting for him." -- Jacob Weisberg,
New York Review of Books
"Unlike most founding narratives that flow out of the Valley, Chaos Monkeys dives into the unburnished, day-to-day realities:
the frantic pivots, the enthusiastic ass-kissing, the excruciating internal politics.... [García] can be rude, but he's shrewd, too."
-- Bloomberg Businessweek
"An unvarnished account of Silicon Valley." -- CBS This Morning
"Romps through Martínez's wild trajectory from Wall Streeter to pre-IPO Facebook employee, with the dramatic sale of his Y Combinator-backed
ad-tech startup (to Twitter) in between." -- Jillian D'Onfirio Business Insider
"Traces the evolution of social media and online marketing and reveals how it's become a part of our daily lives and how it will
affect our future." -- Leonard Lopate, WNYC
"If you're in a startup or even plan to sue one, Chaos Monkeys is the book to read." -- John Biggs, TechCrunch
"This gossipy insider account from the former Twitter adviser, Facebook product manager, and start-up CEO dishes dirt while also
explaining the ins and outs of Silicon Valley." -- Neal Wyatt, Library Journal
"[Garcia Martinez] reads like a philosopher and historian, the exact travel guide you'd want to walk you through the inner workings
of Facebook. His tell-all memoir is the best writing out there on one of the world's most powerful companies. And he even manages
to make the ins and outs of online advertising fascinating." -- Aarti Shahanti, npr.org
Amazingly accurate coverage of Facebook's internal culture, the good, the bad, and the ugly. (Plus much, much more!)
5.0 out of 5 stars
Amazingly accurate coverage of Facebook's internal culture, the good, the bad, and the ugly. (Plus much, much more!) Reviewed
in the United States on July 10, 2016 Verified Purchase I worked at Facebook from 2010 until 2015, and until now I have never
seen the inner machinations as accurately portrayed as they are in 'Chaos Monkeys'. Facebook very carefully maintains a public
relations campaign (almost more internally focused than external) to convince the world it is the best place to work ever. In
reality it is just like any other large company, with plenty of political intrigue, infighting, silo-building, and collateral
damage. Sure, the mini-kitchens have organic bananas, and pistachios that stressed slobby software engineers neither have to shell,
nor leave a pile of shells littered all around the floor... but in reality they are shackled to an oar, pulling to the endless
beat of a drum. Code. Code. Code. It is all here the creepy propaganda, the failed high-profile projects, the surreal manager/staff
relationships, the cultivated cult-like atmosphere, the sharp divide between the have-it-all, and the "hope to have enough to
escape" staff. The bizarro world of inside FB, around the IPO. I was there and experienced many of the same corporate events and
milestones myself. Antonio Garcia Martinez captures it all perfectly.
That's only the last half of the book.
The rest is a tale of escaping from startup hell, making a go at reaching startup heaven, then making deals to salvage it all
when reaching the critical trial-by-fire that every startup must face: die, execute flawlessly, or exit.
There are some who will find the tone, the voice, or the political incorrectness of both to be too harsh to digest. I've already
seen that in a few of the reviews here. To them I say "grow up"... put on your big boy/girl pants and read this for the story.
The tale it tells. The facts it presents. The data with which it backs it all up. Because it is all true. The exposition of complex
systems are described using appropriate, and facile metaphors. Many of the standard Facebook tropes ("stealing/selling your data",
"Zuck is evil", etc.) are explained for the misleading baloney that they are. Best of all it describes how the advertising media
really operates, going back to the dawn of it, and how Facebook, Google, et al are merely extensions of a system that has existed
for two centuries. It is worth the purchase price for that lesson alone, all wrapped in a great, and true story.
For myself, having lived through much of the same experience at Facebook (from onboarding, the devotion, the cynicism, to the
inglorious, frustrated exit bungled by one of the legion of Facebook's incompetent and narcissistic manager corps) I found myself
going from laughter, to nodding agreement, to gut-wrenching bouts of PTSD as I turned the pages of 'Chaos Monkeys'. Now I no longer
have to justify myself to people who ask me why I left Facebook - I can just tell them to read this book, since it explains it
better than I ever could.
Read less 559 people found this helpful >
1.0 out of 5 stars
Whiny Reviewed in the United States on October 20, 2019 Verified Purchase The author seems to be a very bitter and acerbic
individual with huge collection of chips on his shoulder, from past coworkers to the capitalism itself. It is rare to encounter
a character in his book to which he doesn't find something contemptuous or negative to say about. Even when describing genuinely
positive things - like courage, loyalty or generosity - he seems to be astonished that these puny humans he despises so much are
capable of such things. I can't remember any character (including the mother of his children) who is described with genuine warmth
and affection, then best he could master is "that person could be useful to me in certain situations".
While the protagonist seems to be entirely driven by monetary incentives, he does not forget to regularly interrupt his quest
for a lengthy tirade about how capitalism is the worst (usually on the way to convince some capitalists to give him some money
so he could participate in capitalist venture and make some money for himself).
The author undoubtedly has a knack for storytelling and a keen eye (usually turned to finding faults in everything he sees),
so there are many interesting and entertaining bits in the book. But the overall negativity and constant droning of the author
about how everything around him is wrong from the mere atoms upwards is really wearing you down. I understand that's sort of "here's
what I am without any makeup, take it or leave it" but I really wish the it wasn't a whiny narcissistic nihilist...
Gethin Darklord 5.0 out of 5 stars
Revelatory epistole from Silicon Valley Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 29, 2018
I really enjoyed this book which falls into two sections: before the author's employment with Facebook and afterwards until
he is fired. Mr Martinez comes across as a very self centred but brilliant techy geek and whilst unappealing as a friend his frank
discussions of his thoughts give an unusual degree of insight into his character; and of those like him. He actually manages to
explain how Facebook makes its money which is something I have never understood before. His assertion they wouldn't share your
data is charmingly Niaive in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal (2019) - the book was written some years before. Ultimately
it takes bravery to write frankly about one's own failures and this makes it distinct from the hagiographies and self congratulatory
books which characterise most business books. An interesting aside is his obvious erudition with well chosen classical quotations
at the head of each chapter. Recommended highly.
Jason 5.0 out of 5 stars
A great insight into Silicon Valley Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 28, 2019
I don't read a great deal as I struggle to find books that capture me, 'Chaos Monkeys' had me within the first few pages.
A great account of Antonio's life chapters from Wall Street to Techie to startup and working with the big boys in Silicon Valley.
Really enjoyed the style of writing, very humorous in places, and great to get an insight into the large techie firms.
Couldn't wait to read more, read the book in a week which is excellent for me!
If you like the world of tech or IT, I recommend you read this book.
R. A. Mansfield 3.0 out of 5 stars
Frustrating and irritating Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 26, 2019
There were parts of this book I enjoyed. The insight into tech start-ups, a brief window into Facebook and the life in San
Francisco were all interesting.
Sadly, these sections were marred by having to 'listen' to Martinez's overblown prose and sense of self-worth.
The self-deprecation doesn't sound genuine and - let's face it - he comes across as a complete tool. Not worth the money
Amazon Customer 5.0 out of 5 stars
Best bio read of the year Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 4, 2020 Verified Purchase
This book had been on my list for a couple of years but I'd kept moving it down because of the gimmicky sounding title. It's
an amazing read, enhanced by the fact I personally know a couple of the people (briefly) mentioned. It presents an inside view
that I don't think is available in print anywhere else. Learnt so much and truly grateful to the author for writing it. If you
work in tech and read anything this year, it should be this.
T. Adshead5.0 out of 5 stars
Liar's Poker for the second tech bubble Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 21, 2018
I cannot recommend this book enough - it reads as well as anything by Michael Lewis, perhaps better in some ways, as it's more
erudite. It puts you in the room of what it's like to work in a start-up, what happens when you sell it, how compensation works
in Silicon Valley and all those details you won't find in hagiographies of Jobs or Zuckerberg. And it really is well written.
"... He defines "wokeism" as a creed that has arisen in America in response to the "moral vacuum" created by the ebbing from public life of faith, patriotism and "the identity we derived from hard work." He argues that notions like "diversity," "equity," "inclusion" and "sustainability" have come to take their place. ..."
"... "Our collective moral insecurities," Mr. Ramaswamy says, "have left us vulnerable" to the blandishments and propaganda of the new political and corporate elites, who are now locked in a cynical "arranged marriage, where each partner has contempt for the other." Each side is getting out of the "trade" something it "could not have gotten alone." ..."
"... Wokeness entered its union with capitalism in the years following the 2008 financial panic and recession. Mr. Ramaswamy believes that conditions were perfect for the match. "We were -- and are -- in the midst of the biggest intergenerational wealth transfer in history," he says. Barack Obama had just been elected the first black president. By the end of the crisis, Americans "were actually pretty jaded with respect to capitalism. Corporations were the bad guys. The old left wanted to take money from corporations and give it to poor people." ..."
"... The birth of wokeism was a godsend to corporations, Mr. Ramaswamy says. It helped defang the left. "Wokeism lent a lifeline to the people who were in charge of the big banks. They thought, 'This stuff is easy!' " They applauded diversity and inclusion, appointed token female and minority directors, and "mused about the racially disparate impact of climate change." So, in Mr. Ramaswamy's narrative, "a bunch of big banks got together with a bunch of millennials, birthed woke capitalism, and then put Occupy Wall Street up for adoption." Now, in Mr. Ramaswamy's tart verdict, "big business makes money by critiquing itself." ..."
"... Davos is "the Woke Vatican," Mr. Ramaswamy says; Al Gore and Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock , are "its archbishops." CEOs "further down the chain" -- he mentions James Quincey of Coca-Cola , Ed Bastian of Delta , Marc Benioff of Salesforce , John Donahoe of Nike and Alan Jope of Unilever -- are its "cardinals." ..."
"... He describes this sort of corporate imposition -- "a market force supplanting open political debate to settle the essence of political questions" -- as one of the "defining challenges" America faces today. "If democracy means anything," he adds, "it means living in a one-person-one-vote system, not a one-dollar-one-vote system." Voters' voices "are unadjusted by the number of dollars we wield in the marketplace." Open debate in the public square is "our uniquely American mechanism" of settling political questions. He likens the woke-corporate silencing of debate as akin to the "old-world European model, where a small group of elites gets in a room and decides what's good for everyone else." ..."
"... The wokeism-capitalism embrace, Mr. Ramaswamy says, was replicated in Silicon Valley. Over the past few years, "Big Tech effectively agreed to censor -- or 'moderate' -- content that the woke movement didn't like. But they didn't do it for free." In return, the left "agreed to look the other way when it comes to leaving Silicon Valley's monopoly power intact." This arrangement is "working out masterfully" for both sides. ..."
"... Coca-Cola follows the same playbook, he says: "It's easier for them to issue statements about voting laws in Georgia, or to train their employees on how to 'be less white,' than it is to publicly reckon with its role in fueling a nationwide epidemic of diabetes and obesity -- including in the black communities they profess to care about so much." (In a statement, Coca-Cola apologized for the "be less white" admonition and said that while it was "accessible through our company training platform," it "was not a part of our training curriculum.") ..."
"... Nike finds it much easier to write checks to Black Lives Matter and condemn America's history of slavery, Mr. Ramaswamy says, even as it relies on "slave labor" today to sell "$250 sneakers to black kids in the inner city who can't afford to buy books for school." All the while, Black Lives Matter "neuters the police in a way that sacrifices even more black lives." (Nike has said in a statement that its code of conduct prohibits any use of forced labor and "we have been engaging with multi-stakeholder working groups to assess collective solutions that will help preserve the integrity of our global supply chains.") ..."
"... Mr. Varadarajan, a Journal contributor, is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and at New York University Law School's Classical Liberal Institute. ..."
"... Seems to me in a nutshell he is saying that these woke corporations are all hypocrites. No surprise there hypocrisy is a defining characteristic of the woke left and you need to assume that characteristic yourself to be able to work within their bounds. ..."
"... Wokeists argue that theirs is not a religion because it doesn't center on a transcendent being. I see Wokeism as a religion that gathers multiple Secularist sects into a big tent. These sects include Environmentalism, Genderism, Anti-Racism, and more. ..."
"... One thing all religions share in common is the elevation of questionable premises to unassailable truths which they defend with religious zeal. Some questionable premises elevated to unassailable truths by Wokeism are that humans are making the Earth uninhabitable, gender is an individual choice, and race is the most important human characteristic. There are more. ..."
A self-made multimillionaire who founded a biotech company at 28, Vivek Ramaswamy is every
inch the precocious overachiever. He tells me he attended law school while he was in sixth
grade. He's joking, in his own earnest manner. His father, an aircraft engineer at General
Electric, had decided to get a law degree at night school. Vivek sat in on the classes with
him, so he could keep his dad company on the long car rides to campus and back -- a very Indian
filial act.
"I was probably the only person my age who'd heard of Antonin Scalia, " Mr. Ramaswamy, 35,
says in a Zoom call from his home in West Chester, Ohio. His father, a political liberal, would
often rage on the way home from class about "some Scalia opinion." Mr. Ramaswamy reckons that
this was when he began to form his own political ideas. A libertarian in high school, he
switched to being conservative at Harvard in "an act of rebellion" against the politics he
found there. That conservatism drove him to step down in January as CEO at Roivant Sciences --
the drug-development company that made him rich -- and write "Woke, Inc," a book that takes a
scathing look at "corporate America's social-justice scam." (It will be published in
August.)
Mr. Ramaswamy recently watched the movie "Spotlight," which tells the story of how reporters
at the Boston Globe exposed misconduct (specifically, sexual abuse) by Catholic priests in the
early 2000s. "My goal in 'Woke, Inc.' is to do the same thing with respect to the Church of
Wokeism." He defines "wokeism" as a creed that has arisen in America in response to the "moral
vacuum" created by the ebbing from public life of faith, patriotism and "the identity we
derived from hard work." He argues that notions like "diversity," "equity," "inclusion" and
"sustainability" have come to take their place.
"Our collective moral insecurities," Mr. Ramaswamy says, "have left us vulnerable" to the
blandishments and propaganda of the new political and corporate elites, who are now locked in a
cynical "arranged marriage, where each partner has contempt for the other." Each side is
getting out of the "trade" something it "could not have gotten alone."
Wokeness entered its union with capitalism in the years following the 2008 financial panic
and recession. Mr. Ramaswamy believes that conditions were perfect for the match. "We were --
and are -- in the midst of the biggest intergenerational wealth transfer in history," he says.
Barack Obama had just been elected the first black president. By the end of the crisis,
Americans "were actually pretty jaded with respect to capitalism. Corporations were the bad
guys. The old left wanted to take money from corporations and give it to poor people."
The birth of wokeism was a godsend to corporations, Mr. Ramaswamy says. It helped defang the
left. "Wokeism lent a lifeline to the people who were in charge of the big banks. They thought,
'This stuff is easy!' " They applauded diversity and inclusion, appointed token female and
minority directors, and "mused about the racially disparate impact of climate change." So, in
Mr. Ramaswamy's narrative, "a bunch of big banks got together with a bunch of millennials,
birthed woke capitalism, and then put Occupy Wall Street up for adoption." Now, in Mr.
Ramaswamy's tart verdict, "big business makes money by critiquing itself."
Mr. Ramaswamy regards Klaus Schwab, founder and CEO of the World Economic Forum in Davos,
Switzerland, as the "patron saint of wokeism" for his relentless propagation of "stakeholder
capitalism" -- the view that the unspoken bargain in the grant to corporations of limited
liability is that they "must do social good on the side."
Davos is "the Woke Vatican," Mr. Ramaswamy says; Al Gore and Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock , are "its
archbishops." CEOs "further down the chain" -- he mentions James Quincey of Coca-Cola , Ed Bastian of Delta , Marc Benioff of
Salesforce , John
Donahoe of Nike and
Alan Jope of Unilever
-- are its "cardinals."
Mr. Ramaswamy says that "unlike the investigative 'Spotlight' team at the Boston Globe, I'm
a whistleblower, not a journalist. But the church analogy holds strong." He paraphrases a line
in the movie: "It takes a village to raise a child, then it takes a village to abuse one. In
the case of my book, the child I'm concerned about is American democracy."
In league with the woke left, corporate America "uses force" as a substitute for open
deliberation and debate, Mr. Ramaswamy says. "There's the sustainability accounting standards
board of BlackRock, which effectively demands that in order to win an investment from
BlackRock, the largest asset-manager in the world, you must abide by the standards of that
board."
Was the board put in place by the owners of the trillions of dollars of capital that Mr.
Fink manages? Of course not, Mr. Ramaswamy says. "And yet he's actually using his seat of
corporate power to sidestep debate about questions like environmentalism or diversity on
boards."
The irrepressible Mr. Ramaswamy presses on with another example. Goldman Sachs , he says with obvious relish,
"is a very Davos-fitting example." At the 2020 World Economic Forum, Goldman Sachs CEO David
Solomon "issued an edict from the mountaintops of Davos." Mr. Solomon announced his company
would refuse to take a company public if its board wasn't sufficiently diverse. "So Goldman
gets to define what counts as 'diverse,' " Mr. Ramaswamy says. "No doubt, they're referring to
skin-deep, genetically inherited attributes."
He describes this sort of corporate imposition -- "a market force supplanting open political
debate to settle the essence of political questions" -- as one of the "defining challenges"
America faces today. "If democracy means anything," he adds, "it means living in a
one-person-one-vote system, not a one-dollar-one-vote system." Voters' voices "are unadjusted
by the number of dollars we wield in the marketplace." Open debate in the public square is "our
uniquely American mechanism" of settling political questions. He likens the woke-corporate
silencing of debate as akin to the "old-world European model, where a small group of elites
gets in a room and decides what's good for everyone else."
The wokeism-capitalism embrace, Mr. Ramaswamy says, was replicated in Silicon Valley. Over
the past few years, "Big Tech effectively agreed to censor -- or 'moderate' -- content that the
woke movement didn't like. But they didn't do it for free." In return, the left "agreed to look
the other way when it comes to leaving Silicon Valley's monopoly power intact." This
arrangement is "working out masterfully" for both sides.
The rest of corporate America appears to be following suit. "There's a Big Pharma version,
too," Mr. Ramaswamy says. "Big Pharma had an epiphany in dealing with the left." It couldn't
beat them, so it joined them. "Rather than win the debate on drug pricing, they decided to just
change the subject instead. Who needs to win a debate if you can just avoid having it?" So we
see "big-time pharma CEOs musing about topics like racial justice and environmentalism, and
writing multibillion-dollar checks to fight climate change, while taking price hikes that
they'd previously paused when the public was angry about drug pricing."
Coca-Cola follows the same playbook, he says: "It's easier for them to issue statements
about voting laws in Georgia, or to train their employees on how to 'be less white,' than it is
to publicly reckon with its role in fueling a nationwide epidemic of diabetes and obesity --
including in the black communities they profess to care about so much." (In a statement,
Coca-Cola apologized
for the "be less white" admonition and said that while it was "accessible through our company
training platform," it "was not a part of our training curriculum.")
Nike finds it much easier to write checks to Black Lives Matter and condemn America's
history of slavery, Mr. Ramaswamy says, even as it relies on "slave labor" today to sell "$250
sneakers to black kids in the inner city who can't afford to buy books for school." All the
while, Black Lives Matter "neuters the police in a way that sacrifices even more black lives."
(Nike has said in a statement that its code of conduct prohibits any use of forced labor and
"we have been engaging with multi-stakeholder working groups to assess collective solutions
that will help preserve the integrity of our global supply chains.")
... ... ...
Mr. Varadarajan, a Journal contributor, is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute
and at New York University Law School's Classical Liberal Institute.
Rod Drake 53 minutes ago
Seems to me in a nutshell he is saying that these woke corporations are all hypocrites. No
surprise there hypocrisy is a defining characteristic of the woke left and you need to assume
that characteristic yourself to be able to work within their bounds.
In addition, I have been
saying for some time discrimination based on political belief desperately needs to be
included as a prohibited basis. Where are the Republicans, while the greatest civil rights
violation of our time is going on right under their noses?
Terry Overbey 1 hour ago
I love reading stories about people who are willing to take on the woke political class. For
most people, even if they strongly disagree, their only option is to bite their tongue and go
along. People aren't stupid. If you buck the system, you don't get promoted, you don't get
good grades, you don't get into elite schools, you don't get the government job.
Thank you Mr Ramaswany.
James Ransom 1 hour ago
Well. If nothing else, he just sold me a book. I think we should say that "Wokeism" tries to
"Act Like" a religion, not that it is one. Because of this fakery, we do not need to give it
"freedom" in the sense that we have "Freedom of Religion."
These misguided Americans perhaps need to be exposed to a real religion. Christianity and
Buddhism would be good choices; I don't know about Hinduism, but my point is that "Wokeism"
is more like a mental disorder. We should feel sorry for its victims, offer them treatment,
but not let them run anything.
marc goodman 1 hour ago
Wokeists argue that theirs is not a religion because it doesn't center on a transcendent
being. I see Wokeism as a religion that gathers multiple Secularist sects into a big tent.
These sects include Environmentalism, Genderism, Anti-Racism, and more.
One thing all religions share in common is the elevation of questionable premises to
unassailable truths which they defend with religious zeal. Some questionable premises
elevated to unassailable truths by Wokeism are that humans are making the Earth
uninhabitable, gender is an individual choice, and race is the most important human
characteristic. There are more.
Humans need to believe in something greater than themselves. We fulfill this need with
religion, and historically, the "greater something" has been a transcendent being. Wokeism
fulfills this need for its adherents but without a transcendent being. Ultimately, Wokeism
will fail as a religion because it can't nourish the soul like the belief in a transcendent
being does.
Grodney Ross 2 hours ago (Edited)
Judgement will be passed in November of 2022. I don't see this as a Democrat vs Republican
issue. I think it's a matter of who is paying attention vs. those who are not. We live in a
society where, generally, the most strident voices are on the left, along with the most
judgmental voices. When the "wokeless" engage in a manner that conflicts with views of the
woke, they are attacked, be you from the left or the right, so you keep your mouth shut and go
about your day.
I believe that this coming election will give voice to those who are fatigued and fed up
with the progressive lefts venom and vitriol. If not, we will survive, but without a meaningful
first amendment,14th amendment, or 2nd amendment.
Barbara Helton 2 hours ago (Edited)
Being woke, when practiced by the wealthy and influential, can be extremely similar to
bullying.
Looks like this guys somewhat understands the problems with neoliberalism, but still is captured by neoliberal ideology.
Notable quotes:
"... That all seems awfully quaint today. Pensions disappeared for private-sector employees years ago. Most community banks were gobbled up by one of the mega-banks in the 1990s -- today five banks control 50 percent of the commercial banking industry, which itself mushroomed to the point where finance enjoys about 25 percent of all corporate profits. Union membership fell by 50 percent. ..."
"... Ninety-four percent of the jobs created between 2005 and 2015 were temp or contractor jobs without benefits; people working multiple gigs to make ends meet is increasingly the norm. Real wages have been flat or even declining. The chances that an American born in 1990 will earn more than their parents are down to 50 percent; for Americans born in 1940 the same figure was 92 percent. ..."
"... Thanks to Milton Friedman, Jack Welch, and other corporate titans, the goals of large companies began to change in the 1970s and early 1980s. The notion they espoused -- that a company exists only to maximize its share price -- became gospel in business schools and boardrooms around the country. Companies were pushed to adopt shareholder value as their sole measuring stick. ..."
"... Simultaneously, the major banks grew and evolved as Depression-era regulations separating consumer lending and investment banking were abolished. Financial deregulation started under Ronald Reagan in 1980 and culminated in the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 under Bill Clinton that really set the banks loose. The securities industry grew 500 percent as a share of GDP between 1980 and the 2000s while ordinary bank deposits shrank from 70 percent to 50 percent. Financial products multiplied as even Main Street companies were driven to pursue financial engineering to manage their affairs. GE, my dad's old company and once a beacon of manufacturing, became the fifth biggest financial institution in the country by 2007. ..."
The logic of the meritocracy is leading us to ruin, because we arc collectively primed to ignore the voices of the millions getting
pushed into economic distress by the grinding wheels of automation and innovation. We figure they're complaining or suffering because
they're losers.
We need to break free of this logic of the marketplace before it's too late.
[Neoliberalism] had decimated the economies and cultures of these regions and were set to do the same to many others.
In response, American lives and families are falling apart. Ram- pant financial stress is the new normal. We are in the third
or fourth inning of the greatest economic shift in the history of mankind, and no one seems to be talking about it or doing anything
in response.
The Great Displacement didn't arrive overnight. It has been building for decades as the economy and labor market changed in response
to improving technology, financialization, changing corporate norms, and globalization. In the 1970s, when my parents worked at GE
and Blue Cross Blue Shield in upstate New York, their companies provided generous pensions and expected them to stay for decades.
Community banks were boring businesses that lent money to local companies for a modest return. Over 20 percent of workers were unionized.
Some economic problems existed -- growth was uneven and infla- tion periodically high. But income inequality was low, jobs provided
benefits, and Main Street businesses were the drivers of the economy. There were only three television networks, and in my house
we watched them on a TV with an antenna that we fiddled with to make the picture clearer.
That all seems awfully quaint today. Pensions disappeared for private-sector employees years ago. Most community banks were
gobbled up by one of the mega-banks in the 1990s -- today five banks control 50 percent of the commercial banking industry, which
itself mushroomed to the point where finance enjoys about 25 percent of all corporate profits. Union membership fell by 50 percent.
Ninety-four percent of the jobs created between 2005 and 2015 were temp or contractor jobs without benefits; people working
multiple gigs to make ends meet is increasingly the norm. Real wages have been flat or even declining. The chances that an American
born in 1990 will earn more than their parents are down to 50 percent; for Americans born in 1940 the same figure was 92 percent.
Thanks to Milton Friedman, Jack Welch, and other corporate titans, the goals of large companies began to change in the 1970s
and early 1980s. The notion they espoused -- that a company exists only to maximize its share price -- became gospel in business
schools and boardrooms around the country. Companies were pushed to adopt shareholder value as their sole measuring stick.
Hostile takeovers, shareholder lawsuits, and later activist hedge funds served as prompts to ensure that managers were committed
to profitability at all costs. On the flip side, CF.Os were granted stock options for the first time that wedded their individual
gain to the company's share price. The ratio of CF.O to worker pay rose from 20 to 1 in 1965 to 271 to 1 in 2016. Benefits were streamlined
and reduced and the relationship between company and employee weakened to become more transactional.
Simultaneously, the major banks grew and evolved as Depression-era regulations separating consumer lending and investment
banking were abolished. Financial deregulation started under Ronald Reagan in 1980 and culminated in the Financial Services Modernization
Act of 1999 under Bill Clinton that really set the banks loose. The securities industry grew 500 percent as a share of GDP between
1980 and the 2000s while ordinary bank deposits shrank from 70 percent to 50 percent. Financial products multiplied as even Main
Street companies were driven to pursue financial engineering to manage their affairs. GE, my dad's old company and once a beacon
of manufacturing, became the fifth biggest financial institution in the country by 2007.
It's hard to be in the year 2018 and not hear about the endless studies alarming the general public about coming labor automation.
But what Yang provides in this book is two key things: automation has already been ravaging the country which has led to the great
political polarization of today, and second, an actual vision into what happens when people lose jobs, and it definitely is a
lightning strike of "oh crap"
I found this book relatively impressive and frightening. Yang, a former lawyer, entrepreneur, and non-profit leader, writes
showing with inarguable data that when companies automate work and use new software, communities die, drug use increases, suicide
increases, and crime skyrockets. The new jobs created go to big cities, the surviving talent leaves, and the remaining people
lose hope and descend into madness. (as a student of psychology, this is not surprising)
He starts by painting the picture of the average American and how fragile they are economically. He deconstructs the labor
predictions and how technology is going to ravage it. He discusses the future of work. He explains what has happened in technology
and why it's suddenly a huge threat. He shows what this means: economic inequality rises, the people have less power, the voice
of democracy is diminished, no one owns stocks, people get poorer etc. He shows that talent is leaving small towns, money is concentrating
to big cities faster. He shows what happens when those other cities die (bad things), and then how the people react when they
have no income (really bad things). He shows how retraining doesn't work and college is failing us. We don't invest in vocational
skills, and our youth is underemployed pushed into freelance work making minimal pay. He shows how no one trusts the institutions
anymore.
Then he discusses solutions with a focus on Universal Basic Income. I was a skeptic of the idea until I read this book. You
literally walk away with this burning desire to prevent a Mad Max esque civil war, and its hard to argue with him. We don't have
much time and our bloated micromanaged welfare programs cannot sustain.
The author is a very fuzzy way comes to the idea that neoliberalism is in essence a Trotskyism for the rich and that
neoliberals want to use strong state to enforce the type of markets they want from above. That included free movement of
capital goods and people across national borders. All this talk about "small government" is just a smoke screen for naive fools.
"... The second explanation was that neoliberal globalization made a small number of people very rich, and it was in the interest of those people to promote a self-serving ideology using their substantial means by funding think tanks and academic departments, lobbying congress, fighting what the Heritage Foundation calls "the war of ideas." Neoliberalism, then, was a restoration of class power after the odd, anomalous interval of the mid-century welfare state. ..."
"... Here one is free to choose but only within a limited range of options left after responding to the global forces of the market. ..."
"... Neoliberal globalism can be thought of in its own terms as a negative theology, contending that the world economy is sublime and ineffable with a small number of people having special insight and ability to craft institutions that will, as I put it, encase the sublime world economy. ..."
"... One of the big goals of my book is to show neoliberalism is one form of regulation among many rather than the big Other of regulation as such. ..."
"... I build here on the work of other historians and show how the demands in the United Nations by African, Asian, and Latin American nations for things like the Permanent Sovereignty over Natural Resources, i.e. the right to nationalize foreign-owned companies, often dismissed as merely rhetorical, were actually existentially frightening to global businesspeople. ..."
"... They drafted neoliberal intellectuals to do things like craft agreements that gave foreign corporations more rights than domestic actors and tried to figure out how to lock in what I call the "human right of capital flight" into binding international codes. I show how we can see the development of the WTO as largely a response to the fear of a planned -- and equal -- planet that many saw in the aspirations of the decolonizing world. ..."
"... The neoliberal insight of the 1930s was that the market would not take care of itself: what Wilhelm Röpke called a market police was an ongoing need in a world where people, whether out of atavistic drives or admirable humanitarian motives, kept trying to make the earth a more equal and just place. ..."
"... The culmination of these processes by the 1990s is a world economy that is less like a laissez-faire marketplace and more like a fortress, as ever more of the world's resources and ideas are regulated through transnational legal instruments. ..."
Hardcover: 400 pages
Publisher: Harvard University Press (March 16, 2018)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0674979524
ISBN-13: 978-0674979529
From introduction
...The second explanation was that neoliberal globalization made a small number of people very rich, and it was in the interest of
those people to promote a self-serving ideology using their substantial means by funding think tanks and academic departments, lobbying
congress, fighting what the Heritage Foundation calls "the war of ideas." Neoliberalism, then, was a restoration of class power after
the odd, anomalous interval of the mid-century welfare state.
There is truth to both of these explanations. Both presuppose a kind of materialist explanation of history with which I have no
problem. In my book, though, I take another approach. What I found is that we could not understand the inner logic of something like
the WTO without considering the whole history of the twentieth century. What I also discovered is that some of the members of the
neoliberal movement from the 1930s onward, including Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, did not use either of the explanations
I just mentioned. They actually didn't say that economic growth excuses everything. One of the peculiar things about Hayek, in particular,
is that he didn't believe in using aggregates like GDP -- the very measurements that we need to even say what growth is.
What I found is that neoliberalism as a philosophy is less a doctrine of economics than a doctrine of ordering -- of creating
the institutions that provide for the reproduction of the totality [of financial elite control of the state]. At the core of the strain I describe is not the idea that we
can quantify, count, price, buy and sell every last aspect of human existence. Actually, here it gets quite mystical. The Austrian
and German School of neoliberals in particular believe in a kind of invisible world economy that cannot be captured in numbers
and figures but always escapes human comprehension.
After all, if you can see something, you can plan it. Because of the very limits to our knowledge, we have to default to ironclad
rules and not try to pursue something as radical as social justice, redistribution, or collective transformation. In a globalized
world, we must give ourselves over to the forces of the market, or the whole thing will stop working.
So this is quite a different version of neoliberal thought than the one we usually have, premised on the abstract of individual
liberty or the freedom to choose. Here one is free to choose but only within a limited range of options left after responding to
the global forces of the market.
One of the core arguments of my book is that we can only understand the internal coherence of neoliberalism if we see it as a
doctrine as concerned with the whole as the individual. Neoliberal globalism can be thought of in its own terms as a negative theology,
contending that the world economy is sublime and ineffable with a small number of people having special insight and ability to craft
institutions that will, as I put it, encase the sublime world economy.
To me, the metaphor of encasement makes much more sense than the usual idea of markets set free, liberated or unfettered. How
can it be that in an era of proliferating third party arbitration courts, international investment law, trade treaties and regulation
that we talk about "unfettered markets"? One of the big goals of my book is to show neoliberalism is one form of regulation among
many rather than the big Other of regulation as such.
What I explore in Globalists is how we can think of the WTO as the latest in a long series of institutional fixes proposed
for the problem of emergent nationalism and what neoliberals see as the confusion between sovereignty -- ruling a country -- and
ownership -- owning the property within it.
I build here on the work of other historians and show how the demands in the United Nations
by African, Asian, and Latin American nations for things like the Permanent Sovereignty over Natural Resources, i.e. the right to
nationalize foreign-owned companies, often dismissed as merely rhetorical, were actually existentially frightening to global businesspeople.
They drafted neoliberal intellectuals to do things like craft agreements that gave foreign corporations more rights than domestic
actors and tried to figure out how to lock in what I call the "human right of capital flight" into binding international codes. I
show how we can see the development of the WTO as largely a response to the fear of a planned -- and equal -- planet that many saw
in the aspirations of the decolonizing world.
Perhaps the lasting image of globalization that the book leaves is that world capitalism has produced a doubled world -- a world
of imperium (the world of states) and a world of dominium (the world of property). The best way to understand neoliberal globalism
as a project is that it sees its task as the never-ending maintenance of this division. The neoliberal insight of the 1930s was that
the market would not take care of itself: what Wilhelm Röpke called a market police was an ongoing need in a world where people,
whether out of atavistic drives or admirable humanitarian motives, kept trying to make the earth a more equal and just place.
The culmination of these processes by the 1990s is a world economy that is less like a laissez-faire marketplace and more like
a fortress, as ever more of the world's resources and ideas are regulated through transnational legal instruments. The book acts
as a kind of field guide to these institutions and, in the process, hopefully recasts the 20th century that produced them.
This is a rather
interesting look at the political and economic ideas of a circle of important economists, including Hayek and von Mises, over
the course of the last century. He shows rather convincingly that conventional narratives concerning their idea are wrong. That
they didn't believe in a weak state, didn't believe in the laissez-faire capitalism or believe in the power of the market. That
they saw mass democracy as a threat to vested economic interests.
The core beliefs of these people was in a world where money, labor and products could flow across borders without any limit.
Their vision was to remove these subjects (tariffs, immigration and controls on the movement of money) from the control of the
democracy-based nation-state and instead vesting them in international organizations. International organizations which were by
their nature undemocratic and beyond the influence of democracy. That rather than rejecting government power, what they rejected
was national government power. They wanted weak national governments but at the same time strong undemocratic international organizations
which would gain the powers taken from the state.
The other thing that characterized many of these people was a rather general rejection of economics. While some of them are
(at least in theory) economists, they rejected the basic ideas of economic analysis and economic policy. The economy, to them,
was a mystical thing beyond any human understanding or ability to influence in a positive way. Their only real belief was in "bigness".
The larger the market for labor and goods, the more economically prosperous everyone would become. A unregulated "global" market
with specialization across borders and free migration of labor being the ultimate system.
The author shows how, over a period extending from the 1920s to the 1990s, these ideas evolved from marginal academic ideas
to being dominant ideas internationally. Ideas that are reflected today in the structure of the European Union, the WTO (World
Trade Organization) and the policies of most national governments. These ideas, which the author calls "neoliberalism", have today
become almost assumptions beyond challenge. And even more strangely, the dominating ideas of the political left in most of the
west.
The author makes the point, though in a weak way, that the "fathers" of neoliberalism saw themselves as "restoring" a lost
golden age. That golden age being (roughly) the age of the original industrial revolution (the second half of the 1800s). And
to the extent that they have been successful they have done that. But at the same time, they have brought back all the political
and economic questions of that era as well.
In reading it, I started to wonder about the differences between modern neoliberalism and the liberal political movement during
the industrial revolution. I really began to wonder about the actual motives of "reform" liberals in that era. Were they genuinely
interested in reforms during that era or were all the reforms just cynical politics designed to enhance business power at the
expense of other vested interests. Was, in particular, the liberal interest in political reform and franchise expansion a genuine
move toward political democracy or simply a temporary ploy to increase their political power. If one assumes that the true principles
of classic liberalism were always free trade, free migration of labor and removing the power to governments to impact business,
perhaps its collapse around the time of the first world war is easier to understand.
He also makes a good point about the EEC and the organizations that came before the EU. Those organizations were as much about
protecting trade between Europe and former European colonial possessions as they were anything to do with trade within Europe.
To me at least, the analysis of the author was rather original. In particular, he did an excellent job of showing how the ideas
of Hayek and von Mises have been distorted and misunderstood in the mainstream. He was able to show what their ideas were and
how they relate to contemporary problems of government and democracy.
But there are some strong negatives in the book. The author offers up a complete virtue signaling chapter to prove how the
neoliberals are racists. He brings up things, like the John Birch Society, that have nothing to do with the book. He unleashes
a whole lot of venom directed at American conservatives and republicans mostly set against a 1960s backdrop. He does all this
in a bad purpose: to claim that the Kennedy Administration was somehow a continuation of the new deal rather than a step toward
neoliberalism. His blindness and modern political partisanship extended backward into history does substantial damage to his argument
in the book. He also spends an inordinate amount of time on the political issues of South Africa which also adds nothing to the
argument of the book. His whole chapter on racism is an elaborate strawman all held together by Ropke. He also spends a large
amount of time grinding some sort of Ax with regard to the National Review and William F. Buckley.
He keeps resorting to the simple formula of finding something racist said or written by Ropke....and then inferring that anyone
who quoted or had anything to do with Ropke shared his ideas and was also a racist. The whole point of the exercise seems to be
to avoid any analysis of how the democratic party (and the political left) drifted over the decades from the politics of the New
Deal to neoliberal Clintonism.
Then after that, he diverts further off the path by spending many pages on the greatness of the "global south", the G77 and
the New International Economic Order (NIEO) promoted by the UN in the 1970s. And whatever many faults of neoliberalism, Quinn
Slobodian ends up standing for a worse set of ideas: International Price controls, economic "reparations", nationalization, international
trade subsidies and a five-year plan for the world (socialist style economic planning at a global level). In attaching himself
to these particular ideas, he kills his own book. The premise of the book and his argument was very strong at first. But by around
p. 220, its become a throwback political tract in favor of the garbage economic and political ideas of the so-called third world
circa 1974 complete with 70's style extensive quotations from "Senegalese jurists"
Once the political agenda comes out, he just can't help himself. He opens the conclusion to the book taking another cheap shot
for no clear reason at William F. Buckley. He spends alot of time on the Seattle anti-WTO protests from the 1990s. But he has
NOTHING to say about BIll Clinton or Tony Blair or EU expansion or Obama or even the 2008 economic crisis for that matter. Inexplicably
for a book written in 2018, the content of the book seems to end in the year 2000.
I'm giving it three stars for the first 150 pages which was decent work. The second half rates zero stars. Though it could
have been far better if he had written his history of neoliberalism in the context of the counter-narrative of Keynesian economics
and its decline. It would have been better yet if the author had the courage to talk about the transformation of the parties of
the left and their complicity in the rise of neoliberalism. The author also tends to waste lots of pages repeating himself or
worse telling you what he is going to say next. One would have expected a better standard of editing by the Harvard Press.
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Anybody interested in global trade, business, human rights or democracy today
should read this book.
The book follow the Austrians from the beginning in the Habsburgischer empire to the beginning rebellion against the WTO. However,
most importantly it follows the thinking and the thoughts behind the building of a global empire of capitalism with free trade,
capital and rights. All the way to the new "human right" to trade. It narrows down what neoliberal thought really consist of and
indirectly make a differentiation to the neoclassical economic tradition.
What I found most interesting is the turn from economics to law - and the conceptual distinctions between the genes, tradition,
reason, which are translated into a quest for a rational and reason based protection of dominium (the rule of property) against
the overreach of imperium (the rule of states/people). This distinction speaks directly to the issues that EU is currently facing.
"... From the 1980s to 2008, neoliberal politics and policies succeeded in expanding inequality around the world. The political climate Ayn Rand celebrated-the reign of brutal capitalism-intensified. Though Ayn Rand's popularity took off in the 1940s, her reputation took a dive during the 1960s and '70s. Then after her death in 1982, during the neoliberal administrations of Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom, her star rose once more. (See chapter 4 for a full discussion of the rise of neoliberalism.) ..."
"... During the global economic crisis of 2008 it seemed that the neoliberal order might collapse. It lived on, however, in zombie form as discredited political policies and financial practices were restored. ..."
"... We are in the midst of a major global, political, economic, social, and cultural transition - but we don't yet know which way we're headed. The incoherence of the Trump administration is symptomatic of the confusion as politicians and business elites jockey with the Breitbart alt-right forces while conservative evangelical Christians pull strings. The unifying threads are meanness and greed, and the spirit of the whole hodgepodge is Ayn Rand. ..."
"... The current Trump administration is stuffed to the gills with Rand acolytes. Trump himself identifies with Fountainhead character Howard Roark; former secretary of state Rex Tillerson listed Adas Shrugged as his favorite book in a Scouting magazine feature; his replacement Mike Pompeo has been inspired by Rand since his youth. Ayn Rand's influence is ascendant across broad swaths of our dominant political culture - including among public figures who see her as a key to the Zeitgeist, without having read a worth of her writing.'' ..."
"... Rand biographer Jennifer Burns asserts simply that Ayn Rand's fiction is "the gateway drug" to right-wing politics in the United States - although her influence extends well beyond the right wing ..."
"... The resulting Randian sense of life might be called "optimistic cruelty." Optimistic cruelty is the sense of life for the age of greed. ..."
"... The Fountainhead and especially Atlas Shrugged fabricate history and romanticize violence and domination in ways that reflect, reshape, and reproduce narratives of European superiority' and American virtue. ..."
"... It is not an accident that the novels' fans, though gender mixed, are overwhelmingly white Americans of the professional, managerial, creative, and business classes." ..."
"... Does the pervasive cruelty of today's ruling classes shock you? Or, at least give you pause from time to time? Are you surprised by the fact that our elected leaders seem to despise people who struggle, people whose lives are not cushioned and shaped by inherited wealth, people who must work hard at many jobs in order to scrape by? If these or any of a number of other questions about the social proclivities of our contemporary ruling class detain you for just two seconds, this is the book for you. ..."
"... As Duggan makes clear, Rand's influence is not just that she offered a programmatic for unregulated capitalism, but that she offered an emotional template for "optimistic cruelty" that has extended far beyond its libertarian confines. Mean Girl is a fun, worthwhile read! ..."
"... Her work circulated endlessly in those circles of the Goldwater-ite right. I have changed over many years, and my own life experiences have led me to reject the casual cruelty and vicious supremacist bent of Rand's beliefs. ..."
"... In fact, though her views are deeply-seated, Rand is, at heart, a confidence artist, appealing only to narrow self-interest at the expense of the well-being of whole societies. ..."
Mean Girls, which was based on interviews with high school girls conducted by Rosalind Wiseman for her 2002 book Queen Bees and
War/tubes, reflects the emotional atmosphere of the age of the Plastics (as the most popular girls at Actional North Shore High are
called), as well as the era of Wall Street's Gordon Gekko, whose motto is "Greed is Good."1 The culture of greed is the hallmark
of the neoliberal era, the period beginning in the 1970s when the protections of the U.S. and European welfare states, and the autonomy
of postcolonial states around the world, came under attack. Advocates of neoliberalism worked to reshape global capitalism by freeing
transnational corporations from restrictive forms of state regulation, stripping away government efforts to redistribute wealth and
provide public services, and emphasizing individual responsibility over social concern.
From the 1980s to 2008, neoliberal politics and policies succeeded in expanding inequality around the world. The political
climate Ayn Rand celebrated-the reign of brutal capitalism-intensified. Though Ayn Rand's popularity took off in the 1940s, her reputation
took a dive during the 1960s and '70s. Then after her death in 1982, during the neoliberal administrations of Ronald Reagan in the
United States and Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom, her star rose once more. (See chapter 4 for a full discussion of the rise
of neoliberalism.)
During the global economic crisis of 2008 it seemed that the neoliberal order might collapse. It lived on, however, in zombie
form as discredited political policies and financial practices were restored. But neoliberal capitalism has always been contested,
and competing and conflicting political ideas and organizations proliferated and intensified after 2008 as well.
Protest politics blossomed on the left with Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and opposition to the Dakota Access oil pipeline
at the Standing Rock Sioux reservation in the United States, and with the Arab Spring, and other mobilizations around the world.
Anti-neoliberal electoral efforts, like the Bernie Sanders campaign for the U.S. presidency, generated excitement as well.
But protest and organizing also expanded on the political right, with reactionary populist, racial nationalist, and protofascist
gains in such countries as India, the Philippines, Russia, Hungary, and the United States rapidly proliferating. Between these far-right
formations on the one side and persistent zombie neoliberalism on the other, operating sometimes at odds and sometimes in cahoots,
the Season of Mean is truly upon us.
We are in the midst of a major global, political, economic, social, and cultural transition - but we don't yet know which
way we're headed. The incoherence of the Trump administration is symptomatic of the confusion as politicians and business elites
jockey with the Breitbart alt-right forces while conservative evangelical Christians pull strings. The unifying threads are meanness
and greed, and the spirit of the whole hodgepodge is Ayn Rand.
Rand's ideas are not the key to her influence. Her writing does support the corrosive capitalism at the heart of neoliberalism,
though few movers and shakers actually read any of her nonfiction. Her two blockbuster novels, 'The Fountainpen and Atlas Shrugged,
are at the heart of her incalculable impact. Many politicians and government officials going back decades have cited Rand as a formative
influence-particularly finance guru and former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, who was a member of Rand's inner circle,
and Ronald Reagan, the U.S. president most identified with the national embrace of neoliberal policies.
Major figures in business and finance are or have been Rand fans: Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia), Peter Thiel (Paypal), Steve Jobs (Apple),
John Mackey (Whole Foods), Mark Cuban (NBA), John Allison (BB&T Banking Corporation), Travis Kalanik (Uber), Jelf Bezos (Amazon),
ad infinitum.
There are also large clusters of enthusiasts for Rand's novels in the entertainment industry, from the 1940s to the present-from
Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Crawford, and Raquel Welch to Jerry Lewis, Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Rob Lowe, Jim Carrey, Sandra Bullock,
Sharon Stone, Ashley Judd, Eva Mendes, and many more.
The current Trump administration is stuffed to the gills with Rand acolytes. Trump himself identifies with Fountainhead character
Howard Roark; former secretary of state Rex Tillerson listed Adas Shrugged as his favorite book in a Scouting magazine feature; his
replacement Mike Pompeo has been inspired by Rand since his youth. Ayn Rand's influence is ascendant across broad swaths of our dominant
political culture - including among public figures who see her as a key to the Zeitgeist, without having read a worth of her writing.''
But beyond the famous or powerful fans, the novels have had a wide popular impact as bestsellers since publication. Along
with Rand's nonfiction, they form the core texts for a political/ philosophical movement: Objectivism. There are several U.S.- based
Objectivist organizations and innumerable clubs, reading groups, and social circles. A 1991 survey by the Library of Congress and
the Book of the Month Club found that only the Bible had influenced readers more than Atlas Shrugged, while a 1998 Modern Library
poll listed The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged as the two most revered novels in English.
Atlas Shrugged in particular skyrocketed in popularity in the wake of the 2008 financial crash. The U.S. Tea Party movement, founded
in 2009, featured numerous Ayn Rand-based signs and slogans, especially the opening line of Atlas Shrugged: "Who is John Galt?" Republican
pundit David Frum claimed that the Tea Party was reinventing the GOP as "the party of Ayn Rand." During 2009 as well, sales of Atlas
Shrugged tripled, and GQ_magazine called Rand the year's most influential author. A 2010 Zogby poll found that 29 percent of respondents
had read Atlas Shrugged, and half of those readers said it had affected their political and ethical thinking.
In 2018, a business school teacher writing in Forbes magazine recommended repeat readings: "Recent events - the bizarro circus
that is the 2016 election, the disintegration of Venezuela, and so on make me wonder if a lot of this could have been avoided bad
we taken Atlas Shrugged's message to heart. It is a book that is worth re-reading every few years."3
Rand biographer Jennifer Burns asserts simply that Ayn Rand's fiction is "the gateway drug" to right-wing politics in the
United States - although her influence extends well beyond the right wing.4
But how can the work of this one novelist (also an essayist, playwright, and philosopher), however influential, be a significant
source of insight into the rise of a culture of greed? In a word: sex. Ayn Rand made acquisitive capitalists sexy. She launched thousands
of teenage libidos into the world of reactionary politics on a wave of quivering excitement. This sexiness extends beyond romance
to infuse the creative aspirations, inventiveness, and determination of her heroes with erotic energy, embedded in what Rand called
her "sense of life." Analogous to what Raymond Williams has called a "structure of feeling," Rand's sense of life combines the libido-infused
desire for heroic individual achievement with contempt for social inferiors and indifference to their plight.5
Lauren Berlant has called the structure of feeling, or emotional situation, of those who struggle for a good life under neoliberal
conditions "cruel optimism"-the complex of feelings necessary to keep plugging away hopefully despite setbacks and losses.'' Rand's
contrasting sense of life applies to those whose fantasies of success and domination include no doubt or guilt. The feelings of aspiration
and glee that enliven Rand's novels combine with contempt for and indifference to others. The resulting Randian sense of life
might be called "optimistic cruelty." Optimistic cruelty is the sense of life for the age of greed.
Ayn Rand's optimistic cruelty appeals broadly and deeply through its circulation of familiar narratives: the story of "civilizational"
progress, die belief in American exceptionalism, and a commitment to capitalist freedom.
Her novels engage fantasies of European imperial domination conceived as technological and cultural advancement, rather than as
violent conquest. America is imagined as a clean slate for pure capitalist freedom, with no indigenous people, no slaves, no exploited
immigrants or workers in sight. The Fountainhead and especially Atlas Shrugged fabricate history and romanticize violence and
domination in ways that reflect, reshape, and reproduce narratives of European superiority' and American virtue.
Their logic also depends on a hierarchy of value based on radicalized beauty and physical capacity - perceived ugliness or disability'
are equated with pronounced worthlessness and incompetence.
Through the forms of romance and melodrama, Rand novels extrapolate the story of racial capitalism as a story of righteous passion
and noble virtue. They retell The Birth of a Ntation through the lens of industrial capitalism (see chapter 2). They solicit positive
identification with winners, with dominant historical forces. It is not an accident that the novels' fans, though gender mixed,
are overwhelmingly white Americans of the professional, managerial, creative, and business classes."
Ayn Rand is a singular influence on American political thought, and this book brilliantly unfolds how Rand gave voice to the
ethos that shapes contemporary conservatism. Duggan -- whose equally insightful earlier book Twilight of Equality offered an analysis
of neoliberalism and showed how it is both a distortion and continuation of classical liberalism -- here extends the analysis
of American market mania by showing how an anti-welfare state ethos took root as a "structure of feeling" in American culture,
elevating the individual over the collective and promoting a culture of inequality as itself a moral virtue.
Although reviled by the right-wing press (she should wear this as a badge of honor), Duggan is the most astute guide one could
hope for through this devastating history of our recent past, and the book helps explain how we ended up where we are, where far-right,
racist nationalism colludes (paradoxically) with libertarianism, an ideology of extreme individualism and (unlikely bed fellows,
one might have thought) Silicon Valley entrepreneurship.
This short, accessible book is essential reading for everyone who wants to understand the contemporary United States.
Does the pervasive cruelty of today's ruling classes shock you? Or, at least give you pause from time to time? Are you
surprised by the fact that our elected leaders seem to despise people who struggle, people whose lives are not cushioned and shaped
by inherited wealth, people who must work hard at many jobs in order to scrape by? If these or any of a number of other questions
about the social proclivities of our contemporary ruling class detain you for just two seconds, this is the book for you.
Writing with wit, rigor, and vigor, Lisa Duggan explains how Ayn Rand, the "mean girl," has captured the minds and snatched
the bodies of so very many, and has rendered them immune to feelings of shared humanity with those whose fortunes are not as rosy
as their own. An indispensable work, a short read that leaves a long memory.
Mean Girl offers not only a biographical account of Rand (including the fact that she modeled one of her key heroes on a serial
killer), but describes Rand's influence on neoliberal thinking more generally.
As Duggan makes clear, Rand's influence is not just that she offered a programmatic for unregulated capitalism, but that
she offered an emotional template for "optimistic cruelty" that has extended far beyond its libertarian confines. Mean Girl is
a fun, worthwhile read!
Sister, June 3, 2019
Superb poitical and cultural exploration of Rand's influence
Lisa Duggan's concise but substantive look at the political and cultural influence of Ayn Rand is stunning. I feel like I've
been waiting most of a lifetime for a book that is as wonderfully readable as it is insightful. Many who write about Rand reduce
her to a caricature hero or demon without taking her, and the history and choices that produced her seriously as a subject of
cultural inquiry. I am one of those people who first encountered Rand's books - novels, but also some nonfiction and her play,
"The Night of January 16th," in which audience members were selected as jurors – as a teenager.
Under the thrall of some right-wing locals, I was so drawn to Rand's larger-than-life themes, the crude polarization of "individualism"
and "conformity," the admonition to selfishness as a moral virtue, her reductive dismissal of the public good as "collectivism."
Her work circulated endlessly in those circles of the Goldwater-ite right. I have changed over many years, and my own life
experiences have led me to reject the casual cruelty and vicious supremacist bent of Rand's beliefs.
But over those many years, the coterie of Rand true believers has kept the faith and expanded. One of the things I value about
Duggan's compelling account is her willingness to take seriously the far reach of Rand's indifference to human suffering even
as she strips away the veneer that suggests Rand's beliefs were deep.
In fact, though her views are deeply-seated, Rand is, at heart, a confidence artist, appealing only to narrow self-interest
at the expense of the well-being of whole societies.
I learned that the hard way, but I learned it. Now I am recommending Duggan's wise book to others who seek to understand today's
cultural and political moment in the United States and the rise of an ethic of indifference to anybody but the already affluent.
Duggan is comfortable with complexity; most Randian champions or detractors are not.
"... No other book out there has the level of breadth on the history of US imperialism that this work provides. Even though it packs 400 pages of text (which might seem like a turnoff for non-academic readers), "How to Hide an Empire" is highly readable given Immerwhar's skills as a writer. Also, its length is part of what makes it awesome because it gives it the right amount of detail and scope. ..."
"... Alleging that US imperialism in its long evolution (which this book deciphers with poignancy) has had no bearing on the destinies of its once conquered populations is as fallacious as saying that the US is to blame for every single thing that happens in Native American communities, or in the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, etc. Not everything that happens in these locations and among these populations is directly connected to US expansionism, but a great deal is. ..."
"... This is exactly the kind of book that drives the "My country, right or wrong" crowd crazy. Yes, slavery and genocide and ghastly scientific experiments existed before Europeans colonized the Americas, but it's also fair and accurate to say that Europeans made those forms of destruction into a bloody artform. Nobody did mass slaughter better. ..."
I'm a professor at the University of California San Diego and I'm assigning
this for a graduate class.
No other book out there has the level of breadth on the history of US imperialism that this work provides.
Even though it packs 400 pages of text (which might seem like a turnoff for non-academic readers), "How to Hide an Empire" is
highly readable given Immerwhar's skills as a writer. Also, its length is part of what makes it awesome because it gives it the
right amount of detail and scope.
I could not disagree more with the person who gave this book one star. Take it from me: I've taught hundreds of college students
who graduate among the best in their high school classes and they know close to nothing about the history of US settler colonialism,
overseas imperialism, or US interventionism around the world. If you give University of California college students a quiz on
where the US' overseas territories are, most who take it will fail (trust me, I've done it). And this is not their fault. Instead,
it's a product of the US education system that fails to give students a nuanced and geographically comprehensive understanding
of the oversized effect that their country has around our planet.
Alleging that US imperialism in its long evolution (which this book deciphers with poignancy) has had no bearing on the destinies
of its once conquered populations is as fallacious as saying that the US is to blame for every single thing that happens in Native
American communities, or in the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, etc. Not everything that happens in these locations
and among these populations is directly connected to US expansionism, but a great deal is.
A case in point is Puerto Rico's current fiscal and economic crisis. The island's political class share part of the blame for
Puerto Rico's present rut. A lot of it is also due to unnatural (i.e. "natural" but human-exacerbated) disasters such as Hurricane
María. However, there is no denying that the evolution of Puerto Rico's territorial status has generated a host of adverse economic
conditions that US states (including an island state such as Hawaii) do not have to contend with. An association with the US has
undoubtedly raised the floor of material conditions in these places, but it has also imposed an unjust glass ceiling that most
people around the US either do not know about or continue to ignore.
To add to those unfair economic limitations, there are political injustices regarding the lack of representation in Congress,
and in the case of Am. Samoa, their lack of US citizenship. The fact that the populations in the overseas territories can't make
up their mind about what status they prefer is: a) understandable given the way they have been mistreated by the US government,
and b) irrelevant because what really matters is what Congress decides to do with the US' far-flung colonies, and there is no
indication that Congress wants to either fully annex them or let them go because neither would be convenient to the 50 states
and the political parties that run them. Instead, the status quo of modern colonial indeterminacy is what works best for the most
potent political and economic groups in the US mainland. Would
This book is about much more than that though. It's also a history of how and why the United States got to control so much
of what happens around the world without creating additional formal colonies like the "territories" that exist in this legal limbo.
Part of its goal is to show how precisely how US imperialism has been made to be more cost-effective and also more invisible.
Read Immerwhar's book, and don't listen to the apologists of US imperialism which is still an active force that contradicts
the US' professed values and that needs to be actively dismantled. Their attempts at discrediting this important reflect a denialism
of the US' imperial realities that has endured throughout the history that this book summarizes.
"How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States" is a great starting point for making the US public aware of
the US' contradictions as an "empire of liberty" (a phrase once used by Thomas Jefferson to describe the US as it expanded westward
beyond the original 13 colonies). It is also a necessary update to other books on this topic that are already out there, and it
is likely to hold the reader's attention more given its crafty narrative prose and structure
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This is exactly the
kind of book that drives the "My country, right or wrong" crowd crazy. Yes, slavery and genocide and ghastly scientific experiments
existed before Europeans colonized the Americas, but it's also fair and accurate to say that Europeans made those forms of destruction
into a bloody artform. Nobody did mass slaughter better.
The author of this compelling book reveals a history unknown to many
readers, and does so with first-hand accounts and deep historical analyses. You might ask why we can't put such things behind
us. The simple answer: we've never fully grappled with these events before in an honest and open way. This book does the nation
a service by peering behind the curtain and facing the sobering truth of how we came to be what we are.
This is a stunning book, not to be missed. If you finished Sapiens with the feeling your world view had
greatly enlarged, you're likely to have the same experience of your view of the US from reading this engaging work. And like Sapiens,
it's an entirely enjoyable read, full of delightful surprises, future dinner party gems.
The further you get into the book the more interesting and unexpected it becomes. You'll look at the US in ways you likely
never considered before. This is not a 'political' book with an ax to grind or a single-party agenda. It's refreshingly insightful,
beautifully written, fun to read.
This is a gift I'll give to many a good friend, I've just started with my wife. I rarely write
reviews and have never met the author (now my only regret). 3 people found this helpful
This book is an absolutely powerhouse, a must-read, and should be a part of every student's curriculum in
this God forsaken country.
Strictly speaking, this brilliant read is focused on America's relationship with Empire. But like with nearly everything America,
one cannot discuss it without discussing race and injustice.
If you read this book, you will learn a lot of new things about subjects that you thought you knew everything about. You will
have your eyes opened. You will be exposed to the dark underbelly of racism, corruption, greed and exploitation that undergird
American ambition.
I don't know exactly what else to say other than to say you MUST READ THIS BOOK. This isn't a partisan statement -- it's not
like Democrats are any better than Republicans in this book.
This is one of the best books I've ever read, and I am a voracious reader. The content is A+. It never gets boring. It never
gets tedious. It never lingers on narratives. It's extremely well written. It is, in short, perfect. And as such, 10/10.
I heard an interview of Daniel Immerwahr on NPR news / WDET radio regarding this book.
I'm am quite conservative
and only listen to NPR news when it doesn't lean too far to the left.
However, the interview piqued my interest. I am so glad I
purchased this ebook. What a phenomenal and informative read!!! WOW!! It's a "I never knew that" kind of read. Certainly not anything
I was taught in school. This is thoughtful, well written and an easy read. Highly recommend!!
This is a very short book, almost an essay -- 136 pages. It was published in October 2004, four years before financial crisis of
2008, which put the first nail in the coffin of neoliberalism. It addresses the cultural politics of neo-liberalism ("the
Great Deception")
Notable quotes:
"... By now, we've all heard about the shocking redistribution of wealth that's occurred during the last thirty years, and particularly during the last decade. But economic changes like this don't occur in a vacuum; they're always linked to politics. ..."
"... Ultimately, The Twilight of Equality? not only reveals how the highly successful rhetorical maneuvers of neoliberalism have functioned ..."
"... The titles of her four chapters--Downsizing Democracy, The Incredible Shrinking Public, Equality, Inc., Love AND Money--summarize her argument. ..."
"... Her target is neoliberalism, which she sees as a broadly controlling corporate agenda which seeks world domination, privatization of governmental decision-making, and marginalization of unions, low-income people, racial and sexual minorities while presenting to the public a benign and inclusive facade. ..."
"... Neo-liberalism seeks to upwardly distribute money, power, and status, she writes, while progressive movements seek to downwardly distribute money, power, and status. The unity of the downwardly distribution advocates should match the unity of the upwardly distribution advocates in order to be effective, she writes. ..."
"... "There is nothing stable or inevitable in the alliances supporting neoliberal agendas in the U.S. and globally," she writes. "The alliances linking neoliberal global economics, and conservative and right-wing domestic politics, and the culture wars are provisional--and fading...." ..."
"... For example, she discusses neoliberal attempts to be "multicultural," but points out that economic resources are constantly redistributed upward. Neoliberal politics, she argues, has only reinforced and increased the divide between economic and social political issues. ..."
"... Because neoliberal politicians wish to save neoliberalism by reforming it, she argues that proposing alternate visions and ideas have been blocked. ..."
By now, we've all heard about the shocking redistribution of wealth that's occurred during the last thirty years, and
particularly during the last decade. But economic changes like this don't occur in a vacuum; they're always linked to politics.
The Twilight of Equality? searches out these links through an analysis of the politics of the 1990s, the decade when
neoliberalism-free market economics-became gospel.
After a brilliant historical examination of how racial and gender inequities were woven into the very theoretical underpinnings
of the neoliberal model of the state, Duggan shows how these inequities play out today. In a series of political case studies,
Duggan reveals how neoliberal goals have been pursued, demonstrating that progressive arguments that separate identity politics and
economic policy, cultural politics and affairs of state, can only fail.
Ultimately, The Twilight of Equality? not only reveals how the highly successful rhetorical maneuvers of neoliberalism have
functioned but, more importantly, it shows a way to revitalize and unify progressive politics in the U.S. today.
Mona Cohen 5.0 out of 5 stars A Critique of Neoliberalism and the Divided Resistance to It July 3, 2006
Lisa Duggan is intensely interested in American politics, and has found political life in the United States to have been "such
a wild ride, offering moments of of dizzying hope along with long stretches of political depression." She is grateful for "many
ideas about political depression, and how to survive it," and she has written a excellent short book that helps make sense of
many widely divergent political trends.
Her book is well-summarized by its concluding paragraph, which I am breaking up into additional paragraphs for greater
clarity:
"Now at this moment of danger and opportunity, the progressive left is mobilizing against neoliberalism and possible new or
continuing wars.
"These mobilizations might become sites for factional struggles over the disciplining of troops, in the name of unity at a
time of crisis and necessity. But such efforts will fail; the troops will not be disciplined, and the disciplinarians will be
left to their bitterness.
"Or, we might find ways of think, speaking, writing and acting that are engaged and curious about "other people's" struggles
for social justice, that are respectfully affiliative and dialogic rather than pedagogical, that that look for the hopeful spots
to expand upon, and that revel in the pleasure of political life.
"For it is pleasure AND collective caretaking, love AND the egalitarian circulation of money--allied to clear and hard-headed
political analysis offered generously--that will create the space for a progressive politics that might both imagine and
create...something worth living for."
The titles of her four chapters--Downsizing Democracy, The Incredible Shrinking Public, Equality, Inc., Love AND
Money--summarize her argument.
She expected upon her high school graduation in 1972, she writes, that "active and expanding social movements seemed capable
of ameliorating conditions of injustice and inequality, poverty, war and imperialism....I had no idea I was not perched at a
great beginning, but rather at a denouement, as the possibilities for progressive social change encountered daunting historical
setbacks beginning in 1972...."
Her target is neoliberalism, which she sees as a broadly controlling corporate agenda which seeks world domination,
privatization of governmental decision-making, and marginalization of unions, low-income people, racial and sexual minorities
while presenting to the public a benign and inclusive facade.
Neo-liberalism seeks to upwardly distribute money, power, and status, she writes, while progressive movements seek to
downwardly distribute money, power, and status. The unity of the downwardly distribution advocates should match the unity of the
upwardly distribution advocates in order to be effective, she writes.
Her belief is that all groups threatened by the neoliberal paradigm should unite against it, but such unity is threatened by
endless differences of perspectives. By minutely analyzing many of the differences, and expanding understanding of diverse
perspectives, she tries to remove them as obstacles towards people and organizations working together to achieve both unique and
common aims.
This is good book for those interested in the history and current significance of numerous progressive ideological arguments.
It is a good book for organizers of umbrella organizations and elected officials who work with diverse social movements. By
articulating points of difference, the author depersonalizes them and aids in overcoming them.
Those who are interested in electoral strategies, however, will be disappointed. The interrelationship between neoliberalism
as a governing ideology and neoliberalism as a political strategy is not discussed here. It is my view that greater and more
focused and inclusive political organizing has the potential to win over a good number of the those who see support of
neoliberalism's policy initiatives as a base-broadening tactic more than as a sacred cause.
"There is nothing stable or inevitable in the alliances supporting neoliberal agendas in the U.S. and globally," she
writes. "The alliances linking neoliberal global economics, and conservative and right-wing domestic politics, and the culture
wars are provisional--and fading...."
Reading this book adds to one's understanding of labels, and political and intellectual distinctions. It has too much jargon
for my taste, but not so much as to be impenetrable. It is an excellent summarization and synthesis of the goals, ideologies, and
histories of numerous social movements, both famous and obscure.
Duggan
articulately connects social and economic issues to each other, arguing that neoliberal
politics have divided the two when in actuality, they cannot be separated from one another.
In the introduction, Duggan argues that politics have become neoliberal - while politics
operate under the guise of promoting social change or social stability, in reality, she argues,
politicians have failed to make the connection between economic and social/cultural issues. She
uses historical background to prove the claim that economic and social issues can be separated
from each other is false.
For example, she discusses neoliberal attempts to be "multicultural," but points out that
economic resources are constantly redistributed upward. Neoliberal politics, she argues, has
only reinforced and increased the divide between economic and social political issues.
After the introduction, Duggan focuses on a specific topic in each chapter: downsizing
democracy, the incredible shrinking public, equality, and love and money. In the first chapter
(downsizing democracy), she argues that through violent imperial assertion in the Middle East,
budget cuts in social services, and disillusionments in political divides, "capitalists could
actually bring down capitalism" (p. 2).
Because neoliberal politicians wish to save neoliberalism by reforming it, she argues that
proposing alternate visions and ideas have been blocked. Duggan provides historical background
that help the reader connect early nineteenth century U.S. legislation (regarding voting rights
and slavery) to perpetuated institutional prejudices.
Over-promotion far beyond the level of competency using affirmative action playbook is a real problem and much more serious that
Peter Principle would suggest: often it is instrumental in getting female sociopaths into corner office.
Imagine a chimpanzee rampaging through a data center powering everything from Google to Facebook. Infrastructure engineers use a
software version of this "chaos monkey" to test online services' robustness -- their ability to survive random failure and correct
mistakes before they actually occur. Tech entrepreneurs are society's chaos monkeys, disruptors testing and transforming every
aspect of our lives, from transportation (Uber) and lodging (Airbnb) to television (Netflix) and dating (Tinder). One of Silicon
Valley's most provocative chaos monkeys is Antonio García Martínez.
After stints on Wall Street and as CEO of his own startup, García Martínez joined Facebook's nascent advertising team, until he was
forced out in the wake of an internal product war over the future of the company's monetization strategy, and eventually landed at
rival Twitter.
In
Chaos Monkeys
, this gleeful contrarian unravels the chaotic evolution of social media and
online marketing and lays bare the hijinks, trade secrets, and power plays of the visionaries, grunts, sociopaths, opportunists,
accidental tourists, and money cowboys who are revolutionizing our world.
>
Gethin Darklord
5.0 out of 5 stars
Revalatory
epistole from Silicon Valley
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 29, 2018
Verified Purchase
I really enjoyed this book which falls into two sections: before the author's
employment with Facebook and afterwards until he is fired. Mr Martinez comes across as a very self centered but brilliant
tech geek and whilst unappealing as a friend his frank discussions of his thoughts give an unusual degree of insight into
his character; and of those like him. He actually manages to explain how Facebook makes its money which is something I have
never understood before. His assertion they wouldn't share your data is charmingly Naive in the wake of the Cambridge
Analytica scandal (2019) - the book was written some years before.
Ultimately
it takes bravery to write frankly about one's own failures and this makes it distinct from the hagiographies and self
congratulatory books which characterize most business books.
An interesting aside is his obvious erudition with well chosen classical quotations
at the head of each chapter. Recommended highly.
>
Amazingly
accurate coverage of Facebook's internal culture, the good, the bad, and the ugly. (Plus much, much more!)
5.0 out of 5 stars
Amazingly
accurate coverage of Facebook's internal culture, the good, the bad, and the ugly. (Plus much, much more!)
Reviewed in the United States on July 10, 2016
Verified Purchase
I worked at Facebook from 2010 until 2015, and until now I have never seen the inner
machinations as accurately portrayed as they are in 'Chaos Monkeys'. Facebook very carefully maintains a public relations
campaign (almost more internally focused than external) to convince the world it is the best place to work ever. In reality it
is just like any other large company, with plenty of political intrigue, infighting, silo-building, and collateral damage. Sure,
the mini-kitchens have organic bananas, and pistachios that stressed slobby software engineers neither have to shell, nor leave a
pile of shells littered all around the floor... but in reality they are shackled to an oar, pulling to the endless beat of a
drum. Code. Code. Code. It is all here the creepy propaganda, the failed high-profile projects, the surreal manager/staff
relationships, the cultivated cult-like atmosphere, the sharp divide between the have-it-all, and the "hope to have enough to
escape" staff. The bizarro world of inside FB, around the IPO. I was there and experienced many of the same corporate events and
milestones myself. Antonio Garcia Martinez captures it all perfectly.
That's only the last half of the book.
The rest is a tale of escaping from startup hell, making a go at reaching startup heaven, then making deals to salvage it all
when reaching the critical trial-by-fire that every startup must face: die, execute flawlessly, or exit.
There are some who will find the tone, the voice, or the political incorrectness of both to be too harsh to digest. I've already
seen that in a few of the reviews here. To them I say "grow up"... put on your big boy/girl pants and read this for the story.
The tale it tells. The facts it presents. The data with which it backs it all up. Because it is all true. The exposition of
complex systems are described using appropriate, and facile metaphors. Many of the standard Facebook tropes ("stealing/selling
your data", "Zuck is evil", etc.) are explained for the misleading baloney that they are. Best of all it describes how the
advertising media really operates, going back to the dawn of it, and how Facebook, Google, et al are merely extensions of a
system that has existed for two centuries. It is worth the purchase price for that lesson alone, all wrapped in a great, and true
story.
For myself, having lived through much of the same experience at Facebook (from onboarding, the devotion, the cynicism, to the
inglorious, frustrated exit bungled by one of the legion of Facebook's incompetent and narcissistic manager corps) I found myself
going from laughter, to nodding agreement, to gut-wrenching bouts of PTSD as I turned the pages of 'Chaos Monkeys'. Now I no
longer have to justify myself to people who ask me why I left Facebook - I can just tell them to read this book, since it
explains it better than I ever could.
>
1.0 out of 5 stars
Whiny
Reviewed in the United States on October 20, 2019
Verified Purchase
The author seems to be a very bitter and acerbic individual with huge collection of
chips on his shoulder, from past coworkers to the capitalism itself. It is rare to encounter a character in his book to
which he doesn't find something contemptuous or negative to say about. Even when describing genuinely positive things -
like courage, loyalty or generosity - he seems to be astonished that these puny humans he despises so much are capable of
such things. I can't remember any character (including the mother of his children) who is described with genuine warmth and
affection, then best he could master is "that person could be useful to me in certain situations".
While the protagonist seems to be entirely driven by monetary incentives, he does not forget to regularly interrupt his
quest for a lengthy tirade about how capitalism is the worst (usually on the way to convince some capitalists to give him
some money so he could participate in capitalist venture and make some money for himself).
The author undoubtedly has a knack for storytelling and a keen eye (usually turned to finding faults in everything he
sees), so there are many interesting and entertaining bits in the book. But the overall negativity and constant droning of
the author about how everything around him is wrong from the mere atoms upwards is really wearing you down. I understand
that's sort of "here's what I am without any makeup, take it or leave it" but I really wish the it wasn't a whiny
narcissistic nihilist...
>
Insightful,
hilarious and accurate take on the insanity of silicon valley
5.0 out of 5 stars
Insightful,
hilarious and accurate take on the insanity of silicon valley
Reviewed in the United States on August 6, 2016
Verified Purchase
Chaos Monkeys is a bargain, since you are really getting four books in one. First, our
lucky reader is treated to a Sherman-style total war on the vanities and conceits of the tech elite. For the hater in all of us,
it is uncompromised, savage delight. He particularly takes aim at noxious myth of meritocracy in the valley. As anywhere, those
educated at the right places, and taught the right diction and manner of speaking rise to the top. For whatever reason, people in
silicon valley seem to need reminding of this fairly often, perhaps more than most.
Another skewered vanity is that the work being done there is "changing the world." The nirvana of being paid millions while doing
meaningful work is the final privilege being sought by the waves of wall street refugees making their way out west. Only the most
self-deluded really buy it, and as Antonio shows, those often happen to be working at the most influential and powerful
companies. Is Facebook really changing the world? Without question, but when Facebook uses the language of historical figures,
implicitly placing itself on the same podium as Cato the elder, say, it is both creepy and pathetic. Furthermore, the same gulf
between the windfalls of the upper echelon and the rank-and-file is still present.
The second book is a detailed, unsparing deep-dive into the trenches of the ad tech industry. Just for that, it is worth reading
if your job has any remote connection with selling online. You will come away with more awareness of how pixels convert to
dollars. This theme occupies most of the second half of the book. If anything, the vivid metaphors he uses to describe the
otherwise dull and esoteric details of identity matching and attribution will serve you well anytime you must summon a complete
picture of this complex web in your head. Even non-specialists will find fascinating the descriptions of how private data is
collected and sold, not to mention probably realizing they have been worried about the wrong kind of privacy violations.
Third, there is a marvelous how-to guide for aspiring entrepreneurs hidden between the diatribes. Antonio managed to meet many of
the key players in the industry. His detailed accounts of many of these meetings (confrontations) offer a unique
behind-the-scenes vantage which many manuals for silicon valley success avoid, so the authors can remain in good stead with the
figures involved. In addition, there is another way that Chaos Monkeys serves as an excellent preview of what entrepreneurship
entails. Other how-to books are so smitten with the idea of entrepreneur as Hero that they often fail to convey the tedium,
anxiety and chaos that are most of the day-to-day realities for any entrepreneur. These other books mention that building a
company is hard and stressful, but often seem shy to mention exactly why, beyond executing a bad idea, or a linear increase in
working hours. In reality, the unspoken "hard" part of any startup is not the actual hours involved, or the idea, or execution,
but rather the unwavering conviction you must have to keep at it when things are totally falling apart. The struggle to convince
yourself, your investors and your customers that your vision of the world is the correct one is constant war against entropy,
counterfactuals, competitors or self-doubts. Any of these must be swallowed, digested, shat out, and freeze-dried as more grist
for your sales pitch mill. Every entrepreneur will immediately recognize what Antonio unabashedly portrays: the dreadful gulf
between the inward awareness of all the chaos and flux at the startup, while preserving the outward image of polish, order and
optimism. In fact, the delusion of performing world-changing work as an entrepreneur (even when you're just building a s***ty
analytics panel) is so pervasive, it cannot be solely attributed to narcissism. The book makes the point that this delusion is
actually an emotional coping mechanism to endure the aforementioned doublethink on a daily basis.
Finally, we are given an intimate, unsentimental portrait of Antonio's tortured psyche. While I wouldn't necessarily advocate
"praying for Antonio's soul," as a previous reviewer stated, his relentless self-deprecation and raw honesty balance out some of
the selfish decisions he makes in the book. He is extremely well read, and I suspect this background informs a somewhat tragic
theme of the book -- for a certain type of person, the only hope that can lift the cynicism and misanthropy of early life
disappointment is to undergo a meaningful quest with loyal companions. There aren't many of those quests around anymore,
unfortunately, nor is there a surfeit of loyal companions in the sort of places and professions that demand one's full faculties.
In the book, many characters and causes fail to meet this high bar, of course. I suspect more than a few failed idealists will
find a kindred spirit in Antonio, despite the caustic tone throughout. That said, there is plenty here to be offended about, if
that is your sort of thing. Some of the criticism is justified. For example, there is some objectification of women that could
have been omitted. However, if that is your ONLY take-away, then you are precisely the sort of self-important, thin-skinned
windbag that is rightfully skewered in Chaos Monkeys.
>
3.0 out of 5 stars
Silicon
Valley: Operating Instructions or Expose?
Reviewed in the United States on February 12, 2017
Verified Purchase
It's an interesting read as most reviews indicate is basically two books in one. The first
"book" is about the world of Silicon Valley incubators and small start-ups. That takes up the first half of the story. The tale
is close to reality as anyone involved in the SV start-up world can attest. It is full of the excess, hype, positioning,
politics, back-stabbing and intrigue that is so commonplace. Somewhere in that mix is technology most of which is not even close
to revolutionary but likely to be useful to someone. The trick is to make that "someone" seem like a really big someone who is
dying to spend a lot of money. Then after getting investors to buy in ... keep selling. This is all well and entertainingly
covered in the book. The second "book" covers the author's life at Facebook pre- and post-IPO. Like all companies, Facebook has
its own dysfunctionalities. The dysfunctionalities that the author experienced at Facebook were not the sort he felt comfortable
with. He also felt like his ideas were far better than anything Facebook came up with and that they were idiots for not listening
to him. Maybe they were but they, as he begrudgingly indicated, seemed to do OK pursuing a different approach. Because the second
half seemed to be more about "how stupid Facebook was" and "how smart he was", it served to be far less entertaining and
enlightening than the first half mostly because I didn't care that he was being ignored and that he felt like he didn't fit in.
You can read this book two ways - especially the first half. It can be consumed as an expose showing the shallow nature and
hollow core of the Silicon Valley gold rush or a "how to" book for fledgling entrepreneurs going after the incubator and investor
dollars. And then you can skip that second half.
VINE VOICE
5.0 out of 5 stars
Surprisingly
informative and a good read
Reviewed in the United States on September 13, 2016
Verified Purchase
I bought this book on a whim as it looked like an interesting take on the inner workings of
the world of start ups as well as insights into the machinations at Facebook. Having worked for some big-ish technology companies
and now playing in the start up world I expected to get some fairly vanilla anecdotes about the ups and downs of life in the
Valley and the personalities who make the headlines.
Initially, I was not sure how the story was going to play out as the author started out with some of the later FB meetings and
the goings on in his private life. This book was not going to find its way into any college class on entrepreneurship! Happily,
the story then moves into 2 distinct phases - life in startup hell and life in big company hell. Antonio Garcia Martinez goes on
to tell it how it really is - no matter where the chips fall or who he may insult on the way through. And - he does this in an
articulate and informative way, whether discussing personalities or the arcane inner workings of ad-serving technology.
Bottom line - this book is a very authentic description of the way the tech ecosystem works. Whether discussing option vesting,
the randomness of successful product development, the lot of a product manager (the man in the middle), the venture capital
roundabout, the modus operandi of corp dev folks (that would be me) Martinez captures it accurately - f-bombs and all.
>
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fear
and Loathing in Silicon Valley
Reviewed in the United States on July 7, 2016
Verified Purchase
Were it not for the possibility of legal complications, Chaos Monkeys could have been
titled "Fear and Loathing in Silicon Valley." It is a unique blend of high stakes gambling, sex, alcohol and hubris. For those
willing to wade through technical detail, it shows how Internet applications like Facebook and Google convert pixels into
dollars. For the rest of us, the story of the excruciatingly hard work and intense drama that go into both a startup company and
the internal machinations of an established, aggressive hi-tech company provide plenty of drama.
Garcia Martinez is obviously widely read. His well chosen chapter heading quotes and references to disparate sources make that
clear. His writing is articulate, fast paced, intense and focused. The fact that he names names and gives an insider perspective
to well known events makes the story an especially interesting one.
Having been sucked in, ground up and spit out of the Silicon Valley madness, Garcia Martinez is talking about taking off on a
circumnavigation aboard his sailboat. One cannot help but wonder if he can make the change from the pressure and fast pace of his
old existence to the new. I hope so.
>
5.0 out of 5 stars
Brilliantly
written and refreshingly honest
Reviewed in the United States on August 7, 2016
Verified Purchase
Mr. Martinez chronicle's of his career in Silicon Valley is entertaining, refreshingly
honest and of historical significance. The first part of the book details his time at AdGrok, a startup of no great consequence,
where he cut his teeth in Silicon Valley. It is a tale of ambition, greed, irreverence, vengeance and betrayal, sprinkled with
enough kindness and chutzpah to keep even the less morbid reader engaged. The second part of the book chronicles Mr. Martinez
career in Facebook, as a member of the nascent Ads team. It is a fascinating and unforgiving account of the culture and
personalities that propelled Facebook to profitability. Of historical significance is the brilliant description of the evolution
of the surprisingly technical world of Internet advertisement, written in the first person by someone who had a hand in its
shaping. The tale is interesting in of itself but the book is made by Mr. Martinez prose. His writing is articulate, witty and
erudite. Most importantly, in a world where BS is a major currency, Mr. Martinez's voice is a breath of fresh air in its
irreverence and honesty. He spares nothing and no one: SV Feminists, SJWs, greedy VCs, sycophant middle managers and sociopath
CEOs. I suspect many readers will be turned off by his candor, but I for one thoroughly enjoyed his genuine, if sometimes coarse,
voice. I wish Mr. Martinez all the best in his nautical adventures and best of luck in his literary career - it is hard to
imagine he can come back to technology after this.
>
Chaos Monkeys takes you through the culture, the contradictions and, as the title would suggest, the chaos in which Silicon
Valley is apparently wrapped. Antonio Garcia Martinez makes a charming guide: funny, literate and with a rakish sense of humor
that gives this insider's account a kind of immediacy and real emotional punch. I got the kind of lift from reading this book
that I once did when reading the rollicking prose of Tom Wolfe, who was also a chronicler of the earliest corporate cultures that
defined California and the Valley. Martinez, like Wolfe, offers keen cultural observations that spring from our very human
strivings and persistent ambitions.
This book delivers a lot. We learn much about Antonio's personal life, his history, his loves (several women and a couple boats),
his avocations, his strengths (which include his gift for writing and other forms of persuasion as well as his canny negotiating
powers) and his weaknesses (his impulsiveness and his willingness to shade the truth a bit when it serves his purposes). But this
account is hardly a highly varnished one, and he casts his critical capacities inward on several occasions. We might prudently
reserve some suspicions about the strict veracity of a gifted story-teller like Martinez, but I find this account has the ring of
truth and he holds the mirror close to the his own face.
But the book is also a compendium of information, anecdotes and personal portraits of an important scene in American business
history. All this, of course, relates to the "obscene fortune and random failure in Silicon Valley" advertised in the book's
subtitle. Though many reviewers damn this aspect with faint praise, calling it gossipy, I myself found it substantive, detailed
and instructive about a slice of entrepreneurial and investment activity that is not really well known or understood by many who
might like to know. What's involved in a bona fide start-up? What are the aims of venture capitalists, who variously smile or
frown on these endeavors? When the corporate development types from Twitter and Facebook come calling, what are they seeking and
what are they offering? Martinez reliably spills the beans in this regard, naming names, pegging salaries and calculating
compensation packages out over two-, three- and four-year time horizons. Enquiring minds want to know. And in the end there is
really more random failure than obscene fortune. And I think Martinez would likely agree and especially as it applied to him
personally.
As a sort of footnote (and, by the way, Martinez likes footnotes very much, as do I), let me advise the potential reader that
this book also takes a fairly deep dive into advertising technology. And this, too, is really a big economic and business story
of our time. Open your newspaper (or however you take your news these days) and you'll likely read about the disruptive influence
of the Internet, mobile technology and all things digital on those reliable engines of the 20th century economy: media and
advertising. It's a story literally told daily. Old models are rapidly shrinking and new ones shape-shifting at the present
moment. Many think Google and Facebook own this future, although that's probably premature. Make no mistake about it though;
Martinez knows this scene up close and personal. He was toiling daily for several years, working simultaneously at both the work
of destruction and the act of creation, in the very belly of the beast. I venture an opinion that there are few people who know
more about this brave new world of digital persuasion than Antonio Garcia Martinez.
Bottom line: This book has been my favorite summer read by far. It entertained as it informed. I heartily recommend it.
>
Subtly
blistering takedown of frauds, charlatans, and stooges.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Subtly
blistering takedown of frauds, charlatans, and stooges.
Reviewed in the United States on September 26, 2017
Verified Purchase
"He's such a cynic." A favorite phrase of the deluded and dishonest used to invalidate the
perspectives and arguments of someone who's figured them out. I suppose it depends on how you define a cynic, and I tend to think
of cynicism as a condition where one knows the price of everything but can't see or won't accept the value. While I don't know
Antonio, I'm pretty sure he's not that. Time and again throughout his book, you see a guy who's just refreshingly skeptical of
the inflated value others put on both themselves and the technology they make or manage.
I enjoyed the narrative structure of the book, which starts somewhat close to the end--in a scene that nails the sad banality of
every corporate meeting ever--then jumps back in time to lay the foundation for later decisions (and effectively explains
complexities of high finance), and diverts into a mixture of expository asides, personal experiences and workplace politics. This
aspect is chaotic, and often pleonastic, and might annoy some. Overall I appreciated it, possibly because I can't stay on a
single topic for that long myself. Roughly, Antonio focuses on the day-to-day realities of cutting deals in the first half, and
the day-to-day realities of building and shipping product throughout the rest. There are some blistering insights, too, notably
the take-down of entitled Bay Area "feminists" and basic lessons on realities of capitalism and startups and investors. He's got
a knack for capturing personalities, and his vocabulary is impressive, at least to a rube such as myself.
As to the narrative: You can't help but think that the old adage that life is high school extended applies here. Or really, as
Tom Brokaw put it, life is junior high, filled with people drowning in pettiness, insecurities, and irrelevant rivalries over
imagined and exaggerated slights. This, of course, can be discarded as a cynical take on things but it's not intended to
be--we're all prone to mistakes, losing our tempers, and feeling fraudulent or irrationally immature while harboring (hopefully
only briefly) silly grudges. And it's okay. It happens. It's what people in all of their flawed glory frequently do.
The problem, however, with so many companies in the tech world is that their leadership often assumes they're somehow removed
from such pedestrian afflictions. That they are about more than what it is they actually do, that they're better, and that they
warrant their wealth and status. And this delusion would be comical if it wasn't so corrosive. For Antonio to call things what
they actually are--more than just "calling it as he sees it" but actually behaving like the scientist he is, discerning what's
going on, and explaining the discovery--isn't cynical. It's realistic. And it's a frightening, problematic reality that,
curiously, many seem to be okay with.
I understand that if you launch a startup, you have to deliver soaring platitudes about grander meaning and purpose, because you
can't offer wildly valuable stock units and enormous salaries to experienced people who can do the job but know better than to
believe the BS or indulge the risk. The comparison of early-stage startups to combat units he makes might be stretching it some,
but the stress is at least along the same lines, if only conceptually. I also enjoyed how he explained how after a startup
succeeds and transitions into the establishment, that to keep shareholders/investors happy, leadership has to make
bold-yet-credible-sounding promises about a vision that drives future growth. Thus, Facebook will continue to talk about
connection and community, and Google will talk about "billion people problems" and do everything possible to mask that their
inner machinations mostly consist of capturing behavioral data and predicting purchasing decisions, and selling that to peddlers
of largely insipid nonsense.
I kept relating the various parables in Chaos Monkeys to Game of Thrones plot-lines and characters. In that show, my favorites
are Arya and Bronn--an assassin and a mercenary, both with a different ethos but each resolutely self-deterministic, and each
capable of living according to their own principles without playing the power games that consume and crush so many others.
They're good models to follow if you choose to enter this world. I got into the tech industry because I love the challenges and
working with curious, intelligent people. It is mostly fulfilling and worthwhile, and I accept that my chances of Fast Company
glory are nil. After reading this, I feel "pretty good" about my decision, and am glad to have a greater understanding of what
founders deal with.
"... "Within the next generation I believe that the world's rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience." ..."
"... all those responsible for this plandemic are guilty of crimes against humanity. ..."
"Within the next generation I believe that the world's rulers will discover that infant
conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs
and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting
people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience."
Indeed. Dr. Fauxi is a quack and the medical establishment has lost all credibility.
GoodyGumdrops 15 hours ago
Fauci is an evil psychopath and all those responsible for this plandemic are guilty of
crimes against humanity.
This is starting to look really like staging of "Brave new world..." Today's society is
closer to Huxley's "Brave New World" than to Orwell's "1984". But there are clear elements of
both. If you will, the worst of both worlds has come true today.
In 1949, sometime after the publication of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four , Aldous
Huxley, the author of Brave New World (1931), who was then living in California, wrote to
Orwell. Huxley had briefly taught French to Orwell as a student in high school at Eton.
Huxley generally praises Orwell's novel, which to many seemed very similar to Brave New
World in its dystopian view of a possible future. Huxley politely voices his opinion that his
own version of what might come to pass would be truer than Orwell's. Huxley observed that the
philosophy of the ruling minority in Nineteen Eighty-Four is sadism, whereas his own version is
more likely, that controlling an ignorant and unsuspecting public would be less arduous, less
wasteful by other means. Huxley's masses are seduced by a mind-numbing drug, Orwell's with
sadism and fear.
The most powerful quote In Huxley's letter to Orwell is this:
Within the next generation I believe that the world's rulers will discover that infant
conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs
and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting
people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience.
Aldous Huxley.
Could Huxley have more prescient? What do we see around us?
Masses of people dependent upon drugs, legal and illegal. The majority of advertisements
that air on television seem to be for prescription drugs, some of them miraculous but most of
them unnecessary. Then comes COVID, a quite possibly weaponized virus from the
Fauci-funded-with-taxpayer-dollars lab in Wuhan, China. The powers that be tragically deferred
to the malevolent Fauci who had long been hoping for just such an opportunity. Suddenly, there
was an opportunity to test the mRNA vaccines that had been in the works for nearly twenty
years. They could be authorized as an emergency measure but were still highly experimental.
These jabs are not really vaccines at all, but a form of gene therapy . There
are potential
disastrous consequences down the road. Government experiments on the public are
nothing new .
Since there have been no actual, long-term trials, no one who contributed to this massive
drug experiment knows what the long-term consequences might be. There have been countless
adverse injuries and deaths already for which the government-funded vaccine producers will
suffer no liability. With each passing day, new side-effects have begun to appear: blood clots,
seizures, heart failure.
As new adverse reactions become known despite the censorship employed by most media outlets,
the more the Biden administration is pushing the vaccine, urging private corporations to make
it mandatory for all employees. Colleges are making them mandatory for all students returning
to campus.
The leftmedia are advocating the "shunning" of the unvaccinated. The self-appointed
virtue-signaling Democrats are furious at anyone and everyone who declines the jab. Why? If
they are protected, why do they care? That is the question. Same goes for the ridiculous mask
requirements . They protect no one but for those in operating rooms with their insides
exposed, yet even the vaccinated are supposed to wear them!
Months ago, herd immunity was near. Now Fauci and the CDC say it will never be achieved? Now
the Pfizer shot will necessitate yearly booster shots. Pfizer
expects to make $21B this year from its COVID vaccine! Anyone who thinks this isn't about
money is a fool. It is all about money, which is why Fauci, Gates, et al. were so determined to
convince the public that HCQ and ivermectin, both of which are effective, prophylactically and
as treatment, were not only useless, but dangerous. Both of those drugs are tried, true, and
inexpensive. Many of those thousands of N.Y. nursing home fatalities might have been prevented
with the use of one or both of those drugs. Those deaths are on the hands of Cuomo and his
like-minded tyrants drunk on power.
Months ago, Fauci, et al. agreed that children were at little or no risk of getting COVID,
of transmitting it, least of all dying from it. Now Fauci is demanding that all teens be
vaccinated by the end of the year! Why? They are no more in danger of contracting it now than
they were a year ago. Why are parents around this country not standing up to prevent their kids
from being guinea pigs in this monstrous medical experiment? And now they are " experimenting
" on infants. Needless to say, some have died. There is no reason on Earth for teens, children,
and infants to be vaccinated. Not one.
Huxley also wrote this:
"The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they
will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be
able to behave badly and call your bad behavior 'righteous indignation' -- this is the height
of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats ."
Perhaps this explains the left's hysterical impulse to force these untested shots on those
of us who have made the decision to go without it. If they've decided that it is the thing to
do, then all of us must submit to their whims. If we decide otherwise, it gives them the
righteous right to smear all of us whom they already deplore.
As C.J. Hopkins has
written , the left means to criminalize dissent. Those of us who are vaccine-resistant are
soon to be outcasts, deprived of jobs and entry into everyday businesses. This kind of
discrimination should remind everyone of ...oh, Germany three quarters of a century ago. Huxley
also wrote, "The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other
sets of people are human." That is precisely what the left is up to, what BLM is planning, what
Critical Race Theory is all about.
Tal Zaks, Moderna's chief medical officer, said these new vaccines are "hacking the
software of life." Vaccine-promoters claim he never said this, but he did. Bill Gates called
the vaccines " an operating
system " to the horror of those promoting it, a Kinsley gaffe. Whether it is or isn't
hardly matters at this point, but these statements by those behind the vaccines are a clue to
what they have in mind.
There will be in the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love
their servitude and producing dictatorship without tears , so to speak, producing a kind of
painless concentration camp for entire societies so that people will in fact have their
liberties taken away from them but will rather enjoy it.
This is exactly what the left is working so hard to effect: a pharmacologically compromised
population happy to be taken care of by a massive state machine. And while millions of people
around the world have surrendered to the vaccine and mask hysteria, millions more, about 1.3
billion, want no part of this government vaccine mania.
In his letter to Orwell, Huxley ended with the quote cited above and again here because it
is so profound:
Within the next generation I believe that the world's rulers will discover that infant
conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs
and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting
people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience.
Huxley nailed the left more than seventy years ago, perhaps because leftists have never
changed throughout the ages. 61,497 173
Fat Beaver 14 hours ago (Edited)
If i am to be treated as an outcast or an undesirable because i refuse the vax, i will
immediately become someone that has zero reverence for the law, and i can only imagine 10's
of millions will be right there with me.
strych10 14 hours ago
Welcome to the club.
We have coffee in the corner and occasional meetings at various bars.
Dr. Chihuahua-González 13 hours ago
I'm a doctor, you could contact me anytime and receive your injection.
Fat Beaver 13 hours ago (Edited)
I've gotta feeling the normie world you think you live in is about to change drastically
for the worse...
sparky139 PREMIUM 10 hours ago
You mean you'll sign papers that you injected us *wink *wink? And toss it away?
bothneither 2 hours ago
Oh geez how uncommon, another useless doctor with no Scruples who sold out to big Pharma.
Please have my Gates sponsored secret sauce.
Unknown 6 hours ago (Edited)
Both Huxley and Orwell are wrong. Neoliberalism (the use of once office for personal
gains) is by far the most powerful force that subjugates the inept population. Neoliberalism
demolished the mighty USSR, now destroying the USA, and will do the same to China. And this
poison dribbles from the top to bottom creating self-centered population that is unable to
unite, much less resist.
Deathrips 15 hours ago (Edited) remove link
Tylers.
You gonna cover Tucker Carlsons show earlier today on FOX news about vaxxx deaths? almost 4k
reported so far this year.
Is the population of india up in arms or is the MSM?
Nelbev 10 hours ago
Facebook just flagged/censored it, must sign into see vid, Tuck also failed to mention
mRNA and adenovirus vaxes were experimental and not FDA approved nor gone through stage III
trials. Beside deaths, have blood clot issues. Good he mentioned how naturally immune if get
covid and recovered, better than vaccine, but not covered for bogus passports. Me personally,
I would rather catch covid and get natural immunity than be vaccinated with an untested
experimental vaccine.
Dr. Jayanta Bhattacharya; Dr. Geert Vanden Bossche; Dr. Ron Brown; Dr. Ryan Cole; Dr.
Richard Fleming; Dr. Simone Gold; Dr. Sunetra Gupta; Dr. Carl Heneghan; Dr. Martin Kulldorff;
Dr. Paul Marik; Dr. Peter McCullough; Dr. Joseph Mercola; Dr. Lee Merritt; Dr. Judy Mikovits;
Dr. Dennis Modry; Dr. Hooman Noorchashm; Dr. Harvey Risch; Dr. Sherri Tenpenny; Dr. Richard
Urso; Dr. Michael Yeadon;
Dr. Jayanta Bhattacharya; Dr. Geert Vanden Bossche; Dr. Ron Brown; Dr. Ryan Cole; Dr.
Richard Fleming; Dr. Simone Gold; Dr. Sunetra Gupta; Dr. Carl Heneghan; Dr. Martin Kulldorff;
Dr. Paul Marik; Dr. Peter McCullough; Dr. Joseph Mercola; Dr. Lee Merritt; Dr. Judy Mikovits;
Dr. Dennis Modry; Dr. Hooman Noorchashm; Dr. Harvey Risch; Dr. Sherri Tenpenny; Dr. Richard
Urso; Dr. Michael Yeadon;
His making of the gamma and delta workforce was quite prescient. We are seeing it play out
now, we all know gammas and delta. There was a really good ABC tv movie made in 1980 Brave
New World. Excellent show, it shows the Alphas and names them Rothchild and so on. Shows what
these people specifically want to do to the world. I wonder if the ruling psychopaths
actually wait for science fiction authors to plan the future and then follow their
script.
Mineshaft Gap 10 hours ago
If Huxley were starting out today no major publisher would touch him.
They'd tell him Brave New World doesn't have a diverse enough of cast. Even the mostly
likable totalitarian guy named Mustapha turns out to be white! A white Mustapha. It's soooo
triggering. Also, what's wrong with a little electronic fun and drug taking, anyway? Lighten
up , Aldous.
Meanwhile his portrait of shrieking medieval Catholic nuns who think they're possessed in
The Devils of Loudun might remind the leftist editors too uncomfortably of their own recent
bleating performances at "White Fragility" struggle sessions.
An award-winning journalist investigates Amazon's impact on the wealth and poverty of
towns and cities across the United States.
In 1937, the famed writer and activist Upton Sinclair published a novel bearing the subtitle
A Story of Ford-America . He blasted the callousness of a company worth "a billion
dollars" that underpaid its workers while forcing them to engage in repetitive and sometimes
dangerous assembly line labor. Eighty-three years later, the market capitalization of
Amazon.com has exceeded one trillion dollars, while the value of the Ford Motor Company
hovers around thirty billion. We have, it seems, entered the age of one-click America―and
as the coronavirus makes Americans more dependent on online shopping, its sway will only
intensify.
Alec MacGillis's Fulfillment is not another inside account or exposé of our
most conspicuously dominant company. Rather, it is a literary investigation of the America that
falls within that company's growing shadow. As MacGillis shows, Amazon's sprawling network of
delivery hubs, data centers, and corporate campuses epitomizes a land where winner and loser
cities and regions are drifting steadily apart, the civic fabric is unraveling, and work has
become increasingly rudimentary and isolated.
Ranging across the country, MacGillis tells the stories of those who've thrived and
struggled to thrive in this rapidly changing environment. In Seattle, high-paid workers in new
office towers displace a historic black neighborhood. In suburban Virginia, homeowners try to
protect their neighborhood from the environmental impact of a new data center. Meanwhile, in El
Paso, small office supply firms seek to weather Amazon's takeover of government procurement,
and in Baltimore a warehouse supplants a fabled steel plant. Fulfillment also shows how
Amazon has become a force in Washington, D.C., ushering readers through a revolving door for
lobbyists and government contractors and into CEO Jeff Bezos's lavish Kalorama mansion.
With empathy and breadth, MacGillis demonstrates the hidden human costs of the other
inequality―not the growing gap between rich and poor, but the gap between the country's
winning and losing regions. The result is an intimate account of contemporary capitalism: its
drive to innovate, its dark, pitiless magic, its remaking of America with every click.
" Fulfillment vividly details the devastating costs of Amazon's dominance and brutal
business practices, showcasing an economy that has concentrated in private hands staggering
wealth and power while impoverishing workers, crushing independent business, and supplanting
public governance with private might. A critical read." ―Lina Khan, associate
professor at Columbia Law School and author of Amazon's Antitrust Paradox
"Anyone who orders from Amazon needs to read these moving and enraging stories of how one
person's life savings, one life's work, one multigenerational tradition, one small business,
one town after another, are demolished by one company's seemingly unstoppable machine. They are
all the more enraging because Alec MacGillis shows so clearly how things could have been
different." ―Larissa MacFarquhar, staff writer at The New Yorker and author of
Strangers Drowning: Grappling with Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the
Overpowering Urge to Help
"Alec MacGillis practices journalism with ambition, tenacity, and empathy that will command
your awe. Like one of the great nineteenth-century novels, Fulfillment studies a social
ill with compelling intimacy and panoramic thoroughness. In the process, Jeff Bezos's dominance
and its costs are made real―and it becomes impossible to one-click again the same."
―Franklin Foer, staff writer at The Atlantic and author of World Without
Mind
"For a generation, inequality has been rising relentlessly in the United States―not
just inequality of income and wealth, but also inequality of power and geography. In
Fulfillment , Alec MacGillis brings this crisis vividly alive by creating a broad
tableau of the way one giant company, Amazon, affects the lives of people and places across the
country. This book should be read as a call to action against the new economy's continuing
assault on working people, small businesses, and left-behind places." ―Nicholas
Lemann, author of Transaction Man
" Fulfillment addresses the human impact of current technologies and economic
inequality with rare power. People in tech don't often think about the ramifications of their
work; Alec MacGillis reminds us that it has consequences, and that even if there are no clear
solutions, we have a moral imperative to consider its effects." ―Craig Newmark,
founder of craigslist
Alec MacGillis is a senior reporter for ProPublica and the recipient of the
George Polk Award, the Robin Toner prize, and other honors. He worked previously at The
Washington Post , Baltimore Sun , and The New Republic , and his journalism
has appeared in The New York Times Magazine , The New Yorker , The
Atlantic , and other publications. His ProPublica reporting on Dayton, Ohio was the
basis of a PBS Frontline documentary about the city. He is the author of The Cynic , a
2014 biography of Mitch McConnell. He lives in Baltimore.
All of these "advancements" are around removing face-to-face interaction with other people.
Whether work-from-home, automated rental & purchase, retail goods delivered, etc. Curious
what long term impact this seemingly exponential shift toward human interaction as personal
irritant is doing to our social cohesion.
Is standing in a line always a burden or is it sometimes a benefit? Sure, sometimes I just
want to do my business and go but have also met fascinating people while in lines. I'm assuming
many of the people working at that ski resort are "ski bums" who used the job as a way to
fulfill their skiing lifestyle. They are a part of the skiing culture that has been removed
from the experience now. So many local jobs are being removed and replaced by tech jobs. We
barely have local community left and it's being replaced with, what? Social media? I'm a big
fan of our online communities here at NC so it's not all bad of course.
Yes, change is inevitable and much of this is convenient but just curious what it's doing to
us as a society. Maybe it's allowing us more time to focus on closer social bonds we've already
developed? Less time in lines or stores means more time with friends and family?
Our prior ways weren't exactly healthy so honestly I don't know if this will lead to better
ways or push us further apart. Any insights or ideas are appreciated. Just been pondering it
and curious what other think.
"In a system that generates masses, individualism is the only way out. But then what happens
to community -- to society?" – Jeanette Winterson
Maybe it's allowing us more time to focus on closer social bonds we've already developed?
Less time in lines or stores means more time with friends and family?
The social bond with your doctor is pretty important I would say. As it is with your local
bookseller or grocery store. They are all people too, and being face to face with them you
build more trust and compassion. This helps us both in times of hardship
I'll take the most dire view here (someone has to!):
Every step this society takes away from face-to-face interaction, and therefore community
and fellowship, is going to proportionally increase the death rate when the rolling disasters
of our era arrive properly at our shore.
I wish I could reach out and shake everyone who is like "I interact with people too much
already, this enforced isolation is GREAT!" don't they realize this philosophy might
kill them? In the upcoming chaos, if they're an unknown unknown to the people around
them, don't they realize they'll be all too easy to leave behind or even sacrifice??
This seems to be the path our society is absolutely determined to take – so be it.
Even NC is posting articles that are more or less cheering it. But as for me, I will rage, rage
against the dying of the light.
Found myself in a rather long line (no complaints) last Sat. for 2nd Covid vaccine. Realized
later that between the long line waiting and the after waiting to leave it was probably the
most people interaction I've had for over a year! We are social creatures. Our system preaches
"individualism" because that is the only way the "instant profit" system can operate. There are
other ways; our ruling classes opt out of those and the general population becomes muddled
instead.
"Modernity" and "AI" technology is great but if u have no human interaction eventually those
traits leave and you have what???? A dead society.
And with every step forward there is a step backward. Going digital across the board is not
always good as it takes away privacy and I have an example here. There is a linked article in
Links today called "Are punitive rules forcing doctors to hide their mental health problems?"
In it, a young doctor is under enormous mental stress and turns to older doctors for advice.
They 'advised her to drive out of town, pay cash and use a pseudonym if she needed to talk
to someone.' If most transaction were done digitally, how would this doctor and others like
her go for help without endangering their jobs? What options would they have?
In cases like this, the only 'options' allowed will be "official" options. As my
misguided attempt at "therapy" years ago taught me, often times, the analyst can be toxic.
Also, in a mental health setting, I encountered the "official" preference for medication
over 'therapy.' Both are situations that put the 'authority's' preferences above the
patients. One big way I eventually 'twigged' to the dystopian dynamic was in observing the
attitudes and body language of the "health care professionals" I was dealing with.
Electronica and devices have no agency, and no "body language." The entire process is
removing useful tools for the patient to navigate the shoals and reefs where the sharks
hang out in any bureaucracy.
The other, knock on effect of telemedicine we encountered was that the charges for
electronic "office visits" have not dropped. This is analogous to when a grocery store
keeps the cost of an individual item stable and reduces the package size.
Others have said it better than I, but it bears repeating; 'modern' methods are reducing
people to the status of 'things.' Just as in the process of reducing a person or group of
people to the status of "other," the next step is 'removal.'
Cash is agency. The spying may be efficient, but its main purpose is to take away
agency. Just like "software as a service" or "in the cloud", when you could just as easily
have the same functionality on your device which you own. The vendors don't want that. They
want to control you.
The only alternative is to support and keep alive businesses that accept customers with
cash and agency. And boycott the rest. Even if it is inconvenient!
Yay, less human interaction, more isolation, fewer seasonal jobs for high school or college
students. More magical technological solutions that the on-site staff has no idea how to fix
when they stop working. You're too busy and important to stand in line! That's socialism! Let's
tell everyone that they're risking imminent death by being around other people and then sell
them ways to avoid it!
The U.S. exported its production of goods and became a "service" economy or a "knowledge"
economy. Thanks to Corona much of the service employment has become virtual. Knowledge workers
can now work from home. How many knowledge workers possess knowledge unique to the U.S. and how
many could be replaced by remote workers from somewhere else?
This post describes changes, some of which may prove temporary and others may prove
permanent. I believe most of the changes and their longer term implications require time to
fully unfold. I am not fond of virtual service. I order online from the independent vendors
still around as Amazon, E-Bay, Etsy, and other platforms grind them down, but how long will
they remain independent? The U.S. Postal Service is under attack and when it falls to
privatization what kind of e-commerce will come after that? Cashless means exposed to me --
exposed to tracking and monitoring and exposed to theft from the shadows.
I don't understand the rush to eliminating cash. Cash is the last way to opt out of
commercial control. People seem to positively embrace it, and I don't get it.
(Exception: I understand why legal cash-business owners like the idea.)
I hear crime prevention and money laundering prevention as reasons. The first is code
for "control of poor people", the second is true as far as it goes, but that's not very
far. You're targeting mainly drug money while completely ignoring corporate and
high-net-worth individuals.
My question (to no one) is how was the automation financed? Did the ski company issue
new shares in equity with first refusal to the employees? Or did the company instead mosey
on down to a local branch of the government-privileged private credit cartel to have
themselves a heaping helping of the PUBLIC'S (including the employees') CREDIT but for the
company owners' PRIVATE GAIN?
As a partridge that hatches eggs which it has not laid,
So is a person who makes a fortune, but unjustly;
In the middle of his days it will abandon him,
And in the end he will be a fool. Jeremiah 17:11
The human population didn't grow to 8 billion through physical distancing, touchless
interaction, and living in isolation. ecommerce is a thing now, but it may not have a long
shelf life. There is an inherent need for human interaction if the specie is to prosper. The
pandemic is transitory and will eventually pass; human needs, wants, and desires will endure. I
look forward to the day when I can speak with a store clerk, browse shelves and racks, and pay
for things with currency. I don't believe that there is no going back. In fact, we must go
back. At least most of the way back.
Given that we no longer trust the intentions of most public and private institutions,
i am looking for signs of a new phenomenon, which i call "Fear of new developments in
science or technology". ...due to the belief that said developments will only be used
against us, either by the state or oligarchy. Anyone have thoughts on this?
When I read "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley I considered it an improbable fantasy. But
it certainly does seem now that something of the kind is in our future, if the "best people"
have their way. Another good treatment of the subject is the short story "Welcome to the
Monkey House" by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
"Satan has returned to Earth for a sightseeing visit in the form of the American
billionaire Henry Wondergood. Accompanied by his faithful demon butler Toppi they head for
Rome, but are sidetracked by an unforeseen accident and end up at the home of the inscrutable
Thomas Magnus and his divine daughter Maria. As Satan begins to discover the meaning of being
a man, the satanic aspects of mankind become ever more apparent to him"
"...Evgeny Zamyatin who wrote the book "Us", many think that the book served as inspiration
for Orwell's 1984, for lovers of anti utopian literature it is a must read."
I've been appreciating your recommendations over the past months, Paco. Thank you. I wish
I could read/listen to them in the original language.
I noticed the other day that this book by Evgeny Zamyatin is available online for
free:
EUGENE ZAMIATIN
"WE"
Authorized Translation from the Russian
By GREGORY ZILBOORG
@1924
Paco, was your series you first mentioned an adaptation of the novel I am reading? I was
puzzled by your mention that 'Bulgakov was a physician' -- the author of 'The Master and
Margarita was not, so not to confuse James any further than I have - and James, just to
clarify, the quotation I gave is not from the novel. Here's a bit, and I'll include
psychohistorian in this conversation as well:
"But here is a question that is troubling me: if there is no God, then, one may ask,who
governs human life and, in general, the whole order of things on earth?"
"Man governs it himself," Homeless angrily hastened to reply to this admittedly
none-too-clear question.
"Pardon me," the stranger responded gently, "but in order to govern, one needs, after
all, to have a precise plan for a certain, at least somewhat decent, length of time. Allow
me to ask you, then, how can man govern, if he is not only deprived of the opportunity of
making a plan for at least some ridiculously short period--well, say, a thousand years, but
cannot even vouch for his own tomorrow?
And in fact," and here the stranger turned to Berlioz, "imagine that you, for instance,
start governing, giving orders to others and yourself, generally, so to speak, acquire a
taste for it, and suddenly you get ... hem ... hem ... lung cancer ..." - here the
foreigner smiled sweetly, as if the though of lung cancer gave him pleasure - "yes, cancer"
- narrowing his eyes like a cat, he repeated the sonorous word - "and all your governing is
over!..."
Yes indeed, we are talking about the same book and author, Mikhail Bulgakov. He was a
doctor even though he did not practice for too long. He wrote a book of short stories about a
young doctor out of university who is sent to a remote village:
He became adicted to morphine, adiction that would torture him all his life. The great
post soviet -greatest IMO- film maker Balabanov took those stories and made a film by the
name "Morfiy" of Morphine, I truly recommend you to watch it, a fantastic film that depicts
the backwardness of Russian villages during the revolution and the decadence of the
burgeoise. There is a truly electrifying scene -among many- of an iced run on a sleigh, the
doctor is pursued by a pack of wolves. The film maker took a liberty for the end of the movie
that does not appear in the book and that obviosuly is not real but closes a circle of a
fantastic story. I read both books before watching the TV serial or the movie, the serial is
really worth watching in spite of its length, but try to search for the original with
subtitles, I watched a couple of minutes of the one dubbed and it is awful, it kills the
impresive acting of Basilashvily doing Voland, and the film Morphine too, high quality stuff
both of them.
If you're interested in Bulgakov's life read about the phone call from Stalin, he asked
him if he wanted to leave the Soviet Union and Bulgakov hesitated, so he did stay unlike
another writer that just as Bulgakov wrote a letter to Stalin asking to be allowed to leave,
which he did, the other writer was Evgeny Zamyatin who wrote the book "Us", many think that
the book served as inspiration for Orwell's 1984, for lovers of anti utopian literature it is
a must read.
@ juliania and @ paco... thank you both... i was able to watch the first of a 10 part
series that i did find on youtube.. although the english subtitles are poor, one gets the
brilliant content of the philosophical discussion in episode 1.. i am thinking it might be
best for me to read the book, as opposed to watching the other 9 episodes..
here is episode 2 link if you are interested in seeing what i am watching - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PG07m3-_Oxc
Mikhail Bulgakov is a fascinating character and story teller... i am still caught up in
the brothers karamazov book and don't imagine i will finish it for another good month! thank
you both for drawing my attention to him and this book The Master and Margarita.. thanks also
paco for mentioning those other books as well!
@ 211-212 migueljose / paco... i my late 20's i made a trip down to the yucatan pennisula
visiting the area - merida, progresso and the archaeological sites chitzen itza, and also
palenque which is a bit further away... i believe this is mostly all mayan culture and there
are still mayan people in these areas.. i really enjoyed my experience and believe i would
have crossed paths with some of the mayan people in this area, but i have never been to
gautemala...i think the reason these people are not highlighted as the uighurs is for geo
political purposes only... it is the way of the west... thanks for both your notes and
comments..
Thanks very much, Paco @ 212, the introductory information for the novel (which is all I
have read of Bulgakov's work) did not mention his medical profession, nor his morphine
addiction. Here is what wikipedia says about it (I know the source is not always accurate but
in this case it would seem fairly reliable):
At the outbreak of the First World War, he volunteered with the Red Cross as a medical
doctor and was sent directly to the front, where he was badly injured at least twice.
Bulgakov's suffering from these wounds had deleterious long-term effects. To suppress
chronic pain, especially in the abdomen, he injected himself with morphine. Over the next
year his addiction grew stronger. In 1918, he abandoned morphine and never used it again.
Morphine, a book released in 1926, is his account of that trying period.
His description of Pilate in the novel is most certainly as a result of his experience
with morphine; it is really a powerful rendition of character, and based upon Bulgakov's own
experiences - another motif is cowardice in the face of imperial might, certainly a factor in
his inability to release the novel and, like Pilate, his subservience to Stalin. (That is
discussed in the introduction by the translator, Pevear.)
Sorry, james @ 226, from just the first frame of that I shut it off -- no way is it what
the book is presenting, which is farcical and humorous. Bulgakov had his novel memorized --
he went over and over it to get the right effect and the shock value I think much depends on
our imaginations at full play and his actual descriptions of what is happening, not how it
would look, with musical interpretation. I think you lose that with a visual representation
-- I have watched the Russian series on TBK also, and I would say the same for that, even
though they did better than the American version, which was awful.
It's about words. Do save yourself for the words - they are exquisite, even in
translation
. And the contrast in the words between the two narrative forms used in the novel is like
Dorothy going to the land of OZ -- happening in the second chapter of the book, which
starts:
Pontius Pilate
In a white cloak with blood-red lining, with the shuffling gait of a cavalryman, early
in the morning of the fourteenth day of the month of Nisan, there came out to the covered
colonnade between the two wings of the palace of Herod the Great, the procurator of Judea,
Pontius Pilate...
It's the reader's imagination, first shocked by the earlier tone of fantasy, being now
given an epic scene, tragic as the first chapter was comic...it can't be made real except as
the words carry it forward. The novel reads like that theatrical image of the two masks of
tragedy and comedy combined - that's the only visual that works. And it's like poetry. You
can't make a film of a poem, or you shouldn't try. The words are sufficient.
This is a good, short book laying out many of the ways that the market has crept up on us and made our lives smaller.
Konczal provides necessary pushback to the neoliberal project, showing just everything that we have lost as the forces of capital
decided that the Great Society, the New Deal, and the Progressive Era were bridges too far against the corporate form. 8 people
found this helpful
Konczal's book is a compact history of how Americans have tried to remove the constraints imposed on them by the market. Konczal
questions the conventional idea that the market is solely a mechanism that expands choices and opportunity. As he shows, markets
can, and have, achieved precisely the opposite outcomes -- restricting choices and preventing people from having options. In many
instances, Americans successfully reclaimed the liberty they had lost to the market by organizing or taking state action. He thus
makes a more general case for ensuring that societal outcomes are more consistent with Berlin's notion of positive liberty. Libertarians
will not appreciate the book's conclusions.
The book starts with the Homestead Act and ends with the decision to terminate virtually free higher education in the 1960s
and 1970s. In between, he covers a lot of historical ground -- the effort to reduce working hours in the 19th century, the Wagner
Act and Social Security during the New Deal, and the introduction of Medicare and Medicaid, among other things. Despite the book's
ambitious scope, you can read it in a sitting, which is quite a feat. Either Konczal is a naturally efficient writer, or he has
a good editor.
There is one topic I would've liked to see treated in more detail -- finance. Konczal gives the best concise summary of the
economic ideas behind the ideological shift toward neoliberalism I have read. Still, the liberalization of finance during the
past 50 years and its farreaching implications receive a cursory discussion. In an interview, Konczal said he wanted to include
more discussion of this topic and something on the gold standard but didn't see how to incorporate it. In my view, it would have
fit quite naturally into the chapter "Free Economy."
But this is a quibble. Overall, the book is both well researched and well written. It sheds light on an important and timely
question -- to what extent should Americans permit themselves to be subject to market-driven outcomes? The book shows that, historically,
Americans have tried to implement changes that enabled them to live freer lives by organizing and taking political action. Not
all those changes were successful but many were.
For a deeper dive into these and related questions, read this book along with Polanyi's "The Great Transformation," Robin's
"The Reactionary Mind," and Slobodian's "The Globalists." 4 people found this helpful
Freedom from the Market remakes our understanding of American politics. By drawing intelligently on forgotten aspects of American
history, Konczal makes it easier for Americans to understand that things they might not believe are possible in America must be,
because they have been. He rescues moments such as the WWII government run daycare centers, or the use of the power of the federal
state to bring through the integration of Southern hospitals, from the enormous condescension of posterity. And notably, although
he doesn't dwell on this point, many of these changes began at moments that seem shittier and more despairing than our own.
So what Konczal is doing is neither to provide a standard linear history, nor yet a policy textbook. Instead, he is claiming
an alternative American tradition, that has not looked to the market as its apotheosis, but instead has sought to free Americans
from its random vagaries. His history explains how Americans have responded collectively to the real and expressed needs of publics,
who have organized to fight for them. And it does so in the plain language that he mentions in passing was necessary to allow
ordinary people to organize and understand who was trying to stop them.
Konczal's fundamental claim is that people who link freedom to markets miss out on much of the story. Equally important is
a notion of freedom <em>from</em> markets, "rooted in public programs that genuinely serve people and checking market dependency."
This notion goes back much further in time than the New Deal. The nineteenth century is sometimes depicted as a reign of laissez-faire,
both by those who admired it and deplored it. Konczal argues instead that there was an emerging sense of public needs - and how
the government might provide for them. For example, this helps us understand the provision of public land through the Homestead
Act and the land grant universities.
The nineteenth century notion of the public was clearly horribly flawed and contradictory - it did not include slaves or Native
Americans. Some, like Horace Greeley ended up fleeing these contradictions into the welcoming arms of free market absolutism.
But within these contradictions lay possibilities that opened up in the twentieth century. Konczal builds, for example on Eric
Schickler's work to argue that as the New Deal began to provide concrete benefits to African Americans, it created a new conduit
between them and the Democratic Party, breaking up the old coalition that had held Jim Crow together.
Konczal explains how change happens - through social movements and the state:
While the Supreme Court can be effective at holding back change and enforcing already existing power structures, it is actually
very weak at creating new reform itself. It controls no funding and is dependent on elite power structures to carry out its
decisions. What really creates change is popular mobilization and legislative changes.
He also draws on historians like Quinn Slobodian, to describe how modern Hayekians have sought to "encase" the market order
in institutions and practices that are hard to overturn. Property rights aren't the foundation of liberty, as both nineteenth
century jurists and twentieth century economists would have it. They are a product of the choices of the state, and as such intensely
political.
This allows Konczal to turn pragmatism against the Hayekians. Hayek's notion of spontaneous order is supposed to be evolutionary.
But if there is a need to to provide collective goods for people that cannot be fulfilled through voluntarism, the Hayekian logic
becomes a brutal constraint on adaptation.
The efforts of Hayekians to enforce binding legal constraints, to cripple the gathering of the collective knowledge that can
guide collective action, to wink at legal doctrines intended to subvert social protections against the market; all these prevent
the kinds of evolutionary change that are necessary to respond to changing circumstances. Konczal makes it clear that Oliver Wendell
Holmes was no left-winger - but his criticisms of the rigid and doctrinaire laissez-faire precepts of his colleagues rings true.
Their "willingness to use a very specific understanding of economics to override law writes a preferential understanding of economics
into the constitution itself." Although Konczal wrote this book before the current crisis, he describes Holmes as mentioning compulsory
vaccination laws as one of the ways in which government interference in private decisions can have general social benefits. The
wretched contortions of libertarians over the last several months, and their consequences for human welfare in states such as
North Dakota illustrate the point, quite brutally.
What Konczal presses for is a very different notion of freedom. This doesn't deny the benefits of markets, but it qualifies
them. In Konczal's words, "markets are great at distributing things based on people's willingness to pay. But there are some goods
that should be distributed by need." Accepting this point entails the necessity of keeping some important areas of life outside
the determining scope of markets. Furthermore, people's needs change over time, as societies and markets change. Konczal's framework
suggests the need for collective choice to figure out the best responses to these changes, and a vibrant democratic politics,
in which the state responds to the expressed needs of mobilized publics as the best way to carry out these choices.
All this makes the book sound more like an exercise in political theory than it is. You need to read the book itself, if you
really to get the good stuff - the stories, the examples, and the overall narrative that Konczal weaves together. <em>Freedom
from the Market</em> has the potential to be a very important book, focusing attention on the contested, messy but crucially important
intersection between social movements and the state. It provides a set of ideas that people on both sides of that divide can learn
from, and a lively alternative foundation to the deracinated technocratic notions of politics, in which good policy would somehow,
magically, be politically self supporting, that has prevailed up until quite recently. Recommended.
Despite the fact that John le Carre was to his last day was MI6 asset and continue to spread the MI6 propaganda (he was
adamantly anti-Russian and anti-Trump), he was entertaining story teller and some of his interviews are a real art.
Le Carré feuded with Salman Rushdie over The Satanic Verses , stating
that "nobody has a God-given right to insult a great religion and be published with impunity".
[35]
In January 2003, two months prior to the invasion, The Times published le Carré's essay
"The United States Has Gone Mad" criticising the buildup to the Iraq War and President George W. Bush 's
response to the 11
September 2001 terrorist attacks , calling it "worse than McCarthyism , worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term
potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War " and "beyond anything Osama bin Laden could have
hoped for in his nastiest dreams". [36][37] Le
Carré participated in the London protests against the Iraq War
. He said the war resulted from the "politicisation of intelligence to fit the political
intentions" of governments and "How Bush and his junta succeeded in deflecting America's anger
from bin Laden to Saddam
Hussein is one of the great public relations conjuring tricks of history". [38][39]
He was critical of Tony
Blair 's role in taking Britain into the Iraq War, saying "I can't understand that Blair
has an afterlife at all. It seems to me that any politician who takes his country to war under
false pretences has committed the ultimate sin. I think that a war in which we refuse to accept
the body count of those that we kill is also a war of which we should be ashamed".
[38]
Le Carré was critical of Western governments' policies towards Iran. He believed
Iran's actions are a response to being "encircled by nuclear powers" and by the way in which
"we ousted Mosaddeq through the CIA and the Secret
Service here across the way and installed the Shah and trained his ghastly secret
police force in all the black arts, the SAVAK ". [38]
In 2017, le Carré expressed concerns over the future of liberal democracy , saying "I think of
all things that were happening across Europe in the 1930s, in Spain, in Japan, obviously in
Germany. To me, these are absolutely comparable signs of the rise of fascism and it's contagious, it's infectious.
Fascism is up and running in Poland and Hungary. There's an encouragement about".
[40] He later wrote
that the end of the Cold War had left the West without a coherent ideology, in contrast to the
"notion of individual
freedom , of inclusiveness, of tolerance – all of that we called anti-communism " prevailing during that
time. [41]
... ... ...
Le Carré was an outspoken advocate of European integration and sharply
criticised Brexit .
[45] Le Carré
criticised Conservative politicians such as
Boris Johnson (whom
he referred to as a "mob orator"), Dominic Cummings , and Nigel Farage in interviews, claiming that
their "task is to fire up the people with nostalgia [and] with anger". He further opined in
interviews that "What really scares me about nostalgia is that it's become a political weapon.
Politicians are creating a nostalgia for an England that never existed, and selling it, really,
as something we could return to", noting that with "the demise of the working class we saw also the demise of an
established social order, based on the stability of ancient class structures". [44][46]
On the other
hand, he said that in the Labour Party "they have this Leninist element and they have this
huge appetite to level society."
"As we view the achievements of aggregated capital, we discover the existence of trusts, combinations, and monopolies, while the
citizen is struggling far in the rear or is trampled to death beneath an iron heel." ~Grover Cleveland
(about that other gilded
age)
"There is fraud at the heart of Wall Street -- deliberate intellectual, business, and political deception. Charles Ferguson is in
hot pursuit.
Inside
Job
shook
up the cozy world of academic finance.
Predator
Nation
should
stir prosecutors into action. And if we fail to reform our political system, you can say goodbye to American democracy." --
Simon
Johnson
,
coauthor of
White
House Burning
and
professor at MIT Sloan School of Management
"Over the last thirty years, the United States has been taken over by an amoral financial oligarchy, and the American dream of
opportunity, education, and upward mobility is now largely confined to the top few percent of the population.
Federal policy is increasingly dictated by the wealthy, by the financial sector, and by powerful (though sometimes badly mismanaged)
industries. These policies are implemented and praised by these groups' willing servants, namely the increasingly
bought-and-paid-for leadership of America's political parties, academia, and lobbying industry.
If allowed to continue, this process will turn the United States into a declining, unfair society with an impoverished, angry,
uneducated population under the control of a small, ultrawealthy elite. Such a society would be not only immoral but also
eventually unstable, dangerously ripe for religious and political extremism."
4.0 out of 5 stars
Scary
read. Frightening true! HIGHLY recommend!!
Reviewed in the United States on February 11, 2017
Verified Purchase
Just finished this page turner. Wow! Talk about an enlightening read.
Scary too and worse, yet it's so spot on. I always knew that most businesses, especially those dealing with
money are crooked, selfish and good for nothing greedy souls. This book proves my point and more. Personally, I
never heard of this book or the author until my brother recommended it to me in passing. It scared the hell out
of him. Naturally, I had to see what book could do that. After reading it, I understand why.
Not only are the financial industries greedy and crooked but so is our governments and both Democrats and
Republicans. The housing crash of 2008 wasn't the beginning of our problems but the culmination of years of
greed, shady deals and lack of accountability for the financial industry. President George W. Bush was
complicit in protecting the finance industry not the people of America. Worse yet was President Barack Obama.
It's all in there: every dirty little detail. If you think your broker, banker or financial advisor has your
best interest at heart, this couldn't show how very wrong you are. Is the book perfect? No. Is the U.S.
Government or any other world government perfect? Hell no. should we be very afraid of how our bankers are?
Yes.
This is a book I enjoyed reading because I already knew about most of it already just by observing and never
trusting anyone anyway. I highly recommend it. I loved the fact that the author wasn't afraid to speak the
truth. That is always refreshing. I look forward to reading more by Charles Ferguson.
Overall, an informative and compelling read. Everyone whether interested in finances or note needs to read this
book. Seriously!
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OMG!
You owe it to yourself to read what is really going on!
5.0 out of 5 stars
OMG!
You owe it to yourself to read what is really going on!
Reviewed in the United States on November 4, 2014
Verified Purchase
Definitely an eye opener. If I was cynical before, this one pushed me
over the edge. Banks and large corporations in collusion with the government and zero accountability. Our
newspapers, again, did a disservice to the public. It is one thing to talk about the mortgage industry going
under, it is quite another to understand what the banks did to facilitate a world-wide recession with NO
prosecutions. I was particularly appalled that the corporations paid the politicians who voted to remove any
restraints on the banks. Then the banks created derivative markets they knew would fail. Moreover, the bank
made millions of dollars by betting the derivative market would fail. Yet, when the bubble burst, these same
people were standing at the government door (that they paid for) with their hand out for a taxpayer bail-out.
The CEOs were rewarded for their bad behavior with millions of dollars in bonuses and no repercussions for
bilking millions of victims or for causing a world wide downward money spiral.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
Long
on diagnosis, short on solution
Reviewed in the United States on June 9, 2012
Verified Purchase
As a fan of "Inside Job" I was eager to read Predator Nation, which
minces no words in designating the financial industry as "criminal" abetted by the political establishment,
whether Republican or Democrat. The other reviews here lay out what this book accomplishes, to which I would
only underscore the powerful and no-holds-barred approach of Ferguson to establishing responsibility and
labeling it "criminal" as well as "predatory."
Beyond critique of Wall Street and the political "duopoly," the book widely supports the thesis that something
is terribly wrong in America, a cultural malaise rooted in economic thievery and imbalance empowering the
wealthy, and rendering today's America into the equivalent of what we used to call "a banana republic." Charles
Ferguson pulls no punches in laying out his case here.
But, as another review has pointed out, the ending is disappointing. Charles has laid into Obama as part of the
"duopoly" governing America, meaning diverging only on fractious social issues but essentially united in
matters of finance and government, including war. At one point he labels Obama's weak commentary on controlling
Wall Street "horse [manure]" and then at another point says "he [Obama] screwed us." In his concluding five
page chapter which has an "oh, well" feel to it he tells us "hold your nose and vote for him [Obama], as I
will."
With this and various commentaries we seem to be very long on laying out damages and ascribing responsibility,
but have almost nothing to say on what to do other than repair to the lounge on the Titanic and have another
whiskey, hoping somebody will come along with a bright idea or two at some point. If more energy were put into
finding answers, as with ascribing blame, maybe we could be more hopeful.
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9 people found this helpful
At 78, after a prolonged illness and without recovering consciousness, Joe Biden succumbed
to the Presidency. The last hopes of the last QAnon believers vanished like smoke in the night,
with Biden assuming the mighty US throne. This is truly a dark day for America and for the
world, as the US example will be followed by many. It is also a farewell to the real world we
were brought up in. The new world is virtual, like most of the inauguration. It is virtual and
dark, ruled by digital companies fronted by old and tired politicians.
Foreword to Brave New World, second edition -- circa 1947
Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)
Here's my abridgement:
In the meantime, however, it seems worth while at least to mention the most serious defect in
the story, which is this. The Savage is offered only two alternatives, an insane life in
Utopia, or the life of a primitive in an Indian village, a life more human in some respects,
but in others hardly less queer and abnormal. ... Today I feel no wish to demonstrate that
sanity is impossible. ... If I were now to rewrite the book, I would offer the Savage a third
alternative. Between the utopian and the primitive horns of his dilemma would lie the
possibility of sanity -- a possibility already actualized, to some extent, in a community of
exiles and refugees from the Brave New World, living within the borders of the Reservation.
In this community economics would be decentralist and Henry-Georgian , politics
Kropotkinesque cooperative. Science and technology would be used as though, like the Sabbath,
they had been made for man, not (as at present and still more so in the Brave New World) as
though man were to be adapted and enslaved to them. Religion would be the conscious and
intelligent pursuit of man's Final End, the unitive knowledge of the immanent Tao or Logos,
the transcendent Godhead or Brahman. And the prevailing philosophy of life would be a kind of
Higher Utilitarianism, in which the Greatest Happiness principle would be secondary to the
Final End principle -- the first question to be asked and answered in every contingency of
life being: "How will this thought or action contribute to, or interfere with, the
achievement, by me and the greatest possible number of other individuals, of man's Final
End?"
.... and here is the Foreword, in full:
Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you
have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of
behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrong-doing. Rolling in the muck is
not the best way of getting clean.
Art also has its morality, and many of the rules of this morality are the same as, or at
least analogous to, the rules of ordinary ethics. Remorse, for example, is as undesirable in
relation to our bad art as it is in relation to our bad behaviour. The badness should be hunted
out, acknowledged and, if possible, avoided in the future. To pore over the literary
shortcomings of twenty years ago, to attempt to patch a faulty work into the perfection it
missed at its first execution, to spend one's middle age in trying to mend the artistic sins
committed and bequeathed by that different person who was oneself in youth -- all this is
surely vain and futile. And that is why this new Brave New World is the same as the old one.
Its defects as a work of art are considerable; but in order to correct them I should have to
rewrite the book -- and in the process of rewriting, as an older, other person, I should
probably get rid not only of some of the faults of the story, but also of such merits as it
originally possessed. And so, resisting the temptation to wallow in artistic remorse, I prefer
to leave both well and ill alone and to think about something else.
In the meantime, however, it seems worth while at least to mention the most serious defect
in the story, which is this. The Savage is offered only two alternatives, an insane life in
Utopia, or the life of a primitive in an Indian village, a life more human in some respects,
but in others hardly less queer and abnormal. At the time the book was written this idea, that
human beings are given free will in order to choose between insanity on the one hand and lunacy
on the other, was one that I found amusing and regarded as quite possibly true. For the sake,
however, of dramatic effect, the Savage is often permitted to speak more rationally than his
upbringing among the practitioners of a religion that is half fertility cult and half
Penitente ferocity would actually warrant. Even his acquaintance with Shakespeare would
not in reality justify such utterances. And at the close, of course, he is made to retreat from
sanity; his native Penitente -ism reasserts its authority and he ends in maniacal
self-torture and despairing suicide. "And so they died miserably ever after" -- much to the
reassurance of the amused, Pyrrhonic aesthete who was the author of the fable.
Today I feel no wish to demonstrate that sanity is impossible. On the contrary, though I
remain no less sadly certain than in the past that sanity is a rather rare phenomenon, I am
convinced that it can be achieved and would like to see more of it. For having said so in
several recent books and, above all, for having compiled an anthology of what the sane have
said about sanity and the means whereby it can be achieved, I have been told by an eminent
academic critic that I am a sad symptom of the failure of an intellectual class in time of
crisis. The implication being, I suppose, that the professor and his colleagues are hilarious
symptoms of success. The benefactors of humanity deserve due honour and commemoration. Let us
build a Pantheon for professors. It should be located among the ruins of one of the gutted
cities of Europe or Japan, and over the entrance to the ossuary I would inscribe, in letters
six or seven feet high, the simple words: SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF THE WORLD'S EDUCATORS. SI
MONUMENTUM REQUIRIS CIRCUMSPICE.
But to return to the future . . . If I were now to rewrite the book, I would offer the
Savage a third alternative. Between the utopian and the primitive horns of his dilemma would
lie the possibility of sanity -- a possibility already actualized, to some extent, in a
community of exiles and refugees from the Brave New World, living within the borders of the
Reservation. In this community economics would be decentralist and Henry-Georgian,
politics Kropotkinesque cooperative. Science and technology would be used as though, like the
Sabbath, they had been made for man, not (as at present and still more so in the Brave New
World) as though man were to be adapted and enslaved to them. Religion would be the conscious
and intelligent pursuit of man's Final End, the unitive knowledge of the immanent Tao or Logos,
the transcendent Godhead or Brahman. And the prevailing philosophy of life would be a kind of
Higher Utilitarianism, in which the Greatest Happiness principle would be secondary to the
Final End principle -- the first question to be asked and answered in every contingency of life
being: "How will this thought or action contribute to, or interfere with, the achievement, by
me and the greatest possible number of other individuals, of man's Final End?"
Brought up among the primitives, the Savage (in this hypothetical new version of the book)
would not be transported to Utopia until he had had an opportunity of learning something at
first hand about the nature of a society composed of freely co-operating individuals devoted to
the pursuit of sanity. Thus altered, Brave New World would possess artistic and (if it is
permissible to use so large a word in connection with a work of fiction) a philosophical
completeness, which in its present form it evidently lacks.
But Brave New World is a book about the future and, whatever its artistic or philosophical
qualities, a book about the future can interest us only if its prophecies look as though they
might conceivably come true. From our present vantage point, fifteen years further down the
inclined plane of modern history, how plausible do its prognostications seem? What has happened
in the painful interval to confirm or invalidate the forecasts of 1931?
One vast and obvious failure of foresight is immediately apparent. Brave New World contains
no reference to nuclear fission. That it does not is actually rather odd, for the possibilities
of atomic energy had been a popular topic of conversation for years before the book was
written. My old friend, Robert Nichols, had even written a successful play about the subject,
and I recall that I myself had casually mentioned it in a novel published in the late twenties.
So it seems, as I say, very odd that the rockets and helicopters of the seventh century of Our
Ford should not have been powered by disintegrating nuclei. The oversight may not be excusable;
but at least it can be easily explained. The theme of Brave New World is not the advancement of
science as such; it is the advancement of science as it affects human individuals. The triumphs
of physics, chemistry and engineering are tacitly taken for granted. The only scientific
advances to be specifically described are those involving the application to human beings of
the results of future research in biology, physiology and psychology. It is only by means of
the sciences of life that the quality of life can be radically changed. The sciences of matter
can be applied in such a way that they will destroy life or make the living of it impossibly
complex and uncomfortable; but, unless used as instruments by the biologists and psychologists,
they can do nothing to modify the natural forms and expressions of life itself. The release of
atomic energy marks a great revolution in human history, but not (unless we blow ourselves to
bits and so put an end to history) the final and most searching revolution.
This really revolutionary revolution is to be achieved, not in the external world, but in
the souls and flesh of human beings. Living as he did in a revolutionary period, the Marquis de
Sade very naturally made use of this theory of revolutions in order to rationalize his peculiar
brand of insanity. Robespierre had achieved the most superficial kind of revolution, the
political. Going a little deeper, Babeuf had attempted the economic revolution. Sade regarded
himself as the apostle of the truly revolutionary revolution, beyond mere politics and
economics -- the revolution in individual men, women and children, whose bodies were
henceforward to become the common sexual property of all and whose minds were to be purged of
all the natural decencies, all the laboriously acquired inhibitions of traditional
civilization. Between sadism and the really revolutionary revolution there is, of course, no
necessary or inevitable connection. Sade was a lunatic and the more or less conscious goal of
his revolution was universal chaos and destruction. The people who govern the Brave New World
may not be sane (in what may be called the absolute sense of the word); but they are not
madmen, and their aim is not anarchy but social stability. It is in order to achieve stability
that they carry out, by scientific means, the ultimate, personal, really revolutionary
revolution. But meanwhile we are in the first phase of what is perhaps the penultimate
revolution. Its next phase may be atomic warfare, in which case we do not have to bother with
prophecies about the future. But it is conceivable that we may have enough sense, if not to
stop fighting altogether, at least to behave as rationally as did our eighteenth-century
ancestors. The unimaginable horrors of the Thirty Years War actually taught men a lesson, and
for more than a hundred years the politicians and generals of Europe consciously resisted the
temptation to use their military resources to the limits of destructiveness or (in the majority
of conflicts) to go on fighting until the enemy was totally annihilated. They were aggressors,
of course, greedy for profit and glory; but they were also conservatives, determined at all
costs to keep their world intact, as a going concern. For the last thirty years there have been
no conservatives; there have been only nationalistic radicals of the right and nationalistic
radicals of the left. The last conservative statesman was the fifth Marquess of Lansdowne; and
when he wrote a letter to the the Times , suggesting that the First World War should be
concluded with a compromise, as most of the wars of the eighteenth century had been, the editor
of that once conservative journal refused to print it. The nationalistic radicals had their
way, with the consequences that we all know --Bolshevism, Fascism, inflation, depression,
Hitler, the Second World War, the ruin of Europe and all but universal famine.
Assuming, then, that we are capable of learning as much from Hiroshima as our forefathers
learned from Magdeburg, we may look forward to a period, not indeed of peace, but of limited
and only partially ruinous warfare. During that period it may be assumed that nuclear energy
will be harnessed to industrial uses. The result, pretty obviously, will be a series of
economic and social changes unprecedented in rapidity and completeness. All the existing
patterns of human life will be disrupted and new patterns will have to be improvised to conform
with the nonhuman fact of atomic power. Procrustes in modern dress, the nuclear scientist will
prepare the bed on which mankind must lie; and if mankind doesn't fit -- well, that will be
just too bad for mankind. There will have to be some stretching and a bit of amputation -- the
same sort of stretching and amputations as have been going on ever since applied science really
got into its stride, only this time they will be a good deal more drastic than in the past.
These far from painless operations will be directed by highly centralized totalitarian
governments. Inevitably so; for the immediate future is likely to resemble the immediate past,
and in the immediate past rapid technological changes, taking place in a mass-producing economy
and among a population predominantly propertyless, have always tended to produce economic and
social confusion. To deal with confusion, power has been centralized and government control
increased. It is probable that all the world's governments will be more or less completely
totalitarian even before the harnessing of atomic energy; that they will be totalitarian during
and after the harnessing seems almost certain. Only a large-scale popular movement toward
decentralization and self-help can arrest the present tendency toward statism. At present there
is no sign that such a movement will take place.
There is, of course, no reason why the new totalitarianisms should resemble the old.
Government by clubs and firing squads, by artificial famine, mass imprisonment and mass
deportation, is not merely inhumane (nobody cares much about that nowadays), it is demonstrably
inefficient and in an age of advanced technology, inefficiency is the sin against the Holy
Ghost. A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive
of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have
to be coerced, because they love their servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned, in
present-day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, news- paper editors and
schoolteachers. But their methods are still crude and unscientific. The old Jesuits' boast
that, if they were given the schooling of the child, they could answer for the man's religious
opinions, was a product of wishful thinking. And the modern pedagogue is probably rather less
efficient at conditioning his pupils' reflexes than were the reverend fathers who educated
Voltaire. The greatest triumphs of propaganda have been accomplished, not by doing something,
but by refraining from doing. Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of
view, is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects, by lowering what Mr.
Churchill calls an "iron curtain" between the masses and such facts or arguments as the local
political bosses regard as undesirable, totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much
more effectively than they could have done by the most eloquent denunciations, the most
compelling of logical rebuttals. But silence is not enough. If persecution, liquidation and the
other symptoms of social friction are to be avoided, the positive sides of propaganda must be
made as effective as the negative. The most important Manhattan Projects of the future will be
vast government-sponsored enquiries into what the politicians and the participating scientists
will call "the problem of happiness" -- in other words, the problem of making people love their
servitude. Without economic security, the love of servitude cannot possibly come into
existence; for the sake of brevity, I assume that the all-powerful executive and its managers
will succeed in solving the problem of permanent security. But security tends very quickly to
be taken for granted. Its achievement is merely a superficial, external revolution. The love of
servitude cannot be established except as the result of a deep, personal revolution in human
minds and bodies. To bring about that revolution we require, among others, the following
discoveries and inventions.
First, a greatly improved technique of suggestion -- through infant conditioning and,
later, with the aid of drugs, such as scopolamine.
Second, a fully developed science of human differences, enabling government managers to
assign any given individual to his or her proper place in the social and economic hierarchy.
(Round pegs in square holes tend to have dangerous thoughts about the social system and to
infect others with their discontents.)
Third (since reality, however utopian, is something from which people feel the need of
taking pretty frequent holidays), a substitute for alcohol and the other narcotics, something
at once less harmful and more pleasure-giving than gin or heroin.
And fourth (but this would be a long-term project, which it would take generations of
totalitarian control to bring to a successful conclusion), a foolproof system of eugenics,
designed to standardize the human product and so to facilitate the task of the managers. In
Brave New World this standardization of the human product has been pushed to
fantastic, though not perhaps impossible, extremes. Technically and ideologically we are
still a long way from bottled babies and Bokanovsky groups of semi-morons. But by A.F. 600,
who knows what may not be happening? Meanwhile the other characteristic features of that
happier and more stable world -- the equivalents of soma and hypnopaedia and the scientific
caste system --are probably not more than three or four generations away. Nor does the sexual
promiscuity of Brave New World seem so very distant. There are already certain American
cities in which the number of divorces is equal to the number of marriages. In a few years,
no doubt, marriage licenses will be sold like dog licenses, good for a period of twelve
months, with no law against changing dogs or keeping more than one animal at a time. As
political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends compensatingly to increase.
And the dictator (unless he needs cannon fodder and families with which to colonize empty or
conquered territories) will do well to encourage that freedom. In conjunction with the
freedom to daydream under the influence of dope and movies and the radio, it will help to
reconcile his subjects to the servitude which is their fate.
All things considered it looks as though Utopia were far closer to us than anyone, only
fifteen years ago, could have imagined. Then, I projected it six hundred years into the future.
Today it seems quite possible that the horror may be upon us within a single century. That is,
if we refrain from blowing ourselves to smithereens in the interval. Indeed, unless we choose
to decentralize and to use applied science, not as the end to which human beings are to be made
the means, but as the means to producing a race of free individuals, we have only two
alternatives to choose from: either a number of national, militarized totalitarianisms, having
as their root the terror of the atomic bomb and as their consequence the destruction of
civilization (or, if the warfare is limited, the perpetuation of militarism); or else one
supranational totalitarianism, called into existence by the social chaos resulting from rapid
technological progress in general and the atomic revolution in particular, and developing,
under the need for efficiency and stability, into the welfare-tyranny of Utopia. You pays your
money and you takes your choice.
In the foreword to the 1946 edition of his novel, Brave New World , Aldous Huxley anticipated the
continued emergence, perhaps in novel forms, of statist totalitarianism:
There is, of course, no reason why the new totalitarianisms should resemble the old.
Government by clubs and firing squads, by artificial famine, mass imprisonment and mass
deportation, is not merely inhumane (nobody cares much about that nowadays), it is
demonstrably inefficient and in an age of advanced technology, inefficiency is the sin
against the Holy Ghost. A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the
all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of
slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. To make them love it
is the task assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda,
news-paper editors and schoolteachers. But their methods are still crude and
unscientific.
Because, in 1946, the world had yet to witness the horrors of Red China, North Korea, Cuba,
and Cambodia, Huxley guessed wrong that artificial famines, mass imprisonment, and political
executions would go out of fashion. Totalitarianism is impossible without brute violence. And,
from our brave new world of 2021, where Big Tech's promiscuous deployment of tools like
Machine
Learning Fairness and
shadow banning prevent users' exposure to wrongthink, his estimation of propaganda methods
as "crude and unscientific" is badly out of date.
But how chilling is Huxley's prescience about propaganda ministers, news editors, and
schoolteachers training generations of serfs to willingly obey "political bosses and their army
of managers"?
Just like the truism that "generals always fight the last war," Huxley's point that there's
"no reason why the new totalitarianisms should resemble the old" calls for both vigilance and
imagination on our part; our next totalitarian enemy isn't limited to patterns of
twentieth-century Nazism or Soviet-style Communism.
For instance, the suffocating blanket of censorship and suppression of free speech, which
seems to defy any constitutional remedy because it's not directly traceable to
government action, remains a problem without an obvious solution. Regardless, it's an open
secret that the corporate executives in media, Big Tech, and Hollywood managing this
suppression are acting on behalf of a single political party -- a party that, due in large part
to that interference and suppression now have near total control of the federal government.
Townhall's Matt Vespa quotes even a liberal reporter, Michael Tracey, warning that the
"absolute authoritarian lunacy" of Twitter's decision to ban President Trump isn't about
"'safety,' it's about purposely inflating a threat in order to assert political and cultural
dominance." Warns Tracey, "The new corporate authoritarian liberal-left monoculture is going to
be absolutely ruthless -- and in 12 days it is merging with the state ." [My
italics].
Glenn Greenwald, another committed progressive, also complains "
that political censorship has 'contaminated virtually every mainstream centre-left
political organization, academic institution and newsroom.'" In October, Greenwald, co-founder
of The Intercept news site,
resigned after they refused to publish his article
about Joe Biden and Hunter's shocking influence-peddling, unless Greenwald first removed
"critical points against the Democratic candidate."
In
reality, standing alone with election fraud notwithstanding , last October's lockstep
decision by an entire news industry to suppress the starkly headline-worthy scandals around
Hunter Biden's laptop, along with all other negative stories about Joe Biden, accounts directly
for 17% of Biden voters who would have abandoned him "
had they known the facts about one or more of these news stories." Because those lost votes
"would have changed the outcome in all six of the swing states won by Joe Biden," re-electing
Trump, burying those stories was first-degree election interference.
Huxley foresaw this, too:
The greatest triumphs of propaganda have been accomplished, not by doing something, but by
refraining from doing. Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is
silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects, by lowering what Mr.
Churchill calls an "iron curtain" between the masses and such facts or arguments as the local
political bosses regard as undesirable, totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion
much more effectively than they could have done by the most eloquent denunciations, the most
compelling of logical rebuttals.
In 2020 alone, news outlets systematically misinformed, or kept uninformed, scores of
millions of voters whose only news sources are either mainstream media or the occasional
de-contextualized sound bite. Corporate news, in addition to disappearing the Hunter Biden
story:
Misreported that opportunistic politicians imposing destructive, arbitrary lockdowns to
stop the spread of the Wuhan virus were only "following the science," while disregarding all
scientific studies showing how lockdowns were ineffective, detrimental, and even deadly;
Misreported for months that Black Lives Matter/Antifa's nightly demonstrations were
"mostly peaceful," while refusing to report on hundreds of BLM and Antifa-organized protests
involving widespread arson, looting, and violence against police and innocent civilians;
Perpetuated the dangerous myth that black men are casually shot down by white police
every day, while ignoring that "statistics "
flatly debunk the false narratives about 'racist white cops' and the 'hunt for unarmed
black men'";
Parroted the Democrat talking point that Trump's allegations of election fraud were made
"without any evidence," while obstinately refusing to investigate well-documented evidence of
pervasive election irregularities in battleground states.
But Fake News is only as powerful as its consumers are gullible. Knowing that, PJMedia's
Stephen Kruiser was able to predict in advance that a Biden win would be "the complete triumph
of decades of
public education indoctrination ," which is no longer education, anyway, but "more of a
leftist catechism class." Journalist
William Haupt III reports that 12 years of Common Core "has resulted in 51 percent of our
youth preferring socialism to democracy." It's also why "[t]wo thirds of the millennials
believe America is a racist and sexist country and 40 percent agree America is 'the most
unequal society in the world.'" In fact, in 2011 Chuck
Rogér traced this decline to the sixties, when teachers' colleges began churning out
"[s]ocial justice-indoctrinated teachers [who] instill resentment in 'non-dominant' (minority)
children and guilt in 'dominant' (white) children. Judging by the abundance of guilt-ridden
white Americans, the tactic is working its magic well." At present a reported
3,500 classrooms across fifty states are incorporating the New York Times ' specious
1619 Project , which teaches that every accomplishment in America's history came out
of slavery . The purpose of this all this falsified history? Not education, but more
generations of Americans "unable to discern
fact from fiction ."
Now that progressives have complete control of Washington, they'll escalate their lies -- of
commission, and especially of omission -- to gain a tighter and more permanent grip. Still,
Truth remains their real enemy. It explains social media's current blitz of de-platforming
conservatives, trying to drop an "iron curtain," just as Huxley predicted, to separate the
people from undesirable facts.
Likewise, fidelity to truth is our best defense; that, and continuing to refuse their lies.
That's one positive action Solzhenitsyn was able to offer his comrades who felt
powerless against the repressive Soviet system, "the most perceptible of its aspects" being
lies: "Personal non-participation in lies. Though lies conceal everything, though lies embrace
everything, but not with any help from me."
T.R. Clancy looks at the world from Dearborn, Michigan. You can email him at [email protected] .
In today's climate of political correctness and economic uncertainty, ad revenue only goes
so far to keep an independent voice like AmericanThinker.com going. If you enjoy our articles,
please consider supporting us with a direct contribution of as much or as little as you can
give. Your donation will ensure that we continue to bring great pieces from our outstanding
columnists.
The rich understand that capitalism is a game of musical chairs. It's systemic class warfare
conducted on a grand scale to discourage solidarity across lines that might otherwise threaten
the system, and with each market re-set arranged by the Federal Reserve, more of the country's
resources fall into wealthy hands.
Examining what happens when a society favors old money over new and breaks all the rules to
make the world safe for finance, author Jeanne Haskin predicts increasing volatility and
violence in the United States if we do not significantly change course.
For a preview of what lies ahead for the U.S., the author takes us for a quick exemplary
trip through Central America.
A society that is reared on competition will face unsettling
challenges to authority if it doesn't set certain functions outside the arena of battle, via
systematic enrichment of the affluent minority that has always had the power to topple and ruin
the system.
Today's preoccupation with America's revolutionary history is not just a piece of theater.
At the heart of America's outrage is an inability to lash out and demand redemption from the
source of its distress because the pain is inflicted, not by hatred, but by the fundamental
lack of stability built into our way of life.
Now that a fifth of the population is suffering job loss, foreclosures, or exclusion from
employment due to prejudice, poor credit, a lack of skills or education, a glut of competition
and insufficient opportunity, the failure to provide for the helpless majority means the system
is at an impasse. Because the system can't or won't perform, the Tea Party's rise was
preemptive with all its implied violence and 'real' American theater as the means to channel
our anger into voting out Obama so reform can proceed unimpeded...with all its inherent
dangers.
After reviewing some foreign examples that erupted in the environments of colonialism and
post-colonialism, neoliberalism, militarism and oligarchies, the author filters through the
head-spinning social and political noise that stands in for responsible debate in America
today. Ms. Haskin's richly documented essay sees a bonfire prepared as social tensions are
increased and inter-group pressures are encouraged to mount. So much for "One nation..."
Title Pagev
Table of Contentsxi
Introduction1
Chapter One- Unearthing the Bones7
Chapter Two- Instilling the Illusion of Choice19
Chapter Three- Political Strategizing23
Chapter Four- Behavioral Economics27
Chapter Five- Favoring Old Money over New33
Chapter Six- Making the World Safe for Finance39
Chapter Seven- The Colonial History of Belize51
Chapter Eight- Belize -- Party Politics and Debt65
Chapter Nine- Belize -- Recommendations of the IMF83
Chapter Ten- Nicaragua 1522–193991
Chapter Eleven- Nicaragua -- The Somoza Dynasty107
Chapter Twelve- Nicaragua -- Opposition to the Sandinistas119
Chapter Thirteen- Nicaragua -- Implementing Neoliberalism133
Chapter Fourteen- El Salvador -- The Military and the Oligarchy151
Chapter Fifteen- El Salvador -- The War and Its Aftermath165
Chapter Sixteen- Honduras -- Land of Instability179
Chapter Seventeen- Honduras -- The Impact of the Contras191
Chapter Eighteen- Fast-Forward to a Volatile USA205
Bibliography227
Index25
It's hilarious hearing democrats say "no-one is above the law" as they cheat the system becoming multi millionaires via
insider trading and selling their influence.
Over these last few weeks Tucker has been one of the few people to stand up to the mob and refuses to give in. Tremendous
respect for people who refuse to give up their dignity.
4.0 out of 5 stars
Mosquitoes,
Fever, and America
Reviewed in the United States on March 8, 2009
Verified Purchase
Over three generations ago Hans Zinsser wrote "Rats, Lice and History" telling the
story of lice and men (sorry) and the typhus Rickettsia.
He founded the literary genre marked by the examination of disease, history, and having tripartite titles; Recent
examples: Guns, Germs, and Steel; Viruses, Plagues, and History.
Though Ms. Crosby did not call her book "Mosquitoes, Fever, and America," "The American Plague" nicely continues the
tradition of this fascinating venue.
The subtitle (why must books so often have subtitles now?) claims this to be "The Untold Story of Yellow Fever, The
Epidemic That Shaped Our History", which is more than a bit of a reach - Especially, given the existence of the very
similarly themed and titled adolescent's book "An American Plague: The True and Terrifying Story of the Yellow Fever
Epidemic of 1793" (2003) by Jim Murphy (which, whatever your age, is also worth reading).
It is arguable that the subtitle means only to refer to the Memphis outbreak, but that single event did not "shape our
history," it was the repeated outbreaks of Yellow Jack beginning with those in the northeast ports in 1699 that truly
did change the history of all of North America. The subtitle is simply annoying marketing hyperbole - though such an
unfounded, untrue, claim did nearly make me put the book back on the shelf unopened. Which would have been a shame, as I
enjoyed the book greatly.
"(The) American Plague" details the impact of an outbreak of Yellow Fever (YF) in Memphis, Tennessee (the author's home)
in the year 1878, and follows with an in-depth examination of the subsequent discovery of the means of transmission,
prevention, vaccination, cause, and sad lack of cure for the disease.
This book also traces the origin of the disease, and reviews how it likely came to the Americas from its home in Africa
as a consequence of the slave trade. The occurrence of YF epidemics in Europe (perhaps even dating back to the mid
500's) is not discussed, which is forgivable given the focus of the book, though the fact that 300,000 people perished
from YF in Spain in the 1800's makes it clear that YF was (is) a scourge far beyond America's shores.
The author brings to life the horror and uncertainly of epidemic disease at the dawn of scientific medicine. She
recounts the difficulty of seeing the true nature of a disease though the conflicting overlay of current knowledge and
cultural belief (a current example: autism).
Further, she points to the mendacity of businessmen who may have, in their efforts to prevent disruption of commerce by
quarantine, allowed this outbreak to spread from New Orleans to Memphis in the first place. She briefly touches on the
ethics of human, of animal, and of self, experimentation. It is not a simple book, though it is clearly, if at times
unevenly, written.
Unlike most popular science books, she includes an extensive source bibliography that points to precisely where her
material has come from. This is a very welcome addition. Over all, this is a solidly written, well researched and
interesting book. I strongly recommend it.
I also strongly recommend that you consider that the World Health Organization estimates that YF still kills 30,000
people a year. Most of these deaths could be prevented by vaccination and by mosquito control. Over the past few years
Yellow Jack has been re-emerging and spreading in the western hemisphere. This spread is, as Ms. Crosby shows that to a
degree the Memphis epidemic was, a political failure marked by primacy of business interests and of underfunded and
inadequate public health measures.
The toxicity that Matt writes about isn't just due to Trump - it's due to the left
abandoning traditional liberal values in favor of political correctness and identity
politics. This new Red Guard of ideological purity is the natural - shocking - evolution of
that....
1984 -- The writer of Truth rewrites history to fit whatever they want. Read the book.
That's the news media today. A warning leftists: Stalin and Hitler controlled the media. It's
not TRUMP controlling the media. Or ignoring the truth. And it should scare the hell out of
every American.
Crazy times indeed. It is reminiscent of the Hollywood Terror. A tipping point will come
when enough people are sickened of their arbitrary and capricious cultural fascism.
Mr. Taibbi fires a warning shot to alert us that the "instinct (in the American media)
to shield audiences from views or facts deemed politically uncomfortable has been in
evidence since Trump became a national phenomenon." I would say not "since" -- that vile
instinct has merely been more in evidence. The media's fear and hatred for diversity of
opinion, for the freedom of speech, has doubtless worsened ...
This is looking like another 1960's type insurrection that will end up the same way: it will
be used by the rich and powerful elites (notice how the corporate controlled media has gone
on one knee for BLM and has gone outright anti-white?), there will be a back lash that will
crush it (right after the election), and its leaders will be either absorbed into the
establishment or offed.
America looks like a hybrid of Stephen King, Brave New World, and 1984 and the rich and
powerful US elites and intel agencies stroke it and love it. Notice that the US super rich
have been raking it in since January 2020? While at the same time Trump is busy making the US
a vassal state of Israel and accelerating the roll-out of Cold War v2 which is just fine with
US elites that will not change with the election of moron Biden (if the people elect Biden
they are electing his VP as Biden will not last long; he is a lot like Yeltsin that was
pumped up on mental stimulants and nutriments to perform for short periods until the next
treatment).
"... This is where Orwell enters the convergence , for the State masks its stripmining and power grab with deliciously Orwellian misdirections such as "the People's Party," "democratic socialism," and so on. ..."
"... Orwell understood the State's ontological imperative is expansion, to the point where it controls every level of community, markets and society. Once the State escapes the control of the citizenry, it is free to exploit them in a parasitic predation that is the mirror-image of Monopoly capital. For what is the State but a monopoly of force, coercion, data manipulation and the regulation of private monopolies? ..."
"... Aldous Huxley foresaw a Central State that persuaded its people to "love their servitude" via propaganda, drugs, entertainment and information-overload. In his view, the energy required to force compliance exceeded the "cost" of persuasion, and thus the Powers That Be would opt for the power of suggestion. ..."
"... "My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power, and these ways will resemble those which I described in Brave New World . ..."
"... As Marx explained, the dynamics of state-monopoly-capitalism lead to the complete dominance of capital over labor in both financial and political "markets," as wealth buys political influence which then protects and enforces capital's dominance. ..."
The global crisis is not merely economic; it is the result of profound financial,
sociological and political trends described by Marx, Kafka, Orwell and Huxley.
The unfolding global crisis is best understood as the convergence of the dynamics described
by Marx, Kafka, Orwell and Huxley. Let's start with Franz Kafka , the writer (1883-1924) who most
eloquently captured the systemic injustices of all-powerful bureaucratic institutions--the
alienation experienced by the hapless citizen enmeshed in the bureaucratic web, petty
officialdom's mindless persecutions of the innocent, and the intrinsic absurdity of the
centralized State best expressed in this phrase: "We expect errors, not justice."
If this isn't the most insightful summary of the current moment in history, then what is? A
lawyer by training and practice, Kafka understood that the the more powerful and entrenched the
institution and its bureaucracy, the greater the collateral damage rained on the innocent, and
the more extreme the perversion of justice.
We are living in a Kafkaesque nightmare where suspicion alone justifies the government stealing from its citizens, and an
unrelated crime (possessing drug paraphernalia) is used to justify state theft.
As in a Kafkaesque nightmare, the state is above the law when it needs an excuse to steal your car or cash. There is no
crime, no arrest, no due process--just the state threatening that you should shut up and be happy they don't take everything you
own.
All these forms of civil forfeiture are well documented. While some would claim the worst
abuses have been rectified, that is far from evident. What is evident is how long these kinds
of legalized looting have been going on.
When the state steals our cash or car on mere suspicion, you have no recourse other than
horrendously costly and time-consuming legal actions. So you no longer have enough money to
prove your innocence now that we've declared your car and cash guilty?
Tough luck, bucko--be glad you live in a fake democracy with a fake rule of law, a fake
judiciary, and a government with the officially sanctioned right to steal your money and
possessions without any due process or court proceedings-- legalized looting .
They don't have to torture a confession out of you, like the NKVD/KGB did in the former
Soviet Union, because your cash and car are already guilty.
This is where Orwell enters the convergence , for the State masks its stripmining and power
grab with deliciously Orwellian misdirections such as "the People's Party," "democratic
socialism," and so on.
Orwell understood the State's ontological imperative is expansion, to the point where it
controls every level of community, markets and society. Once the State escapes the control of
the citizenry, it is free to exploit them in a parasitic predation that is the mirror-image of
Monopoly capital. For what is the State but a monopoly of force, coercion, data manipulation
and the regulation of private monopolies?
What is the EU bureaucracy in Brussels but the perfection of a stateless State?
As Kafka divined, centralized bureaucracy has the capacity for both Orwellian obfuscation
(anyone read those 1,300-page Congressional bills other than those gaming the system for their
private benefit?) and systemic avarice and injustice.
The convergence boils down to this: it would be impossible to loot this much wealth if the
State didn't exist to enforce the "rules" of parasitic predation.
Aldous Huxley foresaw a Central State that persuaded its people to "love their servitude"
via propaganda, drugs, entertainment and information-overload. In his view, the energy required
to force compliance exceeded the "cost" of persuasion, and thus the Powers That Be would opt
for the power of suggestion.
"My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of
governing and of satisfying its lust for power, and these ways will resemble those which I
described in Brave New World .
Within the next generation I believe that the world's rulers will discover that infant
conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs
and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting
people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience."
As prescient as he was, Huxley could not have foreseen the power of mobile telephony, gaming
and social media hypnosis/addiction as a conditioning mechanism for passivity and
self-absorption. We are only beginning to understand the immense addictive/conditioning powers
of 24/7 mobile telephony / social media.
What would we say about a drug that caused people to forego sex to check their Facebook
page? What would we say about a drug that caused young men to stay glued to a computer for 40+
hours straight, an obsession so acute that some actually die? We would declare that drug to be
far too powerful and dangerous to be widely available, yet mobile telephony, gaming and social
media is now ubiquitous.
... ... ...
Last but not least, we come to Marx. As Marx explained, the dynamics of
state-monopoly-capitalism lead to the complete dominance of capital over labor in both
financial and political "markets," as wealth buys political influence which then protects and
enforces capital's dominance.
Marx also saw that finance-capital would inevitably incentivize over-capacity, stripping
industrial capital of pricing power and profits. Once there's more goods and services than
labor can afford to buy with earnings, financialization arises to provide credit to labor to
buy capital's surplus production and engineer financial gains with leveraged speculation and
asset bubbles.
But since labor's earnings are stagnant or declining, there's an end-game to
financialization. Capital can no longer generate any gain at all except by central banks
agreeing to buy capital's absurdly over-valued assets. Though the players tell themselves this
arrangement is temporary, the dynamics Marx described are fundamental and inexorable: the
insanity of central banks creating currency out of thin air to buy insanely over-priced assets
is the final crisis of late-stage capitalism because there is no other escape from
collapse.
Having stripped labor of earnings and political power and extracted every last scrap of
profit from over-capacity (i.e. globalization) and financialization, capital is now completely
dependent on money-spewing central banks buying their phantom capital with newly printed
currency, a dynamic that will eventually trigger a collapse in the purchasing power of the
central banks' phantom capital (i.e. fiat currencies).
When there is no incentive to invest in real-world productive assets and every incentive to
skim profits by front-running the Federal Reserve, capitalism is dead. Paraphrasing
Wallerstein, "Capitalism is no longer attractive to capitalists."
We can see this for ourselves in the real world: if "renewable energy" was as profitable as
some maintain, private capital would have rushed in to fund every project to maximize their
gains from this new source of immense profits. But as Art Berman explained in Why the
Renewable Rocket Has Failed To Launch , this hasn't been the case. Rather, "green energy"
remains dependent on government subsidies in one form or another. If hydropower is removed from
"renewables," all other renewables (solar, wind, etc.) provide only 4% of total global energy
consumption.
Japan's stagnation exemplifies Marx's analysis: Japan's central bank has created trillions
of yen out of thin air for 30 years and used this phantom capital to buy the over-valued assets
of Japan's politically dominant state-capitalist class, a policy that has led to secular
stagnation and social decline. If it weren't for China's one-off expansion, Japan's economy
would have slipped into phantom capital oblivion decades ago.
Kafka, Orwell, Huxley and Marx called it, and we're living in the last-gasp stage of the
cruel and unsustainable system they described. So sorry, but investing your phantom capital in
FANG stocks, Tik-Tok and virtual-reality games will not save phantom capital from well-deserved
oblivion.
The wristband and microchip sound fab for children under 18 so we monitor to ensure their
safety, especially in educational settings and on school trips. It would enable them to be
located if lost or snatched. If it can be used to monitor language and aspects of behaviour
then they could not be falsely accused of of antisocial actions. If they don't comply then
child care benefits or access to higher education could be withdrawn as a sanction. It may
even improve road safety if they drive illegally or badly. Any chance of a tiny electric
shock feature to the microchip?
If you thought you knew everything about Eric Blair/George Orwell, I suggest
reading this essay as a test. Hopefully, you'll discover many facets not known before as
I did.
Orwell's career was a lot more complicated than that. Basically, he came from a relatively
prosperous middle-class family, which allowed him to play the game of the writer, when it
worked, and to come back to the family when things were thin. Of course he exploited his own
experiences, as every writer does. That doesn't detract from the great creations. Animal Farm
and 1984 don't have direct origins.
Posted by: Laguerre | May 20 2020 21:39 utc |
32 @Posted by: karlof1 | May 20 2020 18:51 utc | 26
That essay is a real shame, an impossible intend of whitewashing and redime Orwell, just
another intent on rewritting of history, and try to paint what is black as white.
Neo-language
This intent could be inscribed along the rescues of Stepan Bandera and the Forest Brothers as
new heroes of NATO world in their offensive against reviving socialist ideas.
That Orwell did not change even a bit after returning from Burma is proven by the fact
that he came to Spain, and strolled around there with the Trotskyites of POUM, to elaborate
black lists of communists which then were provided to Franco, at result of which many people
was tortured and summarily executed. He, this way, contributed greatly to decimate the
resistance in the side of the legitimate republican government, and thus, to help the
fascists in their way to power, well supported by the US with arms and fuel and by the air
forces of fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.
Orwell: Sneak sighting of British secret services in the Cold War (is declassified by MI-5
and documented). Its function: to expose communists. He even betrayed Charles Chaplin,
exiled in his native England for FBI persecution. "Referrer". "Always loyal"
@Posted by: H.Schmatz | May 20 2020 21:40 utc | 33
In the essay by Alert Escusa linked above, it is studied the historical context in which
Orwell published his most famous works, at all innocent, debunking the legend on that he was
kinda an outsider and was about to self-publish Animal Farm , being the checked
reality that he had full support of the birgueoisie to publish his influential works when the
time was more propice for the capitalists.
As a sample, a button:
What was happening that year of 1943, while Orwell was writing his Animal Farm? It was not
exactly, as Pepe Gutiérrez says "the distribution of the world", but something quite
different that he hides from us: the Nazis had invaded the USSR two years ago,
exterminating millions of Russians and devastating much of the country. The greatest battle
of the war, Stalingrad, had taken place, and it was not yet known who would win the
conflict, whether Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. No one could safely predict that Nazism
would be extirpated from Europe, the Nazi death camps had not yet been discovered, but
Orwell was obsessed with his anti-Soviet writings. What did Orwell want to portray with his
Farm Rebellion? Nothing more and nothing less than the following: "The specific purpose
Orwell threw into it with a sense of urgency was the desire to exploit the "myth" of the
Soviet Union, as a paradigm of the socialist state".
There are plenty of comments about it. It is only worth reflecting on who benefited from
Orwell's position in 1943. The victory was precisely achieved by the Soviet people and the
Red Army at the price of innumerable human sacrifices, also easily forgotten in the West,
where the true character of the anti-fascist war is hidden. It is logical that the USSR,
which had suffered a war of extermination unprecedented in history, and which also defeated
the collaborationist and fascist regimes of Eastern Europe, along with the popular and
communist guerrillas, was seen as a liberating power by broad sectors of local populations.
In addition, the communist guerrillas, ideologically linked to the USSR, had come to have
great prestige throughout Europe: so much so that, in the first French general elections
after Nazism, the French Communist Party was the most voted party, achieving more out of 5
million votes representing 30% of the electorate [7]. As we will see later, the USSR had
very well-founded reasons to believe that a new war was being prepared against him, this
time with the country devastated, so it was logical and legitimate that he try to win
allies against the possibility of a new world war. This is a long way from "distribution of
the world" and trying to equate imperialism with socialism, as will be seen later.
I must say the replies to my 26 go in many directions. As to Martin Sieff's essay, it's
fundamentally a well deserved critique of the BBC that segues into a discussion about how
George Orwell would easily recognize its Fake News for what it is that draws on Finding George
Orwell in Burma for some of its content. (A very short preview's available at the
link and it can be borrowed if you're an Archive member, for which there's no excuse as it's
free.) IMO, the comments fit Sieff's intent quite well. Judging from book excerpts offered here , the book's more
a critique of Myanmar than Orwell, although the additional sources provided at page bottom
leads to credibility questions. I also note that most websites promoting Finding lead
with the NY Times jacket blurb which is more about dissing Myanmar than revealing what
was found regarding Orwell. Sieff says he knows the author but doesn't speculate on why he
chose a female nom de plume; I too wonder why as I don't see what purpose it could serve
unless it's anti-Myanmar propaganda that Orwell would recognize or something similar.
Curious--an innocuous comment becomes a can of worms. Also curious how Orwell and his
writing still generate an intense level of controversy.
karlof1 , May 20 2020 22:47 utc |
42H.Schmatz , May 20 2020 22:52 utc |
43
@Posted by: H.Schmatz | May 20 2020 22:08 utc | 36
A bit more from the must read essay linked, even related to current events...
2. THE HISTORICAL ENVIRONMENT OF "ANIMAL FARM" AND "1984"
What events were taking place in the western world at that time, which caused a
favorable change of attitude towards Orwell's publications, of those who were previously
reticent? Neither more nor less than the imminent offensive against socialism, which had
already lost almost thirty million lives during the anti-fascist war and had suffered
appalling material destruction.
While the first copies of Animal Farm were being printed and bound, some
extremely disturbing events were taking place. Just at the end of the war, Nazi spies and
war criminals were being recycled by the American spy services, such as the German SS
General Reinhard Genhlen, whose spy network passed entirely to the Americans and was used
in Eastern Europe to promote the anti-Soviet uprisings in East Berlin in 1953 and Hungary
in 1956. Clandestine networks were created to evade thousands of Nazi criminals towards
Latin America and the USA. Later, with Japan defeated, the operation was repeated with the
Japanese scientists who are experts in bacteriological weapons, responsible for the deaths
of tens of thousands of allied prisoners, but who were secretly brought to the United
States. Meanwhile, during the 1945 Potsdam conference, which brought together Hitler's
victorious allies - where the alleged "honeymoon" took place to "divide the world" - US
President Truman and English Churchill had speculated before Stalin about the power the
western allies had with a new secret weapon. On August 6, 1945, the first atomic bomb was
dropped on Hiroshima. According to Ian Gray, Stalin's biographer: "Stalin and the majority
of Russians immediately understood the terrible meaning of this fact ... Stalin realized
that the Americans had used the bomb mainly to impress and threaten Russia". Stalin and the
Soviets were right: the American Secretary of State, James Byrnes, recognized that the bomb
was necessary not against Japan, but "to make Russia moldable to Europe".
As the historian Pauwels has explained, the initial will of the Soviets in Europe was
not to have like-minded regimes and their own zone of influence, but to intervene in
Germany to prevent it from engaging in a second war, this time together with its former
allies against the USSR. This is demonstrated by the fact that until well into the post-war
period, the Soviets did not help to make any political-social change in the liberated
countries. It was Truman's nuclear policy that forced the Soviets to stand face to face
with the Americans in Eastern Europe, thus deterring American aviation: from this way they
would have to carry out a long trip until arriving at the Soviet cities where they had to
drop their bombs. This caused the political and social changes in Eastern Europe to
accelerate, which, however, were already taking place autonomously since the end of the war
thanks to the triumph of the popular anti-fascist forces. This fact not only saved the USSR
from a new war and enabled socialism to survive: stability in Eastern Europe laid the
foundations for a development of national liberation struggles and for socialism throughout
the world: in 1949 the victory of the Chinese Revolution heralded the triumph of many
others, putting all capitalism in danger of death.
In parallel, just after the Cold War started by imperialism, the conservative British
leader Churchill theorized about the need to build an Iron Curtain to contain the
communists and allegedly asked the American President Truman to attack the USSR with the
atomic bomb by means of a preemptive attack. Churchill was not just any character, but one
of the most influential leaders of the British Empire, champion of English colonialism and
the participation of his country in World War I, therefore responsible for many millions of
deaths and suffering of peoples.
That was the real reason for the delay in publishing Animal Farm . Orwell,
naturally, during the anti-fascist war could not see his anti-Soviet work published until
the end of the conflict, since it would have been quite awkward for the Western governments
allied to the USSR, who were risking their lives against the Nazis, to criminalize in this
way a friendly government. On the other hand, at that time, from the Orwellian model, it
would be difficult for western and world public opinion to understand how it was possible
that the Soviet people fought with such a degree of sacrifice and heroism, expelling the
Nazis from Europe: all the other bourgeois regimes, where there was freedom, had collapsed
rapidly and had collaborated with the Nazis.
It was in connection with these events that the first copies of Animal farm were
placed on the shelves of bookstores. Precisely the publication coincided with the end of
World War II and the dissolution of the anti-fascist alliance between England, USA, and the
USSR. The first edition is exactly from 1945 in England, published by Secker &
Wargburg, from London, and from 1946 in the USA, published by Harcourt, from New York. The
capitalist governments, which were imminently going to promote Animal Farm , were
evaluating different options to attack the USSR: from rearming German units as shock
brigades to attack the Soviets, to the launch of "preventive" atomic bombs. The prestige
that the USSR had among all the workers of the world, fundamentally the Europeans who
suffered the Nazi atrocities, was enormous, as well as among the intellectual and popular
sectors, whose reflection could be followed in the great influence that some communist
parties had. It was necessary to dismantle this prestige to sweep the opposition of the
world public opinion to an armed aggression against those who liberated Europe from Nazism,
and Orwell's novels came as a ring to a finger for this purpose, since they were a good
instrument to spread among the so called mass culture, just as later were the film versions
of his works.
Albert Escusa, gives in his essay a good semblance of what kind of person could Orwell
really be:
Orwell was above all a great individualist, with some important personal contradictions and
prejudices that led him to oscillate along various paths without being able to commit
himself in a stable and permanent way to anything that was not himself, in such a way that,
when he became disenchanted with some social processes that he was unable to interpret
correctly and scientifically, ended up ranting against what he believed to be the object of
his anger.
We can see it in Corbière's sharp description: "Who was Orwell? A sniper, a
skeptic who devoted his efforts to Manichean criteria describing the great social and
political contradictions of our time. Anarchist, Semitrotskyist in Spain, Labor in England,
free thinker, undercover anti-Semite, his real ideas reveal a kind of elitism.
He had an intense imagination but his methodology of thought was restricted,
one-sided.
No that I am aware, but, if interested, you could translate it with a translator.
Since the essay is quite long, you could translate paragraph by paragraph, then read the whol
thing once assembled.
A bit complicated, but worth the effort, the essay is a well researched work, wu¡ith
several referecnes as weel worth reading, like a disection of Orwell, his epoch and
motives.
Oh dear. Relatively prosperous middle class means descended from Earls of Westmorland, family
tree of Fanes, de Veres, Grosvenors, at a little reach basically related to the entire
peerage. True, Orwell's father was a bit of a dope, he did manage to contract a marriage to a
very wealthy woman. Jacintha Buddicom's memoir, Eric and Us, about growing up living next
door to the Blairs, will tell you what 'middle class' life was like.
Orwell maintained the friendships from St. Cyprians and Eton for life. Pretty much
everyone on the roster could be considered as spooks and agents. All of them tied to old
money, old family, government service. Government as MI6 and CIA.
I think he's a great writer. My copy of the four volumes of Collected Essays Letters &
Journalism is still right here next to the fireplace. All the rest of it around here
somewhere, even the minor novels from the 30s. But no illusions what team he is on or what
station he was born to.
Winston Smith means 'maker of Winston', as in broadcasting from Room 101 and forging the
myth of Winston Churchill. Orwell was a big boy when he did that and was far past having any
illusions. He created the myth that Room 101 of Broadcasting House was the worst place in the
world. And talked of how the war years were the best years of his life.
@Posted by: oldhippie | May 20 2020 23:13 utc | 48
I think he's a great writer
Not even so, more proper a plagiarist and propagandist at the service of Western
totalitarian imperialism.
Since we are in the task of deconstructing Orwell, let´s go to the end...
In addition to the Animal Farm , one of the works that most influenced the
construction of Western totalitarianism against the Communists was 1984 . It shows
an overview of socialism in the USSR similar to a delusional totalitarian and monstrous
drama, with a Big Brother (Stalin) who had absolute social control over the individuals
under his rule, through a sophisticated mind control mechanism. This work became a
must-read for CIA officers and a dependent body called the Council for Psychological
Strategies, in addition to the fact that NATO used the entire vocabulary of this novel
during the 1950s in its anti-communist strategy.12 It is interesting to know how He
conceived this book, since it was apparently a plagiarism Orwell did to another
disenchanted of Bolshevism, in this case a Russian writer, in the opinion of the writer
Emilio J. Corbière: "Orwell's was a conscious plagiarism, since he explained it
himself in another of his works. The plot, the main characters, the symbols and the climate
of its narration, belonged to a completely forgotten Russian writer of the beginning of the
century: Evgeny Zamyatin. In his book We , the Russian disillusioned with socialism
after the failure of the 1905 revolution, devoted his efforts to anathematizing the Social
Democratic Workers Party founded by Jorge Plejanov. When the October revolution happened -
in 1917 - Zamyatin went into exile in Paris, where he wrote his posthumous anti-communist
work"
This opinion is also shared by the historian Isaac Deutscher in his work The
Mysticism of Cruelty , an essay about 1984 , where he states that Orwell
"borrowed the idea of 1984, the plot, the main characters, the symbols and
the whole plot situation from the work We of Evgeny Zamyatin"
We see how behind the image of a great writer, lies the reality of a plagiarist of
stories, which served to elaborate theoretical and academic models on the functioning of
socialism in the Soviet Union totally adjusted to the requirements of imperialism in the
anti-communist Cold War. The impact of 1984 was tremendous among the population,
creating an atmosphere of anti-communist and anti-Soviet paranoia that was very effective
among the masses, as the disturbing personal testimony of Isaac Deutscher demonstrates:
"Have you read that book? You have to read it, sir. Then you will know why we have to drop
the atomic bomb on the Bolsheviks! With those words, a miserable blind newspaper vendor
recommended me in New York 1984 , a few weeks before Orwell's death".
H. Schmatz.
I am not a good book reader but I did read 1984 and it definitely seemed to be a veiled
critique on Communism.
However it seems the story is now more fitting to capitalism.
The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), happily amplified by the Public Broadcasting
System (PBS) in the United States which carries its World News, continues to pump out its
regular dreck about the alleged economic chaos in Russia and the imagined miserable state of
the Russian people.
It is all lies of course. Patrick Armstrong 's
authoritative regular updates including his reports on this website are a necessary corrective
to such crude propaganda.
But amid all their countless fiascoes and failures in every other field (including the
highest per capita death rate from COVID-19 in Europe, and one of the highest in the world) the
British remain world leaders at managing global Fake News. As long as the tone remains
restrained and dignified, literally any slander will be swallowed by the credulous and every
foul scandal and shame can be confidently covered up.
None of this would have surprised the late, great George Orwell. It is fashionable these
days to endlessly trot him out as a zombie (dead but alleged to be living – so that he
cannot set the record straight himself) critic of Russia and all the other global news outlets
outside the control of the New York and London plutocracies. And it is certainly true, that
Orwell, whose hatred and fear of communism was very real, served before his death as an
informer to MI-5, British domestic security.
But it was not the Soviet Union, Stalin's show trials or his experiences with the Trotskyite
POUM group in Barcelona and Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War that "made Orwell Orwell" as
the Anglo-America Conventional Wisdom Narrative has it. It was his visceral loathing of the
British Empire – compounded during World War II by his work for the BBC which he
eventually gave up in disgust.
And it was his BBC experiences that gave Orwell the model for his unforgettable Ministry of
Truth in his great classic "1984."
George Orwell had worked in one of the greatest of all world centers of Fake News. And he
knew it.
More profoundly, the great secret of George Orwell's life has been hiding in plain sight for
70 years since he died. Orwell became a sadistic torturer in the service of the British Empire
during his years in Burma, modern Myanmar. And as a fundamentally decent man, he was so
disgusted by what he had done that he spent the rest of his life not just atoning but slowly
and willfully committing suicide before his heartbreakingly premature death while still in his
40s.
The first important breakthrough in this fundamental reassessment of Orwell comes from one
of the best books on him. "Finding George Orwell in Burma" was published in 2005 and written by
"Emma Larkin", a pseudonym for an outstanding American journalist in Asia whose identity I have
long suspected to be an old friend and deeply respected colleague, and whose continued
anonymity I respect.
"Larkin" took the trouble to travel widely in Burma during its repressive military
dictatorship and her superb research reveals crucial truths about Orwell. According to his own
writings and his deeply autobiographical novel "Burmese Days" Orwell loathed all his time as a
British colonial policeman in Burma, modern Myanmar. The impression he systematically gives in
that novel and in his classic essay "Shooting an Elephant" is of a bitterly lonely, alienated,
deeply unhappy man, despised and even loathed by his fellow British colonialists throughout
society and a ludicrous failure at his job.
This was not, however, the reality that "Larkin" uncovered. All surviving witnesses agreed
that Orwell – Eric Blair as he then still was – remained held in high regard during
his years in the colonial police service. He was a senior and efficient officer. Indeed it was
precisely his knowledge of crime, vice, murder and the general underside of human society
during his police colonial service while still in his 20s that gave him the street smarts,
experience, and moral authority to see through all the countless lies of right and left, of
American capitalists and British imperialists as well as European totalitarians for the rest of
his life.
The second revelation to throw light on what Orwell had to do in those years comes from one
of the most famous and horrifying scenes in "1984." Indeed, almost nothing even in the memoirs
of Nazi death camp survivors has anything like it: That is the scene where "O'Brien", the
secret police officer tortures the "hero" (if he can be called that) Winston Smith by locking
his face to a cage in which a starving rat is ready to pounce and devour him if it is
opened.
I remember thinking, when I was first exposed to the power of "1984" at my outstanding
Northern Irish school, "What kind of mind could invent something as horrific as that?") The
answer was so obvious that I like everyone else missed it entirely.
Orwell did not "invent" or "come up" with the idea as a fictional plot device: It was just a
routine interrogation technique used by the British colonial police in Burma, modern Myanmar.
Orwell never "brilliantly" invented such a diabolical technique of torture as a literary
device. He did not have to imagine it. It was routinely employed by himself and his colleagues.
That was how and why the British Empire worked so well for so long. They knew what they were
doing. And what they did was not nice at all.
A final step in my enlightenment about Orwell, whose writings I have revered all my life
– and still do – was provided by our alarmingly brilliant elder daughter about a
decade ago when she too was given "1984" to read as part of her school curriculum. Discussing
it with her one day, I made some casual obvious remark that Orwell was in the novel as Winston
Smith.
My American-raised teenager then naturally corrected me. "No, Dad, " she said. "Orwell isn't
Winston, or he's not just Winston. He's O'Brien too. O'Brien actually likes Winston. He doesn't
want to torture him. He even admires him. But he does it because it's his duty."
She was right, of course.
But how could Orwell the great enemy of tyranny, lies and torture so identify with and
understand so well the torturer? It was because he himself had been one.
"Emma Larkin's" great book brings out that Orwell as a senior colonial police officer in the
1920s was a leading figure in a ruthless war waged by the British imperial authorities against
drug and human trafficking crime cartels every bit as vicious and ruthless as those in modern
Ukraine, Columbia and Mexico today. It was a "war on terror" where anything and everything was
permitted to "get the job done."
The young Eric Blair was so disgusted by the experience that when he returned home he
abandoned the respectable middle class life style he had always enjoyed and became, not just an
idealistic socialist as many in those days did, but a penniless, starving tramp. He even
abandoned his name and very identity. He suffered a radical personality collapse: He killed
Eric Blair. He became George Orwell.
Orwell's early famous book "Down and Out in London and Paris" is a testament to how much he
literally tortured and humiliated himself in those first years back from Burma. And for the
rest of his life.
He ate miserably badly, was skinny and ravaged by tuberculosis and other health problems,
smoked heavily and denied himself any decent medical care. His appearance was always
abominable. His friend, the writer Malcolm Muggeridge speculated that Orwell wanted to remake
himself as a caricature of a tramp.
The truth clearly was that Orwell never forgave himself for what he did as a young agent of
empire in Burma. Even his literally suicidal decision to go to the most primitive, cold, wet
and poverty-stricken corner of creation in a remote island off Scotland to finish "1984" in
isolation before he died was consistent with the merciless punishments he had inflicted on
himself all his life since leaving Burma.
The conclusion is clear: For all the intensity of George Orwell's experiences in Spain, his
passion for truth and integrity, his hatred of the abuse of power did not originate from his
experiences in the Spanish Civil War. They all flowed directly from his own actions as an agent
of the British Empire in Burma in the 1920s: Just as his creation of the Ministry of Truth
flowed directly from his experience of working in the Belly of the Beast of the BBC in the
early 1940s.
George Orwell spent more than 20 years slowly committing suicide because of the terrible
crimes he committed as a torturer for the British Empire in Burma. We can therefore have no
doubt what his horror and disgust would be at what the CIA did under President George W. Bush
in its "Global War on Terror." Also, Orwell would identify at once and without hesitation the
real fake news flowing out of New York, Atlanta, Washington and London today, just as he did in
the 1930s and 1940s.
Let us therefore reclaim and embrace The Real George Orwell: The cause of fighting to
prevent a Third World War depends on it.
Interesting book "Deadly Medicines and Organized Crime " published in 2013 by PETER C
GØTZSCHE
He points out "Science philosopher Karl Popper in "The Open Society and Its Enemies"
depicts the totalitarian, closed society as a rigidly ordered state in which freedom of
expression and discussion of crucial issues are ruthlessly suppressed. Most of the time, when
I have tried to publish unwelcome truths about the drug industry, I have been exposed to the
journal's lawyers, and even after I have documented that everything I say is correct and have
been said before by others, I have often experienced that important bits have been removed or
that my paper was rejected for no other reason than fear of litigation. This is one of the
reasons I decided to write this book, as I have discovered that I have much more freedom when
I write books. Popper would have viewed the pharmaceutical industry as an enemy of the open
society.
Rigorous science should put itself at risk of being falsified and this practice should be
protected against those who try to impede scientific understanding, as when the industry
intimidates those who discover harms of its drugs. Protecting the hypotheses by ad hoc
modifications, such as undeclared changes to the measured outcomes or the analysis plan once
the sponsor has seen the results, or by designing trials that make them immune to refutation,
puts the hypotheses in the same category as pseudoscience.
In healthcare, the open democratic society has become an oligarchy of corporations whose
interests serve the profit motive of the industry and shape public policy, including that of
weakened regulatory agencies. Our governments have failed to regulate an industry, which has
become more and more powerful and almighty, and failed to protect scientific objectivity and
academic curiosity from commercial forces."
Thats about it in a nutshell. Too bad the good scientists are all muzzled. Only the
politicized fraudsters get the good press.
We are living in strange times indeed, this crisis raises many questions about the nature of
freedom and what our expectations are, or should be. Everyone has their own notions about what
freedom means and how far that should extend to oneself and indeed, to everyone else.
I want to start with a look at where we've come from before I look at where we are now, as I
feel it gives a better understanding of our definitions of freedom and a better context for
viewing where we are, at this moment in time.
Society probably started with the tribe – maybe not even having a leader if the
numbers where small enough, say 10 people. Tribes of scores or more obviously became hard to
manage and so, undoubtedly, this led to the idea of a leader or a group of leaders – a
chief, or a council of chiefs. Such a system seems to have worked well, so long as the chiefs
acted in the best interest of the tribe, and not in their own best interest. Tribes and early
kingdoms often had a mechanism for dealing with a poor leader – the symbolic marriage of
the leader to the land and the right to depose, or even execute, a leader that failed to live
up to expectations.
Such concepts of leadership are ancient but have survived in various places into the modern
era, including Ireland where I live. Although the practice associated with this custom is long
gone, knowledge of it remains vaguely in the public consciousness and more definitively in the
realms of scholarship and Celtic Neo-Paganism. However, societies across the globe began to
move beyond this cherished accountability millenia ago – with the rise of despotic
monarchy, something that still exists as an unfortunate anachronism even now.
As tribes grew into countries and countries grew into empires, monarchs became decreasingly
accountable to their citizens, or rather subjects – those who are subjugated. While many
monarchs felt an obligation, both 'divine' and moral to behave with care and responsibility,
others acted in pure self interest, free of any accountability for their actions. With the
backing a large army or, sizeable personal guard, it became increasing difficult to hold
monarchs accountable and one had to rely on goodwill in most cases, rather than
enforcement.
Of course, there have been countless deposing of monarchs, by the people or by rival
claimants, although the latter didn't always turn out to be beneficial. Probably the most
famous of these is that of Galus Julius Caesar, the Dictator for life of the final years of the
Roman Republic, who gave his name to the title Caesar, Czar and Keiser. He was brutally
murdered by Brutus (hence the word brutal) and we all know how that turned out the for Roman
Republic.
The republic itself was a form of democracy, based on an earlier model from Greece, a
civilization that had immense influence on Rome. Of course, Athenian democracy was nothing like
what we now regard as democracy. The right to decide how government was organised and what it
did fell to the hands of an elite group - demokratia , or "rule by the people" was only for
citizens and of these, only the men could vote. At the time (507 BC) this meant 40,000 men, out
of a much larger population, but in reality no more than about 5000 men could attend
assemblies, due to other commitments. Still, it was a ground-breaking step, so long as you
weren't a foreigner, criminal, woman, child or a slave.
It is from these Greek origins that we get the word democracy and the notion of rights and
freedom for all. Over time there have been variations on this model that have been tried out
– constitutional monarchies, republics, socialist states, fascist states and communist
states, which have varying levels of input for the masses. The masses might also be referred to
as 'plebeians' as the Romans liked to call ordinary folk, a corrupted form of which still
exists as a minor insult - pleb.
However, through most of recorded history, the most common system has been monarchy,
although one could hardly describe it as the most popular. Simpler than a democracy and easy to
enforce – notions such as corruption, fairness and accountability do not come into play,
as divine rule (e.g. the divine right of kings) gives the ruler carte blanche to do whatever
they god-damn like, unless their despotism provokes a revolt. Of course, revolt has happened,
from time to time, throughout history and one of the most famous ones is that of the barons in
England against king John.
The Magna Carta (Great Charter, of 1215) is considered by many as the bedrock of Western
civilization and democracy, despite the fact that it only gave limited concessions to a very
small number of nobles. It was a start at least, and perhaps enabled further inroads into the
monarchic monopoly on power. The Peasants' Revolt of 1381, against Richard II of England was a
major shift. Led by a commoner (Wat Tyler) it was a great embarrassment for Richard, who did
not have a standing army on hand. He was forced to pretend to negotiate with the rebels, who
camped at Blackheath, while he secretly ordered the Mayor of London to raise an army to
disperse and execute the protestors.
There are countless other examples of rebellion against monarchs across the world, but most
of them are forgotten. Perhaps the best remembered rebellion is that of the French paupers,
against the Bourbon monarchy and the entire aristocracy of France. This violent and
bloodthirsty revolution sent shudders of terror across the monarchies of the world and
precipitated a programme of reform, based on fear of similar events occurring.
Of course, some countries carried on regardless – Russia and America being
particularly sad examples, as Russia only abolished serfdom in 1861, while USA only abolished
slavery in 1865. One could justifiably say that the lives of these ordinary people, who were
now 'citizens' hardly improved as their freedom was pretty much nominal. This, in Russia, led
to the revolution of 1917, due to the intransigence of the Czar/Tsar (Caesar) Nicholai II
Alexandrovich Romanov II. The overthrow of the Russian system, inspired by the ideas of Marx
and Engels, led to a Bolshevik government headed by Vladimir Lenin. Whatever notions the
Soviets had, Lenin was a de facto Tzar in waiting and Stalin was certainly that, if not an
uncrowned heir to Ivan The Terrible.
Post World War II, we supposedly have a new age of democracy and freedom, but that only
applies to some. In truth, almost the whole world collection of governments has learned the art
of propaganda - thanks to the astounding upskilling efforts of the National Socialists (Nazis)
of Germany, who took this to new heights (or lows rather), turning it almost into an artform.
While we have been led to believe that we are free and democratic, we have never been more
exposed to lies and propaganda than we are now. The biggest lie of all is that we live in a
democracy, when in fact we actually only get to choose a new set of corrupt and self-serving
narcissists, every 4 or 5 years.
Democracies, the world over, have been bought – lobbyists have far more power than the
electorate could ever hope to achieve. What we in fact have is the illusion of democracy
– state agencies act without oversight, individuals have no say over the manifesto and
policies of parties in power and have no mechanism to undo or prevent undesirable actions by
governments. The only mechanisms available are the occasional referenda (instigated under
pressure), protest (peaceful or otherwise) and violent overthrow.
In most cases, the effort and risk of violent overthrow is considered too much for the
majority of people – it takes dire poverty, starvation and horrific coercion before the
'plebs' are pushed to the brink. Governments are aware of this and generally apply the 'boiling
frog' method of restricting people's freedoms and the removal of privacy and general rights.
However, they do on occasion overstep the mark or fail to adequately conceal their stealthy
nefarious actions – which inevitably leads to protest or insurrection.
History has proven that violent insurrection usually fails, but it is rather foolish of
authoritarian governments to take a gamble on this not happening. What is far more effective
for us 'plebs' is non-violent insurrection, in the form of non-compliance - this worked wonders
for both Gandhi and for Martin Luther-King, two of the most inspirational leaders of the 20th
century. Nelson Mandella is another fine example of someone who led a monumental change, in
South Africa, while also avoiding a catastrophic bloodbath, again through advocating of
non-violence and showing exceptional leadership skills.
At this moment in time, we are held hostage by a virus and the fear of what it might do to
humanity. While public safety has to be a priority, one has to ask the question – what is
this really about? Is this a manufactured crisis or is it is just opportunistic governments
capitalizing on their best chance to roll out new draconian measures? Temporary emergency
powers is one thing, but if there is no rollback after the crisis is over, what then? What if
the crisis is one without end – like George Orwell's perpetual war in his novel 1984?
We have come to expect freedom, we are told that we live in the 'free world' yet we see our
rights and freedoms and privacy being eroded by government legislation, corporate invasive
technology and data collection. Where do we draw the line? When do we say enough is enough?
Strangely, the same technology that enables our surveillance monitoring is also the most
powerful tool at our disposal. Internet and telecommunications enables us to share information,
just as the 'system' collects information about all of us. For many, it has opened our eyes
about government agendas, methods and operations as we now have unprecedented access to
worldwide information, often in real-time, or within minutes and hours of events happening.
Many believe that a new era of oppression is being rolled out, right now as we sit in our
homes, enabled by the high-power, high-speed and low latency 5G network, worldwide by a hidden
agency. Conspiracies aside, there are many questions to be asked about our rights, what our
freedoms should consist of and what the limits of government and corporate actions should be.
We need to ask those questions, we need to demand answers and show the 'powers that be' that
the thirst for true democracy is still alive and kicking. If we volunteer to be imprisoned or
to become our own jailors then there is no hope for humanity. As in the past, humanity needs to
assert itself, in order to remain free of despotism and it has never been more urgent than now.
Corny as it may be, the simplest way to express this is for me to repeat the words of the late
Bob Marley - "Get up, stand up, stand up for your rights!"
"... There is little doubt that the modern cult of power worship is bound up with the modern man's feeling that life here and now is the only life there is. If death ends everything, it becomes much harder to believe that you can be in the right even if you are defeated . I would say that the decay in the belief in personal immortality has been as important as the rise of machine civilization. ..."
"... Since society is held together by this myth system – the beliefs and values people live for and live by – that sustains it, societies have always had to offer symbolic "answers" to death. For without a meaningful symbolic for coming to terms with death, human action would be stymied and people would be reduced to what the psychiatrist Allan Wheelis termed "intense, preoccupying yearning." ..."
"... When leaders speak, the children hear the inner voices of their parents telling them to be careful, be very careful, the bogeyman is everywhere, so listen and obey. Freud, the Jewish atheist, and Dostoevsky, the Russian Orthodox Christian, were in agreement about people's desire to give up their freedom to authority figures who would allegedly shelter them within their warm embrace. ..."
"... The easiest way to do this is to convince people that death is stalking them, for the bogeyman is always death in one form or another. ..."
"... It works to get people to support the terrifying sadism of wars against fabricated "others, ..."
"... It works to get people to give up their freedoms out of fear of "terrorists," who are said to slide and hide in the interstices of everyday life, ready to pounce and kill at any moment. ..."
"... For the Grand Inquisitor represents those power elites across the world who wish to cower people into accepting their dicta on Covid-19 as truth without questioning its logic or rationale. ..."
"... The use of technology to control behaviour by denying holidays to people, denying promotions etc all based on credit scores and similar monitoring has to be seen by the wealthy as a model of what can be achieved by the combination of ruthless force and control over information. ..."
"... All are brainwashed from birth. Its not "capitalism" its is a parasitic banking cabals economy . ..."
"... When the education system has been designed to eliminate the use of critical thinking and the purveyors of propaganda control the vast majority of the MSM, academia plus the creation of a veneer of democracy, it is little wonder so many people have swallowed this lie. ..."
"... many who call themselves atheists worship science( but not science as knowledge as it originally meant) ..."
"... The cabal wants only their narrative( lies as the truth) they want the truth of who we are and that we are co creators in this world unknown to us . ..."
Since death is one idea that has no history except as an idea and not a reality any of us have experienced, it is the most frightening
idea there is and also quite simple. It is the ultimate unknown. It has always haunted human beings, whether consciously or unconsciously.
It lies at the root of war, violence, religion, art, love, and civilization. The good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly,
why we like to win and not lose, pass and not fail, "pass on" and not die. It is so funny and so sad. We would be lost without it,
even when we feel lost when thinking about it. And it is fundamental for understanding the action and reaction to Covid-19.
Societies have always been people banded together in the face of death. And since people are not just physical beings but symbolic
creatures who can think and imagine the past and the future, societies are necessarily mythic symbol systems whose job is not only
to protect people physically, but symbolically as well.
Sometimes, however, the protection is a protection racket with racketeers holding people hostage to fabricated fears that keep
them locked in a living-death.
Thus death, this most potent imaginative idea and reality that doesn't exist except as a mystery about which anything we say is
speculation, can be used for good and evil, depending on who controls society.
Death is the great fear, the human haunting that hangs by a thread over life like the sword of Damocles.
In 1944 in a newspaper column, George Orwell made an astute remark:
There is little doubt that the modern cult of power worship is bound up with the modern man's feeling that life here and now
is the only life there is. If death ends everything, it becomes much harder to believe that you can be in the right even if you
are defeated . I would say that the decay in the belief in personal immortality has been as important as the rise of machine civilization.
Beliefs, of course, like "personal immortality" and all others, such as the recent rise in the belief in atheism, which is as
much a belief as belief in God, are, partially at least, relative to time and place, and develop out of social storytelling. The
"hard facts" on which many feel their lives and security rest are themselves dependent upon the symbols which give them legitimacy.
Reality is indeed precarious with society suspended by a web of myths and symbols. It is through cultural and social symbol systems
that society's meaning is transmitted to individuals, and it is within the symbol systems that the control and release of action
resides.
In today's electronic mass media world, those who control the mass media that control the narrative flow – the storytelling –
control the majority's beliefs and actions.
Since society is held together by this myth system – the beliefs and values people live for and live by – that sustains it,
societies have always had to offer symbolic "answers" to death. For without a meaningful symbolic for coming to terms with death,
human action would be stymied and people would be reduced to what the psychiatrist Allan Wheelis termed "intense, preoccupying
yearning."
Today we can hear such yearning everywhere.
Shortly after Orwell made his prescient comment in The Tribune, nuclear weapons were developed and used by the United States to
kill hundreds of thousands of innocent Japanese civilians. With those weapons and their use, the ages-old symbolic narrative of life
and death was transformed in a flash.
"The significance of the possibility of nuclear death is that it radically affects the meaning of death, of immortality,
of life itself," wrote Hans Morgenthau.
The traditional symbolic sources that once served to allow humans to transcend death were fundamentally undercut, and the search
for new modes of death transcendence was carried on beneath the portentous covering of the nuclear umbrella.
A qualitative transformation in the meaning of human existence was thus brought about as humans, who had the weapons, replaced
the belief in God as the holder of the power over life and death, since nuclear war could result in the extinction of human life,
leaving no one left to die.
This is our world today, and it is where the Covid-19 story takes place. A world not just of nuclear fear, but a host of other
fears constantly inflamed by the mass media that hypnotize people through the conjuring of death-fear.
In his great work on group psychology, Freud showed us how it was not just mental contagion and the herd instinct that got people
to join in group behavior. People could be induced to become little children and obey their leaders because they have "an extreme
passion for authority."
When leaders speak, the children hear the inner voices of their parents telling them to be careful, be very careful, the bogeyman
is everywhere, so listen and obey. Freud, the Jewish atheist, and Dostoevsky, the Russian Orthodox Christian, were in agreement about
people's desire to give up their freedom to authority figures who would allegedly shelter them within their warm embrace.
The easiest way to do this is to convince people that death is stalking them, for the bogeyman is always death in one form
or another.
It works to get people to support the terrifying sadism of wars against fabricated "others," who are always portrayed
as aliens who are out to kill the good people.
It works to get people to give up their freedoms out of fear of "terrorists," who are said to slide and hide in the interstices
of everyday life, ready to pounce and kill at any moment.
And it works to get people to obey orders to protect themselves from terrifying viruses that are lying in wait everywhere to strike
them dead.
In his novel The Brothers Karamazov , Dostoevsky said that people want miracles, mystery, and authority, not freedom. His
Grand Inquisitor, while a fictional creation, lives on in reality.
For the Grand Inquisitor represents those power elites across the world who wish to cower people into accepting their dicta
on Covid-19 as truth without questioning its logic or rationale.
To question has become an act of insubordination deserving death by censorship or the defiling of one's name via the term "conspiracy
theorist," a name used by the CIA to dismiss anyone questioning its murder of President Kennedy. Death comes in many forms, and the
fear of it has always been used by the powerful to render the common people speechless and obedient.
How can any thinking person, anyone not totally crippled by fear, not question what is going on with the coronavirus disaster
when reading what Peter Koenig, a thirty-year veteran economist of the World Bank and World Health Organization, writes in his article
The Farce and Diabolical Agenda
of a 'Universal Lockdown' :
The pandemic was needed as a pretext to halt and collapse the world economy and the underlying social fabric.
There is no coincidence. There were a number of preparatory events, all pointing into the direction of a worldwide monumental
historic disaster. It started at least 10 years ago – probably considerably earlier – with the infamous 2010 Rockefeller Report,
which painted the first phase of a monstrous Plan, called the "Lock Step" scenario. Among the last preparatory moves for the "pandemic"
was Event 201, held in NYC on 18 October 2019.
The event was sponsored by the Johns Hopkins Center for Public Health, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) and the World
Economic Forum (WEF), the club of the rich and powerful that meets every January in Davos, Switzerland. Participating were a number
of pharmaceuticals (vaccine interest groups), as well as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)'s of the US and – of
China.
One of the objectives of Event 201 was a computer simulation of a corona virus pandemic. The simulated virus was called SARS-2-nCoV,
or later 2019-nCoV. The simulation results were disastrous, killing 65 million people in 18 months and plunging the stock market
by more than 30% -- causing untold unemployment and bankruptcies. Precisely the scenario of which we are now living the beginning.
The Lock Step scenario foresees a number of ghastly and disturbing events or components of The Plan to be implemented by the so
called Agenda ID2020, a Bill Gates creation, fully integrated into the UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) – target date for
completion – 2030 (also called Agenda 2030, the hidden agenda unknown to most of the UN members), the same target date for completion
of the Agenda ID02020.
I ask the question but I am afraid I know the answer: miracle, mystery, and authority usually defeat evidence and simple logic.
Fear of death and free thought scare children. The Grand Inquisitor lives on:
But man seeks to bow before that only which is recognized by the greater majority, if not by all his fellow-men, as having
a right to be worshipped; whose rights are so unquestionable that men agree unanimously to bow down to it.
Death: A simple idea with such a powerful punch.
JoeC ,
It isn't just about the fear of death. It's also the fear of being responsible for the death of others. It's no accident that
they've chosen a contagion as our imaginary enemy. We become the visible enemy if we refuse to wear face masks, abide social distance,
wash our hands every 30 seconds or refuse a vaccine when it comes to it etc etc. Hence the laws that will follow. We will soon
be public enemy number one. The new terrorists. I'm not scared of dying but I'm petrified of being persecuted for not believing
this shit. What sort of life is that?
a belief. The author adds his on baggage to an otherwise lucid
article, which rather diminishes the other truths he mentions ?
BigB ,
Excellent stuff, with plenty to think about as usual. As a proviso: Ed's sociology and ethnography needs tightening up though.
The big cultural repertoire of myths and symbols has a name; several names actually nomos, Weltanschauung, Weltansicht (cosmographic
worldview or wide world sight), and *sensus communis* (the consensual common sense). Which is the consensus of views everyone
shares.
The last is from Giambattista Vico: who also said: "Verum esse ipsum factum" ("What is true is precisely what is made [up]").
Which is the verum-factum principle of worldviews. The ideal eternal cosmological history is subjectively made up, culturally
constructed, as a consensually maintained worldbuilding and world-maintaining mythological storytelling.
To which the individual is socialised not once – from birth through education – not twice – in the workforce – but continually
as a process of cultural individuality making. Which is not all one way, top-down traffic of obedience and control – but a reflexive
and causal circularity. The big bunch of historically specific myths and symbols make and maintain the person: just as the person
makes and maintains the big bunch of historically specific myths as a consensually maintained worldbuilding and world-maintaining
mythological storytelling. The individual self is itself a cultural constructivism.
It cannot be any other way: otherwise there can be no common ground for communication and there is only communication. Or participatory
sense-making: no one can have their own language or behavioural repertoire maintained far from the socially regulated consensus
and continue to make sense. Maintaining the dictionary definition of words (intension) and the encyclopaedic repertoire of social
norms and modes of behaviour is critical to the meaning of the overall order. And there is only the order. Very uneasy order.
The individual finds themselves historically situated in the ordinate nexus of thinking, speaking, and acting in a constrained,
shared, and lawfully regulated landscape of language, culture, society, state and market economy. There is no 'outside': except
for the retreat into solipsism and ahistoric flights of imagination. We make our own history: but not autonomously and not in
circumstances of our own choosing.
Cultural construction and reproduction – and the worldview maintainence of socially constructed reality – is a permanent process.
Following the basic processes of social constructivism – as laid out by Berger and Luckman. Which are: habitualisation by subjectivated
externalisation and reification by objectivated internalisation as a recurrent, resonant, and reflexive lifelong process.
We are part of the tissue and fabric of socially constructed reality. And socially constructed reality is part of the tissue
and fabric of us: the flesh of the cultural worldview.
Of course: the biggest lie of the principle of cultural constructivist storytelling is that what is told is naturally objective,
true, and real. And some of it is lawfully authoritative (like this old computer epidemiology model I had lying around). Which
is what gives the story its universal regulative ordinate control and constative overpower.
I mean, who would want to self-admit they were regurgitating institutionalised and habitualised false beliefs and mistaken
abstractive assumptions about the objective nature of things that were just a bunch of made up and recycled socialisation and
pacification rites of a cultural constructivist performance?
Truth, self, and social reality itself is constructed by such rites.
And what if the nomos – the ordered and naturalised ordinate principle – which is a cultures own talisman against chaos, indiscipline,
and made up shite about virology turns out to be chaotic, restrictive, petrifying and rapidly fossilising as a permanent order
of fascising bollox and corporatist control?
If the fossilising order is worse than the disorder it symbolically wards off and guards against: and the culturally created
fear of death worse than the natural process of dying then what?
Is it better that the institutionalised and institutionalising lawful ordering is in principle false and an unjust draconian
social realism? Or that it is objective, rational, and scientifically real? And eternally and universally valid?
What if a society had been rationalised and institutionalised into a universal analytical reasoning, an empiric objectivity,
a historically contingent subjectivity, and a nomological scientific principle that were in fact falsely constructed? And just
habitually and consensually maintained as a lawful, juridical, and regulatory idealism of an eternally natural cosmological order?
Which just happened to turn out to be totalitarian fascistic co-participatory dumbfuckerry?
That culture would find itself in a headfuck situation of a nomological breakdown of its worldview and its interwoven individual
identities most of which would want to shelter in the pretence of being ahistorically situated outside of language, culture, and
thought in a nomological no mans land. Which is exactly the abnegation of cultural creativity that precipitated the meaning crisis
and breakdown of order.
I'm so glad I do not live in such a culture. That would indeed be terrifying.
😱 😱 😱 😱 😱
aspnaz ,
An interesting article that reminds me of the difference between westerners and the mainland Chinese whom I believe are the model
that will used to create the future world.
I am not talking about communism, the Chinese gave up communism ages ago, they are now the world's premier imperialists, using
capitalism to drive their influence across the globe. But their control over people is surely the model aspired to by any person
wanting to rule the world.
The use of technology to control behaviour by denying holidays to people, denying promotions etc all based on credit scores
and similar monitoring has to be seen by the wealthy as a model of what can be achieved by the combination of ruthless force and
control over information.
The response of the Chinese to the virus – the lockdown – was seen in the west as China caring for its people, but here in
HK it is still commonly seen as China panicking because it thought that the people would be afraid and would turn on the government
for not protecting them. It was riot control, not virus control, hence the arrest of people spreading virus rumours.
tonyopmoc ,
Edward Curtin, what you wrote is completely brilliant, in the few minutes it took me to read it, you took me through the vastness
of time, and my entire physical and spiritual existence. thank you. tony
Hugh O'Neill ,
Another thought-provoking article, Ed. I was reminded of four quotes:
1. G.K. Chesterton: "When a man ceases to believe in God, he doesn't believe in nothing; he believes in anything"
2. On the dropping of the first atomic bomb, Oppenheimer quoted from Hindu scripture: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of
worlds"
3. JFK's favourite poem was Alan Seeger's "I have a rendezvous with death". Seeger died in 1916
4. Whatever the merits of the poem, JFK was no stranger to death. Likewise, he had adopted Lincoln's prayer: "I know there is
a God – and I see a storm coming. If he has a place for me, I believe that I am ready."
Edward, how people can be so easily fooled is an age old question. One hundred years ago they queued up to be slaughtered in the
trenches. It was all so senseless it was beyond belief.
"Over the top lads, for King and Country" (the Black Adder comedy programme really captured this).
I'm not sure what else I can say about the stupidity of the human race.
We are at this point again, and people need to fecking wake-up.
Richard Le Sarc ,
People in the West are brainwashed from birth. They have NO idea that the capitalist system is incompatible with Life on Earth,
that it is a form of cancer, that the USA is the greatest force for Evil in history and that businessmen, politicians, MSM presstitutes
are psychopaths at best, dullards and ignoramuses at best. And the worst are those that deny death in belief in various 'Gods'
who all hate each other and compel them to kill and destroy in his name. The system is collapsing, and that is finally dawning
on the brain-dead 'consumers', who will now proceed to consume one another.
All are brainwashed from birth.
Its not "capitalism" its is a parasitic banking cabals economy .
Its a monopoly you've just always believed as a debt slave its capitalism and you're free.
They are resetting it, those that understand the minds of the manchild.
Good stuff Edward,
Most of the 'plan' has been on these boards for months- the one missing is Whitney Webbs latest which exposes the dumb fucks plan
to close the 'AI Gap with China'.
'THEY' have never let a good crises go to waste to further their agenda and plans.
Another old adage is about not being able to fool all of the people all of the time.
Death and politicians and media narrative control can also lose their grip. It starts by laughing at them. It's started:
THEY will not succeed this time – the narrative is a shattering mirror, that reveals their plans – the BS isn't sticking any
more.
crank ,
Confronting our exaggerated fear of dying is the only way out of this prison.
Thanks for this article Edward.
John Deehan ,
When the education system has been designed to eliminate the use of critical thinking and the purveyors of propaganda control
the vast majority of the MSM, academia plus the creation of a veneer of democracy, it is little wonder so many people have swallowed
this lie.
Doug Stillborn ,
The cabal beleives that the truth is irrelevant and that whatever appears to you as truth is what is true to you and the only truth.
This is false. The truth is not relative. Einstein knew this and said, time is an illusion albeit a persistent one. If you propagate
the idea of atheism and science what you are actually doing is you are relinquishing any responsibility/accountability.
I don't think so Doug . The ideas of " atheism and science " are out there.
But what has happened is that many who call themselves atheists worship science( but not science as knowledge as it originally
meant) so its mostly theories taken a facts, pseudoscience.
Agree though that time is an illusion.
The cabal wants only their narrative( lies as the truth) they want the truth of who we are and that we are co creators in this
world unknown to us .
1. "The US political culture is that 99.99% of Americans will believe literally ANY lie,
no matter how self-evidently stupid, about the rest of the world rather than accepting any
unpleasant truth about the US. "
2. "Eventually, and inevitably, this strategic PSYOP upped the ante and FOXnews
(logically) aired this true masterpiece: "Sen. Hawley: Let coronavirus victims sue Chinese
Communist Party". Truly, this is brilliant. "I lost my job, let the evil Chinese commies pay
me back" is music to the ears of most Americans."
This is what Anglo-Zionist religious/political culture produces. And it is not restricted
to jingoistic blaming of the peoples of other nations; it also features blaming those who are
citizens of the nation but are more outsiders to the WASP Elites that the group doing the
blaming. That pattern keeps the non-Elites from ever seeing that their enemy is the
national/imperial Elite they serve.
For example, the horrors the Brit WASP Elites and their system inflicted on Lancashire
factory workers would have made any real life Simon Legree giddy at the possibilities. And
those abused masses could be counted on at every turn to retard their own demands any time
the Elites could turn the conversation to how the Irish or Highlanders would come in and take
their jobs for even less and ruin their delightful communities. Or how the evil empires on
the Continent were causing trouble and to save lives of British soldiers the factory workers
must be reasonable.
Orwellian fiction is steeped deeply in the actual ways that WASP Empire operates to grind
its own citizens and ue them as mindless pawns to make Anglo-Zionist Elites ever richer, ever
more entrenched in power.
1984 and Animal Farm get the attention, but Homage to Catalonia - Orwell's non-fiction on
the Spanish Civil War - might be his best. Wow, did he hate reporters: "It was the first time
that I had seen a person whose profession was telling lies -- unless one counts
journalists..."
Alex Berenson 4:34 PM - 18 Apr 2020
2/ And this: "I do not suppose I should exaggerate if I said that nine-tenths of it is
untruthful. Nearly all the newspaper accounts published at the time were manufactured by
journalists at a distance, and were not only inaccurate in their facts but intentionally
misleading..."
Alex Berenson 4:37 PM - 18 Apr 2020
3/ I guess one might say that the groupthink and lies Orwell saw in Spain *informed* his
writing in 1984 - which was published in 1949, 11 years after Homage to Catalonia. Apropos of
nothing, of course.
Okay, I'll be adding this book to my list of books to read after I graduate and take my
big exam.
B Ekdahl 5:06 PM - 18 Apr 2020
The part of that book that I've thought of
with hope during this chillling time is how Orwell noted that the Spanish were incompetent
even with fascism. Let's hope that US is even more incompetent.
R.R. Reno 5:30 PM - 18 Apr 2020
I don't think we can underestimate how many reporters have been so panicked that only a
few are outside their homes in New York reporting on what's actually happening.
1984 and Animal Farm get the attention, but Homage to Catalonia - Orwell's non-fiction on
the Spanish Civil War - might be his best. Wow, did he hate reporters: "It was the first time
that I had seen a person whose profession was telling lies--unless one counts
journalists..."
Will 6:27 PM - 18 Apr 2020
If you haven't heard of Udo Ulfkotte's story, you should check it out: https://www. paulcraigroberts.org/2019/10/14/jou
rnalists-are-prostitutes/ His initiation into big time media was watching fellow
reporters pour gasoline on burnt up tanks & film it, replete w/ soldier actors, like war
was happening. Audio tracks added later.
"... This is the problem with the Democrats. You might be interested in class issues, and economic equality, and not at all interested in wokeness. But what you're going to get is wokeness, because that is what the power-holding class in the Democratic Party really cares about. As James Lindsay, the left-liberal professor who does heroic work fighting wokeness, told me in our recent interview: ..."
"... Of course [Social Justice Warriors] going to find ways to use this crisis to their advantage. They go around inventing problems or dramatically exaggerating or misinterpreting small problems to push their agenda; why wouldn't they do the same in a situation where there's so much chaos and thus so much going wrong. My experience so far is that people are really underestimating how much of this there will be and how much of it will be institutionalized while we're busy doing other things like tending to the sick and dying and trying not to lose our livelihoods and/or join them ourselves. ..."
"... It's very important to understand that "Critical Social Justice" isn't just activism and some academic theories about things. It's a way of thinking about the world, and that way is rooted in critical theory as it has been applied mostly to identity groups and identity politics ..."
Might Orwell's sensitive nose have detected a whiff of cant anywhere on the contemporary left? I suspect he would have cast
a baleful eye on identity politics. He would, I think, be dubious about "diversity." Why do every college and corporation in America
have a fleet of "diversity" officers? What is gained by ensuring -- at enormous expense -- that every student or employee is proud
of his/her culture and that every other student or employee respects it? According to Walter Benn Michaels in The Trouble with
Diversity, what is gained is the avoidance of class conflict. "The commitment to diversity is at best a distraction and at worst
an essentially reactionary position . We would much rather celebrate cultural diversity than seek to establish economic equality."
Orwell was moderately obsessed with class. He would probably have noted that the explosive growth of inequality in the United
States over the past four decades has closely paralleled the explosive growth of the diversity industry, and would have drawn
some conclusions. He might have asked: If there were two societies with the same Gini coefficient, but in one of them, the proportion
of billionaires by race and gender matched that of the general population, would that society be morally better than the other?
Or: If the ratio of CEO to median employee earnings was the same in two societies, but in one of them the proportion of CEOs by
race and gender matched that of the general population, would that society be morally better than the other? I'm pretty sure that
most diversity bureaucrats would answer "yes" to both questions, and that Orwell would have answered "no."
Orwell was fearless, so a tribute to him shouldn't pull any punches. I think he would suggest that there was something irrational
about the way we enforce our most sensitive taboo: the N-word. From the wholesale banning of Huckleberry Finn to the many times
teachers and civil servants have been censured, and in one case fired, for using the word "niggardly" (which has no etymological
relation to the N-word) to the resignation under pressure recently of a Cambridge, Massachusetts, school committeewoman for using
the N-word in a discussion of a proposed high-school course about the N-word, we have often made fools of ourselves and done disadvantaged
African Americans no good. As the school superintendent summarized the Cambridge case: the committeewoman "made a point about
racist language and used the full N-word instead of the common substitute, 'N-word.' Although said in the context of a classroom
discussion, and not directed to any student or adult present, the full pronunciation of the word was upsetting to a number of
students and adults who were present or who have since heard about the incident." No one, however, as far as I am aware, has publicly
expressed hurt feelings over the fact that the average net worth of African Americans in the Boston area is $8. (Eight, no zeros.)
As Benn Michaels observes: "As long as the left continues to worry about [respect], the right won't have to worry about inequality."
I wrote earlier today about actually existing conservatism being more of a "folk libertarianism" than anything resembling philosophical
conservatism. But what about actually existing liberalism?
The surprising triumph of Joe Biden, the most normie Democrat in America, tells us something about actually existing liberalism.
Illiberal progressivism dominates in academia, the media, and in corporate America's human resources departments. A reader sends
in this abstract from a paper published by a Penn professor at the Ivy League university's Wharton School of Business (Trump's alma
mater!) in which she argues that the state should
forbid identity-based discrimination but permit refusals of service for projects that foster hate toward protected groups,
even where the hate-based project is intimately linked to a protected characteristic (as with religious groups that mandate white
supremacy). Far from perpetuating discrimination, these refusals instead promote anti-discrimination norms, and they help realize
the vision of the morally inflected marketplace that the Article defends.
You could say that Biden's (not yet assured) victory in the Democratic primaries shows that actually existing liberalism is much
less interested in wokeness than in bread-and-butter issues. After all, the more self-consciously woke candidates in the Democratic
race didn't get anywhere. I would like to read it that way. But would Biden actually stand up to any wokeness? After all, this is
the man who tweeted:
Let's be clear: Transgender equality is the civil rights issue of our time. There is no room for compromise when it comes to
basic human rights.
This is the problem with the Democrats. You might be interested in class issues, and economic equality, and not at all interested
in wokeness. But what you're going to get is wokeness, because that is what the power-holding class in the Democratic Party really
cares about. As James Lindsay, the left-liberal professor who does heroic work fighting wokeness, told me
in our recent interview:
Of course [Social Justice Warriors] going to find ways to use this crisis to their advantage. They go around inventing
problems or dramatically exaggerating or misinterpreting small problems to push their agenda; why wouldn't they do the same in
a situation where there's so much chaos and thus so much going wrong. My experience so far is that people are really underestimating
how much of this there will be and how much of it will be institutionalized while we're busy doing other things like tending to
the sick and dying and trying not to lose our livelihoods and/or join them ourselves.
It's very important to understand that "Critical Social Justice" isn't just activism and some academic theories about things.
It's a way of thinking about the world, and that way is rooted in critical theory as it has been applied mostly to identity groups
and identity politics. Thus, not only do they think about almost nothing except ways that "systemic power" and "dominant
groups" are creating all the problems around us, they've more or less forgotten how to think about problems in any other way.
The underlying assumption of their Theory–and that's intentionally capitalized because it means a very specific thing–is that
the very fabric of society is built out of unjust systemic power dynamics, and it is their job (as "critical theorists") to find
those, "make them visible," and then to move on to doing it with the next thing, ideally while teaching other people to do it
too. This crisis will be full of opportunities to do that, and they will do it relentlessly. So, it's not so much a matter of
them "finding a way" to use this crisis to their advantage as it is that they don't really do anything else.
To be honest, I don't have a lot of confidence in predictions about what valence wokeness (or right-wing culture war
themes) will have in this fall's election, given the economic destruction upon us now. I do have confidence, though, that if the
left gets into power, this professional class of woke activists will march triumphantly through the institutions of government,
and implement their identity-politics utopianism. Do I think that most Democratic voters do, or would, favor that? No, probably
not. I imagine they would be voting Democratic primarily to oust Trump, and secondarily because they are more interested in
income inequality...
If Orwell were alive today and writing with his superlative critical pen about them, he would struggle
to find publication in one of our major liberal journals.
UPDATE: Just now:
I'm sure Critical Social Justice isn't quietly reorganizing things that might matter because of the pandemic Or so I keep being
told. https://t.co/LEzvjqbu2B
-- James Lindsay, staying home (@ConceptualJames)
March 31, 2020
Rod Dreher is a senior editor at The American Conservative . He has written and edited for the New York Post , The Dallas
Morning News , National Review , the South Florida Sun-Sentinel , the Washington Times , and the Baton Rouge Advocate . Rod's commentary
has been published in The Wall Street Journal , Commentary , the Weekly Standard , Beliefnet, and Real Simple, among other publications,
and he has appeared on NPR, ABC News, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, and the BBC. He lives in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, with his wife Julie
and their three children. He has also written four books, The Little Way of Ruthie Leming , Crunchy Cons , How Dante Can Save Your
Life , and The Benedict Option
We is set in the future. D-503, a spacecraft engineer, lives in the One State,[3] an urban nation constructed almost entirely of
glass, which assists mass surveillance. The structure of the state is Panopticon-like, and life is scientifically managed F. W.
Taylor-style. People march in step with each other and are uniformed. There is no way of referring to people except by their given
numbers. The society is run strictly by logic or reason as the primary justification for the laws or the construct of the
society.[4][5] The individual's behaviour is based on logic by way of formulas and equations outlined by the One State.[6]
Francis Lee ,
Sounds very much like Yevgeny Zamyatin – We . But we never thought it would
happen!
In the case of "Brave New World", the establishment knows how to cure pretty much any
conventional disease. Then if you're in approved society you die around age 60 because of
everything that's kept you alive and looking like 40.
I just read the book last month for the first time in 30+ years. It does belong on that
diagram. And "1984" doesn't either, since it really doesn't deal with anything like
infectious diseases--reread that about 2 years ago.
I've not read the other 2 outer books ever, but the movie of "Fahrenheit 451", which I just
watched and Bradbury certainly had a hand in writing, has nothing to do with infectious
disease.
There might be something in Camus' "The Plague" though. Haven't read that since the
1980s.
There aren't food shortages so not sure about the "Soylent Green" reference, yet at least.
"Long's Run" is about killing people off at age 35, which I guess overlaps with "kill 80% of
the poor workers", something the likes of Charles Koch certainly supports. So indirectly
there could be a "Logan's Run" connection.
Gattica is just about favored people with the right genes, so an update of "Brave New
World", without the highly literate "savage" as the main character.
I don't see how "The Matrix" relates, that's more about the material world's completeness
being an illusion.
"Clockwork Orange?" A thug suppressed with mind control?
Haven't read "Lord of the Flies", but don't the kids worship a god of the island, and
justify the horrors they commit based on that conception of god or a god?
From Albert Camus's The Plague , which is
once again on my nightstand: "There have been as many plagues as wars in history; yet always
plagues and wars take people equally by surprise."
+ We are witnessing what happens to a country (this one) that faces a pandemic after it has
privatized almost every aspect of its public social welfare and health systems & gutted the
teaching of science in public schools so thoroughly that most people can't even understand
what's coming at them
+ Even as we are being told to distance ourselves from each other, we need more solidarity
now than ever before, because the System we are living under has failed, failed to offer even a
minimum level of protection to those most vulnerable, just as we all knew it would fail, in
precisely the ways it was meant to fail.
+ Leave it to
Mike Davis , who wrote
a terrifying book a
few years ago on Avian Flu, to give us a stark forecast for what we're up against: "There is,
however, more reliable data on the virus's impact on certain groups in a few countries. It is
very scary. Italy, for example, reports a staggering 23 per cent death rate among those over
65; in Britain the figure is now 18 per cent. The 'corona flu' that Trump waves off is an
unprecedented danger to geriatric populations, with a potential death toll in the
millions."
+ Six months from now, 75% of Americans will have a "pre-existing condition." The other 25%
will probably be composting
+ When CDC Director Dr. Redfield was asked at a congressional hearing on Thursday morning
who's in charge of making sure coronavirus tests can be administered, he hesitated and then
turned to Dr. Fauci, who said, "My colleague is looking at me to answer that "
+ Do you REALLY want to give Trump those extreme powers, Bernie?
We are dealing with a national emergency and the president should declare one now.
+ All of the financial elites who were willing to swallow Trump's nativism, managerial
incompetence and anti-science lunacies in exchange for tax cuts, gutted regulations and a bull
market are getting their just desserts but did they have to drag the rest of us down with
them?
I tried reading that about 20 years ago, but it never engaged me. I'll have to give it
another try.
Currently, I'm reading Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon for the third time. One of his
best, in my opinion. But, I'd also recommend the System of the World trilogy. Slower-paced,
but also tremendously satisfying.
Stay away from Stephenson's latest, Fall, or Dodge in Hell . I've loved everything
else I've read by him, but this last one was truly execrable. I slogged through the whole
thing, thinking there must be some point to it all, and there never was.
Stephenson can be incredibly hit or miss. I loved Anathem, Cryptonomicon, Zodiac, and
Diamond Age, thought that anything Stephenson touched: cyberpunk, alt-history, sprawling
world building, etc was pure gold. Then I read Reamde What a waste of a thousand pages.
Confederacy is great, and I say that as a former New Orleanian . . .
If you like humor around absurd characters and their doings, I would recommend Charles
Portis' works, all are good. He's best known for True Grit , but additionally both
Dog of the South, Masters of Atlantis are also outstanding. The latter is a lot of fun
with secret societies, Theosophy & Masonry, that kind of social stew.
A bit more gentle in his absurdity than the over-the-top characters in Confederacy, but
lots of fun.
I picked up Anathem at random several years ago and it gave me a Nerdwoody.
I love constructed universes(LOTR, Dune) but that one was so subtle it was almost implied
that there's all this s^^t going on.
you had to grow into it.
Given EITC, I just had a haul:
Harvey's "Neoliberalism", Mr Hudson's "Forgive them ", Ruskin's" Unto this Last"(currently
involved), Frank's"Listen Liberal"(similarly involved), and EP Thompson's "The Making of the
English Working Class" this latter of which i've wanted to read for a long while.
All of them due to suggestions or mentions on NC in the last couple of years.
the first two and the last will hafta wait till all i'm doing is harvesting.
EITC + Spring Break + General Spingtime = Sudden Flurry of Activity.
2 sheds in progress sheep/goat and woodshed gigantic telephone poles set, ready for me to
wander by and frame it in then another Barnraising Day(ribs, tater salad, beer, etc) to put
the r-panel up(already pained red with yellow stripes(everything else is blue and green and
purple) then the next however long for me to finish it up.
and i've planted more this year than i have in 20.
including around 80 black gallon+ pots with seeds/acorns i've picked up all over, or rooted
cuttings of everything else i've come across.
and tons of manure.
so, only Light Reading for now.
for i am not worth shootin'.
A Confederacy of Dunces spoke to me! Funniest book I have ever read. And like you, I've
re-read several times. Just seeing the title makes me laugh. :-)
Anatomy of a Campaign: The British Fiasco in Norway, 1940 – John Kiszely
The British underfunded their military until too late. Which would have been o.k. up to a
point, except they seemed to have no realization at this point how disparate the Nazi German
capabilities were compared to their own.
When We Were Vikings – Andrew David MacDonald
A very nice coming of age tail of an adult mentally challenged young woman who is into
Vikings and dealing with a family crisis.
#Library-of-Psychohistory,_for_times_of_plague_and_famine (TM)____________
Anabasis by Xenophon
Muqaddimmah: an Introduction to History by ibn Khaldun
Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time by Johanna Nichols
Hamlet's Mill by Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend
The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe by Marija Gimbutas
Models of Discovery by Herbert Simon
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes
Unifying the Mind by David Danks
Targeted Learning in Data Science: Causal Inference for Complex Longitudinal Studies by Mark
Vanderlaan and Sherri Rose
Vladimir Propp and the Study of Structure in Hebrew Biblical Narrative by Pamela J. Milne
Washington Babylon by Alexander Cockburn and Ken Silverstein
Algernon Blackwood Anthony Hope Anthony Trollope Anton Chekhov Arthur Conan Doyle Arthur
Quiller-Couch Baroness Orczy Benjamin Disraeli Charles Dickens Dinah Craik E. Phillips
Oppenheim Edith Wharton Elizabeth Gaskell Eugene Sue F. Marion Crawford G.A. Henty G.K.
Chesterton George Gissing George Meredith Gertrude Atherton H. Rider Haggard H.G. Wells
Hamlin
Garland Henry James Honore de Balzac etc
Counterintuitive as it may sound, people fearing the coronavirus are
buying up copies
of Albert Camus'
The Plague
, Stephen King's
The Stand
, and Dean Koontz's
The Eyes
of Darkness
. If you're
one of those
who finds consuming pandemic stories to be palliative for your anxiety, I recommend the addition of
one of the only pieces
of American
fiction about the 1918–19 flu pandemic that was written by a survivor: Katherine Anne Porter's
Pale Horse, Pale Rider
. This short novel,
published in 1939, is a story of two doomed lovers caught up in the gears of world war and a deadly virus; somehow, it manages
to be romantic and bitter, all at once.
The story is semi-autobiographical. Porter
was 28
during the 1918–19
pandemic and working for the Rocky Mountain News in Denver. She was dating a young soldier, who was readying for deployment
overseas. When she fell sick, he nursed her at her boarding house, until her editor finally pulled strings to get her admitted
to a hospital. That hospital was so overcrowded that Porter was left on a gurney in a hallway for nine days, running a fever
of 105. When she recovered, she found out that the soldier had died of the flu.
Pale Horse, Pale Rider
gives the
bones of this experience to its protagonist, Miranda Gay.
Miranda bristles at jingoistic homefront culture, which Porter depicts as a mind virus that rivals the flu. A couple of
unctuous war bond salesmen try to guilt Miranda into purchasing a bond she cannot afford; she and the other female reporter at
her paper worry that they will lose their jobs if they can't scrape together the money to buy one. The novel shows how the
expectation of support for the war colors everyone's daily interactions. Miranda describes how everyone reacts in a particular
way when they hear the words "the war": "It was habitual, automatic, to give that solemn, mystically uplifted grin when you
spoke the words or heard them spoken."
The war and the flu mingle together as threats to a good thing that's happening in Miranda's life. In this fictionalization of
Porter's experience, the soldier Miranda is in love with is named Adam, and he's from Texas. They've been dating about 10
days, but they both feel like this is something real. They've spent those 10 days in the frenzy of early romance: dancing to
jazz, going to see plays she needs to write about for the paper, poking around geological museums, skipping out of town to
take hikes. They both know that their mutual affection will be short-lived, since he'll be going to France soon. What they
don't know is that it will be the virus that gets them first.
While Miranda admits to herself how much she would love him if he weren't bound for the war, between them, they keep
everything light by policy; the flu is no exception. "It seems to be a plague, something out of the Middle Ages," Miranda says
to Adam, who is about to be sent back to training, about the sickness. "Did you ever see so many funerals, ever?" "Never did,"
he replies. "Well, let's be strong minded and not have any of it. I've got four days more straight from the blue and not a
blade of grass must grow under our feet." With that, they make plans to go dancing.
Slowly, the flu makes its presence known in her body, even as her mind continues to dwell on the war. On the night she
collapses from the sickness she's been feeling inklings of for days, Adam and Miranda go to a play together, so she can review
it. It's a boring play, but before the third act, a fundraiser comes onstage to implore people to buy war bonds. It's this
endless speech, which hits all the patriotic high notes, that catalyzes Miranda's illness, making her head ache and spin.
At a restaurant after the play, she passes out; when she comes to, Adam is nursing her in her boardinghouse room. That's the
last time she has with him. After she's taken to the hospital and suffers through days of pain and fever dreams, Miranda wakes
up, finds out he's dead, and feels profoundly alienated from her body and her life. "Can this be my face?" Miranda asks when
she looks in the mirror after finally regaining consciousness. "Are these my own hands?" she asks a nurse, "holding them up to
show the yellow tint like melted wax glimmering between the closed fingers."
The book's small story of one person's tragedy reminds us that illness is a personal trauma, and a pandemic is a million
personal traumas in one. Porter
said of the flu pandemic in an
interview
in 1963: "It simply divided my life, cut across it like that. So that everything before that was just getting ready, and after
that I was in some strange way altered."
Pale Horse, Pale Rider
isn't a book about secretly released bioweapons or an
epic struggle between good and evil or a metaphor about Nazism; it's just a story about people coming to terms with their own
mortality. "The body is a curious monster, no place to live in, how could anyone feel at home there?" Miranda asks. How,
indeed?
The "social" is "social media" is in contrast to "professional" or "business" or
"commercial" media, i.e. the MSM and other commercial media.
I understand "social media" literally in the Orwellian sense, it is "social" media just like
war is peace. The true meaning is "asocial media" which prevents real interaction, and under
complete control by big brother, you can become a non-person at any moment.
Not recommended for anybody with a college education, especially in STEM. The author's writing is entertaining, but that's the
only positive feature of the book. All-in-all this is a collection of cyber-rumors. Thus one star.
The content is simply yet another "Russians under each bed" fearmongering transposed into cyberspace. The magic abbreviation GRU
sells such sensationalist nonsense really well. What is funny is that the organization referred as GRU does not exist under this
name since I think 1991; after the dissolution of the USSR it was renamed GU (Wikipedia GRU_(G.U.)), but I heard that now Russians
in view of the popularity of the name in the West plan to restore the original name ;-).
So much for the non-technical competence of the author in this area. The guy clearly can't shoot straight and belongs to the
category of journalists whose news coverage is considered to be inappropriately influenced by business interests, political motives,
and trumpeted by the corporate media. There is an appropriate slang name for this category; you can Google it.
In a way, the book can serve as a classic example of Russophobia in the narrow area of cybersecurity. He presents little or no
legitimate facts, preferring to retell rumors and using eye-catching phrases like a "dark room with glowing monitors". For example,
"Working on computers whose glowing monitors were the room's only light source, the reverse engineers began by running the
Ukrainians' malware-infected PowerPoint attachment again and again inside a series of virtual machines."
It is absurd to have a dark room to investigate malware ;-)
Techniques of category of journalists include exaggerations of news events, misrepresentation of facts, sensationalism,
scandal-mongering, and . They usually politicized facts and treat them in an unprofessional and/or unethical fashion.
The author is clearly is not a programmer, just a reasonably gifted snake cyber oil seller. He would be better off if he tries to
distill the content of Vault 7 based on Wikileak's information. In this case, I think both source code (archive of malware ) and
descriptions and user manuals are available in the public domain; so with enough tech skills and time in hand one can write a really
fascinating book. But that's too hard for the guy. So he just decided to milk the public by rehashing and spreading unsubstantiated
cyber rumors.
The technical level of the author can be illustrated by the following paragraph
When Robinson finally cracked those layers of obfuscation after a week of trial and error, he was rewarded with a view of the
BlackEnergy samples millions of ones and zeros -- a collection of data that was, at a glance, still entirely meaningless. This was,
after all, the program in its compiled form, translated into machine-readable binary rather than any human-readable programming
language. To understand the binary, Robinson would have to watch it execute step-by-step on his computer, unraveling it in real-time with a common reverse-engineering tool called IDA Pro that translated the
function of its commands into code as they ran. "It's almost like you're trying to determine what someone might look like solely by
looking at their DNA," Robinson said. "And the god that created that person
was trying to make the process as hard as possible."
So trivial step-by-step tracing of the code using a non-standard (more suitable for the specific purpose) binary debugger (IDA) is
in the author's opinion close to decoding DNA. Nice try but no cigar ;-) .
Actually, the debugger does not necessarily process machine binary code. It can be some VM code like Java VM. For example, parts of
Flame malware (2012) were written in LUA. Along with Stuxnet this was another groundbreaking malware, which unfortunately was
omitted by the author.
Similar incompetent techno-blabbing fills the rest of the book.
Unless this is a pre-paid part of a disinformation campaign by usual suspects, the book is really weak and should be avoided at
prices above one dollar plus shipping. But it is OK effort, if we view it as a part of the disinformation campaign and the attempt
to revive McCarthyism.
Ukrainian part of his story fully correlates with the State Department talking points, and as such, it is stupid to pay money for
it. All other Russophobia based cyber-entertainment and fearmongering is available for free, including multiple good quality videos
on YouTube (look for Crowdstrike :-)
This propaganda honcho was too lazy even to collect relevant information about the Stuxnet -- the groundbreaking worm, which really
opened a new changer in cyberwafare. It is covered in just a dozen pages (96-109) -- less then the length is less of a free good
quality magazine article on this important subject (for example, from Mark Russinovich).
But on the level of qualification of the author all worms looks the same :-) In reality this was a real, very sophisticated act of
cyberwafare, not some Ukrainian hallucinations.
I fully agree with the assessment of "val s golovskoy" (the only other one star reviewer so far):
1.0 out of 5 stars Readers: do not waste your time. December 30, 2019
Tones of rumors, zero facts. The book is following the fashionable trend to dump everything happens in America/UK to the Kremlin.
Easy and comfortable but far from reality.
The author [is] full of fears and see enemy's computers even under his bed. This book creating another legend: how Russian hackers
tried (but did not) to crash Ukrainian system.
Absolutely false and extremely boring. Low intellectual level - do not waste your time.
Here is the contents of the book:
313 - In 2010, Michael Hayden, the former director of the NSA and CIA, made a darkly prescient point in a keynote at the Black
Hat security conference in Las Vegas, speaking to a crowd of programmers, security engineers, and hackers. "You guys made the
cyber domain look like the north German plain. Then you bitch and moan when you get invaded," he said. "On the Internet, we arc
all Poland. We all get invaded on the Web. The inherent geography of this domain is that everything plays to the offense."
317- In an era marked by those in positions of power telling shameless, blatantly self-promotional lies, that sort of
selfless truth telling is more admirable and important than ever.
Working on computers whose glowing monitors were the room's only
light source, the reverse engineers began by running the Ukrainians'
malware-infected PowerPoint attachment again and again inside a
scries of virtual machines -- ephemeral simulations of a computer
housed within a real, physical one, each one of them as scaled oft
from the rest of the computer as the black room was from the rest
of the iSight offices.
In those sealed containers, the code could be studied like a scor-
pion under an aquarium's glass. They'd allow it to infect its virtual
victims repeatedly, as the reverse engineers spun up simulations of
different digital machines, running varied versions of Windows and
Microsoft Office, to study the dimensions and flexibility of the attack.
When they'd determined that the code could extract itself from the
PowerPoint file and gain full control of even the latest, fully patched
versions of the software, they had their confirmation: It was indeed
a zero day, as rare and powerful as the Ukrainians and Hultquist
had suspected. By late in the evening -- a passage of time that went
almost entirely unmarked within their work space -- they'd produced
a detailed report to share with Microsoft and their customers and
coded their own version of it, a proof-of-concept rewrite that dem-
onstrated its attack, like a pathogen in a test tube.
1.0 out of 5 stars
Readers: do not waste your time
December 30, 2019
Format: Hardcover
Tones of rumors, zero facts. The book is
following the fashionable trend to dump everything happens in America/UK to the Kremlin. Easy and comfortable but far from
reality. The author full of fears and see enemy's computers even under his bed. This book creating another legend: how Russian
hackers tried (but did not) to crash Ukrainian system. Absolutely false and extremely boring. Low intellectual level- do not
waste your time.
"... "When the party of activist government, faced with an epic crisis, will not use government's extensive powers to reverse the economic disorders and heal deepening social deterioration, then it must be the end of the line for the governing ideology inherited from Roosevelt, Truman and Johnson." ..."
"... Bill's frustration with what he referred to as "the rightward-drifting Democrats" ran deep. While his books often explored economic themes -- with particular brilliance in One World, Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism (1997) and Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country (1987) -- he was at his finest when he wrote about the awful intersection of money and politics, in books such as Who Will Tell the People? The Betrayal of American Democracy (1992). ..."
"... Bill believed Wall Street money was corrupting American politics in general, and the Democratic Party in particular. Decades ago, during the Reagan interregnum, he warned that if the Democrats did not renew the robust commitment to economic justice that characterized FDR's tenure at its best, then surely right-wing populists would seize the opening. As always, whether he was writing for The Washington Post , Rolling Stone or The Nation (where he served as the ablest of all national affairs correspondents), Bill was right. ..."
"... The power arrangement resembles a shared monopoly, in which two companies have tacitly ceded territories to each other to avoid costly competition. ..."
"... Furthermore, the permanent hierarchy of both parties is dominated at the top by a network of pricey Washington lawyers and lobbyists who represent business interests and collaborate with one another on lobbying the government -- while pretending to be opponents. These inside players channel their corporate clients' money to the elected politicians. In effect, everyone is on the same side. ..."
I knew Bill as a quick-witted comrade in the press corps of too many campaigns to count, a generous mentor, an ideological compatriot,
and an occasional co-conspirator. He taught me to see politics not as the game that TV pundits discuss but as a high-stakes struggle
for power in which the Democrats foolishly, and then dangerously, yielded far too much ground to increasingly right-wing Republicans.
This son of the Depression era bemoaned the failure of the Democratic Party to make a New Deal–style response to the financial meltdown
of 2008,
I knew Bill as a quick-witted comrade in the press corps of too many campaigns to count, a generous mentor, an ideological compatriot,
and an occasional co-conspirator. He taught me to see politics not as the game that TV pundits discuss but as a high-stakes struggle
for power in which the Democrats foolishly, and then dangerously, yielded far too much ground to increasingly right-wing Republicans.
This son of the Depression era bemoaned the failure of the Democratic Party to make a New Deal–style response to the financial
meltdown of 2008, This son of the Depression era bemoaned the failure of the Democratic Party to make a New Deal–style response to
the financial meltdown of 2008, explaining after
the devastating Republican victories of 2010 , "When the party of activist government, faced with an epic crisis, will not use
government's extensive powers to reverse the economic disorders and heal deepening social deterioration, then it must be the end
of the line for the governing ideology inherited from Roosevelt, Truman and Johnson."
And, anticipating the rise of Donald Trump, he counseled that the void left by Democrats who pulled their punches would be filled
by Republicans who would not hesitate to practice the crudest divide-and-conquer politics. And, anticipating the rise of Donald Trump,
he counseled that the void left by Democrats who pulled their punches would be filled by Republicans who would not hesitate to practice
the crudest divide-and-conquer politics.
Bill's frustration with what he referred to as "the rightward-drifting Democrats" ran deep. While his books often explored economic
themes -- with particular brilliance in One World, Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism (1997) and Secrets
of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country (1987) -- he was at his finest when he wrote about the awful intersection
of money and politics, in books such as Who Will Tell the People? The Betrayal of American Democracy (1992).
Bill believed Wall Street money was corrupting American politics in general, and the Democratic Party in particular. Decades
ago, during the Reagan interregnum, he warned that if the Democrats did not renew the robust commitment to economic justice that
characterized FDR's tenure at its best, then surely right-wing populists would seize the opening. As always, whether he was writing
for The Washington Post , Rolling Stone or The Nation (where he served as the ablest of all national affairs
correspondents), Bill was right.
More than 30 years ago, he recognized that "the two-party rivalry is not nearly as significant as it's made to appear" and
counseled that
The power arrangement resembles a shared monopoly, in which two companies have tacitly ceded territories to each other to avoid
costly competition.
Furthermore, the permanent hierarchy of both parties is dominated at the top by a network of pricey Washington lawyers and
lobbyists who represent business interests and collaborate with one another on lobbying the government -- while pretending to
be opponents. These inside players channel their corporate clients' money to the elected politicians. In effect, everyone is on
the same side.
The parties have begun to delineate themselves a bit more in recent years. But not sufficiently, as Bill explained in scorchingly
honest articles for The Nation . He spoke inconvenient truths about the roots of our current politics, especially when he
explained
that "the Democratic Party's crude betrayal of the working class was carried out by Bill Clinton and Al Gore when those 'New Democrats'
won power in 1992. The Clinton-Gore administration swiftly enacted NAFTA, with Republican votes, sealing the deal with Republican
policy-makers and selling out the remnants of organized labor." Bill recognized the necessity of understanding this history in order
to explain the rise of Trump and Trumpism.
Above all, Bill argued that for Democrats to seize the high ground, morally and electorally, they had to stop being a "managerial
party" and reacquaint themselves with the message FDR delivered during an epically successful 1936 reelection run. That was the year
when Roosevelt declared that
We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace -- business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism,
sectionalism, war profiteering.
They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government
by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.
Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous
in their hate for me -- and I welcome their hatred.
I don't know if Bill had that FDR speech memorized. But he carried its spirit in his heart and soul. And he taught the rest of
us to do the same. He appreciated the history, as all great journalists do. But there was a point to its recollection. He wanted
people to think about how a genuine two-party system might work in the 21st century.
The better part of two decades ago, Bill pointed to the way out when he wrote, for The Nation , on Republican scheming
to roll back the economic and social advances initiated by progressives during the 20th century. It was sound advice then. It is
sounder advice now, as a great wrestling for the soul of the Democratic Party plays out in the fight for the 2020 nomination to take
on Trump.
"Most elected Democrats, I think, now see their role as managerial rather than big reform, and fear that even talking about ideology
will stick them with the right's demon label: 'liberal,'" he suggested. But,
he continued,
If a new understanding of progressive purpose does get formed, one that connects to social reality and describes a more promising
future, the vision will not originate in Washington but among those who see realities up close and are struggling now to change
things on the ground. We are a very wealthy (and brutally powerful) nation, so why do people experience so much stress and confinement
in their lives, a sense of loss and failure? The answers, I suggest, will lead to a new formulation of what progressives want.
The first place to inquire is not the failures of government but the malformed power relationships of American capitalism --
the terms of employment that reduce many workers to powerless digits, the closely held decisions of finance capital that shape
our society, the waste and destruction embedded in our system of mass consumption and production. The goal is, like the right's,
to create greater self-fulfillment but as broadly as possible. Self-reliance and individualism can be made meaningful for all
only by first reviving the power of collective action.
My own conviction is that a lot of Americans are ready to take up these questions and many others. Some are actually old questions
-- issues of power that were not resolved in the great reform eras of the past. They await a new generation bold enough to ask
if our prosperous society is really as free and satisfied as it claims to be. When conscientious people find ideas and remedies
that resonate with the real experiences of Americans, then they will have their vision, and perhaps the true answer to the right
wing.
This was how Bill Greider told the people of the politics that must be. He wrote truthfully, boldly, consistently, without fear
or favor, and without the empty partisanships of these awkward times. He was our North Star.
Totalitarian ideologies live by lies and contradiction. For example, the slave-state of
North Korea , ruled by
a hereditary dictatorship, proclaims itself a Democratic People's Republic when it is neither
democratic, popular, nor a republic.
In Nineteen Eighty-Four , Orwell wrote of how "the names of the
four Ministries by which [the oppressed population is] governed exhibit a sort of impudence in
their deliberate reversal of the facts. The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the
Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with
starvation.
These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from ordinary
hypocrisy; they are deliberate exercises in doublethink ."
Defending the death-machine
You could, then, call GCHQ and the NSA part of the Ministry of Morality. While breaking laws
against surveillance and trying to destroy freedom of expression and enquiry, they pretend that
they're caring, ethical organizations who defend the oppressed and want to build a better
world. In fact, of course, GCHQ and the NSA are defending the death-machine of the military-industrial
complex , which has been wrecking nations and slaughtering civilians in
the Middle East (and elsewhere ) for
decades.
Quote: Orwell didn't foresee the celebration of homosexuality by totalitarians, but he did
explain it.
If you read Anthony Burgess' The Wanting Seed he writes about the roles of gays in
dystopia. He also talks about race, two things that Orwell and Huxley didn't. The Wanting
Seed is just as important in the world of dystopia as Brave New World or 1984.
one way George Orwell got the future completely wrong
That assumes he was writing about the future. He was mocking the Soviet "justice" system
in the recent past. The man was a satirist, after all. How did Stalin's men treat sexual
deviation?
1) The iniquities of the members of one skyfairy cult are not evidence for the virtues of
another such organisation and never will be.
2) It seems likely to me that homosexuality is a feature of overpopulation and may be a
natural population control mechanism. Experiments have shown that rats kept in overcrowded
conditions exhibit homosexual tendencies and also become more violent towards other rats. I
doubt that it is purely a coincidence that homosexuality first became notable round about the
time that humans started living in cities.
Other species have means of controlling their
populations, rabbits for example can reabsorb their embryos if the population count is too
high, seals can freeze the development of their foetuses etc.
I see no rational purpose in demonising homosexuals and I am certainly not going to let the purveyors of ancient
superstitious claptrap do my thinking for me. Cue howls of outrage from both skyfairy
cultists and from queers (if they are happy to use the word I don't see why I shouldn't)
3) It seems to me that the Zionist bankers have essentially bankrupted the western world
in an attempt to bring the rest of the world under their control, they have failed. They are
now attempting to mobilise any and all sections of the population that identify as minorities
as allies against the majorities in those countries, importing as many more as they can get
away with. What sense does it make to reinforce their narrative that it is heterosexual
whites v everyone else? because that is exactly what some people are doing. The Zionists are
making their following as broad as possible while attempting to narrow ours, why play into
their hands? Opposition to immigration for example does not have to be presented as a racial
issue, many people here in the UK were opposed to mass immigration from eastern Europe on
purely economic grounds, Poles and Lithuanians are not a different race and hardly even a
different culture. Do you really think that Blacks and Latinos that have been in the US for
generations are uniformly delighted about a new influx of cheap labour? Do you really believe
that Muslims are the natural allies of Jews or of homosexuals? If you actually put some
thought into the struggle rather than relying on superstitious claptrap and bigotry you might
be able to start pushing back.
So, Western civilization is going to collapse because of a few fairies & fag
hags?
Yes, it looks as if it will collapse. Not because the fairies and fag hags are
all-powerful, but because we have had it so good & easy for so long that we've gotten
weaker than any determined, focused fairy or hag.
Leftism in general, which I characterize as a mass adoption of a "mental map" (the gross
oversimplification of infinite reality people use to navigate their lives) highly estranged
from underlying reality, is Nature's "suicide switch" for an organism that has grossly
overgrown its ecological niche.
Today people believe palpably unreal things, in incredibly large numbers, with incredibly
deep fervor. The poster-child is the belief in the efficacy of magical incantations (statute
legislation) to change Actual Reality. If "we" want to end racism (however we define it in
the Newspeak Dictionary) then we just pass a law and "pow!" it's gone. (When that doesn't
work, we pass another law, and another and another and another, always expecting a different
result.)
Ditto the banking (and monetary) system. Money used to be basically a "receipt" for
actually having something IN HAND to take to the market and engage in trade. This was the
essence of Say's Law, "in order to consume (buy something) you must first produce."
Some clever Machiavellians figured out that if you could "complexify" and obscure the
monetary system enough, you could obtain the legal right to create from thin air the
ability to enter that market and buy something, which stripped to its essence is the crime of
fraud.
Banking has been an open fraud for a very long time, certainly since the era of naked fiat
money was introduced in the 1960's. But as long as everyone went along with the gag, and
especially once Credit Bubble Funny Money started fueling a debt orgy and rationalizing an
asset price mania, everyone thought "we could all get rich."
Today we have vast claims on real wealth (real wealth is productive land, productive plant
& equipment and capital you can hold in your hands, so to speak.) But we have uncountable
claims on each unit of real capital. The Machiavellians think that they will end up holding
title to it all, when the day comes to actually make an honest accounting. I suspect that
they lack the political power to pull that off, but only time will tell.
When this long, insane boom is reconciled, a lot of productive capital will turn out to be
nothing but vaporware and rusting steel. Entire industries arose to cater to
credit-bubble-demand, and when the bubble eventually ceases to inflate, demand in (and the
capital applied to) those industries will collapse. How many hospitals do you need when no
one has the money to pay for their services, and the tax base has burned to the ground?
Simple formula. Liberalism was the defense of the individual against the group.
All one needs to do is a simple substitution. Minorities , environment , animals etc are a
means by witch one can make individuals into the institutionalized oppressor. Even better is
the so called intersectional mini oppressions which make nearly all victims which in turns
makes all guilty. State intervention must increase .Guilty people , as all religions of the
world understand, are easily dominated and controlled.
The power the individual is destroyed by its own momentum.
@Digital Samizdat The Bolsheviks first pushed "free love" – easy divorce, abortion
and homosexuality. There even was serious discussion about whether or not to abolish
marriage. They reversed themselves and by the time WWII broke out, the official culture of
the Soviet Union was more socially conservative than that of the US. Even in the 1980s, the
Commies were tough on gays, lesbians and druggies.
This author is brilliant. He gave a comprehensive yet very compact overview of neoliberalism
the first part of the book. An overview which IMHO is very difficult to match. Here are the key
ideas and periods that he outlined:
== quote ==
This is not an ordinary political moment. Everywhere around us, the old order is collapsing.
The golden age of postwar economic growth is over, replaced by a new Gilded Age of inequality
and stagnation... People once united by common culture and information are now fractured into
social media echo chambers.
The [neo]liberal international order is cracking as nationalism grows in strength and global
institutions decay. The United States' role as a global superpower is challenged by the rising
strength of China and a new era of Russian assertiveness.
Optimists hope that generational and demographic change will restore inexorable progress.
Pessimists interpret the current moment as the decline and fall of democracy.
.. we are currently in the midst of one of these epochal transitions. We live on the edge of
a new era in politics -- the third since the Great Depression and World War II. The first era
is probably best described as liberal.... from the 1940s through the 1970s, a version of
political liberalism provided the paradigm for politics. Charting a path between the state
control of communists and fascists and the laissez-faire market that dominated before the Great
Depression, liberals adopted a form of regulated capitalism. Government set the rules of the
road for the economy, regulated finance, invested to create jobs and spark consumer demand,
policed the bad behavior of businesses, and provided a social safety net for Americans. Big
institutions -- big government, big corporations, big labor -- cooperated to balance the needs
of stakeholders in society. In the United States, it was called New Deal Liberalism. In Europe,
social democracy. There were differences across countries, of course, but the general approach
was similar. ...even the conservatives of the time were liberal. Republican president Dwight
Eisenhower championed the national highway system and warned of the military-industrial
complex. President Richard Nixon said, "I am now a Keynesian in economics." His administration
created the EPA and expanded Social Security by indexing benefits to inflation.
...since the 1980s, we have lived in a second era -- that of neoliberalism. In economic and
social policy, neoliberalism's tenets are simple: deregulation, privatization, liberalization,
and austerity. Under neoliberalism, individuals are on their own and should be responsible for
themselves. Instead of governments, corporations, and unions balancing the interests of all
stakeholders, the primary regulator of social interests should be the marketplace. Neoliberals
opposed unions and unionization, they wanted to pursue vouchers instead of public provision of
services, and they sought to shrink the size and functioning of government, even if it meant a
less effective government. Markets worked like magic, and market logic would be applied to all
aspects of life. Around the world, the neoliberal era came with an aggressive emphasis on
expanding democracy and human rights, even by military force. Expanding trade and commerce came
with little regard for who the winners and losers were -- or what the political fallout might
be. ...It was President Bill Clinton who said that the "era of big government is over" and who
celebrated the legislation deregulating Wall Street.
...With the election of Donald Trump, the neoliberal era has reached its end. While in
control of the House, Senate, and presidency, Republicans neither repealed the Affordable Care
Act nor privatized Social Security and Medicare. Their party is increasingly fractured between
Trumpist conservatives, who are far more nationalist, and the never-Trump old-line
conservatives like Bill Kristol or Jeb Bush. An increasing number of people recognize that
neoliberalism's solutions are unsuited to the challenges of our time.
== end ==
The most valuable part of the book IMHO are two chapters devoted to the collapse of
neoliberalism
The author also proposes a very interesting approach to evaluation of the identity politics
as a political strategy:
== quote ==
To be sure, race, gender, culture, and other aspects of social life have always been important
to politics. But neoliberalism's radical individualism has increasingly raised two interlocking
problems. First, when taken to an extreme, social fracturing into identity groups can be used
to divide people and prevent the creation of a shared civic identity. Self-government requires
uniting through our commonalities and aspiring to achieve a shared future.
When individuals fall back onto clans, tribes, and us-versus-them identities, the political
community gets fragmented. It becomes harder for people to see each other as part of that same
shared future.
Demagogues [more correctly neoliberals] rely on this fracturing to inflame racial,
nationalist, and religious antagonism, which only further fuels the divisions within society.
Neoliberalism's war on "society," by pushing toward the privatization and marketization of
everything, thus indirectly facilitates a retreat into tribalism that further undermines the
preconditions for a free and democratic society.
The second problem is that neoliberals on right and left sometimes use identity as a shield
to protect neoliberal policies. As one commentator has argued, "Without the bedrock of class
politics, identity politics has become an agenda of inclusionary neoliberalism in which
individuals can be accommodated but addressing structural inequalities cannot." What this means
is that some neoliberals hold high the banner of inclusiveness on gender and race and thus
claim to be progressive reformers, but they then turn a blind eye to systemic changes in
politics and the economy.
Critics argue that this is "neoliberal identity politics," and it gives its proponents the
space to perpetuate the policies of deregulation, privatization, liberalization, and
austerity.
Of course, the result is to leave in place political and economic structures that harm the
very groups that inclusionary neoliberals claim to support. The foreign policy adventures of
the neoconservatives and liberal internationalists haven't fared much better than economic
policy or cultural politics. The U.S. and its coalition partners have been bogged down in the
war in Afghanistan for 18 years and counting. Neither Afghanistan nor Iraq is a liberal
democracy, nor did the attempt to establish democracy in Iraq lead to a domino effect that
swept the Middle East and reformed its governments for the better. Instead, power in Iraq has
shifted from American occupiers to sectarian militias, to the Iraqi government, to Islamic
State terrorists, and back to the Iraqi government -- and more than 100,000 Iraqis are
dead.
Or take the liberal internationalist 2011 intervention in Libya. The result was not a
peaceful transition to stable democracy but instead civil war and instability, with thousands
dead as the country splintered and portions were overrun by terrorist groups. On the grounds of
democracy promotion, it is hard to say these interventions were a success. And for those
motivated to expand human rights around the world, it is hard to justify these wars as
humanitarian victories -- on the civilian death count alone.
Indeed, the central anchoring assumptions of the American foreign policy establishment have
been proven wrong. Foreign policymakers largely assumed that all good things would go together
-- democracy, markets, and human rights -- and so they thought opening China to trade would
inexorably lead to it becoming a liberal democracy. They were wrong. They thought Russia would
become liberal through swift democratization and privatization. They were wrong.
They thought globalization was inevitable and that ever-expanding trade liberalization was
desirable even if the political system never corrected for trade's winners and losers. They
were wrong. These aren't minor mistakes. And to be clear, Donald Trump had nothing to do with
them. All of these failures were evident prior to the 2016 election.
== end ==
In other words identity politics is, first and foremost, a dirty and shrewd political
strategy developed by the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party (aka "soft neoliberals".)
Along with Neo-McCarthyism it represents a mechanism to compensate for the loss by Clinton
Democrats of their primary voting block: trade union members, who in 2016 "en mass" defected to
Trump.
Initially Clinton calculation was that trade union voters has nowhere to go anyways, and it
was correct for first decade or so of his betrayal. But gradually trade union members and lower
middle class started to leave Dems in droves (Demexit; compare with Brexit) and that where
identity politics was invented to compensate for this loss.
We also can identity politics as a double edge sword, which the second edge being the
political strategy of the "soft neoliberals " directed at discrediting and the suppression of
the rising nationalism.
The author correctly argues that the resurgence of nationalism is the inevitable byproduct
of the dominance of neoliberalism, resurgence which I think is capable to bury neoliberalism as
it lost the popular support (which now is limited to financial oligarchy and high income
professional groups, such as we can find in corporate and military brass, (shrinking) IT
sector, upper strata of academy, upper strata of medical professionals, etc.)
In other words, if you are interested in this topic (as well as the most probable outcome of
2020 elections which would be the second referendum on neoliberalism held in the USA) , please
buy the book; you will never regret this decision ;-)
That means that the structure of the current system isn't just flawed which imply that most
problems are relatively minor and can be fixed by making some tweaks. It is unfixable, because
the "Identity wars" reflect a deep moral contradictions within neoliberal ideology. And they
can't be solved within this framework.
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form or by any means without permission in writing from the Brookings Institution Press.
The Brookings Institution is a private nonprofit organization devoted to research,
education, and publication on important issues of domestic and foreign policy. Its principal
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and emerging policy problems. Interpretations or conclusions in Brookings publications should
be understood to be solely those of the authors.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as
follows:
Hill, Fiona, 1965–
Mr. Putin : operative in the Kremlin / Fiona Hill and Clifford G. Gaddy.
pages ; cm. -- (Brookings focus book)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8157-2376-9 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Putin, Vladimir Vladimirovich, 1952– 2. Presidents -- Russia (Federation) 3. Russia
(Federation) -- Politics and government -- 1991– I. Gaddy, Clifford G. II. Title. III.
Series: Brookings focus books.
THIS BOOK IS THE REVISED and considerably expanded version of the
first edition of Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin , which we finished
writing in September 2012 and was published in 2013. The original manuscript was the result of
a long-standing collaboration between Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy as colleagues at the
Brookings Institution, dating to the beginning of Mr. Putin's presidency in 2000. The
background for the authors' research work (individually and jointly) was outlined in the
acknowledgments to the 2013 edition. These acknowledgments also thanked all the colleagues and
contacts who assisted in fleshing out specific ideas and identifying source material.
Fiona Hill researched and wrote the additional material for this second edition, which moves
the narrative frame of the original book from its focus on the Russian domestic scene to the
international arena. Between the launch of the first edition in early 2013 and September 2014,
Fiona Hill collected and analyzed new source material and embarked on a series of international
research trips to conduct supplemental interviews with analysts, policymakers, government
officials, and private sector representatives on the key themes of the book. Some of these
trips were sponsored by external organizations, including the Embassy of the United States in
Berlin and the U.S. consulates in Germany (through the U.S. Department of State's Strategic
Speaker Program); the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan (through its official visitors and
speakers program); and the Department of National Defence of Canada (through the National
Defence, Defence Engagement Program). Other trips and interviews were facilitated through
meetings and conferences arranged by partner organizations, including the Aspen Institute,
Chatham House, the Council on the United States and Italy, the Ditchley Foundation, the
European Council on Foreign Relations, the EU Institute for Strategic Studies, the German
Marshall Fund, the Heinrich Böll Foundation, the French Institute of International
Relations (IFRI), the Körber Stiftung, the London School of Economics, and the Munich
Security Conference. Participation in numerous Brookings Institution conferences, seminars, and
private meetings in Washington, D.C., and Europe also provided opportunities to engage in
one-on-one or small-group discussions with a range of U.S., European, and Russian officials, as
well as U.S. and international business figures active in Russia.
Other interviews with officials were conducted in Washington, D.C. (as indicated in the
endnotes), with the assistance of the embassies of many foreign countries, including Australia,
Canada, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, France, Georgia, Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan,
Moldova, Norway, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Sweden, Turkey, Ukraine, the United
Kingdom, and the Delegation of the European Union.
Clifford Gaddy contributed new material and conclusions from two separate research projects:
on the reform of the Russian military and the evolution of Russia's new military doctrine
(conducted with Michael O'Hanlon), and on the state of the Russian economy (conducted with
Barry Ickes). Some of this material will also be reflected in Clifford Gaddy and Barry Ickes's
forthcoming book: Russia's Addiction. The Political Economy of Resource
Dependence.
The book was written between June and September 2014 with the help and hard work of
Brookings senior research assistant Hannah Thoburn. Hannah was a genuine collaborator on both
editions of the book, carrying out painstaking work on Russian source material and playing an
essential role in all aspects of the manuscript preparation.
Irina Angelescu played a critical role in the final stages of completing the manuscript,
checking sources, editing, and thinking through the organization of concepts and material.
Bilyana Lilly, Jan Malaskowski, and Catherine Trainor also assisted with the identification of
Russian language source material.
Jill Dougherty, Michael O'Hanlon, Robert Otto, and Angela Stent all reviewed the text and
gave invaluable editorial, conceptual, and organizational suggestions for the final manuscript.
Also at Brookings, Andrew Moffatt provided moral support, kept everything on track, and made
sure that time and the necessary funding were carved out so the work could get done. Other
colleagues shared sources and ideas, and offered critiques, including Strobe Talbott, Tim
Boersma, Charley Ebinger, Kai Eide, Michael Doran, Erica Downs, Bruce Jones, Kenneth
Lieberthal, Tanvi Madan, Suzanne Maloney, Ted Piccone, Natan Sachs, Mireya Solis, Harold
Trinkunas, and Thomas Wright.
Colleagues at the Center on the United States and Europe -- Riccardo Alcaro, Pavel Baev,
Carlo Bastasin, Caitlyn Davis, Jutta Falke-Ischinger, Richard Kauzlarich, Kemal Kirişci,
Steven Pifer, and Jeremy Shapiro -- all generously took the time to brainstorm on core
concepts.
Valentina Kalk, Janet Walker, and other colleagues at Brookings Institution Press embraced
the idea of an expanded second edition of the book and assisted the project all along the way.
The Brookings Institution Press also covered the new editorial and production costs for the
book. Independent editor John Felton gave editorial support and suggestions for improving the
final manuscript. Laura Mooney and other colleagues at the Brookings library helped with
difficult sourcing. Gail Chalef and Tina Trenkner pitched in with a range of ideas on outreach
as the new version of the book moved toward completion.
As the second phase of research moved along, several people who had read the first edition
raised important questions about core ideas, flagged articles in the Russian and international
press, suggested individuals for interviews (or offered themselves for interview), and very
generously sent their own and other publications for reference. These included Hannes Adomeit,
Ellen Barry, Samuel Bendett, Lynn Berry, J. D. Bindenagel, Samuel Charap, William Courtney,
Igor Danchenko, Jaba Devdariani, William Drozdiak, John Evans, Florence Fee, Katja Gloger, Paul
Goble, Tomas Gomart, Charles Grant, Zuhra Halimova, Michael Haltzel, Andrej Heinke, Marc Hujer,
Shinji Hyodo, Shoichi Ito, Akihiro Iwashita, Barbara Junge, Alisher Khamidov, Nina Khrushcheva,
Hiroshi Kimura, Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff, Martin Klingst, John Kornblum, Ivan Krastev, Johann
Legner, Bobo Lo, Jenny Lo, Alexander Lukin, Georg Mascolo, Steven Lee Myers, James Nixey, Rene
Nyberg, Craig Oliphant, Tim Oliver, Bruce Parrott, William Partlett, Volker Perthes, Simon
Saradzhyan, Yukio Satoh, Zachary Shore, Mary Springer, Holger Stark, Constanze
Steltzenmüller, Stephen Szabo, Michael Thumann, Kazuhiko Togo, Mikhail Troitsky, Charles
Undeland, David Du Vivier, Thomas de Waal, Kyle Wilson, Igor Zevelev, and Nikolai Zlobin.
Finally, our dear friend and colleague Clara O'Donnell was a great source of inspiration and
ideas at the beginning of the new edition. Clara passed away in January 2014 and did not see
the project completed. Her loss is keenly felt, and perhaps this second edition of the book may
serve in some small measure as a testament to her accomplishments and memory.
We are grateful for the generous support of Stephen and Barbara Friedman, whose
contributions to the Brookings Foreign Policy program made this book possible. This revised
edition is part of Foreign Policy's project, Order from Chaos. The book's findings are in
keeping with Brookings's mission: to conduct high-quality and independent research and, based
on that research, to provide innovative, practical recommendations for policymakers and the
public. The conclusions and recommendations of any Brookings research are solely those of its
authors and do not reflect the views of the Institution, its management, or its other
scholars. PART ONETHE OPERATIVE EMERGES CHAPTER ONEWHO IS MR. PUTIN?
ON MARCH 18, 2014 , still bathed in the afterglow of the Winter
Olympics that he had hosted in the Black Sea resort of Sochi, Russian president Vladimir Putin
stepped up to a podium in the Kremlin to address the nation. Before an assembly of Russian
officials and parliamentarians, Putin signed the documents officially reuniting the Russian
Federation and the peninsular republic of Crimea, the home base of Russia's Black Sea Fleet.
Crimea had seceded from Ukraine only two days earlier, on March 16. The Russian president gave
what was intended to be a historic speech. The events were fresh, but his address was laden
with references to several centuries of Russian history.
Putin invoked the origins of Orthodox Christianity in Russia. He referenced military
victories on land and sea that had helped forge the Russian Empire. He noted the grievances
that had festered in Russia since the 1990s, when the state was unable to protect its interests
after the disintegration of the Soviet Union. At the center of his narrative was Crimea. Crimea
"has always been an inseparable part of Russia," Putin declared. Moscow's decision to annex
Crimea was rooted in the need to right an "outrageous historical injustice." That injustice
began with the Bolsheviks, who put lands that Russia had conquered into their new Soviet
republic of Ukraine. Then, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev made the fateful decision in 1954 to
transfer Crimea from the Russian Federation to Ukraine. When the Soviet state fell apart in
1991, Russian-speaking Crimea was left in Ukraine "like a sack of potatoes," Putin said.
1 The Russian nation was divided by borders.
Vladimir Putin's speech and the ceremony reuniting Russia with its "lost province" came
after several months of political upheaval in Ukraine. Demonstrations that had begun in late
November 2013 as a protest against Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych's decision to back out
of the planned signing of an association agreement with the European Union soon turned into a
large-scale protest movement against his government. By February 2014, protesters were engaged
in clashes with Ukrainian police that left over 100 people dead on both sides. 2 On February 21, 2014, talks between Yanukovych and the
opposition were brokered by outside parties, including Russia. A provisional agreement,
intended to end the violence and pave the way for new presidential elections at the end of
2014, was upended when Yanukovych abruptly fled the country. After several days of confusion,
Yanukovych resurfaced in Russia. Meanwhile, the opposition in Ukraine formed an interim
government and set presidential elections for May 25, 2014.
At about the same time that Yanukovych left Ukraine, unidentified armed men began to seize
control of strategic infrastructure on the Crimean Peninsula. On March 6, the Crimean
parliament voted to hold a snap referendum on independence and the prospect of joining Russia.
On March 16, the results of the referendum indicated that 97 percent of those voting had opted
to unite with Russia. It was this referendum that Putin used to justify Russia's
reincorporation, its annexation, of Crimea. He opened his speech with a reference to the
referendum and how more than 82 percent of eligible voters had turned out to make this
momentous and overwhelming choice in favor of becoming part of Russia. The people of Crimea had
exercised their right -- the right of all nations -- to self-determination. They had chosen to
restore the unity of the Russian world and historical Russia. But by annexing the Crimean
Peninsula, immediately after the referendum, Putin had dealt the greatest blow to European
security since the end of the Cold War. In the eyes of most external observers, Putin's Russia
was now a definitively revisionist power. In a short span of time, between February 21 and
March 18, 2014, Russia had moved from brokering peace to taking a piece of Ukraine.
As Western leaders deliberated how to punish Putin for seizing Crimea and deter him from
similar actions in the rest of Ukraine and elsewhere, questions arose: Why did Putin do this?
What does he want? Many commentators turned back to questions that had been asked nearly 15
years earlier, when Vladimir Putin first emerged from near-obscurity to become the leader of
Russia: "Who is Mr. Putin?" For some observers, the answer was easy: Putin was who he had
always been -- a corrupt, avaricious, and power-hungry authoritarian leader. What Putin did in
Ukraine was just a logical next step to what he had been doing in Russia since 2000: trying to
tighten his grip on power. Annexing Crimea and the nationalist rhetoric Putin used to justify
it were merely ploys to bolster his flagging public support and distract the population from
problems at home. Other commentators saw Putin's shift toward nationalist rhetoric and his
decision to annex Crimea as evidence of new "imperial" thinking, and as dangerously genuine.
Putin's goal, they proposed, was to restore the Soviet Union or the old Russian Empire. But if
that was true, where were the patterns and key indicators of neo-imperialist revisionism in
Putin's past behavior? Many world leaders and analysts wondered what they had missed. Unable to
reconcile their old understanding of Putin with his behavior in Ukraine, some concluded that
Putin himself had changed. A "new Putin" must have appeared in the Kremlin.
If, in fact, Putin's behavior in the Ukraine crisis was really different from the past, it
could provide an opportunity to understand him better. In his 2014 book, A
Sense of the Enemy: The High-Stakes History of Reading Your Rival's Mind, Zachary Shore
argues that it is precisely when people break with previous patterns of behavior that we can
begin to gain an understanding of their real character. Patterns of past behavior are a poor
predictor of how a person will act in the future. Contexts change and alter people's actions.
Pattern breaks are key for analyzing individual behavior. They push us to focus on the
invariant aspects of the person's self. They help reveal the hidden drivers, the underlying
motivations, and what an actor, a leader, values most. 3
This is the essence of our approach in this book. The book is an effort to figure out who
Mr. Putin is in terms of his motivations -- what drives him to act as he does? Rather than
present a chronicle of events in which Putin played a role, we concentrate on events that
shaped him. We look at formative experiences of Putin's past. And where
we do examine his actions, we focus on the circumstances in which he
acted. Our reasoning is that if Putin's actions and words differed during the crisis in Ukraine
in 2014 from what we might have expected in the past, it is likely that the circumstances
changed. Indeed, as we will lay out and describe in the two parts of this book, Vladimir
Putin's behavior is driven by the imperative to adapt and respond to changing -- especially,
unpredicted -- circumstances.
This book is not intended to be a definitive biography or a comprehensive study of
everything about Vladimir Putin. Although personal and even intimate life experiences shape the
way an individual thinks and views the world, we do not delve into Putin's family life or close
friendships. We also do not critique all the different stories about him, and we try to avoid
retreading ground that has been covered extensively in other analyses and biographies. Our
purpose is to look for new insights in all the material we have on Vladimir Putin.
THE ELUSIVE NATURE OF FACTS
It is remarkable -- almost hard to believe -- that for 15 years there has not been a single
substantive biography published in Russian, by a Russian, of President Putin. It is true that a
few very incomplete books -- limited in their scope -- appeared in his first months as
president. There is also, of course, Putin's own autobiography, Ot pervogo
litsa (First person), which appeared in early 2000. 4 Arguably the only
other true biography with wide circulation in Russia is a translation of Alexander Rahr's
Wladimir Putin: Der "Deutsche" im Kreml (Vladimir Putin: the "German"
in the Kremlin). 5 By contrast, there have been a number of serious
biographies of Putin in English. The West, particularly the United States, is used to a steady
flow of memoirs, and tell-alls, from former associates of our leaders. There has been nothing
like that in Russia. Rather than the flow of information about the man who has led the country
for a decade and a half growing stronger, it has actually declined over time. Above all, the
information that does emerge has been increasingly controlled and manipulated. Instead of
independently verifiable new facts from identified sources, there are only "stories" about
Putin from unidentified sources, sources who are -- we are invariably assured by those who tell
the stories -- "close to the Kremlin." There is also the phenomenon of old stories being
recycled as astonishing new revelations.
Attempting to write about Vladimir Putin is thus a challenge for many reasons. One that we
ourselves never imagined until we were well into this venture is that, like it or not, when you
delve into his hidden aspects, whether in the past or present, you are playing a game with
Putin. It is a game where he is in charge. He controls the facts and the "stories." For that
reason, every apparent fact or story needs to be regarded with suspicion. It has to be traced
back to original sources. If that turns out to be impossible, or the source seems unreliable,
what does one do with the information? As the reader will soon find out, we too use stories
about Putin. But we do so with caution. We have tested the sources. When we were unable to do
so to the fullest extent, we make that clear. Most important, we have learned to ask the
question, "Why has this story been circulated?"
The most obvious reason we cannot take any story or so-called fact at face value when it
comes to Vladimir Putin is that we are dealing with someone who is a master at manipulating
information, suppressing information, and creating pseudo-information. In the course of
studying Putin, and Putin's Russia, we have learned this the hard way. In today's world of
social media, the public has the impression that we know, or easily can know, everything about
everybody. Nothing, it seems, is private or secret. And still, after 15 years, we remain
ignorant of some of the most basic facts about a man who is arguably the most powerful
individual in the world, the leader of an important nation. When there is no certifiably real
and solid information, any tidbit becomes precious.
THE PUTIN BIOGRAPHY
Where then do we start? The basic biographical data, surely, are beyond dispute. Vladimir
Putin was born in the Soviet city of Leningrad in October 1952 and was his parents' only
surviving child. His childhood was spent in Leningrad, where his youthful pursuits included
training first in sambo (a martial art combining judo and wrestling that was developed by the
Soviet Red Army) and then in judo. After school, Putin studied law at Leningrad State
University (LGU), graduated in 1975, and immediately joined the Soviet intelligence service,
the KGB. He was posted to Dresden in East Germany in 1985, after completing a year of study at
the KGB's academy in Moscow. He was recalled from Dresden to Leningrad in 1990, just as the
USSR was on the verge of collapse.
During his time in the KGB, Putin worked as a case officer (the "operative" of our title)
and attained the rank of lieutenant colonel. In 1990–91, he moved into the intelligence
service's "active reserve" and returned to Leningrad State University as a deputy to the vice
rector. He became an adviser to one of his former law professors, Anatoly Sobchak, who left the
university to become chairman of Leningrad's city soviet, or council. Putin worked with Sobchak
during Sobchak's successful electoral campaign to become the first democratically elected mayor
of what was now St. Petersburg. In June 1991, Putin became a deputy mayor of St. Petersburg and
was put in charge of the city's Committee for External Relations. He officially resigned from
the KGB in August 1991.
In 1996, after Mayor Sobchak lost his bid for reelection, Vladimir Putin moved to Moscow to
work in the Kremlin in the department that managed presidential property. In March 1997, Putin
was elevated to deputy chief of the presidential staff. He assumed a number of other
responsibilities within the Kremlin before being appointed head of the Russian Federal Security
Service (the FSB, the successor to the KGB) in July 1998. A year later, in August 1999,
Vladimir Putin was named, in rapid succession, one of Russia's first deputy prime ministers and
then prime minister by President Boris Yeltsin, who also indicated Putin was his preferred
successor as president. Finally, on December 31, 1999, Putin became acting president of Russia
after Yeltsin resigned. He was officially elected to the position of president in March 2000.
Putin served two terms as Russia's president from 2000 to 2004 and from 2004 to 2008, before
stepping aside -- in line with Russia's constitutional prohibition against three consecutive
presidential terms -- to assume the position of prime minister. In March 2012, Putin was
reelected to serve another term as Russia's president until 2018, thanks to a constitutional
amendment pushed through by then President Dmitry Medvedev in December 2008 extending the
presidential term from four to six years.
These basic facts have been covered in books and newspaper articles. Yet there is some
uncertainty in the sources about specific dates and the sequencing of Vladimir Putin's
professional trajectory. This is especially the case for his KGB service, but also for some of
the period when he was in the St. Petersburg mayor's office, including how long he was
technically part of the KGB's "active reserve." Personal information, including on key
childhood events, his 1983 marriage to his wife, Lyudmila (whom he divorced in 2014), the birth
of two daughters in 1985 and 1986 (Maria and Yekaterina), and his friendships with politicians
and businessmen from Leningrad/St. Petersburg is remarkably scant for such a prominent public
figure. His wife, daughters, and other family members, for example, are conspicuously absent
from the public domain. Information about him that was available at the beginning of his
presidency has also been suppressed, distorted, or lost in a morass of competing and often
contradictory versions swirling with rumor and innuendo. Some materials -- related to a
notorious 1990s food scandal in St. Petersburg, which almost upended Putin's early political
career -- have been expunged, along with those with access to them. When it comes to Mr. Putin,
very little information is definitive, confirmable, or reliable.
As a result, there are many important and enduring mysteries about Vladimir Putin that we
will not address in detail in this book. Take something so fundamental as his initial rise to
power as Russian president. In less than two-and-a-half years from 1997 to 99, Vladimir Putin
was promoted to increasingly lofty positions, from deputy chief of the presidential staff, to
head of the FSB, to prime minister, then to acting president. How could this happen? Who
facilitated Putin's rise? Putin does not have a story about that in his official biographical
interviews. He leaves it to others to spin their versions. The fact that there are multiple
competing answers to such a basic question as who chose Putin to be Boris Yeltsin's successor
in 1999 is one of the reasons we decided to write this book and to adopt the specific approach
we have. All the versions of who made this important decision are based on retrospective
accounts, including from Boris Yeltsin himself in his memoir Midnight
Diaries. Almost nothing comes from real-time statements or reliable accounts of actions
taken. Even then -- if this kind of information were available -- we would not know what really
happened behind the scenes. It is clear that many of the after-the-fact statements are
self-serving. None of them seem completely credible. They are from people trying to claim
credit, or avoid blame, for a set of decisions that proved monumental for Russia.
Rather than spending time parsing the course of events in this period and analyzing the
various people who may or may not have influenced the decision to install Vladimir Putin as
Boris Yeltsin's successor, we parse and analyze Putin himself. We focus on a series of
vignettes from his basic biography that form part of a more coherent, larger story. We also
emphasize Putin's own role in getting where he did. We stress the one thing we are certain
about: Putin shaped his own fate. We do not deny there was an element of accident or chance in
his ultimate rise to power. Nor do we deny there were real people who acted on his behalf --
people who thought at a particular time that he was "their man" who would promote their
interests. But, for us, it was what Mr. Putin did that is the most critical element in his
biography.
As a good KGB operative, Vladimir Putin kept his own ambitions tightly under wraps. Like
most ambitious people, he took advantage of the opportunities that presented themselves. Mr.
Putin paid close attention to individuals who might further his career. He studied them,
strengthened his personal and professional ties to them, did favors for them, and manipulated
them. He allowed -- even actively encouraged -- people to underestimate him even as he
maneuvered himself into influential positions and quietly accumulated real power. Instead of
providing a "Who's Who" of Vladimir Putin's political circle, we highlight some of the people
who played important roles for Putin at different junctures. These include Russian historical
figures whose biographies and ideas Putin appropriated and tailored to suit his own personal
narrative. They also include a few people from his inner circle whose relationships and roles
illuminate the connections Putin developed to put himself in a position to become Russian
president and, more important, to become a president with the power to implement his goals.
None of Vladimir Putin's personal ties, however, made his rise to power inevitable.
To understand our approach, it might be useful to present a couple of examples of the
specious "stories" that have circulated about Putin and have been taken at face value by some
authors. One is the story of Putin's alleged personal fortune. The other relates to an apparent
KGB assessment of Putin as a dangerously risk-prone individual who likes to gamble.
PUTIN'S PERSONAL WEALTH
In the wake of Putin's actions in Ukraine in the spring of 2014 and the search by
politicians in the West for effective levers to "punish Putin," one tempting option was to
focus on the Russian president's personal wealth. Over the years, there have been repeated
stories about how Mr. Putin had accumulated a vast fortune thanks to massive corruption within
the inner circle of what we call Russia, Inc. 6 Early on, it was rumored
that Putin's net worth was $20 billion. With each retelling, the number grew -- $30 billion,
$40 billion, $70 billion, up (at last count) to $100 billion. These stories date back to
Putin's time in the St. Petersburg mayor's office, they implicate his family and close
associates, and they have been frequently featured in Russian as well as Western media. There
is, however, little hard documentary evidence to back up even the most credible reporting.
7
Some of the world's top financial institutions have conducted serious research on how the
corrupt hide their stolen assets. 8 We did not have the means to
undertake the kind of detailed and laborious technical work necessary to pursue Mr. Putin's
purported ill-gotten gains, nor did we want to engage in further conjecture on this subject. As
we indicate in the book, there is notable circumstantial evidence -- including expensive
watches and suits -- of Mr. Putin's supposedly luxurious lifestyle beyond the official
trappings of the Russian presidency. These extravagances on their own do not make the case that
he has amassed a fortune in the tens of billions of dollars. There are competing narratives
that Putin's day-to-day lifestyle is ascetic rather than luxurious. It is certainly true that
individuals with close and long-standing personal ties to Vladimir Putin now occupy positions
of great responsibility within the Russian economy and are some of Russia's (and the world's)
richest men. In interviews, they are remarkably frank in discussing the links between their
political connections, their economic roles, and their money.
There might also be political reasons for Putin to accumulate and flaunt personal wealth.
Indeed, some of the stories in the Russian press, and some related to us by Russian colleagues,
suggest that Mr. Putin himself might even encourage rumors that he is the richest of the rich
to curb political ambitions among Russia's billionaire businessmen, the so-called oligarchs.
They cannot even compete in the realm of personal wealth with Vladimir Putin, and it is he who
has supreme power in Russia. But this is all speculation about facts that remain, for now,
unproven.
The problem arises when this so-called fact of huge personal wealth leads to the conclusion
that greed must necessarily be Vladimir Putin's principal motivation, or that somehow the fear
of losing his personal fortune, or his associates' fortunes, would restrain his actions in the
international arena. Even if Vladimir Putin has enriched himself and those around him, we do
not believe a quest for personal wealth is primarily what drives him. We need to understand
what else motivates Putin's actions as head of the Russian state.
A "DIMINISHED SENSE OF DANGER"
One idea that gained currency during the crisis in Ukraine is that Putin is a reckless
gambler who takes dangerous risks. 9 This argument is based on the
alleged fact that Putin's KGB trainers deemed that he suffered from a "diminished sense of
danger" ( ponizhennoye chuvstvo opasnosti ). Although presented in a
couple of recent books about Putin as if it were a new revelation, this is a story familiar to
anyone who has read Putin's 2000 book, Ot pervogo litsa.10 There, Putin describes how, when he was studying at the KGB
academy, one characteristic ascribed to him as a "negative trait" was a "diminished" or
"lowered sense of danger" -- a deficiency that was considered very serious, he noted.
11
In fact, the Putin book turns out to be the only source for this story, something that ought
to have set off alarm bells. Ot pervogo litsa was intended to be a
campaign biography, or "semi-autobiography." The publication of the book was orchestrated by
Putin's staff in the spring of 2000 based on a series of one-on-one interviews with a carefully
selected troika of Russian journalists. Putin's team's task was to stage-manage the initial
presentation, to all of Russia, of this relatively unknown person who was now standing for
election as president of the country. It was crafted as a set of conversations with Putin
himself, his wife, and other people close to him in his childhood and early life. Every
vignette, every new fact presented in the book was chosen for a specific political purpose. The
journalists who interviewed Putin also used some of the material for articles in their own
newspapers and other publications.
What, then, could Putin's purpose have been in revealing such a character flaw? The answer
becomes evident when one reflects on the curious ending of the book. Ot
pervogo litsa ends with the interviewers noting that Putin seems, after all the episodes in
his life that they have gone through, to be a predictable and rather boring person. Had he
never done anything on a whim perhaps? Putin responded by recounting an incident when he risked
his own life and that of his passenger, his martial arts coach, while driving on a road outside
Leningrad (in fact when he was at university). He tried to grab a piece of hay through his open
car window from a passing farm truck and very nearly lost control of the car. At the end of the
harrowing ride, his white-faced (and presumably furious) coach turned to Putin and said, "You
take risks." Why did Putin do that? "I guess I thought the hay smelled good" ( Navernoye, seno vkusno pakhlo ), said Putin. 12 This is the last
line in the book. The reader clearly is meant to identify with Putin's coach and ask: "Wait!
What was that all about? Just who is this guy?"
This story offers a classic case of Putin and his team imparting and spinning information in
a confusing manner so that it can be interpreted in multiple ways. Putin tells contradictory
versions of the story in the same passages of his book. Immediately after stating that the
characteristic was ascribed to him during his KGB studies, Putin then suggests that his
"lowered sense of danger" was well-known to him and all his friends already in his university
days (that is, before he was ever in the KGB). 13 Putin wants people to see
him in certain ways, and yet be confused. He promotes the idea of himself both as a risk-taker
and as someone who takes calculated risks and always has a fallback option. Which version is
the real one? Both have a certain power and useful effect. The end result of Putin's
misinformation and contradictory information is to create the image that he is unknowable and
unpredictable and therefore even dangerous. It is part of his play in the domestic and
international political game -- to keep everyone guessing about, and in some cases fearing, how
he might react.
Putin is hardly the first world leader to engage in this sort of conscious image
manipulation to create doubts about their rationality or even sanity. Richard Nixon's notorious
"Madman Theory" during the Vietnam War is a case in point. In 1972, believing he had a chance
to bluff the North Vietnamese to the negotiating table to end the war, Nixon instructed his
national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, to convey the message to the North Vietnamese, via
their Soviet backers, that Nixon was prepared to use a nuclear weapon. As James Rosen and Luke
Nichter write in a recent article, "Nixon wanted to impress upon the Soviets that the president
of the United States was, in a word, mad: unstable, erratic in his decision-making, and capable
of anything." 14 In a memoir, former White House chief of staff H. R.
Haldeman wrote that Nixon had carefully scripted it all. According to Haldeman, Nixon told him,
"I call it the Madman Theory . I want the North Vietnamese to believe I've reached the point
where I might do anything to stop the war. We'll just slip the word to them that, 'for God's
sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about communism. We can't restrain him when he's angry -- and
he has his hand on the nuclear button,' and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days
begging for peace." 15
In reality, Putin's goal in planting stories about himself is more complicated than Nixon's.
He is not simply trying to project a specific image of himself or even to sow confusion about
the "real" Putin. He also wants to track how the initial seeding of an idea is carried forward,
and by whom. Putin wants to see how the original version is embellished and then how it
ultimately is played back to him again. This is an exercise. It is Putin's own version of an
American children's game, "telephone" (known in the United Kingdom as "Chinese whispers," where
it was also called, in earlier versions, "Russian scandal"). In seeding intrigue, Putin wants
to see how others interpret what he says and then how they react. The focus is on people's
perceptions rather than reality. Figuring out how others think and act, when they know nothing
about him or how he operates, gives Mr. Putin a tactical political advantage.
As we have concluded over the course of writing this book, for Vladimir Putin the main thing
about information is not whether it is true or not. It is how words and deeds are perceived by
others. Putin is less interested in presenting a particular version of reality than in seeing
how others react to the information. For him, others are participants in a game he directs. He
chooses inputs, they react. He judges. Their responses to his input tell him who they think he
is -- but by responding they also tell him who they are, what
they want, what they care about. For his part,
Vladimir Putin reveals very little in return. Indeed, he goes to great, often elaborate,
lengths to throw other participants off track. As president and prime minister, he has
presented himself as a myriad of different personas. Since 2000, Mr. Putin has been the
ultimate international political performance artist.
THE KREMLIN SPECIAL PROPS DEPARTMENT: STAGING THE PRESIDENT
Over the last several years, Vladimir Putin's public relations team has pushed his image in
a multiplicity of directions, pitching him as everything from big game hunter and
conservationist to scuba diver to biker -- even nightclub crooner. Leaders of other countries
have gained notoriety for their flamboyant or patriotic style of dressing to appeal to and
rally the masses -- like Fidel Castro's and Hugo Chávez's military fatigues, Yasser
Arafat's ubiquitous keffiyeh scarf, Muammar Qaddafi's robes (and tent), Hamid Karzai's
carefully calculated blend of traditional Afghan tribal dress, and Yulia Tymoshenko's
ultra-chic Ukrainian-peasant blonde braids -- but Vladimir Putin has out-dressed them all. He
has appeared in an endless number of guises for encounters with the press or Russian special
interest groups, or at times of crisis, as during raging peat bog fires around Moscow in 2010,
when he was transformed into a fire-fighting airplane pilot. All this theatricality is done
with the assistance, it would seem, of the Kremlin's inexhaustible wardrobe and special props
department.
On the surface, Mr. Putin's antics are reminiscent of a much-beloved children's book and
animated cartoon series in the United Kingdom, "Mr. Benn." Each morning, Mr. Benn, a
nondescript British man in a standard issue bowler hat and business suit, strolls down his
street and is beckoned into a mysterious costume shop by a mustachioed, fez-wearing shopkeeper.
The shopkeeper whisks Mr. Benn into a changing room. Mr. Benn puts on a costume that has
already been laid out by the shopkeeper, walks out a secret door, and assumes a new
costume-appropriate identity, as if by magic. In every episode, Mr. Benn solves a problem for
the people he encounters during his adventure, until summoned back to reality by the
shopkeeper. 16 Like his cartoon analogue, Mr. Putin, with the
assistance of his press secretary, Dmitry Peskov (mustachioed but without the fez), and a
coterie of press people, as if by magic embarks on a series of adventures (some of which oddly
enough overlap with Mr. Benn's). In the course of his adventures, Mr. Putin pulls off every
costume and performance with aplomb, a straight face, and a demonstration of skill.
Vladimir Putin and his PR team -- which closely monitors the public reactions to the Mr.
Putin episodes -- are aware that these performances lack universal appeal and have sparked
amusement at home and abroad because of their elaborate and very obvious staging. This has led
people to depict him as a shallow, cartoonish figure, or a man with no face, no substance, no
soul. Putin is often seen as a "man from nowhere," who can appear to be anybody to anyone.
17
But Russian intellectual elites, the Russian political opposition to Mr. Putin, and overseas
commentators are not his target audiences. Each episode of Mr. Putin has a specific purpose.
They are all based on feedback from opinion polls suggesting the Kremlin needs to reach out and
create a direct personal connection to a particular group among the Russian population. Press
Secretary Peskov admitted this directly in a meeting with the press in August 2011 after Mr.
Putin dove to the bottom of the Black Sea to retrieve some suspiciously immaculate amphorae.
18 Putin himself has asserted in biographical interviews that
one of his main skills is to get people -- in this case the Russian people, his audience(s) --
to see him as what they want him to be, not what he really is. These
performances portray Putin as the ultimate Russian action man, capable of dealing with every
eventuality.
THE SERIOUS SIDE: SHOWING RESPECT
It is important to realize that there is something deeper, more complicated, at work beneath
the façade of the "Mr. Putin" performances, something that an outside observer will always
find hard to grasp. Each of the guises that Putin adopts, and the actions he undertakes, pays a
degree of respect to a certain group and validates that group's place in Russian society. If
the Russian president pulls on a leather jacket and rides off on a motorcycle with Russia's
equivalent of the "Hell's Angels" or dresses up in a white suit to fly a microlight aircraft
directing the migration of endangered birds, Russian bikers and Russian conservationists both
get their time in the spotlight. Bikers and conservationists can believe they are equally
worthy of presidential attention. They have inspired presidential action. They have their role
to play in Russian society, just like everyone else. The performances create a sense of
commonality and unity.
Western politicians routinely set out to convince voters that they are one of them, downing
beers and snacks they would never normally eat in bars and restaurants they would not otherwise
frequent. But Putin is not out to win votes. He is running a country. His actions have more in
common with the leaders of traditional societies than Western leaders. Hamid Karzai, when
leader of Afghanistan from 2004 to 2014, for example, frequently told his Western interlocutors
that contrary to their interpretations of democracy, he understood democracy to be rule by
consensus, not by majority. Without consensus, Afghan society would quickly descend into
fragmentation, conflict, and violent strife. To bring reform to Afghanistan there had to be a
broad consensus. Consensus created unity. Traditional Afghan methods of forging consensus, like
the shura, a formalized consultation with societal leaders and elders,
were more effective in reaching consensus, Karzai argued, than Western parliamentary
innovations. The most important element of a shura, a consultation,
Karzai emphasized, was not reaching some kind of decision, but showing respect in a credible
way and validating the views of others. Karzai's adoption of traditional dress was one way of
establishing credibility. Showing up in person and sitting for hours at a shura, or inviting Afghan tribal leaders to meetings in his own home, and simply
listening to the discussions were important ways of showing respect. In Afghanistan, societal
leaders wanted to feel they had been listened to by the Afghan president, not just informed of
executive decisions after the fact. 19
Similarly, Putin has stressed on several occasions that he considers listening to the
Russian people and hearing what they have to say in person as part of his duty as head of the
Russian state. 20 He has traveled extensively to Russia's far-flung
regions over the course of his presidencies and during his time as prime minister and devised
an array of forums for meeting with and hearing from the public. In an impromptu 2012 meeting
with Russian-American journalist and author Masha Gessen, Putin also claimed that most of the
costumed stunts were his own idea and not his staff's. He wanted personally to draw attention
to certain people and places and issues that he thought were being neglected or, in other
words, not given sufficient respect by the rest of society. 21
Collectively, these small but elaborately staged and highly publicized acts of respect have
been one of the reasons why Vladimir Putin has consistently polled as Russia's most popular
politician for a decade and a half.
Putin's stage performances have the double advantage not only of ensuring his domestic
popularity but also of keeping outside analysts confused about his true identity. He benefits
from leaving people guessing about how accurately his various PR versions reflect his real
persona. But if we do not accept these stage performances as even partly reflecting his
identity, then the question remains: Who is Mr. Putin? In fact, Putin hints that he is like
Russia itself in the famous poem of Fyodor Tyutchev:
In this book, we pick up the idea of a multiplicity of Mr. Putins from his PR stunts in
creating a portrait that attempts to provide some answers to the question "Who is Mr. Putin?"
We argue that uncovering the multiple "real Putins" requires looking beyond the staged
performances and the deliberately assumed guises that constitute the Putin political brand. For
most of the first decade of the 2000s, Putin displayed remarkable strength as a political actor
in the Russian context. This strength was derived from the combination of six individual
identities we discuss and highlight in this book, not from his staged performances. We term
these identities the Statist, the History Man, the Survivalist, the Outsider, the Free
Marketeer, and the Case Officer. In Part I of this book, which focuses on the period up until 2012,
we discuss each of the identities in detail, looking at their central elements and evolution,
and their roots in Russian history, culture, and politics. We then explain how Russia's current
political system can be seen as a logical result of the combination of Putin's six identities,
along with the set of personal and professional relationships he formed over several decades in
St. Petersburg and Moscow.
We begin Part I with an initial set of three identities: the Statist, the
History Man, and the Survivalist. These are the most generic, in the sense that they
characterize a larger group of Russians than just Mr. Putin, especially Russian politicians in
Putin's general age cohort who began their careers during the Soviet period and launched
themselves onto the national political stage in the 1990s. These first three identities provide
the foundation for Mr. Putin's views about the Russian state, his political philosophy, and his
conception of his first presidential terms in the 2000s. The decade of the 1990s -- the Russian
Federation's first decade as a stand-alone, independent country after the dissolution of the
USSR -- is a central element in the Statist, History Man, and Survivalist identities. This was
the decade when Russia fell into economic and political crisis, and Moscow lost its direct
authority over the rest of the former Soviet republics, including lands that had previously
been part of the Russian Empire. This period also provides the overarching context for the
identities as well as for Vladimir Putin's personal political narrative. Putin began his tenure
as acting Russian president by publishing a December 1999 treatise, which we refer to as his
"Millennium Message," on the lessons from Russia's experience in the 1990s and how he would
address them. During his 2012 presidential election campaign, Putin returned to the themes of
this earlier treatise. He made frequent explicit reference to what he described as the chaos of
Russia in the 1990s under President Boris Yeltsin. He sharply contrasted this to the decade of
political and economic stability he believes that he, personally, brought to the country after
taking office in 1999. Putin essentially ran his 2012 campaign against the past, specifically
the 1990s, rather than against another candidate. Mr. Putin clearly sees his presidency as the
product of, as well as the answer to, the Russia of the 1990s.
The first three identities help explain Mr. Putin's goals, while the next three -- the
Outsider, the Free Marketeer, and the Case Officer -- are more personal. They are primarily
about the means he has been able to employ to achieve his ends. Putin's childhood experiences
in a working class neighborhood of Leningrad, his years in the KGB at home and abroad, and his
activities in the local government of post-Soviet St. Petersburg and then in a series of
below-the-radar positions in the Kremlin in the late 1990s, all left him with a unique
combination of skills and experience that helped propel him into the presidency in
1999–2000. They allowed him to build up and maintain the political and economic system
that has been in place in Russia ever since.
That system, and Mr. Putin personally, has faced major challenges, both at home and abroad,
in recent years. Part II of the book attempts to explain Putin's responses to those
challenges in terms of the framework developed in Part I . At home, beginning with a political crisis
in 2011–12, it seemed that some of Mr. Putin's core identities had ceased being strengths
and had become sources of weakness for him, as well as a fundamental vulnerability for the
personalized system of governance he had created within the Kremlin. As we will show, key
elements of his identities prevented Mr. Putin from relating and connecting to thousands of
Russian citizens who took to the streets in protest after Russia's 2011 parliamentary and 2012
presidential elections. In the end, however, Putin prevailed over the protesters. We will argue
that he did so by going back to his core identities.
Our final chapters in Part II examine Mr. Putin in the context of his views of and
interactions with the outside world, culminating with the crisis in Ukraine in 2013–14.
Our objective is to understand Putin's motivations and his behavior by again drawing upon the
insights of Part I . We first trace the evolution of his thinking about Russia's
relations with the outside world and then show how Mr. Putin, the Operative in the Kremlin,
translated that thinking into action as the Operative Abroad.
A CONTEXTUAL PORTRAIT
The ultimate purpose of our analysis is to provide a portrait of Mr. Putin's mental outlook,
his worldview, and the individual aspects, or identities, that comprise this worldview. Like
everyone else, Putin is an amalgam, a composite, of his life experiences. Putin's identities
are parallel, not sequential. They blend into each other and are not mutually exclusive. In
many respects they could be packaged differently from the way we present them. The most generic
identities -- the Statist, the History Man, and the Survivalist -- could be merged together.
They overlap in some obvious ways and have some themes in common. Nonetheless, there are key
distinctions in each of them that we seek to tease out. Putin's outlook has been shaped by many
influences: a combination of the Soviet and Russian contexts in which he grew up, lived and
worked; a personal interest in Russian history and literature; his legal studies at Leningrad
State University (LGU); his KGB training; his KGB service in Dresden in East Germany; his
experiences in 1990s St. Petersburg; his early days in Moscow in 1996–99; and his time at
the helm of the Russian state since 2000. Instead of trying to track down all the Putin stories
to fit with these experiences, we have built a contextual narrative based on the known parts of
Putin's biography, a close examination of his public pronouncements over more than a decade,
and, not least, our own personal encounters with Mr. Putin. 23
Just as we do not know who exactly selected Mr. Putin to be Boris Yeltsin's successor in
1999, we do not know specifically what Putin did during his 16 years in the KGB. We do,
however, know the context of the KGB during the period when Vladimir Putin operated in it. So,
for example, we have examined the careers, published writings, and memoirs of leading KGB
officials such as Yury Andropov and Filipp Bobkov -- the people who shaped the institution and
thus Putin's role in it. Similarly, Putin constantly refers to Russia's "time of troubles" in
the 1990s as the negative reference point for his presidency and premiership. Although we do
not know exactly what Putin was thinking about in the 1990s, we know a great deal about the
events and debates of this decade in which people around him were closely involved. We also
have ample evidence in Mr. Putin's own writings and speeches from 1999 to 2014, of his
appropriation of the core concepts and language of an identifiable body of political and legal
thought from the 1990s. In short, we know what others around Mr. Putin said or did in a certain
timeframe, even if we cannot always prove what Putin himself was up to. We focus on what seems
the most credible in a particular context to draw out information relevant to Putin's specific
identities.
But before we turn to Mr. Putin's six identities, we begin with the context of his emergence
onto the political scene -- Russia of the 1990s. Putin did not appear out of the blue or from
"nowhere" when he arrived in Moscow in 1996 to take up a position in the Russian presidential
administration. He most demonstrably came from St. Petersburg. He also came from a group around
Mayor Anatoly Sobchak to whom he had first gravitated in the 1970s when he was a student in
LGU's law faculty and Sobchak was a lecturer there. Vladimir Putin's KGB superiors later
assigned him to work at LGU in 1990, bringing him back into Anatoly Sobchak's orbit. Features
of Mr. Putin's personality then drew him into the center of Sobchak's team as the former law
professor campaigned to become mayor of St. Petersburg. Because of his real identities -- and
particular (often unsavory) skills associated with his role as a former KGB case officer --
Vladimir Putin was subsequently determined by the St. Petersburg mayor and his close circle of
associates to be uniquely well-suited for the task of enforcing informal rules and making
corrupt businesses deliver in the freewheeling days of the 1990s. Putin became widely known as
"Sobchak's fixer," and some of the activities he engaged in while in St. Petersburg helped pave
his way to power in Moscow. CHAPTER TWOBORIS YELTSIN AND THE TIME OF TROUBLES
SOME COMMENTATORS HAVE DEPICTED THE story of how Mr. Putin came to
be prime minster and then president of Russia as something akin to a tragedy that ruptured what
appeared to be a generally positive trajectory of post-Soviet Russia in the 1990s toward the
development of a more pluralistic democratic state and market economy. Vladimir Putin views the
trajectory of 1990s in a very different way. For him, the Russian state was in a downward
spiral. His elevation to the presidency at the end of 1999 was the logical culmination of, as
well as the response to, a series of sometimes fatal (not just fateful) mistakes made by
Russian political figures over the course of this tumultuous decade. The agenda of his
presidency was an explicit response to the 1990s. His goal, as he himself often states, was to
address the mistakes that were made and put Russia back on track.
The early part of the 1990s was framed by the great upheaval of the Soviet collapse,
attempts at radical economic reform, and a declaration of hostilities between an ambitious
Russian parliament and a weak presidency. In the years before Mr. Putin came to Moscow,
factional squabbling within the Russian leadership, and endless changes in top personnel and
the composition of the Russian government, created a strong sense that President Boris Yeltsin
had allowed events to spin out of control. In 1993, President Yeltsin laid siege to the Russian
parliamentary building to force a recalcitrant legislature to its knees and back into line with
the executive branch, thus inaugurating a period of rule by presidential decree that would last
for several years. In 1994, Yeltsin launched a brutal and unsuccessful domestic war to suppress
an independence drive in the republic of Chechnya, sparking two decades of brutal conflict and
ongoing insurgency in Russia's North Caucasus region. In 1996, Yeltsin's team ran a dirty
election campaign to keep their, by now, ailing and unpopular leader in the Kremlin. They made
a deal for political support with the oligarchs -- the leading figures in Russia's new private
business sectors -- that resulted in the supposed pioneers of Russia's market economy
manipulating politics and fighting among themselves over the purchase of former state assets.
In the same timeframe, repeated setbacks to Russia's foreign policy goals in the Balkans and
elsewhere in the former Soviet space compounded a public perception of disorder verging on
chaos.
One narrative among the Russian political and intellectual elite in this period -- both
inside and outside government -- was that the Russian state had fallen into another time of
troubles ( smutnoye vremya ). This is the narrative that Putin adopted
when he embarked on his presidency in 1999–2000. Russia's infamous smutnoye vremya was the historical period that marked the end of the sixteenth and
beginning of the seventeenth century. The death of the last tsar of the Rurikid dynasty was
followed by uprisings, invasions, and widespread famine before the establishment and
consolidation of the new Romanov dynasty. Boris Yeltsin's critics compared him unfavorably with
Boris Godunov, the notorious de facto Russian regent during the time of troubles. Similar
evocations were made to other historical periods of insurgency and uncertainty in the
eighteenth century under Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, to the aftermath of the
Decembrist revolt in the 1820s–30s, and to the long span of episodic revolutionary
turmoil from the 1860s up to World War I that culminated in the Revolution of 1917.
1
On January 1, 1992, President Yeltsin launched an ambitious economic reform program intended
to transform Russia's inherited Soviet economy into a modern market economy. The approach,
labeled "shock therapy," was modeled on the recent experience of transition in Poland and other
former communist countries. The key steps included the abolition of central planning for
manufacturing and other production, the privatization of government enterprises, rapid
liberalization of prices, and stark budget cuts aimed at restoring fiscal balance. For a
Russian population that for decades had known only fixed prices, lifetime employment
guarantees, and a cradle-to-grave welfare system, there was no doubt about the shock. Since
virtually all prices were deregulated at the same time, they predictably jumped to
unprecedented levels in one single leap. Accumulated household savings were rendered worthless.
There were no provisions for compensation by the government. Enterprises were left without
government orders. Their directors had neither the time nor the skills to find alternative
customers before they had to simply shut down production. 2 Unemployment
soared.
The austerity measures did not lead to any immediate improvement in government finances.
Deficits ballooned while government services collapsed. Yeltsin's team of academic
policymakers, headed by Yegor Gaidar, reassured the president and the public that all this had
been expected but that the painful period would be brief. Recovery was around the corner. The
result would be much greater prosperity than ever before under the Soviet system. The recovery
-- the therapy part of shock therapy -- did not come. Inflation raged: prices rose on average
by 20 percent a month throughout 1993. 3 Unemployment continued to grow.
The economy as a whole shifted from a growth and development orientation to pure survival. On a
private level, Russian households did the same. But publicly there was outrage.
From the outset, Gaidar and his group of young economists bore the brunt of the criticism
for the economic and political consequences of the program. They became the target of
conservative factions in the Russian parliament and industrial circles who had vested interests
in Soviet-style business as usual. By the end of 1992, they were out of the cabinet and Boris
Yeltsin had appointed Viktor Chernomyrdin, former head of the Russian gas industry and a member
of the industrial lobby, as prime minister. Although parliament viewed Chernomyrdin as a
proponent of a slower pace of reform, the conservative factions maintained their pressure on
President Yeltsin. With Gaidar no longer overseeing economic policy, the Russian parliament
moved to challenge Yeltsin on other political issues, including the process for passing a new
Russian constitution. Both the parliament and the presidential administration set about
creating their own competing drafts to replace the defunct Soviet-era constitution.
PRESIDENT VERSUS PARLIAMENT
The political standoff between the Russian legislative and executive branches degenerated to
the point where effective governance was virtually impossible. In September 1993, Yeltsin
abolished the existing parliament and announced that there would be elections for a new lower
house in December 1993. He declared that the new lower house would now be called the State
Duma, the name of the late imperial Russian legislature. The Russian parliament countered by
naming its own acting president -- Vice President Alexander Rutskoi, who had moved into open
political opposition to Yeltsin. Rutskoi set up an alternative cabinet in the "White House,"
the Russian parliamentary building. The confrontation came to a bloody end on October
3–4, 1993. Supporters of the parliament marched on Ostankino, the Moscow television
tower, and a number of protesters were killed in a skirmish with interior ministry forces. On
the morning of October 4, Yeltsin ordered Russian military tanks to fire on the White House to
force his erstwhile vice president and the deputies to surrender. One hundred forty-five people
were killed and 800 wounded in the assault and associated street fighting, according to
official statements.
The events of October 1993 were (at that point) the most violent political confrontation in
the Russian capital since the Revolution of 1917. 4 They left their
mark on many Russian political figures of the period, including Mr. Putin. After the fighting
was over and new elections were held, President Yeltsin stripped the new State Duma of many
legislative oversight functions. He relocated parliament from the charred remnants of the White
House to an old Soviet building symbolically in the shadow of the Kremlin walls. The scorch
marks on the White House were washed off, the building was cleaned up and renovated, and it was
handed off to become the seat of the Russian government. In a January 2012 interview with the
British newspaper The Guardian, Gleb Pavlovsky -- a former Kremlin
adviser and political strategist who worked closely with Putin during his tenure as president
and prime minister before being fired in 2011 -- observed that the 1993 standoff between
Yeltsin and the parliament had a profound effect on Vladimir Putin. The assault on the White
House shaped Putin's views about what tended to happen when the balance of power shifted in
Russia. The losers in a political confrontation would be put against the wall and shot. "Putin
always said, we know ourselves we know that as soon as we move aside, you will destroy us. He
said that directly, you'll put us to the wall and execute us. And we don't want to go to the
wall that was a very deep belief and was based on [the] very tough confrontations of 1993 when
Yeltsin fired on the Supreme Soviet [parliament] and killed a lot more people -- Putin knows --
than was officially announced ." 5
A NEW PRESIDENTIAL CONSTITUTION
Fortunately for Putin, he was nowhere near either the Kremlin or the White House walls in
1993. He was a bystander to Yeltsin's showdown with the parliament, sitting on the sidelines in
the mayor's office in St. Petersburg. Putin's then boss, Anatoly Sobchak, however, was one of
the key drafters of the new Russian constitution. 6 This would prove
to be one of the most consequential documents for defining Putin's future presidency. Having
shelled the parliament into submission, Yeltsin pushed through a draft of the constitution that
granted the Russian president and the executive branch extensive powers over domestic and
foreign policy. In effect, Yeltsin's new constitution retroactively legitimized many of the
steps he had taken (excluding the military action) to curb the powers of parliament. It was a
potentially powerful tool for any president, like Mr. Putin, trying to secure the preeminent
position in Russian political life.
The 1993 Russian constitutional process was deeply rooted in earlier historical attempts to
create a constitution. Although there was a good deal of discussion of other international
conceptual sources and constitutional models, the document that emerged drew heavily from ideas
put forward in Russia's late tsarist era. One of the creators of the 1993 Russian constitution,
Sergei Shakhrai, would later claim that it was a "myth" that the Russian constitution had drawn
any inspiration whatsoever from any Western constitutional models -- except, perhaps, for the
fact that the Russian president was conceived as the "Russian equivalent of the British Queen."
7 (Great Britain, of course, does not have a constitution in the
modern sense of a single written document, nor does the British monarch have real political
power.) The Russian presidency enshrined in the constitution far exceeded even the U.S. and
French equivalents in its sweep of authority.
DEBACLE IN THE DUMA
In spite of the bloodletting and his new quasi-monarchical powers, President Yeltsin found
the Russian State Duma no easier to work with than the old parliament. The 1993 December
elections produced a parliament split between generally anti-reform parties, including the
nationalist Liberal Democratic Party (LDPR) and the Communist Party of the Russian Federation
(CPRF), and pro-reform parties such as Russia's Choice and the Russian United Democratic Party,
Yabloko ("apple"). Among the parties, the nationalist LDPR secured
almost a quarter (22.9 percent) of the popular vote, outstripping the second-place Russia's
Choice with 15 percent. 8 The Duma subsequently fell upon itself in a
series of factional and personal squabbles. Parties and blocs formed and reformed with dizzying
frequency, and some parliamentary sessions were disrupted by fistfights. 9 Similar scenes played out in regional legislatures, including
in St. Petersburg. A decade later, Putin would refer to the legislative rough and tumble with
considerable distaste, noting that the repeated brawls had given him a very low opinion of
politics. 10
In spring 1995, after much debate, a new election law was passed setting parliamentary
elections for December 1995 and presidential elections for June 1996. As would happen again in
2011, the Kremlin had an unpleasant "December surprise" in the 1995 parliamentary election. The
opposition Communist Party trounced the ruling party of the period, Nash
dom Rossiya (NDR), or Our Home Is Russia, which had been formed under the leadership of
Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin to try to unify the range of pro-reform or "democratic"
parties. 11 As we will discuss later, Putin had his own role to play in
this debacle, leading NDR's local campaign in St. Petersburg, an experience that put him off
electoral politics even further.
YELTSIN, THE OLIGARCHS, AND THE JUNE 1996 ELECTION
The subsequent 1996 presidential election -- which like other Russian presidential elections
consisted of two rounds to reduce the pool of candidates to two if no one got a clear majority
of the vote -- was transformed into an apparent head-to-head contest between Yeltsin and
Gennady Zyuganov, the Communist Party leader. Zyuganov made it clear that he would end
Yeltsin's economic reforms and return to a modified Soviet-style system if he won the
presidency. At this fateful juncture, Yeltsin was undergoing his own personal time of troubles.
The Russian president was in poor health. He would in fact have a serious heart attack between
the electoral rounds and disappear from public view for a substantial period of time. These
troubles compounded his government's political difficulties. They also set the scene for
Putin's subsequent move to Moscow. Just before the presidential election, Yeltsin's approval
ratings fell to an all-time low of 3 percent. Yeltsin risked forfeiting the election to
Zyuganov unless the team around him could pull off a political miracle, but the team lacked the
resources for a full-scale national electoral campaign. The Kremlin's coffers were empty, and
new independent media outlets had eclipsed the stale programming and content of the old state
television, newspapers, and radio. 12
Yeltsin's team reached out to a set of business people who had benefitted directly from the
government's reform program. They had amassed fortunes in new financial institutions and
acquired stakes in the new media. Among them were Boris Berezovsky, head of Logovaz, one of
Russia's largest holding companies, which had controlling shares or interests in media outlets,
including the Russian television station ORT, the newspaper Nezavisimaya
gazeta, and the weekly magazine Ogonyok ; Vladimir Potanin, the
president of Uneximbank, Russia's third-largest bank in terms of assets; Mikhail Khodorkovsky,
head of the Menatep-Rosprom financial industrial group; Vladimir Gusinsky, the founder of the
Most Bank and media group; Pyotr Aven, a former Russian minister turned banker; Mikhail
Fridman, the president of Alfa Bank; and Alexander Smolensky, the head of Stolichny Savings
Bank. 13 In return for campaign contributions on a massive scale and
preferential media access, Yeltsin promised this group of seven oligarchs privileged bidding
positions for controlling shares in some of Russia's most important state companies in the oil
and gas, metallurgy, and other industrial sectors when they were privatized. This notorious
"loans-for-shares" agreement has been thoroughly parsed and widely documented. 14 It brought the titans of Russian business, the oligarchs, who
bankrolled the campaign into the business of deciding who would run Russia. It also laid the
ground for clashes between the Yeltsin "Family" (Boris Yeltsin's family members and his closest
associates) and some of the businessmen -- with serious political consequences for Russia in
the period leading up to 1999 -- as their respective sets of interests inevitably diverged.
15
The 1996 Russian presidential campaign prefigured the political tools, components, and
principal actors of the Putin era in the 2000s. The heavy use of Western-style PR, the negative
campaigning, discrediting of opponents, the rise of both independent reformed communist and
Russian nationalist political movements, and massive infusions of campaign capital from vested
private business interests paved the way for the politics of the subsequent decade. Gennady
Zyuganov became the main political pretender to the Russian presidency. He was also Putin's
primary putative opponent in the March 2012 presidential election, reprising his 1996 role.
Russian general and Afghan war hero Alexander Lebed, a strong nationalist candidate who came in
third place in the first round of the 1996 election, died in a helicopter crash in April 2002.
He was succeeded on the national stage at various points by his colleague and co-founder of the
Congress of Russian Communities (KRO) nationalist movement, Dmitry Rogozin. 16 Other political figures -- like nationalist politician
Vladimir Zhirinovsky, head of the LDPR, which Yeltsin's team in 1996 portrayed in the domestic
and international media as the stalking horse for fascism -- also became permanent fixtures of
the Russian political scene. After that election, some of the "magnificent seven" oligarchs
were given positions in the Russian government, including Boris Berezovsky as deputy secretary
of the Russian Security Council and Vladimir Potanin as first deputy prime minister.
Berezovsky, along with Vladimir Gusinsky and Mikhail Khodorkovsky, would later become the
dramatis personae of Putin's clashes with the oligarchs in the early 2000s. Berezovsky and
Gusinsky ended up in exile and Khodorkovsky was dispatched to a Siberian jail. 17
WAR IN CHECHNYA: DOUBLE-DEALING WITH RUSSIA'S REGIONS
In the midst of the political machinations around the parliament and the presidency, Yeltsin
was embroiled in another struggle to forge a new political relationship between Moscow and the
individual regions of the Russian Federation. This struggle unleashed a war in the Russian
North Caucasus that would also prove instrumental in Putin's rise to the presidency in 1999.
Like its dealings with parliament, the Yeltsin government's engagement with the regions was ad
hoc and contradictory. It vacillated among legislative measures, police action, military
intervention, repression, and conciliatory bilateral treaties that granted different regions
varying concessions. The policies Yeltsin initiated provided the frame for contentious
center-periphery relations that have dogged Vladimir Putin's time in office.
Protests against central government policies -- including changes in internal administrative
borders and Moscow's high-level political appointments at the regional and local level -- had
been an enduring feature of politics in the Soviet periphery since the late 1950s.
18 After the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the
establishment of the Russian Federation, Russia's own regions continued to demand territorial
and political changes. The Russian North Caucasus republic of Chechnya declared its
independence and seceded, even before the end of the USSR, in November 1991. In February 1992,
Yeltsin tried to push through a new Federal Treaty to resolve all the contested issues.
Chechnya and the republic of Tatarstan in the Russian Volga region rejected it -- raising fears
that Russia would unravel like the USSR. Tatarstan and a number of other Russian regions then
rejected the provisions in the new 1993 Russian constitution that delineated regional powers.
As a stop-gap effort, the Yeltsin government concluded a bilateral treaty with Tatarstan in
February 1994. As far as Chechnya was concerned, Yeltsin made a half-hearted effort to
negotiate the republic's return to the Federation. He then threw Moscow's support behind forces
opposed to the independent Chechen government. A botched effort in summer 1994 to overthrow the
Chechen government ended with Chechen government forces capturing Russian operatives, who were
paraded in front of the media to humiliate Moscow and Yeltsin.
In December 1994, the Russian government launched a full-scale military assault on Chechnya.
The assault became the largest military campaign on Russian soil since World War II, with mass
civilian and military casualties and the almost complete destruction of Chechnya's principal
city, Grozny. In August 1996, just after the presidential election and simultaneous with
Putin's arrival in Moscow, the over-extended Russian military essentially collapsed as an
effective fighting force. The military's morale was sapped by high casualties, as well as by
shortages of critical armaments that forced commanders to dip into stocks of vintage World War
II ordnance. Even some of the most basic supplies for the predominantly conscript soldiers ran
out -- with appeals sent out during one part of the winter campaign for the Russian population
to knit thick socks for Russian forces fighting in the cold and unforgiving mountainous regions
of Chechnya. The war in Chechnya resulted in Russia's most significant military defeat since
Afghanistan the previous decade, but this time on its own territory. 19 Partly at the instigation of General Lebed -- who was now a
power to be reckoned with in Russian politics after his strong showing in the June presidential
election -- the Yeltsin government was forced to conclude a truce with the Chechen government.
In a subsequent peace agreement, Moscow agreed to end the military intervention and then
conclude a bilateral treaty on future relations with Chechnya. Many prominent figures in the
Russian political and military elite bristled at this humiliation and stressed that the
arrangements hammered out with Chechnya in 1996–97 would be temporary. 20
The war between Moscow and Chechnya emboldened other regions to demand bilateral treaties.
Instead of a stopgap measure, the treaties became the primary mechanism for regulating Moscow's
relations with its entire periphery. 21 Over a two-year period, the
Yeltsin government was forced to negotiate agreements with Bashkortorstan, a major
oil-producing region next to Tatarstan; republics neighboring Chechnya in the North Caucasus;
Nizhny Novgorod, Yekaterinburg, Perm, and Irkutsk, all predominantly ethnic Russian regions
stretching from Russia's heartland into the Urals and the Lake Baikal region of Siberia; the
Siberian republic of Sakha-Yakutiya, which is the heart of Russia's diamond industry; the
exclave of Kaliningrad on the Baltic Sea; and even St. Petersburg and the surrounding Leningrad
oblast. 22 The treaties proved a useful tool for avoiding further
ruinous conflict. They also resulted in the piecemeal, asymmetric decentralization of the
Russian state and a confounding set of overlapping responsibilities.
The bilateral treaties were extremely unpopular in central government and parliamentary
circles. By the end of the 1990s, as Putin rose to the top of the Russian government, they had
become one of the most enduring symbols of the administrative chaos and weakness of the Russian
state. Politicians in Moscow demanded they be overturned. With the treaties in place, leaders
of republics vaulted from the status of regional functionaries to presidents and national-level
political figures. Regional politicians reinterpreted Moscow's decrees to suit local concerns.
They refused to implement Russian federal legislation. They created their own economic
associations. They withheld tax revenues from the federal government. They openly criticized
central government policy. 23 Beyond Chechnya, this weakness found
perhaps its best expression in the Russian far east, in Primorsky Krai. There, at the furthest
edge of the Russian Federation, Moscow engaged in what seemed like a never-ending political
battle with the region's obstinate governor, Yevgeny Nazdratenko. From his political perch in
Vladivostok, the governor assailed the Yeltsin government's attempts to reach a border
agreement with China. He accused Moscow of cutting off Primorsky Krai's access to the Pacific
Ocean. He stationed his own paramilitary Cossack forces on the border, diverted federal funds
for his personal pet projects, and generally harangued Yeltsin for creating the region's
chronic economic problems. 24 Putin would later find a creative way of
dealing with Governor Nazdratenko that would become a hallmark of his efforts to deal with
other difficult personalities in the 2000s.
THWARTED ABROAD
In the meantime, as the Yeltsin government waged war with Chechnya and engaged in a
tug-of-war with Primorsky Krai, Moscow's foreign policy faltered. Russia's internecine
conflicts and economic weakness constrained its ability to exert influence on consequential
developments abroad. In the late 1980s USSR, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and Foreign
Minister Eduard Shevardnadze had drawn a direct link between domestic and foreign policy. To
secure international financial support for restructuring and revitalizing the Soviet economy,
they abandoned the USSR's traditional confrontational posture toward the West and focused
instead on reducing international tensions. 25 Boris Yeltsin initially
continued the same foreign policy line with Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev. During the early
stages of shock therapy, relations with international financial and political institutions and
the United States were prioritized. On February 1, 1992, President Yeltsin and U.S. president
George Herbert Walker Bush issued a joint declaration that Russia and the United States were no
longer adversaries. They proclaimed a new era of strategic partnership.
Optimism for this partnership rapidly faded as Russia's relations with the West became mired
in a series of international crises. After the break-up of Yugoslavia, full-scale fighting
erupted in Sarajevo, the capital of the new state of Bosnia-Herzegovina. United Nations (UN)
sanctions were slapped against Serbia -- Yugoslavia's primary successor state and one of
imperial Russia's traditional regional allies -- which openly supported ethnic Serbian forces
in what soon became a civil war. In July 1992, UN and other international peacekeeping forces
intervened, provoking a backlash from Moscow. Conservative and nationalist factions in the
Russian parliament protested that Russia had not been suitably consulted in spite of its
historic interests in the Balkans. Russia's relations with its neighborhood immediately took on
a harsher tone.
The term "near abroad" was introduced by Foreign Minister Kozyrev and other Russian
officials to describe the former Soviet states on Russia's borders. Government reports were
produced on ways of safeguarding Russian interests in these states. 26 At an Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe
(OSCE) meeting in Stockholm in December 1992, Kozyrev offered a version of a speech to his
counterparts that clearly captured a new mood in Moscow. He outlined an assertive Russian
foreign policy, reaffirming Russia's traditional support for Serbia, laying claim to the entire
former Soviet space, and reserving Russia's right to exert influence through military as well
as economic means. 27 By this time, the Russian parliament's
backlash to shock therapy was in full swing. There was a general perception, in both the
Yeltsin government and parliament, that Russia was being treated as a developing or second-tier
country by the West. Despite repeated promises of substantial financial aid, the United States
and international financial institutions had been unable to provide sufficient assistance to
alleviate the most severe effects of Russia's economic reforms. 28 The disillusioned Yeltsin government increasingly turned its
foreign policy attention away from the West and toward the new states of the former Soviet
Union -- trying to salvage what was left of Moscow's previous regional authority.
REBUFFED IN THE NEAR ABROAD
Yeltsin's overtures for closer relations were soon rebuffed in the near abroad. After the
collapse of the USSR, the Yeltsin team thought it had created a mechanism for some form of
post-Soviet regional reintegration under Russian leadership through the creation of the
Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). Nothing went quite according to plan. Most CIS member
states saw the organization either as a means for heading off nasty Yugoslav-style conflicts,
or as the beginning of a mutual civilized divorce. The Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and
Lithuania -- which the USSR had annexed during World War II in an act that the UN declared
illegal -- refused to join the CIS. They set their sights instead on membership in the European
Union (EU) and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Georgia also initially refused.
Moldova and Azerbaijan agreed only to associate membership. Ukraine, the most important of the
other former Soviet republics, joined the CIS but clashed with Russia over dividing the former
Soviet Black Sea Fleet -- based in Sevastopol on Ukraine's Crimea Peninsula. 29
Then fighting broke out between several new states and various separatist territorial
entities, pulling Moscow into the fray. Armed clashes flared between Azerbaijan and the ethnic
Armenian population in Nagorno-Karabakh. Across the border from Azerbaijan, Georgia fought with
two of its autonomous regions, South Ossetia and Abkhazia. In Moldova, violence erupted between
forces loyal to the new government and the secessionist Transnistria region. Troops from the
Soviet 14th Army stationed in Transnistria intervened. General Alexander Lebed, commander of
the 14th Army, burst into the national spotlight with his efforts to separate the sides and
secure Russian military installations and weapons stockpiles. Further afield, in Central Asia,
Tajikistan fell into civil war. 30
The ethno-political violence in the Soviet successor states was exacerbated by Moscow's
confrontation with Estonia and Latvia over the status of post-war Russian-speaking immigrants.
Both states introduced legislation demanding that those immigrants fulfill residence and
language requirements before they could apply for citizenship. In November 1992, the UN adopted
a resolution calling for Moscow to withdraw all former Soviet troops from the Baltic states,
given their illegal annexation. The Yeltsin government tried to link the troop withdrawal
demanded by the UN to its dispute with the Baltic states. If the immigrants were given
citizenship, the troops would be withdrawn; otherwise they would stay until the issue was
resolved. In September 1993 at the United Nations General Assembly, Foreign Minister Kozyrev
dug in Moscow's heels even further. He declared Russia's "special responsibility" for
protecting Russian language speakers (including in Transnistria and the Baltic states) and
demanded the UN grant Russia primacy in future peacekeeping missions sent into former Soviet
republics. 31 These efforts were to no avail. Sustained Western
pressure, including specific threats to withhold loans vital for Russia's economic reform
program, ultimately forced Moscow's hand. The last former Soviet soldier was out of the Baltic
states by August 31, 1994. 32
Elsewhere in the former Soviet Union, Moscow did its best to retain whatever leverage it
could. In the Caucasus, Russian operatives and weaponry were used in conflicts and coups
against perceived anti-Russian leaders. Economic pressure was deployed against Ukraine and the
Central Asian states in a variety of disputes. A Moscow-encouraged Crimean independence
movement impinged on Ukraine's claims to the Black Sea Fleet. By September 1995, the CIS and
the near abroad had become the priority area for Russian foreign policy and the focal point of
its principal vital interests. President Yeltsin signed a decree on the integration of the CIS,
which set ambitious goals for enhancing economic, political, and military ties. 33 When he came into office in 1999–2000, Putin would
continue to emphasize the importance of Russia's relations with the former Soviet republics and
of maintaining Moscow's grip on the various levers of influence over them. He also took away
some critical lessons from Russia's experience of being ousted (in his view) ignominiously from
the Baltic states in August 1994.
VEERING FROM WEST TO EAST
At the time, none of the Yeltsin government's actions were seen by the political and
military elite in Moscow to have appreciably improved Russia's international standing. The
conflicts dominated Russia's domestic and foreign policy agenda. Relations with the United
States and the West degenerated. In 1994, the civil war in Bosnia-Herzegovina escalated,
culminating in punitive actions against Serbia by the EU and the United States, and then NATO
air strikes. The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and President Yeltsin were informed of the
air attacks after the NATO allies had already made the decision. Although NATO later worked out
an arrangement for Russian troops to serve in a NATO peacekeeping contingent in Bosnia under
their own command, Russia's parliament was, once again, infuriated. Concurrent with the action
in the Balkans, NATO's 1994 decision to expand the alliance to the new democracies of Eastern
Europe, and by extension to former Soviet republics such as the Baltic states, was protested by
all Russian political factions. Between 1994 and 1997, the expansion of NATO dominated Russia's
interactions with the West.
In an interview in the Moscow News in September 1995, former Soviet
President Mikhail Gorbachev summed up the general elite consensus in Moscow. 34 The West had taken advantage of Russia's weakness. The West's
policy in Europe, the Balkans, and within the former Soviet Union, he asserted, "is marked by a
clear disrespect for Russia, as is shown by its failure to consult Russia on the issue of NATO
bombings [in Yugoslavia] . All this proves that some Western politicians would have liked to
see Russia play second fiddle in world politics . Whatever Russia's domestic problems, it will
never reconcile itself to such a humiliating position." 35
Gorbachev insisted that Russia "badly need[ed] a meaningful policy on the international
scene, a policy aimed at restoring the security system in Europe and Russia's role as a top
player in world politics." He also urged a change in Western policies in Russia's former
spheres of influence, warning that "an arrogant attitude towards Russia and her interests is
deeply insulting to the Russian people, and that is fraught with grave consequences."
36
Not long after Gorbachev's interview, President Yeltsin replaced Foreign Minister Kozyrev in
January 1996 with the former head of Russian foreign intelligence and Middle East specialist
Yevgeny Primakov. Humiliated and insulted in the West, Moscow made foreign policy overtures
toward former Soviet allies in Asia and the Middle East -- again with the urging of factions
within the parliament and government. Primakov's appointment marked the beginning of
initiatives aimed at rebuilding Russia's relations with China, India, Iraq, Iran, and other
powers the USSR had previously courted. There was little further talk of partnership with the
United States.
MOUNTING DEMANDS FOR THE RESTORATION OF THE STATE: PUTIN COMES TO MOSCOW
This is when Putin came to Moscow to join the Russian presidential administration. Between
1991 and 1996, Russian domestic and foreign policy had endured a long series of humiliating
setbacks. Russian politicians were at each other's throats. Yeltsin had shelled the Russian
parliament but had not forced it into complete submission. New political opposition forces and
the oligarchs had been emboldened by their roles in the June 1996 presidential election
campaign. The government's progressive economic reform program was in tatters, and its team of
economic reformers was in disarray. The economy was in full-blown recession. Tens of thousands
had taken to the streets to demand unpaid wages and pensions and to protest rising prices. War
had ravaged Chechnya and pulled it even further away from Moscow's orbit. Regional leaders were
picking apart the Russian Federation, treaty by treaty. NATO had denied Russia its traditional
role in the Balkan conflicts. The West had pushed Russia out of the Baltic states. Ukraine and
other putative allies in the near abroad were fighting over the Soviet spoils -- with Moscow
and among themselves. Relations with the United States were on a downward trajectory. CHAPTER THREETHE STATIST
WHEN PUTIN ARRIVED IN MOSCOW in August 1996, few in Russian elite
circles had any illusions about the depth of the state's domestic crisis and the loss of its
previous great-power status internationally. Many internal observers feared Russia was in
danger of total collapse. They bristled at Western commentators constantly regurgitating a
description of the country during the late Soviet period as "Upper Volta with missiles."
1 Russian politics was focused on preserving what was left and
avoiding further humiliations. Practically every political group and party across the Russian
political spectrum, from right to left, felt that the post-Soviet dismantling of the state had
gone too far and advocated the restoration of Russian "state power." Even some of the liberal
economists around Yegor Gaidar who were at the forefront of pulling apart the old Soviet
economy in 1992–93 had moved in this direction. 2
Everything Putin has said on the subject of saving Russia from chaos since he came to power
is consistent with the general elite consensus in the late 1990s on the importance of restoring
order. Most of the Russian domestic and foreign policy priorities that Putin would adopt when
he became president were already identified by the Russian political elite in the same period.
All Vladimir Putin had to do in the 2000s was to channel and synthesize the various ideas
percolating through newspaper columns and political manifestos about how to address Russia's
crisis of statehood to produce what has loosely been referred to as "Putinism." This included
the re-creation of a more authoritative centralized state apparatus -- the so-called
vertikal vlasti or "vertical of power" -- and greater assertiveness in
foreign policy, especially in the near abroad and other areas where Russia had experienced its
greatest setbacks under Boris Yeltsin. 3 Although Putin was short
on the specifics of what he would actually do at the outset of his presidency, he would
ultimately derive most of his ideas for action from some of the more conservative factions in
the 1990s political debates.
THE "MILLENNIUM MESSAGE"
The first key to Vladimir Putin's personality is his view of himself as a man of the state,
his identity as a statist ( gosudarstvennik in Russian). Putin sees
himself as someone who belongs to a large cohort of people demanding the restoration of the
state. Vladimir Putin publicly presented himself as a statist and offered his vision for the
restoration of the Russian state in one of his first major political statements and
presentations just before he became acting Russian president. This statement sets the scene for
Putin's time as both president and prime minister. As a result, we need to examine the specific
connotations of being a statist in the Russian context of the 1990s.
On December 29, 1999, the website of the Russian government posted a 5,000-word treatise
under the signature of then Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. Its title was "Russia on the
Threshold of the New Millennium." Two days later, the president of Russia, Boris Yeltsin,
appeared on national television to declare that he was resigning and handing over power to
Putin. The Internet treatise became known as the "Millennium Message." It was Vladimir Putin's
political mission statement or manifesto for the beginning of his presidency, and it provides
the overall framework for understanding the system of governance he has created around him.
One of Putin's main points in his manifesto was that throughout history, the Russian state
lost its status when its people were divided, when Russians lost sight of the common values
that united them and distinguished them from all others. Since the fall of communism, Putin
asserted, Russians had embraced personal rights and freedoms, freedom of personal expression,
freedom to travel abroad. These universal values were fine, but they were not "Russian." Nor
would they be enough to ensure Russia's survival. There were other, distinctly Russian values
that were at the core of what Putin called the "Russian Idea." Those values were patriotism,
collectivism, solidarity, derzhavnost' -- the belief that Russia is
destined always to be a great power ( derzhava ) exerting its
influence abroad -- and the untranslatable gosudarstvennichestvo .
Russia is not America or Britain with their historical liberal traditions, Putin went
on:
For us, the state and its institutions and structures have always played an exceptionally
important role in the life of the country and the people. For Russians, a strong state is not
an anomaly to fight against. Quite the contrary, it is the source and guarantor of order, the
initiator and the main driving force of any change . Society desires the restoration of the
guiding and regulating role of the state. 4
Putin promised to restore that role. He declared himself to be a gosudarstvennik , a builder of the state, a servant of the state. A gosudarstvennik , a person who believes that Russia must be and must have a strong
state, has a particular resonance in Russia. It does not imply someone who engages in politics.
A gosudarstvennik is not a politician driven by a set of distinct
beliefs who represents a certain group or constituency and jumps into the fray to run for
political office. Instead, the term refers to someone who is selected or self-selects to serve
the country on a permanent basis and who believes only in the state itself.
The MSM is reporting the "impeachment" as if it was a serious (approved by expert
academics) endeavor. However, the veil is lifting. The revealed face of the ruling class is
Neo-Orwellian.
"Nadler's committee will likely vote to impeach Trump. In a report defining what it
considers impeachable offenses, the committee states that even if Trump did not actually
break any laws in his supposed "quid pro quo" dealings with Ukrainian President Volodymyr
Zelensky, he can still be impeached for his unstated motives.
"The question is not whether the president's conduct could have resulted from
permissible motives. It is whether the president's real reasons, the ones in his mind at the
time, were legitimate, " it stated."
About the author
Imran Bashir has an M.Sc. in Information Security from Royal Holloway, University of London, and has a background in software development,
solution architecture, infrastructure management, and IT service management. He is also a member of the Institute of Electrical and
Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the British Computer Society (BCS). Imran has sixteen years' of experience in the public and financial
sectors.
He worked on large scale IT projects in the public sector before moving to the financial services industry. Since then,
he has worked in various technical roles for different financial companies in Europe's financial capital, London. He is currently
working for an investment bank in London as Vice President in the Technology department.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Mastering Blockchain Second Edition
Packt Upsell
Why subscribe?
PacktPub.com
Contributors
About the author
About the reviewer
Packt is searching for authors like you
Preface
Who this book is for
What this book covers
To get the most out of this book
Download the example code files
Download the color images
Conventions used
Get in touch
Reviews
Blockchain 101
The growth of blockchain technology
Distributed systems
The history of blockchain and Bitcoin
Electronic cash
Blockchain
Blockchain defined
Peer-to-peer
Distributed ledger
Cryptographically-secure
Append-only
Updateable via consensus
Generic elements of a blockchain
How blockchain works
How blockchain accumulates blocks
Benefits and limitations of blockchain
Tiers of blockchain technology
Features of a blockchain
Types of blockchain
Distributed ledgers
Distributed Ledger Technology
Public blockchains
Private blockchains
Semiprivate blockchains
Sidechains
Permissioned ledger
Shared ledger
Fully private and proprietary blockchains
Tokenized blockchains
Tokenless blockchains
Consensus
Consensus mechanism
Types of consensus mechanisms
Consensus in blockchain
CAP theorem and blockchain
Summary
Decentralization
Decentralization using blockchain
Methods of decentralization
Disintermediation
Contest-driven decentralization
Routes to decentralization
How to decentralize
The decentralization framework example
Blockchain and full ecosystem decentralization
Storage
Communication
Computing power and decentralization
Smart contracts
Decentralized Organizations
Decentralized Autonomous Organizations
Decentralized Autonomous Corporations
Decentralized Autonomous Societies
Decentralized Applications (DApps)
Requirements of a Decentralized Application
Operations of a DApp
DApp examples
KYC-Chain
OpenBazaar
Lazooz
Platforms for decentralization
Ethereum
MaidSafe
Lisk
Summary
Symmetric Cryptography
Working with the OpenSSL command line
Introduction
Mathematics
Set
Group
Field
A finite field
Order
An abelian group
Prime fields
Ring
A cyclic group
Modular arithmetic
Cryptography
Confidentiality
Integrity
Authentication
Entity authentication
Data origin authentication
Non-repudiation
Accountability
Cryptographic primitives
Symmetric cryptography
Stream ciphers
Block ciphers
Block encryption mode
Electronic Code Book
Cipher Block Chaining
Counter mode
Keystream generation mode
Message authentication mode
Cryptographic hash mode
Data Encryption Standard
Advanced Encryption Standard
How AES works
Summary
Public Key Cryptography
Asymmetric cryptography
Integer factorization
Discrete logarithm
Elliptic curves
Public and private keys
RSA
Encryption and decryption using RSA
Elliptic Curve Cryptography
Mathematics behind ECC
Point addition
Point doubling
Discrete logarithm problem in ECC
RSA using OpenSSL
RSA public and private key pair
Private key
Public key
Exploring the public key
Encryption and decryption
Encryption
Decryption
ECC using OpenSSL
ECC private and public key pair
Private key
Private key generation
Hash functions
Compression of arbitrary messages into fixed-length digest
Easy to compute
Preimage resistance
Second preimage resistance
Collision resistance
Message Digest
Secure Hash Algorithms
Design of Secure Hash Algorithms
Design of SHA-256
Design of SHA-3 (Keccak)
OpenSSL example of hash functions
Message Authentication Codes
MACs using block ciphers
Hash-based MACs
Merkle trees
Patricia trees
Distributed Hash Tables
Digital signatures
RSA digital signature algorithm
Sign then encrypt
Encrypt then sign
Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm
How to generate a digital signature using OpenSSL
ECDSA using OpenSSL
Homomorphic encryption
Signcryption
Zero-Knowledge Proofs
Blind signatures
Encoding schemes
Financial markets and trading
Trading
Exchanges
Orders and order properties
Order management and routing systems
Components of a trade
The underlying instrument
General attributes
Economics
Sales
Counterparty
Trade life cycle
Order anticipators
Market manipulation
Summary
Introducing Bitcoin
Bitcoin
Bitcoin definition
Bitcoin – a bird's-eye view
Sending a payment to someone
Digital keys and addresses
Private keys in Bitcoin
Public keys in Bitcoin
Addresses in Bitcoin
Base58Check encoding
Vanity addresses
Multisignature addresses
Transactions
The transaction life cycle
Transaction fee
Transaction pools
The transaction data structure
Metadata
Inputs
Outputs
Verification
The script language
Commonly used opcodes
Types of transactions
Coinbase transactions
Contracts
Transaction verification
Transaction malleability
Blockchain
The structure of a block
The structure of a block header
The genesis block
Mining
Tasks of the miners
Mining rewards
Proof of Work (PoW)
The mining algorithm
The hash rate
Mining systems
CPU
GPU
FPGA
ASICs
Mining pools
Summary
Bitcoin Network and Payments
The Bitcoin network
Wallets
Non-deterministic wallets
Deterministic wallets
Hierarchical Deterministic wallets
Brain wallets
Paper wallets
Hardware wallets
Online wallets
Mobile wallets
Bitcoin payments
Innovation in Bitcoin
Bitcoin Improvement Proposals (BIPs)
Advanced protocols
Segregated Witness (SegWit)
Bitcoin Cash
Bitcoin Unlimited
Bitcoin Gold
Bitcoin investment and buying and selling bitcoins
Summary
Bitcoin Clients and APIs
Bitcoin installation
Types of Bitcoin Core clients
Bitcoind
Bitcoin-cli
Bitcoin-qt
Setting up a Bitcoin node
Setting up the source code
Setting up bitcoin.conf
Starting up a node in testnet
Starting up a node in regtest
Experimenting with Bitcoin-cli
Bitcoin programming and the command-line interface
Summary
Alternative Coins
Theoretical foundations
Alternatives to Proof of Work
Proof of Storage
Proof of Stake (PoS)
Various stake types
Proof of coinage
Proof of Deposit (PoD)
Proof of Burn
Proof of Activity (PoA)
Nonoutsourceable puzzles
Difficulty adjustment and retargeting algorithms
Kimoto Gravity Well
Dark Gravity Wave
DigiShield
MIDAS
Bitcoin limitations
Privacy and anonymity
Mixing protocols
Third-party mixing protocols
Inherent anonymity
Extended protocols on top of Bitcoin
Colored coins
Counterparty
Development of altcoins
Consensus algorithms
Hashing algorithms
Difficulty adjustment algorithms
Inter-block time
Block rewards
Reward halving rate
Block size and transaction size
Interest rate
Coinage
Total supply of coins
Namecoin
Trading Namecoins
Obtaining Namecoins
Generating Namecoin records
Litecoin
Primecoin
Trading Primecoin
Mining guide
Zcash
Trading Zcash
Mining guide
Address generation
GPU mining
Downloading and compiling nheqminer
Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs)
ERC20 tokens
Summary
Smart Contracts
History
Definition
Ricardian contracts
Smart contract templates
Oracles
Smart Oracles
Deploying smart contracts on a blockchain
The DAO
Summary
Ethereum 101
Introduction
The yellow paper
Useful mathematical symbols
Ethereum blockchain
Ethereum – bird's eye view
The Ethereum network
Mainnet
Testnet
Private net
Components of the Ethereum ecosystem
Keys and addresses
Accounts
Types of accounts
Transactions and messages
Contract creation transaction
Message call transaction
Messages
Calls
Transaction validation and execution
The transaction substate
State storage in the Ethereum blockchain
The world state
The account state
Transaction receipts
Ether cryptocurrency / tokens (ETC and ETH)
The Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)
Execution environment
Machine state
The iterator function
Smart contracts
Native contracts
Summary
Further Ethereum
Programming languages
Runtime bytecode
Opcodes and their meaning
Arithmetic operations
Logical operations
Cryptographic operations
Environmental information
Block information
Stack, memory, storage, and flow operations
Push operations
Duplication operations
Exchange operations
Logging operations
System operations
Blocks and blockchain
The genesis block
The block validation mechanism
Block finalization
Block difficulty
Gas
Fee schedule
Forks in the blockchain
Nodes and miners
The consensus mechanism
Ethash
CPU mining
GPU mining
Benchmarking
Mining rigs
Mining pools
Wallets and client software
Geth
Eth
Pyethapp
Parity
Light clients
Installation
Eth installation
Mist browser
Geth
The geth console
Funding the account with bitcoin
Parity installation
Creating accounts using the parity command line
APIs, tools, and DApps
Applications (DApps and DAOs) developed on Ethereum
Tools
Supporting protocols
Whisper
Swarm
Scalability, security, and other challenges
Trading and investment
Summary
Ethereum Development Environment
Test networks
Setting up a private net
Network ID
The genesis file
Data directory
Flags and their meaning
Static nodes
Starting up the private network
Running Mist on private net
Deploying contracts using Mist
Block explorer for private net / local Ethereum block explorer
Summary
Development Tools and Frameworks
Languages
Compilers
Solidity compiler (solc)
Installation on Linux
Installation on macOS
Integrated Development Environments (IDEs)
Remix
Tools and libraries
Node version 7
EthereumJS
Ganache
MetaMask
Truffle
Installation
Contract development and deployment
Writing
Testing
Solidity language
Types
Value types
Boolean
Integers
Address
Literals
Integer literals
String literals
Hexadecimal literals
Enums
Function types
Internal functions
External functions
Reference types
Arrays
Structs
Data location
Mappings
Global variables
Control structures
Events 
Inheritance
Libraries
Functions
Layout of a Solidity source code file
Version pragma
Import
Comments
Summary
Introducing Web3
Web3
Contract deployment
POST requests
The HTML and JavaScript frontend
Installing web3.js
Example
Creating a web3 object
Checking availability by calling any web3 method
Contract functions
Development frameworks
Truffle
Initializing Truffle
Interaction with the contract
Another example
An example project – Proof of Idea
Oracles
Deployment on decentralized storage using IPFS
Installing IPFS
Distributed ledgers
Summary
Hyperledger
Projects under Hyperledger
Fabric
Sawtooth Lake
Iroha
Burrow
Indy
Explorer
Cello
Composer
Quilt
Hyperledger as a protocol
The reference architecture
Requirements and design goals of Hyperledger Fabric
The modular approach
Privacy and confidentiality
Scalability
Deterministic transactions
Identity
Auditability
Interoperability
Portability
Rich data queries
Fabric
Hyperledger Fabric
Membership services
Blockchain services
Consensus services
Distributed ledger
The peer to peer protocol
Ledger storage
Chaincode services
Components of the fabric
Peers
Orderer nodes
Clients
Channels
World state database
Transactions
Membership Service Provider (MSP)
Smart contracts
Crypto service provider
Applications on blockchain
Chaincode implementation
The application model
Consensus in Hyperledger Fabric
The transaction life cycle in Hyperledger Fabric
Sawtooth Lake
PoET
Transaction families
Consensus in Sawtooth
The development environment – Sawtooth Lake
Corda
Architecture
State objects
Transactions
Consensus
Flows
Components
Nodes
The permissioning service
Network map service
Notary service
Oracle service
Transactions
Vaults
CorDapp
The development environment – Corda
Summary
Alternative Blockchains
Blockchains
Kadena
Ripple
Transactions
Payments related
Order related
Account and security-related
Interledger
Application layer
Transport layer
Interledger layer
Ledger layer
Stellar
Rootstock
Sidechain
Drivechain
Quorum
Transaction manager
Crypto Enclave
QuorumChain
Network manager
Tezos
Storj
MaidSafe
BigchainDB
MultiChain
Tendermint
Tendermint Core
Tendermint Socket Protocol (TMSP)
Platforms and frameworks
Eris
Summary
Blockchain – Outside of Currencies
Internet of Things
Physical object layer
Device layer
Network layer
Management layer
Application layer
IoT blockchain experiment
First node setup
Raspberry Pi node setup
Installing Node.js
Circuit
Government
Border control
Voting
Citizen identification (ID cards)
Miscellaneous
Health
Finance
Insurance
Post-trade settlement
Financial crime prevention
Media
Summary
Scalability and Other Challenges
Scalability
Network plane
Consensus plane
Storage plane
View plane
Block size increase
Block interval reduction
Invertible Bloom Lookup Tables
Sharding
State channels
Private blockchain
Proof of Stake
Sidechains
Subchains
Tree chains (trees)
Block propagation
Bitcoin-NG
Plasma
Privacy
Indistinguishability Obfuscation
Homomorphic encryption
Zero-Knowledge Proofs
State channels
Secure multiparty computation
Usage of hardware to provide confidentiality
CoinJoin
Confidential transactions
MimbleWimble
Security
Smart contract security
Formal verification and analysis
Oyente tool
Summary
Current Landscape and What's Next
Emerging trends
Application-specific blockchains (ASBCs)
Enterprise-grade blockchains
Private blockchains
Start-ups
Strong research interest
Standardization
Enhancements
Real-world implementations
Consortia
Answers to technical challenges
Convergence
Education of blockchain technology
Employment
Cryptoeconomics
Research in cryptography
New programming languages
Hardware research and development
Research in formal methods and security
Alternatives to blockchains
Interoperability efforts
Blockchain as a Service
Efforts to reduce electricity consumption
Other challenges
Regulation
Dark side
Blockchain research
Smart contracts
Centralization issues
Limitations in cryptographic functions
Consensus algorithms
Scalability
Code obfuscation
Notable projects
Zcash on Ethereum
CollCo
Cello
Qtum
Bitcoin-NG
Solidus
Hawk
Town-Crier
SETLCoin
TEEChan
Falcon
Bletchley
Casper
Miscellaneous tools
Solidity extension for Microsoft Visual Studio
MetaMask
Stratis
Embark
DAPPLE
Meteor
uPort
INFURA
Convergence with other industries
Future
Summary
Another Book You May Enjoy
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Preface This book has one goal, to introduce theoretical and practical aspects of the blockchain technology. This book contains
all material that is necessary to become a blockchain technical expert. Since the publication of the first edition of this book,
a lot has changed and progressed further with regards to blockchain; therefore, a need to update the book has arisen. The multitude
of benefits envisaged by the implementation of blockchain technology has sparked profound interest among researchers from academia
and industry who are tirelessly researching this technology. As a result, many consortia, working groups, projects, and professional
bodies have emerged, which are involved in the development and further advancement of this technology. The second edition of this
book will provide in-depth insights into decentralization, smart contracts, and various blockchain platforms such as Ethereum, Bitcoin,
and Hyperledger Fabric. After reading this book, readers will be able to develop a deep understanding of inner workings of the blockchain
technology and will be able to develop blockchain applications. This book covers all topics relevant to the blockchain technology,
including cryptography, cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin, Ethereum, and various other platforms and tools used for blockchain development.
It is recommended that readers have a basic understanding of computer science and basic programming experience to benefit fully from
this book. However, if that is not the case then still this book can be read easily, as relevant background material is provided
where necessary. Who this book is for This book is for anyone who wants to understand blockchain in depth. It can also be
used as a reference by developers who are developing applications for blockchain. Also, this book can be used as a textbook for courses
related to blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies. It can also be used as a learning resource for various examinations and certifications
related to cryptocurrency and blockchain technology. What this book coversChapter 1 , Blockchain 101 , introduces
the basic concepts of distributed computing on which blockchain technology is based. It also covers history, definitions, features,
types, and benefits of blockchains along with various consensus mechanisms that are at the core of the blockchain technology.
Chapter 2 , Decentralization , covers the concept of decentralization and its relationship with blockchain technology.
Various methods and platforms that can be used to decentralize a process or a system have also been introduced. Chapter 3
, Symmetric Cryptography , introduces the theoretical foundations of symmetric cryptography, which is necessary to understand
that how various security services such as confidentiality and integrity are provided. Chapter 4 , Public Key Cryptography
, introduces concepts such as public and private keys, digital signatures and hash functions with practical examples. Finally, an
introduction to financial markets is also included as there are many interesting use cases for blockchain technology in the financial
sector. Chapter 5 , Introducing Bitcoin , covers Bitcoin, the first and largest blockchain. It introduces technical
concepts related to bitcoin cryptocurrency in detail. Chapter 6 , Bitcoin Network and Payments , covers Bitcoin network,
relevant protocols and various Bitcoin wallets. Moreover, advanced protocols, Bitcoin trading and payments is also introduced.
Chapter 7 , Bitcoin Clients and APIs , introduces various Bitcoin clients and programming APIs that can be used to
build Bitcoin applications. Chapter 8 , Alternative Coins , introduces alternative cryptocurrencies that were introduced
after the invention of Bitcoin. It also presents examples of different altcoins, their properties, and how they have been developed
and implemented. Chapter 9 , Smart Contracts , provides an in-depth discussion on smart contracts. Topics such as
history, the definition of smart contracts, Ricardian contracts, Oracles, and the theoretical aspects of smart contracts are presented
in this chapter. Chapter 10 , Ethereum 101 , introduces the design and architecture of the Ethereum blockchain in
detail. It covers various technical concepts related to the Ethereum blockchain that explains the underlying principles, features,
and components of this platform in depth. Chapter 11 , Further Ethereum , continues the introduction of Ethereum
from pervious chapter and covers topics related to Ethereum Virtual Machine, mining and supporting protocols for Ethereum. Chapter
12 , Ethereum Development Environment , covers the topics related to setting up private networks for Ethereum smart contract
development and programming. Chapter 13 , Development Tools and Frameworks , provides a detailed practical introduction
to the Solidity programming language and different relevant tools and frameworks that are used for Ethereum development. Chapter
14 , Introducing Web3 , covers development of decentralized applications and smart contracts using the Ethereum blockchain.
A detailed introduction to Web3 API is provided along with multiple practical examples and a final project. Chapter 15 ,
Hyperledger , presents a discussion about the Hyperledger project from the Linux Foundation, which includes different blockchain
projects introduced by its members. Chapter 16 , Alternative Blockchains , introduces alternative blockchain solutions
and platforms. It provides technical details and features of alternative blockchains and relevant platforms. Chapter 17
, Blockchain – Outside of Currencies , provides a practical and detailed introduction to applications of blockchain technology
in fields others than cryptocurrencies, including Internet of Things, government, media, and finance. Chapter 18 , Scalability
and Other Challenges , is dedicated to a discussion of the challenges faced by blockchain technology and how to address them.
Chapter 19 , Current Landscape and What's Next , is aimed at providing information about the current landscape, projects,
and research efforts related to blockchain technology. Also, some predictions based on the current state of blockchain technology
have also been made. To get the most out of this book
All examples in this book have been developed on Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS (Xenial) and macOS version 10.13.2. As such, it is recommended
to use Ubuntu or any other Unix like system. However, any appropriate operating system, either Windows or Linux, can be used,
but examples, especially those related to installation, may need to be changed accordingly.
Examples related to cryptography have been developed using the OpenSSL 1.0.2g 1 Mar 2016 command-line tool.
Ethereum Solidity examples have been developed using Remix IDE, available online at https://remix.ethereum.org
Ethereum Byzantine release is used to develop Ethereum-related examples. At the time of writing, this is the latest version
available and can be downloaded from https://www.ethereum.org/ .
Examples related to IoT have been developed using a Raspberry Pi kit by Vilros, but any aapropriate latest model or kit can
be used. Specifically, Raspberry Pi 3 Model B V 1.2 has been used to build the hardware example of IoT. Node.js V8.9.3 and npm
V5.5.1 have been used to download related packages and run Node js server for IoT examples.
The Truffle framework has been used in some examples of smart contract deployment, and is available at http://truffleframework.com/
. Any latest version available via npm should be appropriate.
Download the example code files You can download the example code files for this book from your account at www.packtpub.com
. If you purchased this book elsewhere, you can visit www.packtpub.com/support and register to have the files emailed directly
to you. You can download the code files by following these steps:
Log in or register at www.packtpub.com .
Select the SUPPORT tab.
Click on Code Downloads & Errata.
Enter the name of the book in the Search box and follow the onscreen instructions.
Once the file is downloaded, please make sure that you unzip or extract the folder using the latest version of:
WinRAR/7-Zip for Windows
Zipeg/iZip/UnRarX for Mac
7-Zip/PeaZip for Linux
The code bundle for the book is also hosted on GitHub at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Mastering-Blockchain-Second-Edition
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it here: http://www.packtpub.com/sites/default/files/downloads/MasteringBlockchainSecondEdition_ColorImages.pdf . Conventions
used There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book. CodeInText : Indicates code words
in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles.
Here is an example: "After executing the command, a file named privatekey.pem is produced, which contains the
generated private key as follows." A block of code is set as follows:
pragma solidity ^0.4.0;
contract TestStruct {
struct Trade
{
uint tradeid;
uint quantity;
uint price;
string trader;
}
//This struct can be initialized and used as below
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
$ sudo apt-get install solc
Bold : Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see onscreen. For example, words in menus or dialog boxes appear
in the text like this. Here is an example: "Enter the password and click on SEND TRANSACTION to deploy the contract."
Warnings or important notes appear like this.
Tips and tricks appear like this.
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we at Packt can understand what you think about our products, and our authors can see your feedback on their book. Thank you! For
more information about Packt, please visit packtpub.com . Blockchain 101 If you are reading this book, it is very
likely that you already have heard about blockchain and have some fundamental appreciation of its enormous potential. If not, then
let me tell you that this is a technology that has promised to positively alter the existing paradigms of nearly all industries including,
but not limited to IT, finance, government, media, medical, and law. This chapter serves an introduction to blockchain technology,
its technical foundations, the theory behind it, and various techniques that have been combined together to build what is known today
as blockchain. In this chapter, we first describe the theoretical foundations of distributed systems. Next, we address the precursors
of Bitcoin by which blockchain technology was introduced to the world. Finally, we introduce you to blockchain technology. This approach
is a logical way to understanding blockchain technology, as the roots of blockchain are in distributed systems. We will cover a lot
of ground quickly here, but don't worry -- we will go over a great deal of this material in much greater detail as you move through
the book. The growth of blockchain technology With the invention of Bitcoin in 2008, the world was introduced to a new concept,
which is now likely to revolutionize the whole of society. It is something that promises to have an impact on every industry, including
but not limited to the financial sector, government, media, law, and arts. Some describe blockchain as a revolution, whereas another
school of thought believes that it is going to be more evolutionary, and it will take many years before any practical benefits of
blockchain reach fruition. This thinking is correct to some extent, but in my opinion, the revolution has already begun. Many prominent
organizations all around the world are already writing proofs of concept using blockchain technology, as its disruptive potential
has now been fully recognized. However, some organizations are still in the preliminary exploration stage, though they are expected
to progress more quickly as the technology matures. It is a technology that has an impact on current technologies too and possesses
the ability to change them at a fundamental level. If we look at the last few years, we notice that in 2013 some ideas started to
emerge that suggested usage of blockchain in other areas than cryptocurrencies. Around that time the primary usage of blockchain
was cryptocurrencies, and many new coins emerged during that time. The following graph shows a broad-spectrum outline of year wise
progression and adaption trend of blockchain technology. Years shown on the x axis indicate the range of time in which a specific
phase of blockchain technology falls. Each phase has a name which represents the action and is shown on the x axis starting
from the period of IDEAS & THOUGHTS to eventually MATURITY & FURTHER STANDARDIZATION . The y axis shows level of activity,
involvement and adoption of blockchain technology. The graph shows that eventually, roughly around 2025 blockchain technology is
expected to become mature with a high number of users. Blockchain technology adoption and maturity The preceding graph shows that
in 2013 IDEAS & THOUGHTS emerged related to other usages of blockchain technology apart from cryptocurrencies. Then in 2014 some
RESEARCH & EXPERIMENTATION started which led to PROOF OF CONCEPTS , FURTHER RESEARCH , and full-scale TRIAL PROJECTS between 2015
and 2017. In 2018 we will see REAL WORLD IMPLEMENTATIONS . Already many projects are underway and set to replace existing systems,
for example, Australian Securities Exchange ( ASX ) is soon to become the first organization to replace its legacy clearing and settlement
system with blockchain technology.
More information on this topic can be found at https://www.asx.com.au/services/chess-replacement.htm .
It is expected that during 2019 more research will be carried out along with some interest towards regulation and standardization
of blockchain technology. After this, production ready projects and off the shelf products utilizing blockchain technology will be
available from 2020 and by 2021 mainstream usage of blockchain technology is expected to start. Progress in blockchain technology
almost feels like the internet dot-com boom of the late 1990s. More research is expected to continue along with adaption and
further maturity of blockchain technology, and finally, in 2025 it is expected that the technology will be mature enough to be used
on day to day basis. Please note that the timelines provided in the chart are not strict and can vary as it is quite difficult to
predict that when exactly blockchain technology will become mature. This graph is based on the progress made in the recent years
and the current climate of research, interest and enthusiasm regarding this technology which suggests that by 2025 blockchain technology
is expected to become mature. Interest in blockchain technology has risen quite significantly over the last few years. Once dismissed
as simply geek money from a cryptocurrency point of view, or as something that was just not considered worth pursuing, blockchain
is now being researched by the largest companies and organizations around the world. Millions of dollars are being spent to adapt
and experiment with this technology. This is evident from recent actions taken by European Union where they have announced plans
to increase funding for blockchain research to almost 340 million euros by 2020.
Interested readers can read more about this at https://www.irishtimes.com/business/technology/boost-for-blockchain-research-as-eu-increases-funding-four-fold-1.3383340
.
Another report suggests that global spending on blockchain technology research could reach 9.2 billion dollars by 2021.
More information regarding this can be found at https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/report-suggests-global-spending-blockchain-tech-could-reach-92-billion-2021/
.
There are various consortiums such as Enterprise Ethereum Alliance ( EEA ), Hyperledger , and R3 , which have been established for
research and development of blockchain technology. Moreover, a large number of start-ups are providing blockchain-based solutions
already. A simple trend search on Google reveals the immense scale of interest in blockchain technology over the last few years.
Especially, since early 2017 the increase in the search term blockchain is quite significant, as shown in the following graph:
Google trend graph for blockchain Various benefits of this technology are envisioned, such as decentralized trust, cost savings,
transparency, and efficiency. However, there are multiple challenges too that are an area of active research on blockchain, such
as scalability and privacy. In this book, we are going to see how blockchain technology can help bring about the benefits mentioned
earlier. You are going to learn about what exactly is blockchain technology, and how it can reshape businesses, multiple industries,
and indeed everyday life by bringing about a plenitude of benefits such as efficiency, cost saving, transparency, and security. We
will also explore what is distributed ledger technology, decentralization, and smart contracts and how technology solutions can be
developed and implemented using mainstream blockchain platforms such as Ethereum, and Hyperledger. We will also investigate that
what challenges need to be addressed before blockchain can become a mainstream technology. Chapter 18 , Scalability and
Other Challenges , is dedicated to a discussion of the limitations and challenges of blockchain technology. Distributed systems
Understanding distributed systems is essential to the understanding of blockchain technology, as blockchain is a distributed system
at its core. It is a distributed ledger which can be centralized or decentralized. A blockchain is originally intended to be and
is usually used as a decentralized platform. It can be thought of as a system that has properties of both decentralized and distributed
paradigms. It is a decentralized-distributed system. Distributed systems are a computing paradigm whereby two or more nodes work
with each other in a coordinated fashion to achieve a common outcome. It is modeled in such a way that end users see it as a single
logical platform. For example, Google's search engine is based on a large distributed system, but to a user, it looks like a single,
coherent platform. A node can be defined as an individual player in a distributed system. All nodes are capable of sending and receiving
messages to and from each other. Nodes can be honest, faulty, or malicious, and they have memory and a processor. A node that exhibits
irrational behavior is also known as a Byzantine node after the Byzantine Generals Problem.
The Byzantine Generals problem
In 1982, a thought experiment was proposed by Lamport and others in their research paper, The Byzantine Generals Problem
which is available at: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/byzantine-generals-problem/ whereby a group
of army generals who lead different parts of the Byzantine army are planning to attack or retreat from a city. The only way of
communicating among them is via a messenger. They need to agree to strike at the same time in order to win. The issue is that
one or more generals might be traitors who could send a misleading message. Therefore, there is a need for a viable mechanism
that allows for agreement among the generals, even in the presence of the treacherous ones, so that the attack can still take
place at the same time. As an analogy to distributed systems, the generals can be considered nodes, the traitors as Byzantine
(malicious) nodes, and the messenger can be thought of as a channel of communication among the generals.
This problem was solved in 1999 by Castro and Liskov who presented the Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance ( PBFT ) algorithm,
where consensus is reached after a certain number of messages are received containing the same signed content.
This type of inconsistent behavior of Byzantine nodes can be intentionally malicious, which is detrimental to the operation of the
network. Any unexpected behavior by a node on the network, whether malicious or not, can be categorized as Byzantine. A small-scale
example of a distributed system is shown in the following diagram. This distributed system has six nodes out of which one ( N4 )
is a Byzantine node leading to possible data inconsistency. L2 is a link that is broken or slow, and this can lead to partition in
the network. Design of a distributed system: N4 is a Byzantine node, L2 is broken or a slow network link The primary challenge in
distributed system design is coordination between nodes and fault tolerance. Even if some of the nodes become faulty or network links
break, the distributed system should be able to tolerate this and continue to work to achieve the desired result. This problem has
been an active area of distributed system design research for many years, and several algorithms and mechanisms have been proposed
to overcome these issues. Distributed systems are so challenging to design that a hypothesis known as the CAP theorem has been proven,
which states that a distributed system cannot have all three of the much-desired properties simultaneously; that is, consistency,
availability, and partition tolerance. We will dive into the CAP theorem in more detail later in this chapter. The history of
blockchain and Bitcoin Blockchain was introduced with the invention of Bitcoin in 2008. Its practical implementation then occurred
in 2009. For the purposes of this chapter, it is sufficient to review Bitcoin very briefly, as it will be explored in great depth
in Chapter 5 , Introducing Bitcoin . However, it is essential to refer to Bitcoin because, without it, the history
of blockchain is not complete. Electronic cash The concept of electronic cash or digital currency is not new. Since the 1980s,
e-cash protocols have existed that are based on a model proposed by David Chaum. Just as understanding the concept of distributed
systems is necessary to comprehend blockchain technology, the idea of electronic cash is also essential in order to appreciate the
first and astonishingly successful application of blockchain, Bitcoin, or more broadly cryptocurrencies in general. Two fundamental
e-cash system issues need to be addressed: accountability and anonymity. Accountability is required to ensure that cash is spendable
only once (double-spend problem) and that it can only be spent by its rightful owner. Double spend problem arises when same money
can be spent twice. As it is quite easy to make copies of digital data, this becomes a big issue in digital currencies as you can
make many copies of same digital cash. Anonymity is required to protect users' privacy. As with physical cash, it is almost impossible
to trace back spending to the individual who actually paid the money. David Chaum solved both of these problems during his work in
1980s by using two cryptographic operations, namely blind signatures and secret sharing . These terminologies and related concepts
will be discussed in detail in Chapter 3 , Symmetric Cryptography and Chapter 4 , Public Key Cryptography
. For the moment, it is sufficient to say that blind signatures allow for signing a document without actually seeing it, and
secret sharing is a concept that enables the detection of double spending, that is using the same e-cash token twice (double
spending). In 2009, the first practical implementation of an electronic cash (e-cash) system named Bitcoin appeared. The term cryptocurrency
emerged later. For the very first time, it solved the problem of distributed consensus in a trustless network. It used public key
cryptography with a Proof of Work ( PoW ) mechanism to provide a secure, controlled, and decentralized method of minting digital
currency. The key innovation was the idea of an ordered list of blocks composed of transactions and cryptographically secured by
the PoW mechanism. This concept will be explained in greater detail in Chapter 5 , Introducing Bitcoin . Other technologies
used in Bitcoin, but which existed before its invention, include Merkle trees, hash functions, and hash chains. All these concepts
are explained in appropriate depth in Chapter 4 , Public Key Cryptography . Looking at all the technologies mentioned
earlier and their relevant history, it is easy to see how concepts from electronic cash schemes and distributed systems were combined
to create Bitcoin and what now is known as blockchain. This concept can also be visualized with the help of the following diagram:
The various ideas that supported the invention of Bitcoin and blockchain Blockchain In 2008, a groundbreaking paper entitled
Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System was written on the topic of peer-to-peer electronic cash under the pseudonym
Satoshi Nakamoto . It introduced the term chain of blocks . No one knows the actual identity of Satoshi Nakamoto. After introducing
Bitcoin in 2009, he remained active in the Bitcoin developer community until 2011. He then handed over Bitcoin development to its
core developers and simply disappeared. Since then, there has been no communication from him whatsoever, and his existence and identity
are shrouded in mystery. The term chain of blocks evolved over the years into the word blockchain . As stated earlier,
blockchain technology incorporates a multitude of applications that can be implemented in various economic sectors. Particularly
in the finance sector, significant improvement in the performance of financial transactions and settlements is seen as resulting
in desirable time and cost reductions. Additional light will be shed on these aspects of blockchain in Chapter 17 , Blockchain
– Outside of Currencies where practical use cases will be discussed in detail for various industries. For now, it is sufficient
to say that parts of nearly all economic sectors have already realized the potential and promise of blockchain and have embarked,
or will do so soon, on the journey to capitalize on the benefits of blockchain technology. Blockchain defined
Layman's definition : Blockchain is an ever-growing, secure, shared record keeping system in which each user of the data holds
a copy of the records, which can only be updated if all parties involved in a transaction agree to update.
Technical definition : Blockchain is a peer-to-peer, distributed ledger that is cryptographically-secure, append-only, immutable
(extremely hard to change), and updateable only via consensus or agreement among peers.
Now let's examine the preceding definitions in more detail. We will look at all keywords in the definitions one by one. Peer-to-peer
The first keyword in the technical definition is peer-to-peer . This means that there is no central controller in the network,
and all participants talk to each other directly. This property allows for cash transactions to be exchanged directly among the peers
without a third-party involvement, such as by a bank. Distributed ledger Dissecting the technical definition further reveals
that blockchain is a distributed ledger , which simply means that a ledger is spread across the network among all peers in
the network, and each peer holds a copy of the complete ledger. Cryptographically-secure Next, we see that this ledger is
cryptographically-secure , which means that cryptography has been used to provide security services which make this ledger
secure against tampering and misuse. These services include non-repudiation, data integrity, and data origin authentication. You
will see how this is achieved later in Chapter 3 , Symmetric Cryptography which introduces the fascinating world
of cryptography. Append-only Another property that we encounter is that blockchain is append-only , which means that
data can only be added to the blockchain in time-ordered sequential order . This property implies that once data is added
to the blockchain, it is almost impossible to change that data and can be considered practically immutable. Nonetheless, it can be
changed in rare scenarios wherein collusion against the blockchain network succeeds in gaining more than 51 percent of the power.
There may be some legitimate reasons to change data in the blockchain once it has been added, such as the right to be forgotten
or right to erasure (also defined in General Data Protection ( GDPR ) ruling, https://gdpr-info.eu/art-17-gdpr/ ).
However, those are individual cases that need to be handled separately and that require an elegant technical solution. For all practical
purposes, blockchain is indeed immutable and cannot be changed. Updateable via consensus Finally, the most critical attribute
of a blockchain is that it is updateable only via consensus. This is what gives it the power of decentralization. In this
scenario, no central authority is in control of updating the ledger. Instead, any update made to the blockchain is validated against
strict criteria defined by the blockchain protocol and added to the blockchain only after a consensus has been reached among all
participating peers/nodes on the network. To achieve consensus, there are various consensus facilitation algorithms which ensure
that all parties are in agreement about the final state of the data on the blockchain network and resolutely agree upon it to be
true. Consensus algorithms are discussed later in this chapter and throughout the book as appropriate. Blockchain can be thought
of as a layer of a distributed peer-to-peer network running on top of the internet, as can be seen in the following diagram. It is
analogous to SMTP, HTTP, or FTP running on top of TCP/IP. The network view of a blockchain At the bottom layer in the preceding diagram,
there is the internet, which provides a basic communication layer for any network. In this case, a peer-to-peer network runs on top
of the internet, which hosts another layer of blockchain. That layer contains transactions, blocks, consensus mechanisms, state machines,
and blockchain smart contracts. All of these components are shown as a single logical entity in a box, representing blockchain above
the peer-to-peer network. Finally, at the top, there are users or nodes that connect to the blockchain and perform various operations
such as consensus, transaction verification, and processing. These concepts will be discussed in detail later in this book. From
a business standpoint, a blockchain can be defined as a platform where peers can exchange value / electronic cash using transactions
without the need for a centrally-trusted arbitrator. For example, for cash transfers, banks act as a trusted third party. In financial
trading, a central clearing house acts as an arbitrator between two trading parties. This concept is compelling, and once you absorb
it, you will realize the enormous potential of blockchain technology. This disintermediation allows blockchain to be a decentralized
consensus mechanism where no single authority is in charge of the database. Immediately, you'll see a significant benefit of decentralization
here, because if no banks or central clearing houses are required, then it immediately leads to cost savings, faster transaction
speeds, and trust. A block is merely a selection of transactions bundled together and organized logically. A transaction is a record
of an event, for example, the event of transferring cash from a sender's account to a beneficiary's account. A block is made up of
transactions, and its size varies depending on the type and design of the blockchain in use. A reference to a previous block is also
included in the block unless it is a genesis block. A genesis block is the first block in the blockchain that is hardcoded at the
time the blockchain was first started. The structure of a block is also dependent on the type and design of a blockchain. Generally,
however, there are just a few attributes that are essential to the functionality of a block: the block header, which is composed
of pointer to previous block, the timestamp, nonce, Merkle root, and the block body that contains transactions. There are also other
attributes in a block, but generally, the aforementioned components are always available in a block. A nonce is a number that is
generated and used only once. A nonce is used extensively in many cryptographic operations to provide replay protection, authentication,
and encryption. In blockchain, it's used in PoW consensus algorithms and for transaction replay protection. Merkle root is a hash
of all of the nodes of a Merkle tree. Merkle trees are widely used to validate the large data structures securely and efficiently.
In the blockchain world, Merkle trees are commonly used to allow efficient verification of transactions. Merkle root in a blockchain
is present in the block header section of a block, which is the hash of all transactions in a block. This means that verifying only
the Merkle root is required to verify all transactions present in the Merkle tree instead of verifying all transactions one by one.
We will elaborate further on these concepts in Chapter 4 , Public Key Cryptography . The generic structure of a block.
This preceding structure is a simple block diagram that depicts a block. Specific block structures relative to their blockchain technologies
will be discussed later in the book with greater in-depth technical detail. Generic elements of a blockchain Now, let's walk
through the generic elements of a blockchain. You can use this as a handy reference section if you ever need a reminder about the
different parts of a blockchain. More precise elements will be discussed in the context of their respective blockchains in later
chapters, for example, the Ethereum blockchain. The structure of a generic blockchain can be visualized with the help of the following
diagram: Generic structure of a blockchain Elements of a generic blockchain are described here one by one. These are the elements
that you will come across in relation to blockchain:
Address : Addresses are unique identifiers used in a blockchain transaction to denote senders and recipients. An address is
usually a public key or derived from a public key. While addresses can be reused by the same user, addresses themselves are unique.
In practice, however, a single user may not use the same address again and generate a new one for each transaction. This newly-created
address will be unique. Bitcoin is, in fact, a pseudonymous system. End users are usually not directly identifiable, but some
research in removing the anonymity of Bitcoin users has shown that they can be identified successfully. A good practice is for
users to generate a new address for each transaction in order to avoid linking transactions to the common owner, thus preventing
identification.
Transaction : A transaction is the fundamental unit of a blockchain. A transaction represents a transfer of value from one
address to another.
Block : A block is composed of multiple transactions and other elements, such as the previous block hash (hash pointer), timestamp,
and nonce.
Peer-to-peer network : As the name implies, a peer-to-peer network is a network topology wherein all peers can communicate
with each other and send and receive messages.
Scripting or programming language : Scripts or programs perform various operations on a transaction in order to facilitate
various functions. For example, in Bitcoin, transaction scripts are predefined in a language called Script , which consist of
sets of commands that allow nodes to transfer tokens from one address to another. Script is a limited language, however, in the
sense that it only allows essential operations that are necessary for executing transactions, but it does not allow for arbitrary
program development. Think of it as a calculator that only supports standard preprogrammed arithmetic operations. As such, Bitcoin
script language cannot be called Turing complete . In simple words, Turing complete language means that it can perform
any computation. It is named after Alan Turing who developed the idea of Turing machine that can run any algorithm however complex.
Turing complete languages need loops and branching capability to perform complex computations. Therefore, Bitcoin's scripting
language is not Turing complete, whereas Ethereum's Solidity language is.
To facilitate arbitrary program development on a blockchain, Turing complete programming language is needed, and it is now a very
desirable feature of blockchains. Think of this as a computer that allows development of any program using programming languages.
Nevertheless, the security of such languages is a crucial question and an essential and ongoing research area. We will discuss this
in greater detail in Chapter 5 , Introducing Bitcoin , Chapter 9 , Smart Contracts , and Chapter
13 , Development Tools and Frameworks , later in this book.
Virtual machine : This is an extension of the transaction script introduced earlier. A virtual machine allows Turing
complete code to be run on a blockchain (as smart contracts); whereas a transaction script is limited in its operation. However,
virtual machines are not available on all blockchains. Various blockchains use virtual machines to run programs such as Ethereum
Virtual Machine ( EVM ) and Chain Virtual Machine ( CVM ). EVM is used in Ethereum blockchain, while CVM is a virtual machine
developed for and used in an enterprise-grade blockchain called Chain Core .
State machine : A blockchain can be viewed as a state transition mechanism whereby a state is modified from its initial form
to the next one and eventually to a final form by nodes on the blockchain network as a result of a transaction execution, validation,
and finalization process.
Node : A node in a blockchain network performs various functions depending on the role that it takes on. A node can propose
and validate transactions and perform mining to facilitate consensus and secure the blockchain. This goal is achieved by following
a consensus protocol (most commonly PoW). Nodes can also perform other functions such as simple payment verification (lightweight
nodes), validation, and many other functions depending on the type of the blockchain used and the role assigned to the node. Nodes
also perform a transaction signing function. Transactions are first created by nodes and then also digitally signed by nodes using
private keys as proof that they are the legitimate owner of the asset that they wish to transfer to someone else on the blockchain
network. This asset is usually a token or virtual currency, such as Bitcoin, but it can also be any real-world asset represented
on the blockchain by using tokens.
Smart contract : These programs run on top of the blockchain and encapsulate the business logic to be executed when certain
conditions are met. These programs are enforceable and automatically executable. The smart contract feature is not available on
all blockchain platforms, but it is now becoming a very desirable feature due to the flexibility and power that it provides to
the blockchain applications. Smart contracts have many use cases, including but not limited to identity management, capital markets,
trade finance, record management, insurance, and e-governance. Smart contracts will be discussed in more detail in Chapter
9 , Smart Contracts .
How blockchain works We have now defined and described blockchain. Now let's see how a blockchain actually works. Nodes are
either miners who create new blocks and mint cryptocurrency (coins) or block signers who validates and digitally sign
the transactions. A critical decision that every blockchain network has to make is to figure out that which node will append the
next block to the blockchain. This decision is made using a consensus mechanism . The consensus mechanism will be described
later in this chapter. Now we will look at the how a blockchain validates transactions and creates and adds blocks to grow the blockchain.
How blockchain accumulates blocks Now we will look at a general scheme for creating blocks. This scheme is presented here
to give you a general idea of how blocks are generated and what the relationship is between transactions and blocks:
A node starts a transaction by first creating and then digitally signing it with its private key. A transaction can represent
various actions in a blockchain. Most commonly this is a data structure that represents transfer of value between users on the
blockchain network. Transaction data structure usually consists of some logic of transfer of value, relevant rules, source and
destination addresses, and other validation information. This will be covered in more detail in specific chapters on Bitcoin and
Ethereum later in the book.
A transaction is propagated (flooded) by using a flooding protocol, called Gossip protocol, to peers that validate the transaction
based on preset criteria. Usually, more than one node are required to verify the transaction.
Once the transaction is validated, it is included in a block, which is then propagated onto the network. At this point, the
transaction is considered confirmed.
The newly-created block now becomes part of the ledger, and the next block links itself cryptographically back to this block.
This link is a hash pointer. At this stage, the transaction gets its second confirmation and the block gets its first confirmation.
Transactions are then reconfirmed every time a new block is created. Usually, six confirmations in the Bitcoin network are
required to consider the transaction final.
It is worth noting that steps 4 and 5 are considered non-compulsory, as the transaction itself is finalized in step 3; however, block
confirmation and further transaction reconfirmations, if required, are then carried out in step 4 and step 5. This completes the
basic introduction to blockchain. In the next section, you will learn about the benefits and limitations of this technology. Benefits
and limitations of blockchain Numerous advantages of blockchain technology have been discussed in many industries and proposed
by thought leaders around the world who are participating in the blockchain space. The notable benefits of blockchain technology
are as follows:
Decentralization : This is a core concept and benefit of the blockchain. There is no need for a trusted third party or intermediary
to validate transactions; instead, a consensus mechanism is used to agree on the validity of transactions.
Transparency and trust : Because blockchains are shared and everyone can see what is on the blockchain, this allows the system
to be transparent. As a result, trust is established. This is more relevant in scenarios such as the disbursement of funds or
benefits where personal discretion in relation to selecting beneficiaries needs to be restricted.
Immutability : Once the data has been written to the blockchain, it is extremely difficult to change it back. It is not genuinely
immutable, but because changing data is so challenging and nearly impossible, this is seen as a benefit to maintaining an immutable
ledger of transactions.
High availability : As the system is based on thousands of nodes in a peer-to-peer network, and the data is replicated and
updated on every node, the system becomes highly available. Even if some nodes leave the network or become inaccessible, the network
as a whole continues to work, thus making it highly available. This redundancy results in high availability.
Highly secure : All transactions on a blockchain are cryptographically secured and thus provide network integrity.
Simplification of current paradigms : The current blockchain model in many industries, such as finance or health, is somewhat
disorganized. In this model, multiple entities maintain their own databases and data sharing can become very difficult due to
the disparate nature of the systems. However, as a blockchain can serve as a single shared ledger among many interested parties,
this can result in simplifying the model by reducing the complexity of managing the separate systems maintained by each entity.
Faster dealings : In the financial industry, especially in post-trade settlement functions, blockchain can play a vital role
by enabling the quick settlement of trades. Blockchain does not require a lengthy process of verification, reconciliation, and
clearance because a single version of agreed-upon data is already available on a shared ledger between financial organizations.
Cost saving : As no trusted third party or clearing house is required in the blockchain model, this can massively eliminate
overhead costs in the form of the fees which are paid to such parties.
As with any technology, some challenges need to be addressed in order to make a system more robust, useful, and accessible. Blockchain
technology is no exception. In fact, much effort is being made in both academia and industry to overcome the challenges posed by
blockchain technology. The most sensitive blockchain problems are as follows:
Scalability
Adaptability
Regulation
Relatively immature technology
Privacy
All of these issues and possible solutions will be discussed in detail in Chapter 18 , Scalability and Other Challenges
. Tiers of blockchain technology In this section, various layers of blockchain technology are presented. It is thought that
due to the rapid development and progress being made in blockchain technology, many applications will evolve. Some of these advancements
have already been realized, while others are anticipated in the near future based on the current rate of advancement in blockchain
technology. The three levels discussed here were initially described in the book Blockchain: Blueprint for a New Economy by
Melanie Swan , O'Reilly Media , 2015 as blockchain tiers categorized by applications in each category. This
is how blockchain is evolving, and this versioning shows different tiers of evolution and usage of blockchain technology. In fact,
all blockchain platforms, with limited exceptions, support these functionalities and applications. This versioning is just a logical
segregation of various blockchain categories based on the way that they are currently being used, are evolving, or predicted to evolve.
Also note that this versioning is being presented here for completeness and for historic reasons, as these definitions are somewhat
blurred now, and with the exception of Bitcoin (Blockchain 1.0), all newer blockchain platforms that support smart contract development
can be programmed to provide the functionalities and applications mentioned in all blockchain tiers: 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, and beyond. In
addition to Tier 1, Tier 2 and Tier 3, or Tier X in the future, the following represents my own vision of what blockchain technology
eventually could become as this technology advances:
Blockchain 1.0 : This tier was introduced with the invention of Bitcoin, and it is primarily used for cryptocurrencies. Also,
as Bitcoin was the first implementation of cryptocurrencies, it makes sense to categorize this first generation of blockchain
technology to include only cryptographic currencies. All alternative cryptocurrencies as well as Bitcoin fall into this category.
It includes core applications such as payments and applications. This generation started in 2009 when Bitcoin was released and
ended in early 2010.
Blockchain 2.0 : This second blockchain generation is used by financial services and smart contracts. This tier includes various
financial assets, such as derivatives, options, swaps, and bonds. Applications that go beyond currency, finance, and markets are
incorporated at this tier. Ethereum, Hyperledger, and other newer blockchain platforms are considered part of Blockchain 2.0.
This generation started when ideas related to using blockchain for other purposes started to emerge in 2010.
Blockchain 3.0 : This third blockchain generation is used to implement applications beyond the financial services industry
and is used in government, health, media, the arts, and justice. Again, as in Blockchain 2.0, Ethereum, Hyperledger, and newer
blockchains with the ability to code smart contracts are considered part of this blockchain technology tier. This generation of
blockchain emerged around 2012 when multiple applications of blockchain technology in different industries were researched.
Blockchain X.0 : This generation represents a vision of blockchain singularity where one day there will be a public blockchain
service available that anyone can use just like the Google search engine. It will provide services for all realms of society.
It will be a public and open distributed ledger with general-purpose rational agents ( Machina economicus ) running on
a blockchain, making decisions, and interacting with other intelligent autonomous agents on behalf of people, and regulated by
code instead of law or paper contracts. This does not mean that law and contracts will disappear, instead law and contracts will
be implementable in code.
Machina Economicus is a concept which comes from the field of Artificial Intelligence ( AI ) and computational economics. It can
be defined as a machine that makes logical and perfect decisions. There are various technical challenges that need to be addressed
before this dream can be realized.
Discussion of Machina Economicus is beyond the scope of this book, interested readers can refer to https://www.infosys.com/insights/purposeful-ai/Documents/machina-economicus.pdf
, for more information.
This concept in the context of blockchain and its convergence with AI will be elaborated on in Chapter 19 , Current Landscape
and What's Next . Features of a blockchain A blockchain performs various functions which are supported by various features.
These functions include but are not limited to transfer of value, managing assets and agreements. All of the blockchain tiers described
in the previous section perform these functions with the help of features offered by blockchain, but with some exceptions. For example,
smart contracts are not supported by all blockchain platforms, such as Bitcoin. Another example is that not all blockchain platforms
produce cryptocurrency or tokens, such as Hyperledger Fabric, and MultiChain. The features of a blockchain are described here:
Distributed consensus : Distributed consensus is the primary underpinning of a blockchain. This mechanism allows a blockchain
to present a single version of the truth, which is agreed upon by all parties without the requirement of a central authority.
Transaction verification : Any transactions posted from the nodes on the blockchain are verified based on a predetermined
set of rules. Only valid transactions are selected for inclusion in a block.
Platform for smart contracts : A blockchain is a platform on which programs can run to execute business logic on behalf of
the users. Not all blockchains have a mechanism to execute smart contracts ; however, this is a very desirable feature,
and it is available on newer blockchain platforms such as Ethereum and MultiChain.
Smart Contracts
Blockchain technology provides a platform for running smart contracts. These are automated, autonomous programs that reside on
the blockchain network and encapsulate the business logic and code needed to execute a required function when certain conditions
are met. For example, think about an insurance contract where a claim is paid to the traveler if the flight is canceled. In the
real world, this process normally takes a significant amount of time to make the claim, verify it, and pay the insurance amount
to the claimant (traveler). What if this whole process were automated with cryptographically-enforced trust, transparency, and
execution so that as soon as the smart contract received a feed that the flight in question has been canceled, it automatically
triggers the insurance payment to the claimant? If the flight is on time, the smart contract pays itself.
This is indeed a revolutionary feature of blockchain, as it provides flexibility, speed, security, and automation for real-world
scenarios that can lead to a completely trustworthy system with significant cost reductions. Smart contracts can be programmed
to perform any actions that blockchain users need and according to their specific business requirements.
Transferring value between peers : Blockchain enables the transfer of value between its users via tokens. Tokens can be thought
of as a carrier of value.
Generation of cryptocurrency : This feature is optional depending on the type of blockchain in use. A blockchain can create
cryptocurrency as an incentive to its miners who validate the transactions and spend resources to secure the blockchain. We will
discuss cryptocurrencies in great detail in Chapter 5 , Introducing Bitcoin .
Smart property : It is now possible to link a digital or physical asset to the blockchain in such a secure and precise manner
that it cannot be claimed by anyone else. You are in full control of your asset, and it cannot be double-spent or double-owned.
Compare this with a digital music file, for example, which can be copied many times without any controls. While it is true that
many Digital Rights Management ( DRM ) schemes are being used currently along with copyright laws, but none of them is enforceable
in such a way as blockchain based DRM can be. Blockchain can provide DRM functionality in such a way that it can be enforced fully.
There are famously broken DRM schemes which looked great in theory but were hacked due to one limitation or another. One example
is Oculus hack ( http://www.wired.co.uk/article/oculus-rift-drm-hacked ).
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William Slater III , June 13, 2018
If you want to learn Blockchain or if you think you really understand Blockchain, check out this excellent book.
If you want to learn Blockchain or if you think you really understand Blockchain, check out this excellent book.
I bought Imran Bashir's Mastering Blockchain, 2nd Edition because I knew it was a complete update to his first edition, and
because I wanted to keep up with what's happening in the rapidly moving world of Blockchain Development. Needless to say, I am
a huge fan of Blockchain and the promise it has for trusted, decentralized distributed computing transactions.
I have been pleasantly surprised and extremely satisfied with this invaluable tome. It could have been titled "The Bible of
Blockchain", because that's basically what it is. No serious Blockchain Developer or Blockchain Project Manager should be without
this book. With its wealth of information on every facet of Blockchain, it is easily worth more than 10 times the purchase price.
That is not an exaggeration and here's why:
1. The author, who is clearly a great author and a very experienced practitioner of all areas Blockchain development.
2. It is authoritative.
3. Easy to read.
4. Extremely thorough.
5. Provides useful Blockchain knowledge that is immediately useful to all Blockchain professionals from the novice to the journeyman
and master.
What really stands out:
The author's explanation of Blockchain, what it is, its components, and how it works is some of the clearest and most thorough
I have seen.
His incredible explanations of the details about Ethereum and the Ethereum Development environment works. And his explanations
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The author is such a great teacher that he suggests tricks like installing Wireshark so that the Blockchain engineer can actually
see the network events between clients and servers happening in real-time.
The author generously defines and suggests a full spectrum of Blockchain tools from Wallet Managers to Blockchain Browsers
to development environments and that is much appreciated.
His though coverage of major cryptocurrencies shows that he his fair, knowledgeable, passionate about providing as much information
as possible to the reader.
In Summary:
I love this book and have recommended it to everyone I know who is interested in Blockchain. I also teach Blockchain at the
graduate school level and have used this book in my course development and teaching, for my students and the interns I am working
with this summer of 2018. Quite simply, there is nothing better on the market.
Special thanks to the author, Imran Bashir, for his tireless work that produced this masterpiece, and to everyone at PACKT
for publishing it. It is the best Blockchain Book of 2018.
Amazon Customer , July 3, 2018
This was the best book I found out there for Blockchain
As a non-developer, I was able to understand 80% of this book. The information was thorough and concise. This was the best
book I found out there for Blockchain. Read more 10 people found this helpful
Torben Worm , December 1, 2018
Practical hands-on book
This book touches a lot of subjects from distribution over cryptography to blockchain and smart contracts with many practical
examples and pointers to further resources. If you are interested in getting started with blockchain and related technologies
it's a good starting point, but if you are interested in the more theoretical aspects and deeper insights you will probably find
that the book does not fulfil your needs.
Ele Liao , July 4, 2019
a good first book for blockchain
an easy read for a very comprehensive context in the blockchain. Read more
Helpful
ST , October 22, 2019
comprehensive text on blockchain
I have read a number of popular books on blockchain. This is the first book that serves as a text on blockchain. Excellent,
clear presentation. Read more
Helpful
Muriel , June 23, 2018
Thorough and accessible
I am a developer currently building a Solidity DApp. I acquired an advanced reader's copy of this book. "Mastering Blockchain"
by Imran Bashir does a thorough job explaining the foundational concepts behind blockchain programming. I like how the book contains
both high-level descriptions and diagrams as well as examples of implementation at the code level. I was pleasantly surprised
by how accessible the writing is. This book helped me understand the differences between various types of blockchain technologies.
For example, my Bitcoin developer friends asked me how the Ethereum Patricia Merkle Tries I use are different from the regular
Merkle Trees they use in their work. This book gave very clear and concise explanations of that particular difference between
Bitcoin and Ethereum data structures.
Victor , July 30, 2018
It covers the essential and a bit more.
There are several books regarding the topic and it's quite complicate to find a good one among all the noise. I would say that
this is a good one. It's quite concise to go direct to the topic but at the same time it provides a complete view. Quite interesting,
and this is something that almost all other publications miss is the cryptography side. There are several chapters focused on
the topic and these provides a complete background that let you to understand better the blockchain mechanism. Is a really good
book for people with some technical background that want to understand blockchain.
Rami Kudmani , June 20, 2018
Comprehensive and Enjoyable
I have read the first edition of this book. The book is well-structured and it covers a broad spectrum of knowledge around
blockchain technology. What is interesting about this book is that it is one of the rare blockchain books that you could read
the majority of it by non-tech people. The other thing is that it covers many important aspects about Blockchain starting from
digital currencies, alt-coins down to non-financial applications.
I liked that book and would recommend it for newbies who are looking to understand blockchain and crypto-currencies, for for
someone who understands bits and pieces here and there and wants to fill knowledge gaps about this interesting topic.
"... Finally, the Thought Police were also inspired by the human struggle for self-honesty and the pressure to conform. "The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe," Rudyard Kipling once observed. ..."
"... The struggle to remain true to one's self was also felt by Orwell, who wrote about "the smelly little orthodoxies" that contend for the human soul. Orwell prided himself with a "power of facing unpleasant facts" -- something of a rarity in humans -- even though it often hurt him in British society. ..."
"... In a sense, 1984 is largely a book about the human capacity to maintain a grip on the truth in the face of propaganda and power. ..."
"... The new Thought Police may be less sinister than the ThinkPol in 1984 , but the next generation will have to decide if seeking conformity of thought or language through public shaming is healthy or suffocating. FEE's Dan Sanchez recently observed that many people today feel like they're "walking on eggshells" and live in fear of making a verbal mistake that could draw condemnation. ..."
"... When the Berlin Wall came down in November 1989, it was revealed that the Stasi , East Germany's secret police, had a full-time staff of 91,000. That sounds like a lot, and it is, but what's frightening is that the organization had almost double that in informants, including children. And it wasn't just children reporting on parents; sometimes it was the other way around." ..."
"... Movies like the Matrix actually helped people to question everything. What is real and not. Who is the enemy, and can we be sure. And when Conspiracy theories become fact, people learn. The problem is in later generations who get indoctrinated at school and college to not think, not question. Rational examination is forbidden. ..."
There are a lot of unpleasant things in George Orwell's dystopian novel 1984 . Spying screens. Torture and propaganda. Victory
Gin and Victory Coffee always sounded particularly dreadful. And there is Winston Smith's varicose ulcer,
apparently a symbol of his humanity (or something),
which always seems to be "throbbing." Gross.
None of this sounds very enjoyable, but it's not the worst thing in 1984 . To me, the most terrifying part was that you couldn't
keep Big Brother out of your head.
Unlike other 20th-century totalitarians, the authoritarians in 1984 aren't that interested in controlling behavior or speech.
They do, of course, but it's only as a means to an end. Their real goal is to control the gray matter between the ears.
"When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will," O'Brien (the bad guy) tells the protagonist Winston Smith
near the end of the book.
We do not destroy the heretic because he resists us: so long as he resists us we never destroy him. We convert him, we capture
his inner mind, we reshape him.
Big Brother's tool for doing this is the Thought Police, aka the ThinkPol, who are assigned to root out and punish unapproved
thoughts. We see how this works when Winston's neighbor Parsons, an obnoxious Party sycophant, is reported to the Thought Police
by his own child, who heard him commit a thought crime while talking in his sleep.
"It was my little daughter," Parsons tells Winston when asked who it was who denounced him.
"She listened at the keyhole. Heard what I was saying, and nipped off to the patrols the very next day. Pretty smart for a
nipper of seven, eh?"
Who Are These Thought Police?
We don't know a lot about the Thought Police, and some of what we think we know may actually not be true since some of what Winston
learns comes from the Inner Party, and they lie.
What we know is this: The Thought Police are secret police of
Oceania -- the fictional land
of 1984 that probably consists of the UK, the Americas, and parts of Africa -- who use surveillance and informants to monitor the
thoughts of citizens. The Thought Police also use psychological warfare and false-flag operations to entrap free thinkers or nonconformists.
Those who stray from Party orthodoxy are punished but not killed. The Thought Police don't want to kill nonconformists so much
as break them. This happens in Room 101 of the Ministry of Love, where prisoners are re-educated through degradation and torture.
(Funny sidebar: the name Room 101
apparently was inspired by a conference room at the BBC in which Orwell was forced to endure tediously long meetings.)
The Origins of the Thought Police
Orwell didn't create the Thought Police out of thin air. They were inspired to at least some degree by
his experiences in
the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), a complicated and
confusing affair. What you really need to know is that there were no good guys, and it ended with left-leaning anarchists and Republicans
in Spain crushed by their Communist overlords, which helped the fascists win.
Orwell, an idealistic 33-year-old socialist when the conflict started, supported the anarchists and loyalists fighting for the
left-leaning Second Spanish Republic, which received most of its support from the Soviet Union and Josef Stalin. (That might sound
bad, but keep in mind that the Nazis were on the other side.) Orwell described the atmosphere in Barcelona in December 1936 when
everything seemed to be going well for his side.
The anarchists were still in virtual control of Catalonia and the revolution was still in full swing ... It was the first time
that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle,
he wrote in Homage to Catalonia.
[E]very wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle ... every shop and café had an inscription saying that it had been collectivized.
That all changed pretty fast. Stalin, a rather paranoid fellow, was bent on making Republican Spain loyal to him . Factions and
leaders perceived as loyal to his exiled Communist rival, Leon
Trotsky , were liquidated. Loyal Communists found themselves denounced as fascists. Nonconformists and "uncontrollables" were
disappeared.
Orwell never forgot the
purges or the steady stream of lies and propaganda churned out from Communist papers during the conflict. (To be fair, their Nationalist
opponents also used propaganda
and lies .) Stalin's NKVD was not exactly like the Thought Police
-- the NKVD showed less patience with its victims --
but they certainly helped inspire Orwell's secret police.
The Thought Police were not all propaganda and torture, though. They also stem from Orwell's ideas on truth. During his time in
Spain, he saw how power could corrupt truth, and he shared these reflections in his work
George Orwell: My Country Right or Left, 1940-1943 .
...I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary
lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed.
I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as the
heroes of imaginary victories; and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional
superstructures over events that had never happened.
In short, Orwell's brush with totalitarianism left him
worried that "the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world."
This scared him. A lot. He actually wrote, "This kind of thing is frightening to me."
Finally, the Thought Police were also inspired by the human struggle for self-honesty and the pressure to conform. "The individual
has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe," Rudyard Kipling once observed.
The struggle to remain true to one's self was also felt by Orwell, who
wrote about "the smelly little orthodoxies" that contend for the human soul. Orwell prided himself with a "power of facing unpleasant
facts" -- something of a rarity in humans -- even though it often hurt him in British society.
In a sense, 1984 is largely a book about the human capacity to maintain a grip on the truth in the face of propaganda and power.
It might be tempting to dismiss Orwell's book as a figment of dystopian literature. Unfortunately, that's not as easy as it sounds.
Modern history shows he was onto something.
When the Berlin Wall came down in November 1989, it was revealed that the Stasi, East Germany's secret police, had a full-time
staff of 91,000.
When the Berlin Wall came down in November 1989, it was revealed that
the Stasi , East Germany's secret police, had a full-time staff
of 91,000. That sounds like a lot, and it is, but what's frightening is that the organization had almost double that in informants,
including children. And it wasn't just children reporting on parents;
sometimes
it was the other way around.
Nor did the use of state spies to prosecute thoughtcrimes end with the fall of the Soviet Union. Believe it or not, it's still
happening today. The New York Times recently ran
a report featuring one Peng
Wei, a 21-year-old Chinese chemistry major. He is one of the thousands of "student information officers" China uses to root out professors
who show signs of disloyalty to President Xi Jinping or the Communist Party.
The New Thought Police?
The First Amendment of the US Constitution, fortunately, largely protects Americans from the creepy authoritarian systems found
in 1984 , East Germany, and China; but the rise of "cancel culture" shows the pressure to conform to all sorts of orthodoxies (smelly
or not) remains strong.
The new Thought Police may be less sinister than the ThinkPol in 1984 , but the next generation will have to decide if seeking
conformity of thought or language through public shaming is healthy or suffocating. FEE's Dan Sanchez
recently observed
that many people today feel like they're "walking on eggshells" and live in fear of making a verbal mistake that could draw condemnation.
That's a lot of pressure, especially for people still learning the acceptable boundaries of a new moral code that is constantly
evolving. Most people, if the pressure is sufficient, will eventually say "2+2=5" just to escape punishment. That's exactly what
Winston Smith does at the end of 1984 , after all. Yet Orwell also leaves readers with a glimmer of hope.
"Being in a minority, even a minority of one, did not make you mad," Orwell wrote.
"There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad."
In other words, the world may be mad, but that doesn't mean you have to be.
" When the Berlin Wall came down in November 1989, it was revealed that the Stasi, East Germany's secret police, had a full-time
staff of 91,000.
When the Berlin Wall came down in November 1989, it was revealed that
the Stasi , East Germany's secret police, had a full-time staff
of 91,000. That sounds like a lot, and it is, but what's frightening is that the organization had almost double that in
informants,
including children. And it wasn't just children reporting on parents;
sometimes
it was the other way around."
Confidential informants should be illegal.
How many people are employed by the various Federal intelligence agencies, of which there are 17 the last time I heard. Hundreds
of thousands of Federal employees, protected by strong government employee unions.
When this shitshow goes live, it will only take a small team to shut off the water that is necessary to keep the NSA servers
cool in Utah.
Movies like the Matrix actually helped people to question everything. What is real and not. Who is the enemy, and can we be sure. And when Conspiracy theories become fact, people learn. The problem is in later generations who get indoctrinated at school and college to not think, not question.
Rational examination
is forbidden.
"... This is the direction in which the world is going at the present time, and the trend lies deep in the political, social and economic foundations of the contemporary world situation. ..."
"... Specifically the danger lies in the structure imposed on Socialist and on Liberal capitalist communities by the necessity to prepare for total war with the U.S.S.R. and the new weapons, of which of course the atomic bomb is the most powerful and the most publicized. But danger lies also in the acceptance of a totalitarian outlook by intellectuals of all colours. ..."
"... Two of the principal super states will obviously be the Anglo-American world and Eurasia. If these two great blocks line up as mortal enemies it is obvious that the Anglo-Americans will not take the name of their opponents and will not dramatize themselves on the scene of history as Communists. Thus they will have to find a new name for themselves. The name suggested in Nineteen Eighty-Four is of course Ingsoc, but in practice a wide range of choices is open. In the U.S.A. the phrase "Americanism" or "hundred per cent Americanism" is suitable and the qualifying adjective is as totalitarian as anyone could wish. ..."
"... Pretty much explains the SDP and NuLabourInc and his name sake Blair and our political landscape of the last 50 years, don't you think? ..."
"... Also pay attention to the 'parody phrase. ' ..."
Because i feel that some agenda is at play. I'm not going to accuse you of trolling, or even a bit of gas lighting, but
it seems like a slide into classic red scaring and recasting of Eric Blair
By way of explaining my emotion and since you mention Warburg, here is an example of Orwellian post humous attribution.
He never said "imagine a boot stamping on a human face, forever."
'from a post-publication press release directed by publisher Fredric Warburg toward readers who "had misinterpreted [Orwell's]
aim, taking the novel as a criticism of the current British Labour Party, or of contemporary socialism in general." The quotation
from the press release was "soon given the status of a last statement or deathbed appeal, given that Orwell was hospitalized
at the time and dead six months later."
You can read more at georgeorwellnovels.com, which provides a great deal of context on this press release, which runs, in
full, as follows:
It has been suggested by some of the reviewers of Nineteen Eighty-Four that it is the author's view that this, or something
like this, is what will happen inside the next forty years in the Western world. This is not correct. I think that, allowing
for the book being after all a parody, something like Nineteen Eighty-Four could happen. This is the direction in which
the world is going at the present time, and the trend lies deep in the political, social and economic foundations of the contemporary
world situation.
Specifically the danger lies in the structure imposed on Socialist and on Liberal capitalist communities by the necessity
to prepare for total war with the U.S.S.R. and the new weapons, of which of course the atomic bomb is the most powerful and
the most publicized. But danger lies also in the acceptance of a totalitarian outlook by intellectuals of all colours.
The moral to be drawn from this dangerous nightmare situation is a simple one: Don't let it happen. It depends on you.
George Orwell assumes that if such societies as he describes in Nineteen Eighty-Four come into being there will be several
super states. This is fully dealt with in the relevant chapters of Nineteen Eighty-Four. It is also discussed from a different
angle by James Burnham in The Managerial Revolution. These super states will naturally be in opposition to each other or (a
novel point) will pretend to be much more in opposition than in fact they are.
Two of the principal super states will obviously be the Anglo-American world and Eurasia. If these two great blocks
line up as mortal enemies it is obvious that the Anglo-Americans will not take the name of their opponents and will not dramatize
themselves on the scene of history as Communists. Thus they will have to find a new name for themselves. The name suggested
in Nineteen Eighty-Four is of course Ingsoc, but in practice a wide range of choices is open. In the U.S.A. the phrase "Americanism"
or "hundred per cent Americanism" is suitable and the qualifying adjective is as totalitarian as anyone could wish.
If there is a failure of nerve and the Labour party breaks down in its attempt to deal with the hard problems with which
it will be faced, tougher types than the present Labour leaders will inevitably take over, drawn probably from the ranks of
the Left, but not sharing the Liberal aspirations of those now in power. Members of the present British government, from Mr.
Attlee and Sir Stafford Cripps down to Aneurin Bevan will never willingly sell the pass to the enemy, and in general the older
men, nurtured in a Liberal tradition, are safe, but the younger generation is suspect and the seeds of totalitarian thought
are probably widespread among them. It is invidious to mention names, but everyone could without difficulty think for himself
of prominent English and American personalities whom the cap would fit.' http://www.openculture.com/2014/11/george-orwells-final-warning.html
-- -- -- -
Pretty much explains the SDP and NuLabourInc and his name sake Blair and our political landscape of the last 50 years, don't
you think?
Also pay attention to the 'parody phrase. '
'
As i wrote earlier, perhaps Blair of Eton ultimately saw how clearly hist talents had been misused by the 'totalitarians' before
he died.
I understand that some of his works are still censored and others never published. As are his state employment in propaganda
on which he probably based his 'parody' on.
" Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all the unifying agents Mass
movements can rise and spread without belief in a god, but never without a belief in a
devil. " ~ Eric Hoffer,
The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements
(This article was reprinted in the online magazine of the Institute for Ethics &
Emerging Technologies, October 19, 2017.)
Eric Hoffer (1898
– 1983) was an American moral and social philosopher who worked for more than twenty
years as longshoremen in San Francisco. The author of ten books, he was awarded the Presidential Medal
of Freedom in 1983. His first book,
The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (1951), is a work in social psychology which discusses the
psychological causes of fanaticism. It is widely considered a classic.
Overview
The first lines of Hoffer's book clearly state its purpose:
This book deals with some peculiarities common to all mass movements, be they religious
movements, social revolutions or nationalist movements. It does not maintain that all movements
are identical, but that they share certain essential characteristics which give them a family
likeness.
All mass movements generate in their adherents a readiness to die and a proclivity for
united action; all of them, irrespective of the doctrine they preach and the program they
project, breed fanaticism, enthusiasm, fervent hope, hatred and intolerance; all of them are
capable of releasing a powerful flow of activity in certain departments of life; all of them
demand blind faith and single-hearted allegiance
The assumption that mass movements have many traits in common does not imply that all
movements are equally beneficent or poisonous. The book passes no judgments, and expresses no
preferences. It merely tries to explain (pp. xi-xiii)
Part 1 – The Appeal of Mass
Movements
Hoffer says that mass movements begin when discontented, frustrated, powerless people lose
faith in existing institutions and demand change. Feeling hopeless, such people participate in
movements that allow them to become part of a larger collective. They become true believers in
a mass movement that "appeals not to those intent on bolstering and advancing a cherished self,
but to those who crave to be rid of an unwanted self because it can satisfy the passion for
self-renunciation." (p. 12)
Put another way, Hoffer says: "Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a
substitute for the loss of faith in ourselves." (p. 14) Leaders inspire these movements, but
the seeds of mass movements must already exist for the leaders to be successful. And while mass
movements typically blend nationalist, political and religious ideas, they all compete for
angry and/or marginalized people.
Part 2 – The Potential Converts
The destitute are not usually converts to mass movements; they are too busy trying to
survive to become engaged. But what Hoffer calls the "new poor," those who previously had
wealth or status but who believe they have now lost it, are potential converts. Such people are
resentful and blame others for their problems.
Mass movements also attract the partially assimilated -- those who feel alienated from
mainstream culture. Others include misfits, outcasts, adolescents, and sinners, as well as the
ambitious, selfish, impotent and bored. What all converts all share is the feeling that their
lives are meaningless and worthless.
A rising mass movement attracts and holds a following not by its doctrine and promises but
by the refuge it offers from the anxieties, barrenness, and meaninglessness of an individual
existence. It cures the poignantly frustrated not by conferring on them an absolute truth or
remedying the difficulties and abuses which made their lives miserable, but by freeing them
from their ineffectual selves -- and it does this by enfolding and absorbing them into a
closely knit and exultant corporate whole. (p. 41)
Hoffer emphasizes that creative people -- those who experience creative flow -- aren't
usually attracted to mass movements. Creativity provides inner joy which both acts as an
antidote to the frustrations with external hardships. Creativity also relieves boredom, a major
cause of mass movements:
There is perhaps no more reliable indicator of a society's ripeness for a mass movement than
the prevalence of unrelieved boredom. In almost all the descriptions of the periods preceding
the rise of mass movements there is reference to vast ennui; and in their earliest stages mass
movements are more likely to find sympathizers and
support among the bored than among the exploited and oppressed. To a deliberate fomenter of
mass upheavals, the report that people are bored still should be at least as encouraging as
that they are suffering from intolerable economic or political abuses. (pp. 51-52)
Part 3
– United Action and Self-Sacrifice
Mass movements demand of their followers a "total surrender of a distinct self." (p. 117)
Thus a follower identifies as "a member of a certain tribe or family." (p. 62) Furthermore,
mass movements denigrate and "loathe the present." (p. 74) By regarding the modern world as
worthless, the movement inspires a battle against it.
What surprises one, when listening to the frustrated as the decry the present and all its
works, is the enormous joy they derive from doing so. Such delight cannot come from the mere
venting of a grievance. There must be something more -- and there is. By expiating upon the
incurable baseness and vileness of the times, the frustrated soften their feeling of failure
and isolation (p. 75)
Mass movements also promote faith over reason and serve as "fact-proof screens between the
faithful and the realities of the world." (p. 79)
The effectiveness of a doctrine does not come from its meaning but from its certitude
presented as the embodiment of the one and only truth. If a doctrine is not unintelligible, it
has to be vague; and if neither unintelligible nor vague, it has to be unverifiable. One has to
get to heaven or the distant future to determine the truth of an effective doctrine simple
words are made pregnant with meaning and made to look like symbols in a secret message. There
is thus an illiterate air about the most literate true believer. (pp. 80-81).
So believers ignore truths that contradict their fervent beliefs, but this hides the fact
that,
The fanatic is perpetually incomplete and insecure. He cannot generate self-assurance out of
his individual sources but finds it only by clinging passionately to whatever support he
happens to embrace. The passionate attachment is the essence of his blind devotion and
religiosity, and he sees in it the sources of all virtue and strength He sacrifices his life to
prove his worth The fanatic cannot be weaned away from his cause by an appeal to reason or his
moral sense. He fears compromise and cannot be persuaded to qualify the certitude and
righteousness of his holy cause. (p. 85).
Thus the doctrines of the mass movement must not be questioned -- they are regarded with
certitude -- and they are spread through "persuasion, coercion, and proselytization."
Persuasion works best on those already sympathetic to the doctrines, but it must be vague
enough to allow "the frustrated to hear the echo of their own musings in impassioned double
talk." (p. 106) Hoffer quotes Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels : "a sharp sword must
always stand behind propaganda if it is to be really effective." (p. 106) The urge to
proselytize comes not from a deeply held belief in the truth of doctrine but from an urge of
the fanatic to "strengthen his own faith by converting others." (p. 110)
Moreover, mass movements need an object of hate which unifies believers, and "the ideal
devil is a foreigner." (p. 93) Mass movements need a devil. But in reality, the "hatred of a
true believer is actually a disguised self-loathing " and "the fanatic is perpetually
incomplete and insecure." (p. 85) Through their fanatical action and personal sacrifice, the
fanatic tries to give their life meaning.
Part 4 – Beginning and End
Hoffer states that three personality types typically lead mass movements: "men of words",
"fanatics", and "practical men of action." Men of words try to "discredit the prevailing
creeds" and creates a "hunger for faith" which is then fed by "doctrines and slogans of the new
faith." (p. 140) (In the USA think of the late William F. Buckley.) Slowly followers
emerge.
Then fanatics take over. (In the USA think of the Koch brothers, Murdoch, Limbaugh,
O'Reilly, Hannity, Alex Jones, etc.) Fanatics don't find solace in literature, philosophy or
art. Instead, they are characterized by viciousness, the urge to destroy, and the perpetual
struggle for power. But after mass movements transform the social order, the insecurity of
their followers is not ameliorated. At this point, the "practical men of action" take over and
try to lead the new order by further controlling their followers. (Think Steve Bannon, Mitch
McConnell, Steve Miller, etc.)
In the end mass movements that succeed often bring about a social order worse than the
previous one. (This was one of Will Durant's findings in The Lessons of History .) As Hoffer puts it near the end of his work: "All mass
movements irrespective of the doctrine they preach and the program they project, breed
fanaticism, enthusiasm, fervent hope, hatred, and intolerance." (p. 141)
Quotes from
Hoffer, Eric (2002). The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements .
Harper Perennial Modern Classics. ISBN 978-0-060-50591-2 .
The Iron Heel is a dystopian[1] novel by American writer Jack London, first published in
1908.[2] Generally considered to be "the earliest of the modern dystopian" fiction,[3] it
chronicles the rise of an oligarchic tyranny in the United States.
In The Iron Heel, Jack London's socialist views are explicitly on display. A forerunner of
soft science fiction novels and stories of the 1960s and '70s, the book stresses future changes
in society and politics while paying much less attention to technological changes.
The novel is based on the fictional "Everhard Manuscript" written by Avis Everhard... The
Manuscript itself covers the years 1912 through 1932 in which the Oligarchy (or "Iron Heel") arose in the United
States. In Asia, Japan conquered East Asia and created its own empire, India gained independence,
and Europe became socialist. Canada, Mexico, and Cuba formed their own Oligarchies and were
aligned with the U.S. (London remains silent as to the fates of South America, Africa, and the
Middle East.)
In North America, the Oligarchy maintains power for three centuries until the Revolution
succeeds and ushers in the Brotherhood of Man. During the years of the novel, the First Revolt is
described and preparations for the Second Revolt are discussed. From the perspective of Everhard,
the imminent Second Revolt is sure to succeed but from Meredith's frame story , the reader knows that Ernest
Everhard's hopes would go unfulfilled until centuries after his death.
The Oligarchy is the largest monopoly of trusts (or robber barons ) who manage to
squeeze out the middle class by bankrupting most small to mid-sized business as
well as reducing all farmers to effective serfdom . This Oligarchy maintains power through a
"labor caste " and the
Mercenaries . Laborers in
essential industries like steel and rail are elevated and given decent wages, housing, and
education. Indeed, the tragic turn in the novel (and Jack London's core warning to his
contemporaries) is the treachery of these favored unions which break with the other unions and
side with the Oligarchy. Further, a second, military caste is formed: the Mercenaries. The Mercenaries are
officially the army of the US but are in fact in the employ of the Oligarchs.
Jack London ambitiously predicted a breakdown of the US republic starting a few years past
1908, but various events have caused his predicted future to diverge from actual history. Most
crucially, though London placed quite accurately the time when international tensions will reach
their peak (1913 in "The Iron Heel", 1914 in actual history ), he (like many others at
the time) predicted that when this moment came, labor solidarity would prevent a war that would
include the US, Germany and other nations.
The Iron Heel is cited by George Orwell 's biographer Michael Shelden as having influenced
Orwell's most famous novel Nineteen Eighty-Four .
[4] Orwell himself
described London as having made "a very remarkable prophecy of the rise of Fascism ", in the book and believed that
London's understanding of the primitive had made him a better prophet "than many better-informed
and more logical thinkers." [5] ( The Iron Heel - Wikipedia )
As writer or thinker, Jack London can't touch George Orwell, but he's nearly the Brit's
equal when it comes to describing society's bottom. To both, being a writer is as much a
physical as an intellectual endeavor. Wading into everything, they braved all discomforts and
dangers. This attitude has become very rare, and not just among writers. Trapped in intensely
mediated lives, we all think we know more as we experience less and less.
At age 14, London worked in a salmon cannery. At 16, he was an oyster pirate. At 17, he was
a sailor on a sealing schooner that reached Japan. At 18, London crossed the country as a hobo
and, near Buffalo, was jailed for 30 days for vagrancy. At 21, he prospected for gold in the
Klondike. London was also a newsboy, longshoreman, roustabout, window washer, jute mill grunt,
carpet cleaner and electrician, so he had many incidents, mishaps and ordeals to draw from, and
countless characters to portray.
London's The Road chronicles his hobo and prison misadventure. Condemned to hard labor, the
teenager nearly starved, "While we got plenty of water, we did not get enough of the bread. A
ration of bread was about the size of one's two fists, and three rations a day were given to
each prisoner. There was one good thing, I must say, about the water -- it was hot. In the
morning it was called 'coffee,' at noon it was dignified as 'soup,' and at night it masqueraded
as 'tea.' But it was the same old water all the time."
London quickly worked his way up the clink's hierarchy, to become one of 13 enforcers for
the guards. This experience alone should have taught him that in all situations, not just dire
ones, each man will prioritize his own interest and survival, and that there's no solidarity
among the "downtrodden" or whatever. Orwell's Animal Farm is a parable about this. Since man is
an egoist, power lust lurks everywhere.
During the Russo-Japanese War a decade later, London would approvingly quote a letter from
Japanese socialists to their Russian comrades, but this pacific gesture was nothing compared to
the nationalistic fervor engulfing both countries. Like racism, nationalism is but self love.
Though clearly madness if overblown, it's unextinguishable.
Jailed, London the future socialist stood by as his gang disciplined a naïf, "I
remember a handsome young mulatto of about twenty who got the insane idea into his head that he
should stand for his rights. And he did have the right of it, too; but that didn't help him
any. He lived on the topmost gallery. Eight hall-men took the conceit out of him in just about
a minute and a half -- for that was the length of time required to travel along his gallery to
the end and down five flights of steel stairs. He travelled the whole distance on every portion
of his anatomy except his feet, and the eight hall-men were not idle. The mulatto struck the
pavement where I was standing watching it all. He regained his feet and stood upright for a
moment. In that moment he threw his arms wide apart and omitted an awful scream of terror and
pain and heartbreak. At the same instant, as in a transformation scene, the shreds of his stout
prison clothes fell from him, leaving him wholly naked and streaming blood from every portion
of the surface of his body. Then he collapsed in a heap, unconscious. He had learned his
lesson, and every convict within those walls who heard him scream had learned a lesson. So had
I learned mine. It is not a nice thing to see a man's heart broken in a minute and a half."
Jailed, you immediately recover your racial consciousness, but London apparently missed
this. In any case, a lesser writer or man wouldn't confess to such complicity with power.
Elsewhere, London admits to much hustling and lying, and even claims these practices made him a
writer, "I have often thought that to this training of my tramp days is due much of my success
as a story-writer. In order to get the food whereby I lived, I was compelled to tell tales that
rang true [ ] Also, I quite believe it was my tramp-apprenticeship that made a realist out of
me. Realism constitutes the only goods one can exchange at the kitchen door for grub."
Informed by hard-earned, bitter experience, London's accounts resonate and convince, even
when outlandish, for they are essentially true about the human condition.
London on a fellow prisoner, "He was a huge, illiterate brute, an
ex-Chesapeake-Bay-oyster-pirate, an 'ex-con' who had done five years in Sing Sing, and a
general all-around stupidly carnivorous beast. He used to trap sparrows that flew into our hall
through the open bars. When he made a capture, he hurried away with it into his cell, where I
have seen him crunching bones and spitting out feathers as he bolted it raw."
Though London often uses "beast" or "beastly" to describe how humans are treated, this
fellow appears to be congenitally bestial, with his all-around stupidity. As for the other
prisoners, "Our hall was a common stews, filled with the ruck and the filth, the scum and
dregs, of society -- hereditary inefficients, degenerates, wrecks, lunatics, addled
intelligences, epileptics, monsters, weaklings, in short, a very nightmare of humanity." Though
many are wrecked, others are born deficient, addled or weak, but in our retarded days, morons
must be smart in other ways, and raging monsters are merely oppressed into mayhem or
murder.
ORDER IT NOW
But of course, society does oppress, then and now. Remember that an 18-year-old London was
sentenced to 30 days of hard labor for merely being in a strange city without a hotel
reservation. Another inmate was doing 60 for eating from a trash can, "He had strayed out to
the circus ground, and, being hungry, had made his way to the barrel that contained the refuse
from the table of the circus people. 'And it was good bread,' he often assured me; 'and the
meat was out of sight.' A policeman had seen him and arrested him, and there he was." Well, at
least Americans are no longer locked up for dumpster diving, so there's progress for you, but
then many must still feed from the garbage, with that number rapidly rising.
Though London was a worldwide celebrity at his death in 1916, his fame faded so fast that
Orwell could comment in 1944, "Jack London is one of those border-line writers whose works
might be forgotten altogether unless somebody takes the trouble to revive them."
London's most enduring book may turn out to be The People of the Abyss, his 1903
investigation into the abjectly impoverished of London's East End.
Dressed accordingly, London joined its homeless to see how they survived. With a 58-year-old
carter and a 65-year-old carpenter, London wandered the cold streets, "From the slimy,
spittle-drenched, sidewalk, they were picking up bits of orange peel, apple skin, and grape
stems, and, they were eating them. The pits of greengage plums they cracked between their teeth
for the kernels inside. They picked up stray bits of bread the size of peas, apple cores so
black and dirty one would not take them to be apple cores, and these things these two men took
into their mouths, and chewed them, and swallowed them; and this, between six and seven o'clock
in the evening of August 20, year of our Lord 1902, in the heart of the greatest, wealthiest,
and most powerful empire the world has ever seen."
Having mingled with many homeless in cities across America, I can attest that the food
situation is not as bad in that unraveling empire, but the squalor is just as appalling, if not
worse. A Wall Street Journal headline, "California's Biggest Cities Confront a 'Defecation
Crisis'." There's no need to import public shitting from shitholes, since there's already
plenty of it, homegrown and well-fertilized with smirkingly cynical policies.
Trump, "We can't let Los Angeles, San Francisco and numerous other cities destroy themselves
by allowing what's happening," but he's only talking about the unsightliness of it all, not its
root cause, which is a deliberately wrecked economy that, over decades, has fabulously enriched
his and our masters. This, too, is a controlled demolition.
Ensconced in some leafy suburb, you might be missing this beastly, raving, zonked out and
shitty transformation. Jack London, though, never recoiled from society's diarrhea. My favorite
passage of The People of the Abyss is his account of bathing, so to speak, in a workhouse:
We stripped our clothes, wrapping them up in our coats and buckling our belts about them,
and deposited them in a heaped rack and on the floor -- a beautiful scheme for the spread of
vermin. Then, two by two, we entered the bathroom. There were two ordinary tubs, and this I
know: the two men preceding had washed in that water, we washed in the same water, and it was
not changed for the two men that followed us. This I know; but I am also certain that the
twenty-two of us washed in the same water.
I did no more than make a show of splashing some of this dubious liquid at myself, while I
hastily brushed it off with a towel wet from the bodies of other men. My equanimity was not
restored by seeing the back of one poor wretch a mass of blood from attacks of vermin and
retaliatory scratching.
If other men had to endure that, why shouldn't London, especially since he was trying to
understand these wretches?
Many moons, suns and saturns ago, I taught a writing course at UPenn, and for one
assignment, I asked students to take the subway to a strange stop, get off, walk around and
observe, but don't do it in the dark, I did warn them. Frightened, one girl couldn't get off,
so simply wrote about her very first ride. At least she got a taste of an entirely alien world
beyond campus. Considering that her parents had to cough up over 60 grands annually to consign
her to the Ivy League, they'd probably want to murder me for subjecting their precious to such
needless anxieties.
Cocooned, Americans are oblivious to their own destruction. Screwed, they're fixated by
Pornhub.
London insisted a worldwide class revolution was the answer. A century and several gory
nightmares later, there are those who still cling to this faith, but only in the West. In the
East, even the most ignorant know the survival of his identity and dignity is conterminous with
his nation's. Orwell understood this well. It is the biggest crime to wreck anyone's heritage
in a flash.
In each society, you can begin to right the ship by prosecuting the biggest criminals, with
existing laws, but first, you must have the clarity and courage to identify them.
In the US, at least, this shouldn't be too complicated, for their crimes are mostly out in
the open, and their enforcers appear nightly in your living room, not unlike 1984. As you
watch, they cheerfully lie, silence witnesses, mass murder, squander your last cent and
dismantle, brick by brick, the house your forefathers built and died defending. Even if all
they saw was its basement, it was still their everything.
Lexicologically, Jack London far surpasses Orwell. He mixes erudite and argot. Stylistically
London far surpassed anything Orwell ever came up with. Orwell is a man of unum librum.
Nor would I say Orwell was a better thinker than London. 1984 is partly inspired by the
Iron Heel, an image coined by London in a namesake book.
Reducing London to being a mere "socialist" is moronic.
London is one of those authors whom aesthetes despise, but who- against all odds- stubbornly
refuse to go away. When he wrote about "serious" topics, London was a failure (Burning
Daylight, Martin Eden, ); on the other hand, when he wrote about animals, primitives,
mentally impaired, (white) underclass & quasi-fascist-Darwinian fantasies (most stories
& short novels) -he was an unavoidable writer, one that will be read long after most
canonized authors are just a footnote.
By the way, he was extremely popular even in Czarist Russia, something along the lines of
American vitalism & energy.
Jack London's "The Iron Heel" is another of his fictional stories about the working classes
and in the book he attacks capitalism and promotes socialism while presenting the story of
the US turned into an oligarchy in 1913 (the book was written in 1907). What's interesting
about "The Iron Heel" is that by 1900 it must have been quite obvious as to how the world's
more powerful nations were planning on parceling up the world, and London makes reference to
this in his novel about the future military campaigns that will take place in the book's
dystopian future, and his fiction was not far wrong from what actually transpired in WW1 and
WW2.
After Jack London gained fame he did not work alone, he hired aspiring writers to
"fill-in" his fiction, much like famous painters painting large commissions would hire
subordinates to "fill-in" their canvas after the outline was drawn. The plot and subplots
would come from London, but his underlings would write the stories. At this point in time I
can't remember the names but as I recall a few famous authors got their start working for
Jack London.
London was also cursed with the writer's nemesis, he was an alcoholic, and his
autobiographical novel "John Barleycorn" treats the "demon drink" as one of the world's great
ills. The book being published in 1913, it is noteworthy that the eighteenth amendment
banning alcohol was passed by congress a few years later in 1919, so it could be that London
was at least a minor fulcrum in giving a push to the moral crusade against alcohol being sold
in the US.
Much of Jack London's work is classic like his short story fiction placed in Alaska, "To
Start a Fire" about a man exposed to the elements and slowly freezing to death, or his
fictional tales about being a constable sailing a schooner chasing pirates off the coast of
California. Also unique and thrilling is the short story "A Piece of Steak" about an aging
boxer hoping to win one last fight. These were tough and gritty stories about men at their
extremity, and not tales for children.
London wrote a good tale and he understood human nature, and perhaps that's what motivated
him to become an alcoholic socialist.
@Bardon
Kaldian I enjoyed much of London's works. Although I read many of his books when
young,and I don't remember them too much, they helped inspire me to head north in the very
backyard of Burning Daylight, a best seller in it's day. His portrayal of characters of the
North seem quite believable and his description of the land and it's peculiar traits are also
accurate. The short story 'All Gold Canyon' is spot on for how a prospector prospects.
I read the Jack London Reader (for sale in Chicken, ak) a few years ago and enjoyed it
immensely as I did the Sea Wolf.
Martin Eden is a depressing read. I have only read Animal Farm so I really can't compare.
Depends how much one 'likes' to get disgruntled.
Cocooned, Americans are oblivious to their own destruction. Screwed, they're fixated by
Pornhub.
Funny, all I ever read on the Internet these days are articles about America's
destruction. This article's another one. Yet according to some pouty guy on the other side of
the planet, we're oblivious.
And Pornhub is #32 according to Alexa. That's really high, but 31 websites precede it.
I've never visited Pornhub, and I'd bet neither have 9 out of 10 Americans. Eliminate kids
under 10, adults over 80, most women, and all those without Internet access, and you're left
with a core of certain primetime lusty guys who are comfortable with pornography. Couldn't be
more than 10%.
It'd be wonderful if we could have a single calendar day, say October 21, when everyone
declares a moratorium on blithely shitting on America. Or is this part of the Jewish strategy
to keep us divided and unhappy?
"London was also a newsboy, longshoreman, roustabout, window washer, jute mill grunt, carpet
cleaner and electrician" and – not least – SPORTSWRITER!John Griffith Chaney
packed a lot of experience into his short forty year span on this wretched earth but his
stint on the Oakland Herald & later sports writing – especially about surfing
– are some of his best & consistent with his own fiery enjoyment of active outdoor
sports. Perhaps best summed up in his aphorism:"I would rather be ashes than dust." London
was not known for being a soccer fan but nonetheless, he would probably still be pleased to
know that there is in his hometown today a very large & thriving Jack London Youth Soccer
League. Anybody's guess how long it will be before the Woke Folk in town try to shut it down
for being named after a 'white supremacist'.
Eric Arthur Blair had a similarly short stay in this world – only seven more years than
London – but didn't much share his enthusiasm for the sporting life. Orwell was quite
candid in his rejection of the world's favorite past time, explaining in an essay: "I loathed
the game, and since I could see no pleasure or usefulness in it, it was very difficult for me
to show courage at it. Football, it seemed to me, is not really played for the pleasure of
kicking a ball about, but is a species of fighting." Orwell was even more pointed in a London
Tribune op-ed during his early newspaper days, commenting on a recent series of matches
between a Russian & English clubs, " the games cult did not start till the later part of
the last century. Dr Arnold, generally regarded as the founder of the modern public school,
looked on games as simply a waste of time. Then, chiefly in England and the United States,
games were built up into a heavily-financed activity, capable of attracting vast crowds and
rousing savage passions, and the infection spread from country to country. It is the most
violently combative sports, football and boxing, that have spread the widest. There cannot be
much doubt that the whole thing is bound up with the rise of nationalism -- that is, with the
lunatic modern habit of identifying oneself with large power units and seeing everything in
terms of competitive prestige."
"Orwell understood this well. It is the biggest crime to wreck anyone's heritage in a
flash."
Or beat their national team. Go Golden Dragons!
When I read about a woman dying from a rooster attack, or people falling to their death to
take selfies, or the growing number of hikers who venture out into semi- wilderness with
their cell phones but not adequate water, I always think of London's "To Build a Fire."
If London observed man's diminished capacity to measure and survive nature in his era,
what would he make of any airport or street today? Like the parasite creature in "Alien",
phones are stuck to every face encountered. Most people are not "present" in any sense when
in the public sphere now, let alone taking note of the world around them.
Great essay. I made it a point to visit Jack London's ranch on a California visit. The ranch
was a huge unfulfilled project with the sad burnt out ruins of his dream house reminding us
of his grand plans. The condition of his grown-over untended grave startled me. I find it
interesting that many men of that time viewed socialism as a panacea; however, the intellect,
ambition and energy of a man like Jack London would never have survived the ideology he
espoused.
@Paul Did
you see the "Trotsky" miniseries on Netflix? It was in Russian with English subtitles, but I
enjoyed reading them all and found it riveting. It appeared to be historically accurate to
someone like me who knows little of Russian history. Trotsky (born Lev Bronstein) was a
Ukrainian Jew who cared little for how many Russians he killed. I guess Ukies hated Russians
even back then.
In each society, you can begin to right the ship by prosecuting the biggest criminals,
with existing laws, but first, you must have the clarity and courage to identify them.
This is why I don't get your disgust at President Trump. He has the will and the position
to do just as you recommend and he would do it if the ruling class weren't trying to cut him
off at the knees 24-7. Trump is the people's first successful attempt to drive the destroyers
from the forum. I fear for coming generations if he doesn't.
@simple_pseudonymic_handle
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Herman Melville
Walt Whitman
Mark Twain
Stephen Crane
T.S. Eliot
Henry James
Tennessee Williams
Saul Bellow
John Updike
I wish the author would have done an analysis of London's "Iron Heel." I just read it for
the first time, and what he was writing about 100 years ago on the dominance of the
"oligarchs", i.e., the "iron heel" rings as true today as it did back then.
Curious also how he died so suddenly. There is a YouTube video of him at his ranch looking
as healthy as can be only a couple of days before he mysteriously died.
@AaronB
An empire exploits and abuses all natives, including those of its host nation. Just think of
how they must send these natives to foreign lands, not just to kill, but die. It's better to
be a house slave than a field one, however, so many far flung subjects of the empire will try
to sneak into the house. It's also safer there, generally. Except for rare instances, as in
9/11, the empire won't blow up natives inside its borders.
World War II ended nearly three generations ago, and few of its adult survivors still walk
the earth. From one perspective the true facts of that conflict and whether or not they
actually contradict our traditional beliefs might appear rather irrelevant. Tearing down the
statues of some long-dead historical figures and replacing them with the statues of others
hardly seems of much practical value.
But if we gradually conclude that the story that all of us have been told during our entire
lifetimes is substantially false and perhaps largely inverted, the implications for our
understanding of the world are enormous. Most of the surprising material presented here is
hardly hidden or kept under lock-and-key. Nearly all the books are easily available at Amazon
or even freely readable on the Internet, many of the authors have received critical and
scholarly acclaim, and in some cases their works have sold in the millions.
Yet this important material has been almost entirely ignored or dismissed by the popular
media that shapes the common beliefs of our society. So we must necessarily begin to wonder
what other massive falsehoods may have been similarly promoted by that media, perhaps involving
incidents of the recent past or even the present day. And those latter events do have enormous
practical significance. As I pointed out several years ago in my original American Pravda article :
Aside from the evidence of our own senses, almost everything we know about the past or the
news of today comes from bits of ink on paper or colored pixels on a screen, and fortunately
over the last decade or two the growth of the Internet has vastly widened the range of
information available to us in that latter category. Even if the overwhelming majority of the
unorthodox claims provided by such non-traditional web-based sources is incorrect, at least
there now exists the possibility of extracting vital nuggets of truth from vast mountains of
falsehood.
We must also recognize that many of the fundamental ideas that dominate our present-day
world were founded upon a particular understanding of that wartime history, and if there seems
good reason to believe that narrative is substantially false, perhaps we should begin
questioning the framework of beliefs erected upon it.
ORDER IT NOW
George Orwell fought in the Spanish Civil War during the 1930s and discovered that the true
facts in Spain were radically different from what he had been led to believe by the British
media of his day. In 1948 these past experiences together with the rapidly congealing "official
history" of the Second World War may have been uppermost in his mind when he published his
classic novel 1984, which famously declared that "Who controls the past controls the future;
who controls the present controls the past."
Great article, thank you. The WWII legend is sacrosanct because it is the founding myth of
the empire that replaced our republic, just as the Founders predicted would be the result of
choosing sides in foreign conflicts. Is seems credible to think that FDR enabled Churchill's
blood lust because encouraging the seriously weakened British empire to finish committing
suicide by engaging in another ground war in Europe would clear the way for the US to finally
replace the hated mother country as the world's great power- just as another faction of the
Founders dreamed. The motto on our National Seal "Novus Ordo Seclorum" is quoted from
Virgil's Eclogues, where it is the prophecy of the Cumaean Sybil that Rome was destined to
rule the world.
Historian Murray Rothbard best described the impact of the war in this obituary he wrote
for fellow popular historian Harry Elmer Barnes, "Our entry into World War II was the crucial
act in foisting a permanent militarization upon the economy and society, in bringing to the
country a permanent garrison state, an overweening military-industrial complex, a permanent
system of conscription. It was the crucial act in expanding the United States from a republic
into an Empire, and in spreading that Empire throughout the world, replacing the sagging
British Empire in the process. It was the crucial act in creating a Mixed Economy run by Big
Government, a system of State-Monopoly-Capitalism run by the central government in
collaboration with Big Business and Big Unionism. It was the crucial act in elevating
Presidential power, particularly in foreign affairs, to the role of single most despotic
person in the history of the world. And, finally, World War II is the last war-myth left, the
myth that the Old Left clings to in pure desperation: the myth that here, at least, was a
good war, here was a war in which America was in the right. World War II is the war thrown
into our faces by the war-making Establishment, as it tries, in each war that we face, to
wrap itself in the mantle of good and righteous World War II."
For those who lack the time to read these books, or even this great essay, here is a
13-minute video summary. For those shocked by this information, return and read this entire
essay, then the books if you still fail to understand that history has been distorted.
"Although Saddam Hussein clearly had no connection to the attacks, his status as a
possible regional rival to Israel had established him as their top target, and they soon
began beating the drums for war, with America finally launching its disastrous invasion in
February 2003."
I agree that replacing a progressive Arab leader with an Anglo-American puppet government
was an important factor, but the return of Iraqi oil fields to Anglo-American control was the
main objective. Exxon-Mobil, Shell, Total, and British Petroleum are now the biggest
producers of Iraqi oil.:
Thank You to Mr. Unz for mentioning the long-forgotten hero of the America First Committee,
John T. Flynn.
His biography, by Michele Stenehjem Gerber, is called An American First: John T. Flynn
and the America First Committee and has not yet been banned on Amazon:
Nonetheless I read it years ago, and it confirmed my suspicion that Lillian Gish,
pioneering film actress, was on a blacklist of some sort, and indeed she was. And this was
years before her name was removed from a college building here in Ohio. It is short, not hard
to read, less a full biography of Flynn than an interesting look at that filthy period in US
history when non-interventionists were slimed as "isolationists" and had their reputations
ruined. Or at least dinged quite a bit.
From an Amazon review:
This book inspires the broadening of the America First discussion, making references to
Lillian Gish, who proved she was blacklisted , Charlie Chaplin, whose The Great
Dictator was itself attacked as propaganda, and the charges of anti-Semitism from some
names not already researched, like Brooklyn Dodgers' president Larry MacPhail, S. H. Hauk,
Laura Ingalls, and Wilhelm Kunze of the German-American Bund (but still no Walt Disney
I went to Cambridge University in 1966 to study history. Two things I recall very distinctly:
the powerful impression Taylor's books made on me; and the very subtle but unmistakable
deprecation my tutors and lecturers applied to him and his work.
Taylor was certainly very talented, they said, but prone to "bees in his bonnet";
over-enthusiastic; sometimes unreliable.
Looking back, I can see how very effective this treatment was. As a rebellious and
iconoclastic 18-year-old, if I had been told that Taylor was wicked and wrong and I must
ignore his books, I would have hurried to study them deeply. But since I was cleverly
informed that he was just mildly eccentric and prone to unjustified speculation, I neglected
him in order to concentrate on the many other writers we had to read.
Most of the surprising material presented here is hardly hidden or kept under
lock-and-key. Nearly all the books are easily available at Amazon or even freely readable
on the Internet, many of the authors have received critical and scholarly acclaim, and in
some cases their works have sold in the millions. Yet this important material has been
almost entirely ignored or dismissed by the popular media that shapes the common beliefs of
our society. So we must necessarily begin to wonder what other massive falsehoods may have
been similarly promoted by that media, perhaps involving incidents of the recent past or
even the present day. And those latter events do have enormous practical significance.
Being the Guardian, of course, their prescription is that people should make a more
sincere effort to support the Reporters of Truth, such as the Guardian. In their retrograde
Left vs Right world, it's still up to the 'goodthinkers' to preserve our liberties from the
Boris Johnsons and Donald Trumps of the world. Never in a million years would they entertain
the possibility that Johnsons and Trumps come about because the Establishment–most
certainly including its MSM lackeys–is corrupt to its core.
As the Washington Post has it, "Democracy Dies in Darkness" -- neglecting to add, "We
supply the Darkness."
So now, instead of now [erroneously] believing, as we were all , er, "taught", that the
allies were the good guys of WW2, and that the Japs and Germans were the bad guys, we are now
supposed to believe the exact opposite, right, Mr Unz ? Jap and German governments now"good"-
WW2 allies governments now "bad"?
Reality fact: before, during and after WW2 and all the way up to this present
moment in time, the US, Soviet, French , Polish, Brit [etc. etc. ad infinitum] governments
lied; the German government lied, the Jap government lied. They ALL lied [and lie]!
Reality fact: It [lying] is what all governments everywhere all do – , all of
the time!
Reality fact: It's what they _must_ do to maintain power over their slave
populations [ see the Bernays quote below].
Regarding the fundamental nature of all governments, past, present, or future – this
"just" in :
"Because they are all ultimately funded via both direct and indirect theft [taxes], and
counterfeiting [via central bank monopolies], all governments are essentially, at their very
cores, 100% corrupt criminal scams which cannot be "reformed","improved", nor "limited" in
scope, simply because of their innate criminal nature." onebornfree
" The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the
masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen
mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our
country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested,
largely by men we have never heard of." Edward Bernays http://www.voltairenet.org/IMG/pdf/Bernays_Propaganda_in_english_.pdf
"The receptivity of the masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their
power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must
be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of
the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan." ~ Adolf Hitler
"My first rule- I don't believe anything the government tells me- nothing!- ZERO!" George
Carlin
@Tom67
Thank God we American's were pillars morality. LOL
Hitler proudly told his comrades just how closely he followed the progress of the
American eugenics movement. "I have studied with great interest," he told a fellow Nazi,
"the laws of several American states concerning prevention of reproduction by people whose
progeny would, in all probability, be of no value or be injurious to the racial stock."
Hitler even wrote a fan letter to American eugenic leader Madison Grant calling his
race-based eugenics book, The Passing of the Great Race his "bible."
Those measures are nothing special. They are typical for any war or any coup d'état to install totalitarian regime in the
country. Fritened people are easily manipulated. . The only question against whom the war was launched and what was real origin of
9/11. Here 1984 instantly comes to mind.
Next week will be the
18th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.
Politicians and bureaucrats wasted no time after that
carnage to unleash the Surveillance State on average Americans, treating every person like a
terrorist suspect.
Since the government failed to protect the public, Americans somehow
forfeited their constitutional right to privacy. Despite heroic efforts by former NSA staffer
Edward Snowden and a host of activists and freedom fighters, the government continues ravaging
American privacy.
Two of the largest leaps towards "1984" began in 2002.
Though neither the
Justice Department's Operation TIPS nor the Pentagon's Total Information Awareness program was
brought to completion, parcels and precedents from each program have profoundly influenced
subsequent federal policies.
In July 2002, the Justice Department unveiled plans for Operation TIPS -- the Terrorism
Information and Prevention System.
According to the Justice Department website, TIPS would
be "a nationwide program giving millions of American truckers, letter carriers, train conductors,
ship captains, utility employees, and others a formal way to report suspicious terrorist activity."
TIPSters would be people who, "in the daily course of their work, are in a unique position to serve
as extra eyes and ears for law enforcement." The feds aimed to recruit people in jobs that "make
them uniquely well positioned to understand the ordinary course of business in the area they serve,
and to identify things that are out of the ordinary." Homeland Security director Tom Ridge said
that observers in certain occupations "might pick up a break in the certain rhythm or pattern of a
community." The feds planned to enlist as many as 10 million people to watch other people's
"rhythms."
The Justice Department provided no definition of "suspicious behavior" to guide
vigilantes.
As
the public began to focus on the program's sweep, opposition surfaced; even the U.S. Postal Service
briefly balked at participating in the program. Director Ridge insisted that TIPS "is not a
government intrusion." He declared, "The last thing we want is Americans spying on Americans.
That's just not what the president is all about, and not what the TIPS program is all about."
Apparently, as long as the Bush administration did not announce plans to compel people to testify
about the peccadilloes of their neighbors and customers, TIPS was a certified freedom-friendly
program.
When Attorney General John Ashcroft was cross-examined by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) on TIPS at
a Judiciary Committee hearing on July 25, he insisted that
"the TIPS program is
something requested by industry to allow them to talk about anomalies that they encounter."
But, when George W. Bush first announced the program, he portrayed it as an administration
initiative. Did thousands of Teamsters Union members petition 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue over
"anomalies"? Senator Leahy asked whether reports to the TIPS hotline would become part of a federal
database with millions of unsubstantiated allegations against American citizens.
Ashcroft told Leahy, "I have recommended that there would be none, and I've been given assurance
that the TIPS program would not maintain a database." But Ashcroft could not reveal which federal
official had given him the assurance.
The ACLU's Laura Murphy observed,
"This is a program where people's activities,
statements, posters in their windows or on their walls, nationality, and religious practices will
be reported by untrained individuals without any relationship to criminal activity."
San Diego law professor Marjorie Cohn observed, "Operation TIPS will encourage neighbors to
snitch on neighbors and won't distinguish between real and fabricated tips. Anyone with a grudge or
vendetta against another can provide false information to the government, which will then enter the
national database."
On August 9, the Justice Department announced it was fine-tuning TIPS, abandoning any "plan to
ask thousands of mail carriers, utility workers, and others with access to private homes to report
suspected terrorist activity," the
Washington Post
reported. People who had enlisted to be
TIPSters received an email notice from Uncle Sam that "only those who work in the trucking,
maritime, shipping, and mass transit industries will be eligible to participate in this information
referral service." But the Justice Department continued refusing to disclose to the Senate
Judiciary Committee who would have access to the TIPS reports.
After the proposal created a fierce backlash across the political board, Congress passed
an amendment blocking its creation.
House Majority Leader Richard Armey (R-Tex.) attached
an amendment to homeland security legislation that declared, "Any and all activities of the federal
government to implement the proposed component program of the Citizen Corps known as Operation TIPS
are hereby prohibited." But the Bush administration and later the Obama administration pursued the
same information roundup with federally funded fusion centers that encouraged people to file
"suspicious activity reports" for a wide array of innocuous behavior -- reports that are dumped into
secret federal databases that can vex innocent citizens in perpetuity.
Operation TIPS illustrated how the momentum of intrusion spurred government to propose
programs that it never would have attempted before 9/11.
If Bush had proposed in August
2001 to recruit 10 million Americans to report any of their neighbors they suspected of acting
unusual or being potential troublemakers, the public might have concluded the president had gone
berserk.
Total Information Awareness: 300 million dossiers
The USA PATRIOT Act created a new Information Office in the Pentagon's Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
In January 2002, the White House chose retired admiral
John Poindexter to head the new office. White House spokesman Ari Fleischer explained, "Admiral
Poindexter is somebody who this administration thinks is an outstanding American, an outstanding
citizen, who has done a very good job in what he has done for our country, serving the military."
Cynics kvetched about Poindexter's five felony convictions for false testimony to Congress
and destruction of evidence during the investigation of the Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages exchange.
Poindexter's convictions were overturned by a federal appeals court, which cited the immunity
Congress granted his testimony.
Poindexter committed the new Pentagon office to achieving Total Information Awareness (TIA).
TIA's mission is "to detect, classify and identify foreign terrorists -- and decipher their plans --
and thereby enable the U.S. to take timely action to successfully preempt and defeat terrorist
acts,"
according to DARPA. According to Undersecretary of Defense Pete Aldridge, TIA would
seek to discover "connections between transactions -- such as passports; visas; work permits;
driver's licenses; credit cards; airline tickets; rental cars; gun purchases; chemical purchases --
and events -- such as arrests or suspicious activities and so forth." Aldridge agreed that every
phone call a person made or received could be entered into the database. With "voice recognition"
software, the actual text of the call could also go onto a permanent record.
TIA would also strive to achieve "Human Identification at a Distance" (HumanID),
including "Face Recognition," "Iris Recognition," and "Gait Recognition."
The Pentagon
issued a request for proposals to develop an "odor recognition" surveillance system that would help
the feds identify people by their sweat or urine -- potentially creating a wealth of new job
opportunities for deviants.
TIA's goal was to stockpile as much information as possible about everyone on Earth -- thereby
allowing government to protect everyone from everything.
New York Times
columnist William
Safire captured the sweep of the new surveillance system: "Every purchase you make with a credit
card, every magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every Web site you
visit and e-mail you send or receive, every academic grade you receive, every bank deposit you
make, every trip you book, and every event you attend -- all these transactions and communications
will go into what the Defense Department describes as 'a virtual, centralized grand database.'"
Columnist Ted Rall noted that the feds would even scan "veterinary records. The TIA believes that
knowing if and when Fluffy got spayed -- and whether your son stopped torturing Fluffy after you put
him on Ritalin -- will help the military stop terrorists before they strike."
Phil Kent, president of the Southeastern Legal Foundation, an Atlanta-based public-interest law
firm, warned that TIA was "the most sweeping threat to civil liberties since the Japanese-American
internment." The ACLU's Jay Stanley labeled TIA "the mother of all privacy invasions. It would
amount to a picture of your life so complete, it's equivalent to somebody following you around all
day with a video camera." A coalition of civil-liberties groups protested to Senate leaders, "There
are no systems of oversight or accountability contemplated in the TIA project. DARPA itself has
resisted lawful requests for information about the Program pursuant to the Freedom of Information
Act."
Bush administration officials were outraged by such criticisms.
Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld declared, "The hype and alarm approach is a disservice to the public . I
would recommend people take a nice deep breath. Nothing terrible is going to happen." Poindexter
promised that TIA would be designed so as to "preserve rights and protect people's privacy while
helping to make us all safer." (Poindexter was not under oath at the time of his statement.) The
TIA was defended on the basis that "nobody has been searched" until the feds decide to have him
arrested on the basis of data the feds snared. Undersecretary Aldridge declared, "It is absurd to
think that DARPA is somehow trying to become another police agency. DARPA's purpose is to
demonstrate the feasibility of this technology. If it proves useful, TIA will then be turned over
to the intelligence, counterintelligence, and law-enforcement communities as a tool to help them in
their battle against domestic terrorism." In January 2003, Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) learned
that the FBI was working on a memorandum of understanding with the Pentagon "for possible
experimentation" with TIA. Assistant Defense Secretary for Homeland Security Paul McHale confirmed,
in March 2003 testimony to Congress, that the Pentagon would turn TIA over to law-enforcement
agencies once the system was ready to roll.
DARPA responded to the surge of criticism by removing the Information Awareness Office
logo from the website.
The logo showed a giant green eye atop a pyramid, covering half the
globe with a peculiar yellow haze, accompanied by the motto "Scientia est Potentia" (Knowledge is
Power).
Shortly after DARPA completed a key research benchmark for TIA, Lt. Col. Doug Dyer, a DARPA
program manager, publicly announced in April 2003 that Americans are obliged to sacrifice some
privacy in the name of security:
"When you consider the potential effect of a terrorist
attack against the privacy of an entire population, there has to be some trade-off."
But nothing in the U.S. Constitution entitles the Defense Department to decide how much privacy or
liberty American citizens deserve.
In September 2003, Congress passed an amendment abolishing the Pentagon's Information Office and
ending TIA funding. But by that point, DARPA had already awarded 26 contracts for dozens of private
research projects to develop components for TIA. Salon.com reported,
"According to
people with knowledge of the program, TIA has now advanced to the point where it's much more than a
mere 'research project.' There is a working prototype of the system, and federal agencies outside
the Defense Department have expressed interest in it."
The U.S. Customs and Border
Patrol is already using facial recognition systems at 20 airports and the Transportation Security
Administration is expected to quickly follow suit.
Two weeks after the 9/11 attacks, Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo sent a secret memo
to the White House declaring that the Constitution's prohibition on unreasonable searches was null
and void:
"If the government's heightened interest in self-defense justifies the use of
deadly force, then it also certainly would justify warrantless searches."
That memo
helped set federal policy until it was publicly revealed after Barack Obama took office in 2009.
Unfortunately, that anti-Constitution, anti-privacy mindset unleashed many federal intrusions that
continue to this day, from the TSA to the National Security Agency to the FBI and Department of
Homeland Security.
In our time, we are endlessly brainwashed to love all the things that we can buy.
Meanwhile, people are being bombed, terrorized, sanctioned, etc. across the world ... We
can't complain since we got lots of toys to play with.
And here I think one has an enormous area in which the ultimate revolution could
function very well indeed, an area in which a great deal of control could be used by not
through terror, but by making life seem much more enjoyable than it normally does.
Enjoyable to the point, where as I said before, Human beings come to love a state of things
by which any reasonable and decent human standard they ought not to love and this I think
is perfectly possible.
"Happiness" with our toys is being used to keep us quiet.
"The dictatorships of tomorrow will deprive men of their freedom, but will give them in
exchange a happiness none the less real, as a subjective experience, for being chemically
induced. The pursuit of happiness is one of the traditional rights of man; unfortunately,
the achievement of happiness may turn out to be incompatible with another of man's rights
-- namely, liberty."
...press has complete control to filter everything to look rosey for them, demonize any
dissidents, and the masses fall for it. Why? They do not allow any counter arguments...
A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive
of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not
have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.
...bread and circus propaganda. They want to keep that way. Any one who dissents is a
"hater".
What I may call the messages of Brave New World, but it is possible to make people
contented with their servitude. I think this can be done. I think it has been done in the
past. I think it could be done even more effectively now because you can provide them with
bread and circuses and you can provide them with endless amounts of distractions and
propaganda.
...Pleasure trick keeps one from looking at what our rulers are doing.
As political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends correspondingly to
increase. And the dictator will do well to encourage that freedom it will help to reconcile
his subjects to the servitude which is their fate.
...using their MSM to make massive herds of humans all over the earth to love their
servitude to Zion uber alles.
The question of the next generation will not be one of how to liberate the masses, but
rather, how to make them love their servitude
"... Defensive programming is a method of prevention, rather than a form of cure. Compare this to debugging -- the act of removing bugs after they've bitten. Debugging is all about finding a cure. ..."
"... Defensive programming saves you literally hours of debugging and lets you do more fun stuff instead. Remember Murphy: If your code can be used incorrectly, it will be. ..."
"... Working code that runs properly, but ever-so-slightly slower, is far superior to code that works most of the time but occasionally collapses in a shower of brightly colored sparks ..."
"... Defensive programming avoids a large number of security problems -- a serious issue in modern software development. ..."
Okay, defensive programming won't remove program failures altogether. But problems will become less of a hassle and easier to fix.
Defensive programmers catch falling snowflakes rather than get buried under an avalanche of errors.
Defensive programming is a method of prevention, rather than a form of cure. Compare this to debugging -- the act of removing
bugs after they've bitten. Debugging is all about finding a cure.
WHAT DEFENSIVE PROGRAMMING ISN'T
There are a few common misconceptions about defensive programming . Defensive programming is not:
Error checking
If there are error conditions that might arise in your code, you should be checking for them anyway. This is not defensive
code. It's just plain good practice -- a part of writing correct code.
Testing
Testing your code is not defensive . It's another normal part of our development work. Test harnesses aren't defensive ; they
can prove the code is correct now, but won't prove that it will stand up to future modification. Even with the best test suite
in the world, anyone can make a change and slip it past untested.
Debugging
You might add some defensive code during a spell of debugging, but debugging is something you do after your program has failed.
Defensive programming is something you do to prevent your program from failing in the first place (or to detect failures
early before they manifest in incomprehensible ways, demanding all-night debugging sessions).
Is defensive programming really worth the hassle? There are arguments for and against:
The case against
Defensive programming consumes resources, both yours and the computer's.
It eats into the efficiency of your code; even a little extra code requires a little extra execution. For a single function
or class, this might not matter, but when you have a system made up of 100,000 functions, you may have more of a problem.
Each defensive practice requires some extra work. Why should you follow any of them? You have enough to do already, right?
Just make sure people use your code correctly. If they don't, then any problems are their own fault.
The case for
The counterargument is compelling.
Defensive programming saves you literally hours of debugging and lets you do more fun stuff instead. Remember Murphy: If
your code can be used incorrectly, it will be.
Working code that runs properly, but ever-so-slightly slower, is far superior to code that works most of the time
but occasionally collapses in a shower of brightly colored sparks.
We can design some defensive code to be physically removed in release builds, circumventing the performance issue. The
majority of the items we'll consider here don't have any significant overhead, anyway.
Defensive programming avoids a large number of security problems -- a serious issue in modern software development. More
on this follows.
As the market demands software that's built faster and cheaper, we need to focus on techniques that deliver results. Don't skip
the bit of extra work up front that will prevent a whole world of pain and delay later.
There is one danger to defensive coding: It can bury errors. Consider the following
code:
def drawLine(m, b, image, start = 0, stop = WIDTH):
step = 1
start = int(start)
stop = int(stop)
if stop-start < 0:
step = -1
print('WARNING: drawLine parameters were reversed.')
for x in range(start, stop, step):
index = int(m*x + b) * WIDTH + x
if 0 <= index < len(image):
image[index] = 255 # Poke in a white (= 255) pixel.
This function runs from start to stop . If stop is less than start , it just steps backward
and no error is reported .
Maybe we want this kind of error to be "fixed " during the
run -- buried -- but I think we should at least print a warning that the range is coming in
backwards. Maybe we should abort the program .
"... Code installed for defensive programming is not immune to defects, and you're just as likely to find a defect in defensive-programming code as in any other code -- more likely, if you write the code casually. Think about where you need to be defensive , and set your defensive-programming priorities accordingly. ..."
Originally from: Code Complete, Second Edition II. Creating High-Quality Code
8.3. Error-Handling Techniques
Too much of anything is bad, but too much whiskey is just enough. -- Mark Twain
Too much defensive programming creates problems of its own. If you check data passed as parameters in every conceivable way in
every conceivable place, your program will be fat and slow.
What's worse, the additional code needed for defensive programming adds
complexity to the software.
Code installed for defensive programming is not immune to defects, and you're just as likely to find
a defect in defensive-programming code as in any other code -- more likely, if you write the code casually. Think about where you
need to be defensive , and set your defensive-programming priorities accordingly.
Defensive Programming
General
Does the routine protect itself from bad input data?
Have you used assertions to document assumptions, including preconditions and postconditions?
Have assertions been used only to document conditions that should never occur?
Does the architecture or high-level design specify a specific set of error-handling techniques?
Does the architecture or high-level design specify whether error handling should favor robustness or correctness?
Have barricades been created to contain the damaging effect of errors and reduce the amount of code that has to be concerned
about error processing?
Have debugging aids been used in the code?
Have debugging aids been installed in such a way that they can be activated or deactivated without a great deal of fuss?
Is the amount of defensive programming code appropriate -- neither too much nor too little?
Have you used offensive- programming techniques to make errors difficult to overlook during development?
Exceptions
Has your project defined a standardized approach to exception handling?
Have you considered alternatives to using an exception?
Is the error handled locally rather than throwing a nonlocal exception, if possible?
Does the code avoid throwing exceptions in constructors and destructors?
Are all exceptions at the appropriate levels of abstraction for the routines that throw them?
Does each exception include all relevant exception background information?
Is the code free of empty catch blocks? (Or if an empty catch block truly is appropriate, is it documented?)
Security Issues
Does the code that checks for bad input data check for attempted buffer overflows, SQL injection, HTML injection, integer
overflows, and other malicious inputs?
Are all error-return codes checked?
Are all exceptions caught?
Do error messages avoid providing information that would help an attacker break into the system?
Assertions as special statement is questionable approach unless there is a switch to exclude them from the code. Other
then that BASH exit with condition or Perl die can serve equally well.
The main question here is which assertions should be in code only for debugging and which should be in production.
Notable quotes:
"... That an input parameter's value falls within its expected range (or an output parameter's value does) ..."
"... Many languages have built-in support for assertions, including C++, Java, and Microsoft Visual Basic. If your language doesn't directly support assertion routines, they are easy to write. The standard C++ assert macro doesn't provide for text messages. Here's an example of an improved ASSERT implemented as a C++ macro: ..."
"... Use assertions to document and verify preconditions and postconditions. Preconditions and postconditions are part of an approach to program design and development known as "design by contract" (Meyer 1997). When preconditions and postconditions are used, each routine or class forms a contract with the rest of the program . ..."
An assertion is code that's used during development -- usually a routine or macro -- that allows a program to check itself as
it runs. When an assertion is true, that means everything is operating as expected. When it's false, that means it has detected an
unexpected error in the code. For example, if the system assumes that a customerinformation file will never have more than 50,000
records, the program might contain an assertion that the number of records is less than or equal to 50,000. As long as the number
of records is less than or equal to 50,000, the assertion will be silent. If it encounters more than 50,000 records, however, it
will loudly "assert" that an error is in the program .
Assertions are especially useful in large, complicated programs and in high-reliability programs . They enable programmers to
more quickly flush out mismatched interface assumptions, errors that creep in when code is modified, and so on.
An assertion usually takes two arguments: a boolean expression that describes the assumption that's supposed to be true, and a
message to display if it isn't. Here's what a Java assertion would look like if the variable denominator were expected to
be nonzero:
Example 8-1. Java Example of an Assertion
assert denominator != 0 : "denominator is unexpectedly equal to 0.";
This assertion asserts that denominator is not equal to 0 . The first argument, denominator != 0 , is a boolean
expression that evaluates to true or false . The second argument is a message to print if the first argument is
false -- that is, if the assertion is false.
Use assertions to document assumptions made in the code and to flush out unexpected conditions. Assertions can be used to check
assumptions like these:
That an input parameter's value falls within its expected range (or an output parameter's value does)
That a file or stream is open (or closed) when a routine begins executing (or when it ends executing)
That a file or stream is at the beginning (or end) when a routine begins executing (or when it ends executing)
That a file or stream is open for read-only, write-only, or both read and write
That the value of an input-only variable is not changed by a routine
That a pointer is non-null
That an array or other container passed into a routine can contain at least X number of data elements
That a table has been initialized to contain real values
That a container is empty (or full) when a routine begins executing (or when it finishes)
That the results from a highly optimized, complicated routine match the results from a slower but clearly written routine
Of course, these are just the basics, and your own routines will contain many more specific assumptions that you can document
using assertions.
Normally, you don't want users to see assertion messages in production code; assertions are primarily for use during development
and maintenance. Assertions are normally compiled into the code at development time and compiled out of the code for production.
During development, assertions flush out contradictory assumptions, unexpected conditions, bad values passed to routines, and so
on. During production, they can be compiled out of the code so that the assertions don't degrade system performance.
Building Your Own Assertion Mechanism
Many languages have built-in support for assertions, including C++, Java, and Microsoft Visual Basic. If your language doesn't
directly support assertion routines, they are easy to write. The standard C++ assert macro doesn't provide for text messages.
Here's an example of an improved ASSERT implemented as a C++ macro:
Cross-Reference
Building your own assertion routine is a good example of programming "into" a language rather than just programming "in" a language.
For more details on this distinction, see
Program into Your
Language, Not in It .
Use error-handling code for conditions you expect to occur; use assertions for conditions that should. never occur Assertions
check for conditions that should never occur. Error-handling code checks for off-nominal circumstances that might not occur
very often, but that have been anticipated by the programmer who wrote the code and that need to be handled by the production code.
Error handling typically checks for bad input data; assertions check for bugs in the code.
If error-handling code is used to address an anomalous condition, the error handling will enable the program to respond to the
error gracefully. If an assertion is fired for an anomalous condition, the corrective action is not merely to handle an error gracefully
-- the corrective action is to change the program's source code, recompile, and release a new version of the software.
A good way to think of assertions is as executable documentation -- you can't rely on them to make the code work, but they can
document assumptions more actively than program -language comments can.
Avoid putting executable code into assertions. Putting code into an assertion raises the possibility that the compiler will eliminate
the code when you turn off the assertions. Suppose you have an assertion like this:
Example 8-3. Visual Basic Example of a Dangerous Use of an Assertion
The problem with this code is that, if you don't compile the assertions, you don't compile the code that performs the action.
Put executable statements on their own lines, assign the results to status variables, and test the status variables instead. Here's
an example of a safe use of an assertion:
Example 8-4. Visual Basic Example of a Safe Use of an Assertion
Use assertions to document and verify preconditions and postconditions. Preconditions and postconditions are part of an approach
to program design and development known as "design by contract" (Meyer 1997). When preconditions and postconditions are used, each
routine or class forms a contract with the rest of the program .
Further Reading
For much more on preconditions and postconditions, see Object-Oriented Software Construction (Meyer 1997).
Preconditions are the properties that the client code of a routine or class promises will be true before it calls the routine
or instantiates the object. Preconditions are the client code's obligations to the code it calls.
Postconditions are the properties that the routine or class promises will be true when it concludes executing. Postconditions
are the routine's or class's obligations to the code that uses it.
Assertions are a useful tool for documenting preconditions and postconditions. Comments could be used to document preconditions
and postconditions, but, unlike comments, assertions can check dynamically whether the preconditions and postconditions are true.
In the following example, assertions are used to document the preconditions and postcondition of the Velocity routine.
Example 8-5. Visual Basic Example of Using Assertions to Document Preconditions and Postconditions
Private Function Velocity ( _
ByVal latitude As Single, _
ByVal longitude As Single, _
ByVal elevation As Single _
) As Single
' Preconditions
Debug.Assert ( -90 <= latitude And latitude <= 90 )
Debug.Assert ( 0 <= longitude And longitude < 360 )
Debug.Assert ( -500 <= elevation And elevation <= 75000 )
...
' Postconditions Debug.Assert ( 0 <= returnVelocity And returnVelocity <= 600 )
' return value
Velocity = returnVelocity
End Function
If the variables latitude , longitude , and elevation were coming from an external source, invalid values
should be checked and handled by error-handling code rather than by assertions. If the variables are coming from a trusted, internal
source, however, and the routine's design is based on the assumption that these values will be within their valid ranges, then assertions
are appropriate.
For highly robust code, assert and then handle the error anyway. For any given error condition, a routine will generally use either
an assertion or error-handling code, but not both. Some experts argue that only one kind is needed (Meyer 1997).
But real-world programs and projects tend to be too messy to rely solely on assertions. On a large, long-lasting system, different
parts might be designed by different designers over a period of 5–10 years or more. The designers will be separated in time, across
numerous versions. Their designs will focus on different technologies at different points in the system's development. The designers
will be separated geographically, especially if parts of the system are acquired from external sources. Programmers will have worked
to different coding standards at different points in the system's lifetime. On a large development team, some programmers will inevitably
be more conscientious than others and some parts of the code will be reviewed more rigorously than other parts of the code. Some
programmers will unit test their code more thoroughly than others. With test teams working across different geographic regions and
subject to business pressures that result in test coverage that varies with each release, you can't count on comprehensive, system-level
regression testing, either.
In such circumstances, both assertions and error-handling code might be used to address the same error. In the source code for
Microsoft Word, for example, conditions that should always be true are asserted, but such errors are also handled by error-handling
code in case the assertion fails. For extremely large, complex, long-lived applications like Word, assertions are valuable because
they help to flush out as many development-time errors as possible. But the application is so complex (millions of lines of code)
and has gone through so many generations of modification that it isn't realistic to assume that every conceivable error will be detected
and corrected before the software ships, and so errors must be handled in the production version of the system as well.
Here's an example of how that might work in the Velocity example:
Example 8-6. Visual Basic Example of Using Assertions to Document Preconditions and Postconditions
Private Function Velocity ( _
ByRef latitude As Single, _
ByRef longitude As Single, _
ByRef elevation As Single _
) As Single
' Preconditions
Debug.Assert ( -90 <= latitude And latitude <= 90 ) <-- 1
Debug.Assert ( 0 <= longitude And longitude < 360 ) |
Debug.Assert ( -500 <= elevation And elevation <= 75000 ) <-- 1
...
' Sanitize input data. Values should be within the ranges asserted above,
' but if a value is not within its valid range, it will be changed to the
' closest legal value
If ( latitude < -90 ) Then <-- 2
latitude = -90 |
ElseIf ( latitude > 90 ) Then |
latitude = 90 |
End If |
If ( longitude < 0 ) Then |
longitude = 0 |
ElseIf ( longitude > 360 ) Then <-- 2
...
(1) Here is assertion code.
(2) Here is the code that handles bad input data at run time.
"... Defensive programming means always checking whether an operation succeeded. ..."
"... Exceptional usually means out of the ordinary and unusually good, but when it comes to errors, the word has a more negative meaning. The system throws an exception when some error condition happens, and if you don't catch that exception, it will give you a dialog box that says something like "your program has caused an error -- –goodbye." ..."
There are five desirable properties of good programs : They should be robust, correct,
maintainable, friendly, and efficient. Obviously, these properties can be prioritized in
different orders, but generally, efficiency is less important than correctness; it is nearly
always possible to optimize a well-designed program , whereas badly written "lean and mean"
code is often a disaster. (Donald Knuth, the algorithms guru, says that "premature optimization
is the root of all evil.")
Here I am mostly talking about programs that have to be used by non-expert users. (You can
forgive programs you write for your own purposes when they behave badly: For example, many
scientific number-crunching programs are like bad-tempered sports cars.) Being unbreakable is
important for programs to be acceptable to users, and you, therefore, need to be a little
paranoid and not assume that everything is going to work according to plan. ' Defensive
programming ' means writing programs that cope with all common errors. It means things like not
assuming that a file exists, or not assuming that you can write to any file (think of a
CD-ROM), or always checking for divide by zero.
In the next few sections I want to show you how to 'bullet-proof' programs . First, there is
a silly example to illustrate the traditional approach (check everything), and then I will
introduce exception handling.
Bullet-Proofing Programs
Say you have to teach a computer to wash its hair. The problem, of course, is that computers
have no common sense about these matters: "Lather, rinse, repeat" would certainly lead to a
house flooded with bubbles. So you divide the operation into simpler tasks, which return true
or false, and check the result of each task before going on to the next one. For example, you
can't begin to wash your hair if you can't get the top off the shampoo bottle.
Defensive programming means always checking whether an operation succeeded. So the following
code is full of if-else statements, and if you were trying to do something more
complicated than wash hair, the code would rapidly become very ugly indeed (and the code would
soon scroll off the page):
void wash_hair()
{
string msg = "";
if (! find_shampoo() || ! open_shampoo()) msg = "no shampoo";
else {
if (! wet_hair()) msg = "no water!";
else {
if (! apply_shampoo()) msg = "shampoo application error";
else {
for(int i = 0; i < 2; i++) // repeat twice
if (! lather() || ! rinse()) {
msg = "no hands!";
break; // break out of the loop
}
if (! dry_hair()) msg = "no towel!";
}
}
}
if (msg != "") cerr << "Hair error: " << msg << endl;
// clean up after washing hair
put_away_towel();
put_away_shampoo();
}
Part of the hair-washing process is to clean up afterward (as anybody who has a roommate
soon learns). This would be a problem for the following code, now assuming that
wash_hair() returns a string:
string wash_hair()
{
...
if (! wet_hair()) return "no water!"
if (! Apply_shampoo()) return "application error!";
...
}
You would need another function to call this wash_hair() , write out the message
(if the operation failed), and do the cleanup. This would still be an improvement over the
first wash_hair() because the code doesn't have all those nested blocks.
NOTE
Some people disapprove of returning from a function from more than one place, but this is
left over from the days when cleanup had to be done manually. C++ guarantees that any object is
properly cleaned up, no matter from where you return (for instance, any open file objects are
automatically closed). Besides, C++ exception handling works much like a return ,
except that it can occur from many functions deep. The following section describes this and
explains why it makes error checking easier. Catching Exceptions
An alternative to constantly checking for errors is to let the problem (for example,
division by zero, access violation) occur and then use the C++ exception-handling mechanism to
gracefully recover from the problem.
Exceptional usually means out of the ordinary and
unusually good, but when it comes to errors, the word has a more negative meaning. The system
throws an exception when some error condition happens, and if you don't catch that exception,
it will give you a dialog box that says something like "your program has caused an error --
–goodbye."
You should avoid doing that to your users -- at the very least you should give
them a more reassuring and polite message.
If an exception occurs in a try block, the system tries to match the exception with
one (or more) catch blocks.
try { // your code goes inside this block
... problem happens - system throws exception
}
catch(Exception) { // exception caught here
... handle the problem
}
It is an error to have a try without a catch and vice versa. The ON
ERROR clause in Visual Basic achieves a similar goal, as do signals in C; they allow you
to jump out of trouble to a place where you can deal with the problem. The example is a
function div() , which does integer division. Instead of checking whether the divisor
is zero, this code lets the division by zero happen but catches the exception. Any code within
the try block can safely do integer division, without having to worry about the
problem. I've also defined a function bad_div() that does not catch the exception,
which will give a system error message when called:
int div(int i, int j)
{
int k = 0;
try {
k = i/j;
cout << "successful value " << k << endl;
}
catch(IntDivideByZero) {
cout << "divide by zero\n";
}
return k;
}
;> int bad_div(int i,int j) { return i/j; }
;> bad_div(10,0);
integer division by zero <main> (2)
;> div(2,1);
successful value 1
(int) 1
;> div(1,0);
divide by zero
(int) 0
This example is not how you would normally organize things. A lowly function like
div() should not have to decide how an error should be handled; its job is to do a
straightforward calculation. Generally, it is not a good idea to directly output error
information to cout or cerr because Windows graphical user interface programs
typically don't do that kind of output. Fortunately, any function call, made from within a
try block, that throws an exception will have that exception caught by the
catch block. The following is a little program that calls the (trivial) div()
function repeatedly but catches any divide-by-zero errors:
// div.cpp
#include <iostream>
#include <uc_except.h>
using namespace std;
int div(int i, int j)
{ return i/j; }
int main() {
int i,j,k;
cout << "Enter 0 0 to exit\n";
for(;;) { // loop forever
try {
cout << "Give two numbers: ";
cin >> i >> j;
if (i == 0 && j == 0) return 0; // exit program!
int k = div(i,j);
cout << "i/j = " << k << endl;
} catch(IntDivideByZero) {
cout << "divide by zero\n";
}
}
return 0;
}
Notice two crucial things about this example: First, the error-handling code appears as a
separate exceptional case, and second, the program does not crash due to divide-by-zero errors
(instead, it politely tells the user about the problem and keeps going).
Note the inclusion of <uc_except.h> , which is a nonstandard extension
specific to UnderC. The ISO standard does not specify any hardware error exceptions, mostly
because not all platforms support them, and a standard has to work everywhere. So
IntDivideByZero is not available on all systems. (I have included some library code
that implements these hardware exceptions for GCC and BCC32; please see the Appendix for more
details.)
How do you catch more than one kind of error? There may be more than one catch
block after the try block, and the runtime system looks for the best match. In some
ways, a catch block is like a function definition; you supply an argument, and you can
name a parameter that should be passed as a reference. For example, in the following code,
whatever do_something() does, catch_all_errors() catches it -- specifically a
divide-by-zero error -- and it catches any other exceptions as well:
The standard exceptions have a what() method, which gives more information about
them. Order is important here. Exception includes HardwareException , so
putting Exception first would catch just about everything. When an exception is
thrown, the system picks the first catch block that would match that exception. The
rule is to put the catch blocks in order of increasing generality.
Throwing
Exceptions
You can throw your own exceptions, which can be of any type, including C++ strings. (In
Chapter 8 ,
"Inheritance and Virtual Methods," you will see how you can create a hierarchy of errors, but
for now, strings and integers will do fine.) It is a good idea to write an error-generating
function fail() , which allows you to add extra error-tracking features later. The
following example returns to the hair-washing algorithm and is even more paranoid about
possible problems:
void fail(string msg)
{
throw msg;
}
void wash_hair()
{
try {
if (! find_shampoo()) fail("no shampoo");
if (! open_shampoo()) fail("can't open shampoo");
if (! wet_hair()) fail("no water!");
if (! apply_shampoo())fail("shampoo application error");
for(int i = 0; i < 2; i++) // repeat twice
if (! lather() || ! rinse()) fail("no hands!");
if (! dry_hair()) fail("no towel!");
}
catch(string err) {
cerr << "Known Hair washing failure: " << err << endl;
}
catch(...) {
cerr << "Catastropic failure\n";
}
// clean up after washing hair
put_away_towel();
put_away_shampoo();
}
In this example, the general logic is clear, and the cleanup code is always run, whatever
disaster happens. This example includes a catch-all catch block at the end. It is a
good idea to put one of these in your program's main() function so that it can deliver
a more polite message than "illegal instruction." But because you will then have no information
about what caused the problem, it's a good idea to cover a number of known cases first. Such a
catch-all must be the last catch block; otherwise, it will mask more specific
errors.
It is also possible to use a trick that Perl programmers use: If the fail()
function returns a bool , then the following expression is valid C++ and does exactly
what you want:
If dry_hair() returns true, the or expression must be true, and there's no
need to evaluate the second term. Conversely, if dry_hair() returns false, the
fail() function would be evaluated and the side effect would be to throw an exception.
This short-circuiting of Boolean expressions applies also to && and is
guaranteed by the C++ standard.
Once you've adopted this mind-set, you can then rewrite your prototype and follow a set of
eight strategies to make your code as solid as possible.
While I work on the real version, I
ruthlessly follow these strategies and try to remove as many errors as I can, thinking like
someone who wants to break the software.
Never Trust Input. Never trust the data you're given and always validate it.
Prevent Errors. If an error is possible, no matter how probable, try to prevent it.
Fail Early and Openly Fail early, cleanly, and openly, stating what happened, where, and how
to fix it.
Document Assumptions Clearly state the pre-conditions, post-conditions, and invariants.
Prevention over Documentation. Don't do with documentation that which can be done with code
or avoided completely.
Automate Everything Automate everything, especially testing.
Simplify and Clarify Always simplify the code to the smallest, cleanest form that works
without sacrificing safety.
Question Authority Don't blindly follow or reject rules.
These aren't the only strategies, but they're the core things I feel programmers have to
focus on when trying to make good, solid code. Notice that I don't really say exactly how to do
these. I'll go into each of these in more detail, and some of the exercises will actually cover
them extensively.
"... Different responsibilities should go into different components, layers, or modules of the application. Each part of the program should only be responsible for a part of the functionality (what we call its concerns) and should know nothing about the rest. ..."
"... The goal of separating concerns in software is to enhance maintainability by minimizing ripple effects. A ripple effect means the propagation of a change in the software from a starting point. This could be the case of an error or exception triggering a chain of other exceptions, causing failures that will result in a defect on a remote part of the application. It can also be that we have to change a lot of code scattered through multiple parts of the code base, as a result of a simple change in a function definition. ..."
"... Rule of thumb: Well-defined software will achieve high cohesion and low coupling. ..."
This is a design principle that is applied at multiple levels. It is not just about the
low-level design (code), but it is also relevant at a higher level of abstraction, so it will
come up later when we talk about architecture.
Different responsibilities should go into different components, layers, or modules of the
application. Each part of the program should only be responsible for a part of the
functionality (what we call its concerns) and should know nothing about the rest.
The goal of separating concerns in software is to enhance maintainability by minimizing
ripple effects. A ripple effect means the propagation of a change in the software from a
starting point. This could be the case of an error or exception triggering a chain of other
exceptions, causing failures that will result in a defect on a remote part of the application.
It can also be that we have to change a lot of code scattered through multiple parts of the
code base, as a result of a simple change in a function definition.
Clearly, we do not want these scenarios to happen. The software has to be easy to change. If
we have to modify or refactor some part of the code that has to have a minimal impact on the
rest of the application, the way to achieve this is through proper encapsulation.
In a similar way, we want any potential errors to be contained so that they don't cause
major damage.
This concept is related to the DbC principle in the sense that each concern can be enforced
by a contract. When a contract is violated, and an exception is raised as a result of such a
violation, we know what part of the program has the failure, and what responsibilities failed
to be met.
Despite this similarity, separation of concerns goes further. We normally think of contracts
between functions, methods, or classes, and while this also applies to responsibilities that
have to be separated, the idea of separation of concerns also applies to Python modules,
packages, and basically any software component. Cohesion and coupling
These are important concepts for good software design.
On the one hand, cohesion means that objects should have a small and well-defined purpose,
and they should do as little as possible. It follows a similar philosophy as Unix commands that
do only one thing and do it well. The more cohesive our objects are, the more useful and
reusable they become, making our design better.
On the other hand, coupling refers to the idea of how two or more objects depend on each
other. This dependency poses a limitation. If two parts of the code (objects or methods) are
too dependent on each other, they bring with them some undesired consequences:
No code reuse : If one function depends too much on a particular object, or takes too
many parameters, it's coupled with this object, which means that it will be really difficult
to use that function in a different context (in order to do so, we will have to find a
suitable parameter that complies with a very restrictive interface)
Ripple effects : Changes in one of the two parts will certainly impact the other, as they
are too close
Low level of abstraction : When two functions are so closely related, it is hard to see
them as different concerns resolving problems at different levels of abstraction
Rule of thumb: Well-defined software will achieve high cohesion and low coupling.
"... Check all values in function/method parameter lists. ..."
"... Are they all the correct type and size? ..."
"... You should always initialize variables and not depend on the system to do the initialization for you. ..."
"... taking the time to make your code readable and have the code layout match the logical structure of your design is essential to writing code that is understandable by humans and that works. Adhering to coding standards and conventions, keeping to a consistent style, and including good, accurate comments will help you immensely during debugging and testing. And it will help you six months from now when you come back and try to figure out what the heck you were thinking here. ..."
By defensive programming we mean that your code should protect itself from bad data. The bad
data can come from user input via the command line, a graphical text box or form, or a file.
Bad data can also come from other routines in your program via input parameters like in the
first example above.
How do you protect your program from bad data? Validate! As tedious as it sounds, you should
always check the validity of data that you receive from outside your routine. This means you
should check the following
Check the number and type of command line arguments.
Check file operations.
Did the file open?
Did the read operation return anything?
Did the write operation write anything?
Did we reach EOF yet?
Check all values in function/method parameter lists.
Are they all the correct type and size?
You should always initialize variables and not depend on the system to do the
initialization for you.
What else should you check for? Well, here's a short list:
Null pointers (references in Java)
Zeros in denominators
Wrong type
Out of range values
As an example, here's a C program that takes in a list of house prices from a file and
computes the average house price from the list. The file is provided to the program from the
command line.
/* * program to compute the average selling price of a set of homes. * Input comes from a file that is passed via the command line.
* Output is the Total and Average sale prices for * all the homes and the number of prices in the file. * * jfdooley */ #include <stdlib.h> #include <stdio.h>
int main(int argc, char **argv) { FILE *fp; double totalPrice, avgPrice; double price; int numPrices;
/* check that the user entered the correct number of args */ if (argc < 2) { fprintf(stderr,"Usage: %s <filename>\n", argv[0]); exit(1); }
/* try to open the input file */ fp = fopen(argv[1], "r"); if (fp == NULL) { fprintf(stderr, "File Not Found: %s\n", argv[1]); exit(1); } totalPrice = 0.0; numPrices = 0;
avgPrice = totalPrice / numPrices; printf("Number of houses is %d\n", numPrices); printf("Total Price of all houses is $%10.2f\n", totalPrice); printf("Average Price per house is $%10.2f\n", avgPrice);
return 0; }
Assertions Can Be Your Friend
Defensive programming means that using assertions is a great idea if your language supports
them. Java, C99, and C++ all support assertions. Assertions will test an expression that you
give them and if the expression is false, it will throw an error and normally abort the program
. You should use error handling code for errors you think might happen – erroneous user
input, for example – and use assertions for errors that should never happen
– off by one errors in loops, for example. Assertions are great for testing
your program , but because you should remove them before giving programs to customers (you
don't want the program to abort on the user, right?) they aren't good to use to validate input
data.
Exceptions and Error Handling
We've talked about using assertions to handle truly bad errors, ones that should never occur
in production. But what about handling "normal" errors? Part of defensive programming is to
handle errors in such a way that no damage is done to any data in the program or the files it
uses, and so that the program stays running for as long as possible (making your program
robust).
Let's look at exceptions first. You should take advantage of built-in exception handling in
whatever programming language you're using. The exception handling mechanism will give you
information about what bad thing has just happened. It's then up to you to decide what to do.
Normally in an exception handling mechanism you have two choices, handle the exception
yourself, or pass it along to whoever called you and let them handle it. What you do and how
you do it depends on the language you're using and the capabilities it gives you. We'll talk
about exception handling in Java later.
Error Handling
Just like with validation, you're most likely to encounter errors in input data, whether
it's command line input, file handling, or input from a graphical user interface form. Here
we're talking about errors that occur at run time. Compile time and testing errors are covered
in the next chapter on debugging and testing. Other types of errors can be data that your
program computes incorrectly, errors in other programs that interact with your program , the
operating system for instance, race conditions, and interaction errors where your program is
communicating with another and your program is at fault.
The main purpose of error handling is to have your program survive and run correctly for as
long as possible. When it gets to a point where your program cannot continue, it needs to
report what is wrong as best as it can and then exit gracefully. Exiting is the last resort for
error handling. So what should you do? Well, once again we come to the "it depends" answer.
What you should do depends on what your program's context is when the error occurs and what its
purpose is. You won't handle an error in a video game the same way you handle one in a cardiac
pacemaker. In every case, your first goal should be – try to recover.
Trying to recover from an error will have different meanings in different programs .
Recovery means that your program needs to try to either ignore the bad data, fix it, or
substitute something else that is valid for the bad data. See McConnell 8
for a further discussion of error handling. Here are a few examples of how to recover from
errors,
You might just ignore the bad data and keep going , using the next valid piece of
data. Say your program is a piece of embedded software in a digital pressure gauge. You
sample the sensor that returns the pressure 60 times a second. If the sensor fails to deliver
a pressure reading once, should you shut down the gauge? Probably not; a reasonable thing to
do is just skip that reading and set up to read the next piece of data when it arrives. Now
if the pressure sensor skips several readings in a row, then something might be wrong with
the sensor and you should do something different (like yell for help).
__________
8 McConnell, 2004.
You might substitute the last valid piece of data for a missing or wrong piece.
Taking the digital pressure gauge again, if the sensor misses a reading, since each time
interval is only a sixtieth of a second, it's likely that the missing reading is very close
to the previous reading. In that case you can substitute the last valid piece of data for
the missing value.
There may be instances where you don't have any previously recorded valid data. Your
application uses an asynchronous event handler, so you don't have any history of data, but
your program knows that the data should be in a particular range. Say you've prompted the
user for a salary amount and the value that you get back is a negative number. Clearly no one
gets paid a salary of negative dollars, so the value is wrong. One way (probably not the
best) to handle this error is to substitute the closest valid value in the range , in
this case a zero. Although not ideal, at least your program can continue running with a valid
data value in that field.
In C programs , nearly all system calls and most of the standard library functions return
a value. You should test these values! Most functions will return values that indicate
success (a non-negative integer) or failure (a negative integer, usually -1). Some functions
return a value that indicates how successful they were. For example, the
printf() family of functions returns the number of characters printed, and the
scanf() family returns the number of input elements read. Most C functions also
set a global variable named errno that contains an integer value that is the
number of the error that occurred. The list of error numbers is in a header file called
errno.h . A zero on the errno variable indicates success. Any other
positive integer value is the number of the error that occurred. Because the system tells you
two things, (1) an error occurred, and (2) what it thinks is the cause of the error, you can
do lots of different things to handle it, including just reporting the error and
bailing out. For example, if we try to open a file that doesn't exist, the program
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <errno.h>
if ((fd = fopen(fname, "r")) == NULL) {
perror("File not opened");
exit(1);
}
printf("File exists\n");
return 0;
}
will return the error message File not opened: No such file or
directory
if the file really doesn't exist. The function perror() reads the
errno variable and using the string provided plus a standard string
corresponding to the error number, writes an error message to the console's standard
error output. This program could also prompt the user for a different file name or it
could substitute a default file name. Either of these would allow the program to
continue rather than exiting on the error.
There are other techniques to use in error handling and recovery. These examples should
give you a flavor of what you can do within your program . The important idea to remember
here is to attempt recovery if possible, but most of all, don't fail silently!
Exceptions in Java
Some programming languages have built-in error reporting systems that will tell you when an
error occurs, and leave it up to you to handle it one way or another. These errors that would
normally cause your program to die a horrible death are called exceptions . Exceptions
get thrown by the code that encounters the error. Once something is thrown, it's usually
a good idea if someone catches it. This is the same with exceptions. So there are two
sides to exceptions that you need to be aware of when you're writing code:
When you have a piece of code that can encounter an error you throw an exception.
Systems like Java will throw some exceptions for you. These exceptions are listed in the
Exception class in the Java API documentation (see http://download.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api
). You can also write your own code to throw exceptions. We'll have an example later in the
chapter.
Once an exception is thrown, somebody has to catch it. If you don't do anything in
your program , this uncaught exception will percolate through to the Java Virtual
Machine (the JVM) and be caught there. The JVM will kill your program and provide you with a
stack backtrace that should lead you back to the place that originally threw the exception
and show you how you got there. On the other hand, you can also write code to encapsulate the
calls that might generate exceptions and catch them yourself using Java's S
try...catch mechanism. Java requires that some exceptions must be caught.
We'll see an example later.
Java has three different types of exceptions – checked exceptions, errors, and
unchecked exceptions. Checked exceptions are those that you should catch and handle
yourself using an exception handler; they are exceptions that you should anticipate and handle
as you design and write your code. For example, if your code asks a user for a file name, you
should anticipate that they will type it wrong and be prepared to catch the resulting
FileNotFoundException . Checked exceptions must be caught.
Errors on the other hand are exceptions that usually are related to things happening
outside your program and are things you can't do anything about except fail gracefully. You
might try to catch the error exception and provide some output for the user, but you will still
usually have to exit.
The third type of exception is the runtime exception . Runtime exceptions all result
from problems within your program that occur as it runs and almost always indicate errors in
your code. For example, a NullPointerException nearly always indicates a
bug in your code and shows up as a runtime exception. Errors and runtime exceptions are
collectively called unchecked exceptions (that would be because you usually don't try to
catch them, so they're unchecked). In the program below we deliberately cause a runtime
exception:
public class TestNull {
public static void main(String[] args) {
String str = null;
int len = str.length();
}
}
This program will compile just fine, but when you run it you'll get this as output:
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NullPointerException
at TestNull.main(TestNull.java:4)
This is a classic runtime exception. There's no need to catch this exception because the
only thing we can do is exit. If we do catch it, the program might look like:
public
class TestNullCatch {
public static void main(String[] args) {
String str = null;
try {
int len = str.length();
} catch (NullPointerException e) {
System.out.println("Oops: " + e.getMessage());
System.exit(1);
}
}
}
which gives us the output
Oops: null
Note that the getMessage() method will return a String containing
whatever error message Java deems appropriate – if there is one. Otherwise it returns a
null . This is somewhat less helpful than the default stack trace above.
Let's rewrite the short C program above in Java and illustrate how to catch a checked
exception .
import java.io.*; import java.util.*;
public class FileTest
public static void main(String [] args) { File fd = new File("NotAFile.txt"); System.out.println("File exists " + fd.exists());
By the way, if we don't use the try-catch block in the above program ,
then it won't compile. We get the compiler error message
FileTestWrong.java:11: unreported exception java.io.FileNotFoundException; must be caught
or declared to be thrown
FileReader fr = new FileReader(fd);
^1 error
Remember, checked exceptions must be caught. This type of error doesn't show up for
unchecked exceptions. This is far from everything you should know about exceptions and
exception handling in Java; start digging through the Java tutorials and the Java API!
The Last Word on Coding
Coding is the heart of software development. Code is what you produce. But coding is hard;
translating even a good, detailed design into code takes a lot of thought, experience, and
knowledge, even for small programs . Depending on the programming language you are using and
the target system, programming can be a very time-consuming and difficult task.
That's why
taking the time to make your code readable and have the code layout match the logical structure
of your design is essential to writing code that is understandable by humans and that works.
Adhering to coding standards and conventions, keeping to a consistent style, and including
good, accurate comments will help you immensely during debugging and testing. And it will help
you six months from now when you come back and try to figure out what the heck you were
thinking here.
And finally,
I am rarely happier than when spending an entire day programming my computer to perform
automatically a task that it would otherwise take me a good ten seconds to do by
hand.
"... How do you protect your program from bad data? Validate! As tedious as it sounds, you should always check the validity of data that you receive from outside your routine. This means you should check the following ..."
"... Check the number and type of command line arguments. ..."
By defensive programming we mean that your code should protect itself from bad data. The bad
data can come from user input via the command line, a graphical text box or form, or a file.
Bad data can also come from other routines in your program via input parameters like in the
first example above.
How do you protect your program from bad data? Validate! As tedious as it sounds, you should
always check the validity of data that you receive from outside your routine. This means you
should check the following
Check the number and type of command line arguments.
Check file operations.
Did the file open?
Did the read operation return anything?
Did the write operation write anything?
Did we reach EOF yet?
Check all values in function/method parameter lists.
Are they all the correct type and size?
You should always initialize variables and not depend on the system to do the
initialization for you.
What else should you check for? Well, here's a short list:
Null pointers (references in Java)
Zeros in denominators
Wrong type
Out of range values
As an example, here's a C program that takes in a list of house prices from a file and
computes the average house price from the list. The file is provided to the program from the
command line.
/* * program to compute the average selling price of a set of homes. * Input comes from a file that is passed via the command line.
* Output is the Total and Average sale prices for * all the homes and the number of prices in the file. * * jfdooley */ #include <stdlib.h> #include <stdio.h>
int main(int argc, char **argv) { FILE *fp; double totalPrice, avgPrice; double price; int numPrices;
/* check that the user entered the correct number of args */ if (argc < 2) { fprintf(stderr,"Usage: %s <filename>\n", argv[0]); exit(1); }
/* try to open the input file */ fp = fopen(argv[1], "r"); if (fp == NULL) { fprintf(stderr, "File Not Found: %s\n", argv[1]); exit(1); } totalPrice = 0.0; numPrices = 0;
avgPrice = totalPrice / numPrices; printf("Number of houses is %d\n", numPrices); printf("Total Price of all houses is $%10.2f\n", totalPrice); printf("Average Price per house is $%10.2f\n", avgPrice);
return 0; }
Assertions Can Be Your Friend
Defensive programming means that using assertions is a great idea if your language supports
them. Java, C99, and C++ all support assertions. Assertions will test an expression that you
give them and if the expression is false, it will throw an error and normally abort the program
. You should use error handling code for errors you think might happen – erroneous user
input, for example – and use assertions for errors that should never happen
– off by one errors in loops, for example. Assertions are great for testing
your program , but because you should remove them before giving programs to customers (you
don't want the program to abort on the user, right?) they aren't good to use to validate input
data.
Exceptions and Error Handling
We've talked about using assertions to handle truly bad errors, ones that should never occur
in production. But what about handling "normal" errors? Part of defensive programming is to
handle errors in such a way that no damage is done to any data in the program or the files it
uses, and so that the program stays running for as long as possible (making your program
robust).
Let's look at exceptions first. You should take advantage of built-in exception handling in
whatever programming language you're using. The exception handling mechanism will give you
information about what bad thing has just happened. It's then up to you to decide what to do.
Normally in an exception handling mechanism you have two choices, handle the exception
yourself, or pass it along to whoever called you and let them handle it. What you do and how
you do it depends on the language you're using and the capabilities it gives you. We'll talk
about exception handling in Java later.
Error Handling
Just like with validation, you're most likely to encounter errors in input data, whether
it's command line input, file handling, or input from a graphical user interface form. Here
we're talking about errors that occur at run time. Compile time and testing errors are covered
in the next chapter on debugging and testing. Other types of errors can be data that your
program computes incorrectly, errors in other programs that interact with your program , the
operating system for instance, race conditions, and interaction errors where your program is
communicating with another and your program is at fault.
The main purpose of error handling is to have your program survive and run correctly for as
long as possible. When it gets to a point where your program cannot continue, it needs to
report what is wrong as best as it can and then exit gracefully. Exiting is the last resort for
error handling. So what should you do? Well, once again we come to the "it depends" answer.
What you should do depends on what your program's context is when the error occurs and what its
purpose is. You won't handle an error in a video game the same way you handle one in a cardiac
pacemaker. In every case, your first goal should be – try to recover.
Trying to recover from an error will have different meanings in different programs .
Recovery means that your program needs to try to either ignore the bad data, fix it, or
substitute something else that is valid for the bad data. See McConnell 8
for a further discussion of error handling. Here are a few examples of how to recover from
errors,
You might just ignore the bad data and keep going , using the next valid piece of
data. Say your program is a piece of embedded software in a digital pressure gauge. You
sample the sensor that returns the pressure 60 times a second. If the sensor fails to deliver
a pressure reading once, should you shut down the gauge? Probably not; a reasonable thing to
do is just skip that reading and set up to read the next piece of data when it arrives. Now
if the pressure sensor skips several readings in a row, then something might be wrong with
the sensor and you should do something different (like yell for help).
__________
8 McConnell, 2004.
You might substitute the last valid piece of data for a missing or wrong piece.
Taking the digital pressure gauge again, if the sensor misses a reading, since each time
interval is only a sixtieth of a second, it's likely that the missing reading is very close
to the previous reading. In that case you can substitute the last valid piece of data for
the missing value.
There may be instances where you don't have any previously recorded valid data. Your
application uses an asynchronous event handler, so you don't have any history of data, but
your program knows that the data should be in a particular range. Say you've prompted the
user for a salary amount and the value that you get back is a negative number. Clearly no one
gets paid a salary of negative dollars, so the value is wrong. One way (probably not the
best) to handle this error is to substitute the closest valid value in the range , in
this case a zero. Although not ideal, at least your program can continue running with a valid
data value in that field.
In C programs , nearly all system calls and most of the standard library functions return
a value. You should test these values! Most functions will return values that indicate
success (a non-negative integer) or failure (a negative integer, usually -1). Some functions
return a value that indicates how successful they were. For example, the
printf() family of functions returns the number of characters printed, and the
scanf() family returns the number of input elements read. Most C functions also
set a global variable named errno that contains an integer value that is the
number of the error that occurred. The list of error numbers is in a header file called
errno.h . A zero on the errno variable indicates success. Any other
positive integer value is the number of the error that occurred. Because the system tells you
two things, (1) an error occurred, and (2) what it thinks is the cause of the error, you can
do lots of different things to handle it, including just reporting the error and
bailing out. For example, if we try to open a file that doesn't exist, the program
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <errno.h>
if ((fd = fopen(fname, "r")) == NULL) {
perror("File not opened");
exit(1);
}
printf("File exists\n");
return 0;
}
will return the error message File not opened: No such file or
directory
if the file really doesn't exist. The function perror() reads the
errno variable and using the string provided plus a standard string
corresponding to the error number, writes an error message to the console's standard
error output. This program could also prompt the user for a different file name or it
could substitute a default file name. Either of these would allow the program to
continue rather than exiting on the error.
There are other techniques to use in error handling and recovery. These examples should
give you a flavor of what you can do within your program . The important idea to remember
here is to attempt recovery if possible, but most of all, don't fail silently!
At TruePublica we have written endlessly about the continued slow strangulation of civil liberties and human rights in Britain.
We have warned about the rise of a
techno-Stasi-state
where technology is harnessed and used against civilians without any debate or indeed any real legal framework. We have alerted the
public on the illegal mass data collections by the government and
subsequent loss of much it by MI5 who should not have had it all in the first place. We warned against '
digital strip
searches ' – an activity of the police of the victims in rape cases, and the fact that Britain is becoming a
database state . At TruePublica
we have tried to press home the story that surveillance by the state on such a scale, described as the most intrusive in the Western
world – is not just illegal, it's immoral and dangerous. (see our surveillance database
HERE ).
Here is more evidence of just how dangerous and out of hand this creeping surveillance architecture is becoming. An investigation
by Big Brother Watch has uncovered a facial recognition 'epidemic'
across privately owned sites in the UK. The civil liberties campaign group has found major property developers, shopping centres,
museums, conference centres and casinos using the technology in the UK.
Millions of shoppers scanned
Their investigation uncovered the use of live facial recognition in Sheffield's Meadowhall , one of the biggest shopping
centres in the North of England, in secret police trials that took place last year. The trial could have scanned the faces of
over 2 million visitors.
The shopping centre is owned by British Land, which owns large areas within London including parts of Paddington, Broadgate,
Canada Water and Ealing Broadway. Each site's privacy policy says facial recognition may be in use, although British Land insists
only Meadowhall has used the surveillance so far.
Last week, the Financial Times revealed that the privately owned Kings Cross estate in London was using facial recognition,
whilst Canary Wharf is considering following suit. The expose prompted widespread concerns and the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan,
to write to the estate to express his concerns. The Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham has launched an investigation.
Last year, the Trafford Centre in Manchester was pressured to stop using live facial recognition surveillance following an
intervention by the Surveillance Camera Commissioner. It was estimated that up to 15 million people were scanned during the operation.
" Dark irony" of China exhibition visitors scanned
Big Brother Watch's investigation has also revealed that Liverpool's World Museum scanned visitors with facial recognition
surveillance during its exhibition, "China's First Emperor and the Terracotta Warriors" in 2018. Director of Big Brother Watch
Silkie Carlo described it as "dark irony" noting that "this authoritarian surveillance tool is rarely seen outside of China" and
warning that "many of those scanned will have been school children".
The museum is part of the National Museums Liverpool group, which also includes the International Slavery Museum, the
Museum of Liverpool and other museums and art galleries. The museum group said it is "currently testing the feasibility of using
similar technology in the future".
" Eroding freedom of association"
Big Brother Watch's investigation also found that the Millennium Point conference centre in Birmingham uses facial recognition
surveillance "at the request of law enforcement", according to its privacy policy. In recent years, the area surrounding the conference
centre has been used for demonstrations by trade unionists, football fans and anti-racism campaigners. The centre refused to give
further information about its past or present uses of facial recognition surveillance. Millennium Point is soon to host a 'hackathon'.
A number of casinos and betting shops also have policies that refer to their use of facial recognition technology including
Ladbrokes, Coral and Hippodrome Casino London.
Director of Big Brother Watch, Silkie Carlo, said:
There is an epidemic of facial recognition in the UK.
The collusion between police and private companies in building these surveillance nets around popular spaces is deeply
disturbing. Facial recognition is the perfect tool of oppression and the widespread use we've found indicates we're facing
a privacy emergency.
We now know that many millions of innocent people will have had their faces scanned with this surveillance without knowing
about it, whether by police or by private companies.
The idea of a British museum secretly scanning the faces of children visiting an exhibition on the first emperor of China
is chilling. There is a dark irony that this authoritarian surveillance tool is rarely seen outside of China.
Facial recognition surveillance risks making privacy in Britain extinct.
Parliament must follow in the footsteps of legislators in the US and urgently ban this authoritarian surveillance from
public spaces.
"... Today, it might be argued, Americans have been plunged into our own bizarre version of 1984 . In our world, Donald Trump has, in some sense, absorbed into his own person more or less everything dystopian in the vicinity. ..."
"... In some strange fashion, he and his administration already seem like a combination of the Ministry of Truth (a ministry of eternal lies ), the memory hole (down which the past, especially the Obama legacy and the president's own discarded statements , disappear daily), the two-minutes-hate sessions and hate week that are the essence of any of his rallies ("lock her up!," " send her back! "), and recently the "hate" slaughter of Mexicans and Hispanics in El Paso, Texas, by a gunman with a Trumpian "Hispanic invasion of Texas" engraved in his brain. And don't forget Big Brother. ..."
"... In some sense, President Trump might be thought of as Big Brother flipped. In The Donald's version of Orwell's novel, he isn't watching us every moment of the day and night, it's we who are watching him in an historically unprecedented way. ..."
"... In his book, he created a nightmare vision of something like the Communist Party of the Stalin-era Soviet Union perpetuating itself into eternity by constantly regenerating and reinforcing a present-moment of ultimate power. For him, dystopia was an accentuated version of just such a forever, a "huge, accurately planned effort to freeze history at a particular moment of time," as a document in the book puts it, to "arrest the course of history" for "thousands of years." ..."
"... In other words, with the American president lending a significant hand, we may make it to 2084 far sooner than anyone expected. With that in mind, let's return for a moment to 1984 . As no one who has read Orwell's book is likely to forget, its mildly dissident anti-hero, Winston Smith, is finally brought into the Ministry of Love by the Thought Police to have his consciousness retuned to the needs of the Party. In the process, he's brutally tortured until he can truly agree that 2 + 2 = 5. Only when he thinks he's readjusted his mind to fit the Party's version of the world does he discover that his travails are anything but over. ..."
I, Winston Smith I mean, Tom Engelhardt have not just been reading a dystopian novel, but,
it seems, living one -- and I suspect I've been living one all my life.
Yes, I recently reread George Orwell's classic 1949 novel, 1984 . In it, Winston Smith, a secret opponent of the totalitarian world of Oceania,
one of three great imperial superpowers left on planet Earth, goes down for the count at the
hands of Big Brother. It was perhaps my third time reading it in my 75 years on this
planet.
Since I was a kid, I've always had a certain fascination for dystopian fiction. It started,
I think, with War of the
Worlds , that ur-alien-invasion-from-outer-space novel in which Martians land in
southern England and begin tearing London apart. Its author, H.G. Wells, wrote it at the end of
the nineteenth century, evidently to give his English readers a sense of what it might have
felt like to be living in Tasmania, the island off the coast of Australia, and have the
equivalent of Martians -- the British, as it happened -- appear in your world and begin to
destroy it (and your culture with it).
I can remember, at perhaps age 13, reading that book under the covers by flashlight when I
was supposed to be asleep; I can remember, that is, being all alone, chilled (and thrilled) to
the bone by Wells' grim vision of civilizational destruction. To put this in context: in 1957,
I would already have known that I was living in a world of potential civilizational destruction
and that the Martians were here. They were then called the Russians, the Ruskies, the Commies,
the Reds. I would only later grasp that we (or we, too) were Martians on this planet.
The world I inhabited was, of course, a post- Hiroshima , post-
Nagasaki one. I was born on July 20, 1944, just a year and a few days before my country
dropped atomic bombs on those two Japanese cities, devastating them in blasts of a kind never
before experienced and killing more
than 200,000 people. Thirteen years later, I had already become inured to scenarios of the
most dystopian kinds of global destruction -- of a sort that would have turned those Martians
into pikers -- as the U.S. and the Soviet Union (in a distant second place) built up their
nuclear arsenals at a staggering pace.
Nuclear obliteration had, by then, become part of our everyday way of life. After all, what
American of a certain age who lived in a major city can't remember, on some otherwise perfectly
normal day, air-raid sirens suddenly beginning to howl outside your classroom window as the
streets emptied? They instantly called up a vision of a world in ashes. Of course, we children
had only a vague idea of what had happened under those mushroom clouds that rose over Hiroshima
and Nagasaki. As we huddled under our desks, hands over heads, " ducking
and covering " like Bert the Turtle while a radio on the
teacher's desk blared Conelrad
warnings , we knew enough, however, to realize that those desks and hands were unlikely to
save us from the world's most powerful weaponry. The message being delivered wasn't one of
safety but of ultimate vulnerability to Russian nukes. After such tests, as historian Stephen
Weart recalled in his book Nuclear Fear ,
"The press reported with ghoulish precision how many millions of Americans 'died' in each mock
attack."
If those drills didn't add up to living an everyday vision of the apocalypse as a child,
what would? I grew up, in other words, with a new reality: for the first time in history,
humanity had in its hands Armageddon-like possibilities of a sort
previously left to the gods. Consider
, for instance, the U.S. military's Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP) of 1960 for a
massive nuclear
strike on the Communist world. It was, we now know, meant to deliver more than 3,200
nuclear weapons to 1,060 targets, including at least 130 cities. Official, if then secret,
estimates of casualties ran to 285 million dead and 40 million injured (and probably
underestimated the longer term effects of radiation).
In the early 1960s, a commonplace on the streets of New York where I lived was the
symbol for "fallout
shelters" (as they were then called), the places you would head for during just such an
impending global conflagration. I still remember how visions of nuclear destruction populated
my dreams (or rather nightmares) and those of my friends, as some would later admit to me. To
this day, I can recall the feeling of sudden heat on one side of my body as a nuclear bomb went
off on the distant horizon of one of those dreams. Similarly, I recall sneaking into a Broadway
movie theater to see On the
Beach with two friends -- kids of our age weren't allowed into such films without
parents -- and so getting a glimpse, popcorn in hand, of what a devastated, nuclearized San
Francisco might look like. That afternoon at that film, I also lived through a
post-nuclear-holocaust world's end in Australia with no less than Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, and
Fred Astaire for company.
An All-American Hate Week
So my life -- and undoubtedly yours, too -- has been lived, at least in part, as if in a
dystopian novel. And certainly since November 2016 -- since, that is, the election of Donald
Trump -- the feeling (for me, at least) of being in just such a world, has only grown stronger.
Worse yet, there's nothing under the covers by flashlight about The Donald or his invasive
vision of our American future. And this time around, as a non-member of his "base," it's been
anything but thrilling to the bone.
It was with such a feeling growing in me that, all these years later, I once again picked up
Orwell's classic novel and soon began wondering whether Donald Trump wasn't our very own
idiosyncratic version of Big Brother. If you remember, when Orwell finished the book in 1948
(he seems to have flipped that year for the title), he imagined an England, which was part of
Oceania, one of the three superpowers left on the planet. The other two were Eurasia
(essentially the old Soviet Union) and Eastasia (think: a much-expanded China). In the book,
the three of them are constantly at war with each other on their borderlands (mostly in South
Asia and Africa), a war that is never meant to be either decisive or to end.
In Oceania's Airstrip One (the former England), where Winston Smith is a minor functionary
in the Ministry of Truth (a ministry of lies, of course), the Party rules eternally in a world
in which -- a classic Orwellian formulation -- "WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS
STRENGTH." It's a world of "inner" Party members (with great privilege), an outer circle like
Smith who get by, and below them a vast population of impoverished "proles."
It's also a world in which the present is always both the future and the past, while every
document, every newspaper, every bit of history is constantly being rewritten -- Smith's job --
to make it so. At the same time, documentation of the actual past is tossed down "the memory
hole" and incinerated. It's a world in which a "telescreen" is in every room, invariably
announcing splendid news (that might have been terrible news in another time). That screen can
also spy on you at just about any moment of your life. In that, Orwell, who lived at a time
when TV was just arriving, caught something essential about the future worlds of surveillance
and social media.
In his dystopian world, English itself is being reformulated into something called Newspeak,
so that, in a distant future, it will be impossible for anyone to express a non-Party-approved
thought. Meanwhile, whichever of those other two superpowers Oceania is at war with at a given
moment, as well as a possibly mythical local opposition to the Party, are regularly subjected
to a mass daily "two minutes hate" session and periodic "hate weeks." Above all, it's a world
in which, on those telescreens and posters everywhere, the mustachioed face of Big Brother, the
official leader of the Party -- "Big Brother is watching you!" -- hovers over everything,
backed up by a Ministry of Love (of, that is, imprisonment, reeducation, torture, pain, and
death).
That was Orwell's image of a kind of Stalinist Soviet Union perfected for a future of
everlasting horror. Today, it might be argued, Americans have been plunged into our own bizarre
version of 1984 . In our world, Donald Trump has, in some sense, absorbed into his own
person more or less everything dystopian in the vicinity.
In some strange fashion, he and his
administration already seem like a combination of the Ministry of Truth (a ministry of
eternal lies ), the memory hole (down which the past, especially the
Obama legacy and the president's own
discarded statements , disappear daily), the two-minutes-hate sessions and hate week that
are the essence of any of his rallies ("lock her up!," " send her
back! "), and recently the "hate" slaughter of
Mexicans and Hispanics in El Paso, Texas, by a gunman with a Trumpian
"Hispanic invasion of Texas" engraved in his brain. And don't forget Big Brother.
In some sense, President Trump might be thought of as Big Brother flipped. In The Donald's
version of Orwell's novel, he isn't watching us every moment of the day and night, it's we who
are watching him in an historically unprecedented way. In what I've called the
White Ford Bronco presidency , nothing faintly like the media's 24/7 focus on him has ever
been matched. No human being has ever been attended to, watched, or discussed this way -- his
every gesture, tweet, passing comment, half-verbalized thought, slogan, plan, angry outburst,
you name it. In the past, such coverage only went with, say, a presidential assassination, not
everyday life in the White House (or at
Bedminster , Mar-a-Lago, his rallies, on Air Force One, wherever).
Room 101 (in 2019)
Think of Donald Trump's America as, in some sense, a satirical version of 1984 in
crazed formation. Not surprisingly, however, Orwell, remarkable as he was, fell short, as we
all do, in imagining the future. What he didn't see as he rushed to finish that
novel before his own life ended makes the Trumpian present far more potentially dystopian than
even he might have imagined. In his book, he created a nightmare vision of something like the
Communist Party of the Stalin-era Soviet Union perpetuating itself into eternity by constantly
regenerating and reinforcing a present-moment of ultimate power. For him, dystopia was an
accentuated version of just such a forever, a "huge, accurately planned effort to freeze
history at a particular moment of time," as a document in the book puts it, to "arrest the
course of history" for "thousands of years."
Yes, in 1948, Orwell obviously knew about Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the weaponry that went
with them. (In 1984 , he even mentions the use of such weaponry in the then-future
1950s.) What he didn't imagine in his book was a dystopian world not of the grimmest kind of
ongoingness but of endings, of ultimate destruction. He didn't conjure up a nuclear apocalypse
set off by one of his three superpowers and, of course, he had no way of imagining another kind
of potential apocalypse that has become increasingly familiar to us all: climate change.
Unfortunately, on both counts Donald Trump is proving dystopian indeed. He is, after all,
the president who threatened
to unleash "fire and fury like the world has never seen" on North Korea (before
falling in love with its dictator). He only recently claimed he could
achieve victory in the almost 18-year-old Afghan War "in a week" by wiping that country "off
the face of the Earth" and killing "10 million people." For the first time, his generals
used
the "Mother of all Bombs," the most powerful weapon in the U.S. conventional arsenal (with a
mushroom cloud that, in a test at least, could be seen for 20 miles), in that same country,
clearly to impress him.
More recently,
beginning with its withdrawal from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, his
administration has started trashing the Cold War-era nuclear architecture of restraint that
kept the great-power arsenals under some control. In the process, it's clearly helping to
launch a
wildly expensive new nuclear arms race on Planet Earth. And keep in mind that this is happening
at a time when we know that a relatively localized nuclear war between regional powers like
India
and Pakistan (whose politicians are once again at each other's throats
over Kashmir ) could create a global nuclear winter and
starve to death up to a
billion people.
... ... ...
And keep in mind as well that our own twisted version of Big Brother, that guy with the
orange hair instead of the mustache, could be around to be watched for significantly longer,
should he win the election of 2020. (His polling numbers have, on the whole, been slowly rising ,
not falling in these years.)
In other words, with the American president lending a significant hand, we may make it to
2084 far sooner than anyone expected. With that in mind, let's return for a moment to
1984 . As no one who has read Orwell's book is likely to forget, its mildly dissident
anti-hero, Winston Smith, is finally brought into the Ministry of Love by the Thought Police to
have his consciousness retuned to the needs of the Party. In the process, he's brutally
tortured until he can truly agree that 2 + 2 = 5. Only when he thinks he's readjusted his mind
to fit the Party's version of the world does he discover that his travails are anything but
over.
He still has to visit Room 101. As his interrogator tells him, "You asked me once what was
in Room 101. I told you that you knew the answer already. Everyone knows it. The thing that is
in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world." And that "worst thing" is always adjusted to the
specific terrors of the specific prisoner.
So here's one way to think of where we are at this moment on Planet Earth: Americans -- all
of humanity, in fact -- may already be in Room 101, whether we know it or not, and the truth
is, by this steaming summer, that most of us should know it.
It's obviously time to act on a global scale. Tell that to Big Brother.
tomdispatch.com The views of individual contributors do not necessarily represent those of
the Strategic Culture Foundation. Tags: Big BrotherOrwell
This is a great device for shortcuts. I like the part where the driver only runs once on a computer then the setting will remember
even unplug and use it on another computer. The key setting is very easy straightforward. The keys: control alt and shift can
be set as combo key with other keys. The window key is standalone can't do a combo (too bad). The two side extra slot USB2 are
ready, not usb3. The key plate can be lifted up for label custom key. Most other devices do the same and cost more than tripple.
As a developer, I type the same statements repeatedly. I wanted a programmable keypad so the most common operations could be
incorporated into a single key press. The Elsra PK-2068 is perfect for that task.
This is a sturdy, well-made keypad and the keys feel of excellent quality when pressed. The Windows software provided is easy
to understand and use. I did have an issue with the software on one PC which I suspect was a USB HID conflict, but switching to
another PC solved that problem. The programmes are saved onto the keypad itself, which means I can pick up the PK-2068 and plug
it into my Linux desktop and the programmed keys just work.
Whilst troubleshooting the programming issue, I was in contact with Elsre Customer Support, who responded very quickly, and
offered exceptional service.
Overall I am extremely happy with this purchase and recommend the keypad over the many others I looked at when purchasing.
>
Hardware: Excellently built. USB hub works well. Would be better if it were ergonomically angled like a keyboard instead of
being flat, but the size and convenience make up for it. Customizable key covers are sturdy and remain in place even with extended
use. Sturdy, appears to be quality materials. I already have plans to buy a second one.
The software to program it is pretty terrible. No help or instructions, so you just have to figure it out on your own. It doesn't
let you save different configurations as files, so if you want multiple configurations, you'd pretty much have to have the entire
application stored on different machines. Also, you can not type the characters you want to program; you have to manually click
each one from an on-screen keyboard, which is very tedious. You can't easily edit the text, either: If you want to change a character,
you need to click on the "delete" button over and over 'til you reach the character, then you have to re-do everything using the
onscreen keyboard. Presumably, they figure that you'll only have to program it once, so they don't expend much effort on making
the software user friendly.
It's really hard to know how to rate such a good product that comes with such terrible software. Once it's programmed the way
you want it, it's great- but getting there is a real hassle.
This sturdy little keyboard is easy to program with up to 30 characters for each key. And 3-stroke combos like Ctrl+Shift+-(Ctru
plus Shift plus -) appear only to count as one Character toward this limit - at least according to the character counter in the
program. You will see from the included photo that I have set up mine for use with a specialty computer program (for Indexing
Genealogical Records). The two AHK-labeled keys in the lower left trigger AutoHotkey actions I have separately programmed that
assign more complex actions to certain key combos, so yes, it will work with AutoHotkey. The keypress is very quiet and satisfying.
Regarding Support, I had trouble triggering the modifier keys (Ctrl, Shift, etc.) with the specified double-click, possibly
due to a problem with my mouse, but a third click worked for me. I reached out to Support, and they were very responsive and helpful.
I have ordered a second PK-2068 for use with another program we use regularly in our household. For the price and considering
both its capabilities and restrictions, I am very pleased with the value and effectiveness of this product for my purposes, and
highly recommend it for use in similar situations.
For your information, I made the little paper labels in the photo by creating a Table in MS Word with cell size .56" x .56"
(after experimenting) and used AlternateGothic2 BT font in font size 11 for most of the cells. Transparent keycaps and a keycap
puller come with the device and it is easy to pull a keycap, place your label, and replace the transparent keycap over it.
--EDIT 6/17/2019--
The company contacted me and sent me a newer revised keypad with software capable of adding delays between keystrokes, I'm going
to try it asap but my needs changed so it's low on my priority list. Seems like good customer support though!
--EDIT 7/12/2018---
The company that manufactures this keypad contacted me after I asked about adding a delay function, and they're considering adding
it! I'm excited they care about customer service. This keypad works as intended so I upped my rating to 4 stars. It's inability
to have pauses is a bummer but it's still a good keypad and should work for most modern programs. Older programs written to only
accept human-speed inputs may struggle with instant keystrokes. Hopefully the timing feature will make it to a hardware/software
revision.
---EDIT 5/29/2018---
We've been running into either driver issues, or timing issues. Windows 7 installs four drivers for this keypad, and we're not
sure what the problem is but whenever we're using it, our data entry program crashes. It COULD be that the keypad doesn't allow
pauses, so it types so fast the program we use crashes.
We also had a "driver power state failure" while trying to reboot a computer that was affected. Besides the issues above, it's
a good keypad and definitely worth a try, if you have a good modern program to use it with. Personally, our business uses an older
system (auto star) that may not be liking the fast keystrokes.
---original review:
Awesome keypad, immense help at work, and the PRICE is appropriate!!! Unlike some keys that cost over $80 for a simple pad,
this one is $34.90 at time of writing.
We use tons of hotkeys for everyday work at my job, and an entire programmable keyboard was unnecessary and expensive, and
a good number pad can come in handy. This has both, and it has a delete key! Not that you couldn't program one in, but this has
it already, along with "00" for you number crunchers, and still has 4 programmable keys in number pad mode.
The rubber dome keyswitches feel fine, and they bounce well. They aren't rough, slidey, or goopy like some keyboards. These
feel fine and have a tactile pop at the bottom as you'd expect from a decent rubber dome.
The programming is easy, you download the program or install from the disk, run the .exe, and click the keys on the graphic
GUI that you want programmed to the selected button. You can do key combinations or strings of text like you'd expect from other
macro setups. There's a good LED button up top to show what mode you're in; programmable 24 button keypad, or a number pad with
just four open programmable buttons up top.
The macros are stored on the keypad, so if you have several computers, you don't have to worry about loosing your macro programs.
The only two gripes I have so far, which I consider slight; the 5 key doesn't have a bump, so finding the "home row" of the
keypad with your middle finger on the 5 isn't easy. I stuck a rubber pad on it, problem fixed. A drop of hot glue, keycap sticker,
whatever. fixed.
The other thing some may like is a "pause" feature in macros for slower programs or scripts that require a pause in keystrokes.
I don't need it, but some may.
I used a basic template for the caps.
I'm tempted to buy the whole programmable board, but then I'd have two number pads. Still tempting though, as I could use this
for just hotkeys.
If I need hotkeys at home for photoshop or something I may very well buy another one of these. The only improvement I could see
would be hotkeys that are program specific, or a third layer of macros.
Pros:
All keys (except Enter) are programmable
See-through keycaps pop out and label can be inserted
Programming accepts all combinations of Shift, Alt and Ctrl
Key travel with positive feedback, yet quiet
Unit provides two USB 2.0 ports
Solid construction.
Cons:
Keypad must be manually programmed, i.e., cannot save and retrieve macros from configuration files
Wish the Enter key can be programmed as well
Keys do not auto-repeat.
"... I favor the notion that the Internet's gift of vastly more accessible information and greater and less expensive communication is exposing more of corruption in government that continues an ancient trend, this web site being a sterling example. ..."
Quite a few people couldn't help but notice that the country was shifting into a
dis-informational mode several years ago. So much for the Information Age, the Internet and
hand held ( communication ) devices to increase awareness. It was noticed by some folks even
here at CN that tendencies had come ito play that were reminiscent of Orwell's dystopian yet
fictional accounts in the novel 1984. This entire Russiagate episode could just as easily
have come from 1984's Ministry of Information as our own Intelligence Services and might have
been just as boring if it had . Meanwhile us , prols, just go with the flow and don't really
care. Are things that much different than they have ever been? I rem,ember the Waterdate
hearings and the Iran-Contra Hearings, Ken Starr's Investigation. I'm a little to young to
remember the Warren Commission or Senator Joe McCarthy and the Red Scare but I do remember
the 9/11 Commission and WMGs in Iraq.. I remember wrote a paper on Propaganda films in WW II.
Is this episode really all that different?
@ "Quite a few people couldn't help but notice that the country was shifting into a
dis-informational mode several years ago. So much for the Information Age, the Internet and
hand held ( communication ) devices to increase awareness. "
You address a topic I've pondered long and hard. Although I can cite scant evidence, I
can't help but wonder: Are we instead only noticing -- because of the far wider availability
of information via the Internet -- a disinformation phenomenon that is perhaps centuries old
if not still older?
Huxley's Brave New World was published in 1931, Orwell's 1984 in 1949. Dickens' Bleakhouse
was serialized in 1852-53. All can be fairly said to deal with a perception that those who
control government are dishonest and corrupt, based on then-current norms. E.g., Dickens
noted in the preface of his first edition that his fictional Jarndyce and Jarndyce largely
paralleled the sadly real Thellusson v Woodford. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thellusson_v_Woodford
Such precedents argue against the "disinformational mode" being of recent origin.
I favor the notion that the Internet's gift of vastly more accessible information and
greater and less expensive communication is exposing more of corruption in government that
continues an ancient trend, this web site being a sterling example.
While email and web activity of employees is definitely monitored, all other monitoring
usually is pretty fragmentary. Often on a corporate smartphone there are two zones -- secure zone
where you access corporate network and email and private zone where you have access to the
internet via you provider and traffic is not monitored other then for the volume.
Keeping track of all those details (and some of them will be wrong) is just too expensive and
few corporation outside FIRE sector so that.
In short anything that opens company to a lawsuit will be monitored, but outside of that
companies actually are not interested in the information collection as it opens them to
additional liability in save of suicides and such.
Mining data from social media is a different complex topic and requires a separate
article.
Notable quotes:
"... From there, the company even sees as Chet logs onto the guest Wi-Fi connections at places like the coffee shop in the morning. Many companies require additional authentication when they try to access company information from unsecure Wi-Fi networks. ..."
"... Then, as Chet gets to his desk, his web browsing is tracked along with his email. New software breaks down how workers interact with email and how quickly colleagues reply in an attempt to see which employees are most influential . Some software on company computers even snaps screenshots every 30 seconds to evaluate productivity and hours worked. ..."
"... Even Chet's phone conversations can be recorded, transcribed and monitored. Companies use this information to find subject matter experts and measure productivity. Even conference room discussions and meetings can now be recorded and analyzed by software. ..."
Orwell, Inc.: How Your Employer Spies On You From When You Wake Up Until You Go To Bed
An increasing number of large companies are using data from employees' electronic devices to
track such personal details like when you they wake up, where they go for coffee in the
morning, their whereabouts throughout the entire day, and what time they go to bed according to
a new Wall
Street Journal article. What's the company explanation for this type of spying?
"An increasing number of companies are keeping track of such information to flag
potentially suspicious activity and measure work-life balance," the article claims.
The article walks through the day in the life of a fictional worker, Chet. It starts by
noting that his employer logs the time and his location when he first wakes up to check his
e-mail in the morning.
From there, the company even sees as Chet logs onto the guest Wi-Fi connections at
places like the coffee shop in the morning. Many companies require additional authentication
when they try to access company information from unsecure Wi-Fi networks.
Then, a Bluetooth device and his ID badge mark what time he arrives at the office while
tracking his movement around the building. These technologies are supposedly used to see what
teams collaborate frequently and to make sure that employees aren't accessing unauthorized
areas.
Then, as Chet gets to his desk, his web browsing is tracked along with his email. New
software breaks down how workers interact with email and how quickly colleagues reply in an
attempt to see which employees are most influential . Some software on company computers even
snaps screenshots every 30 seconds to evaluate productivity and hours worked.
Even Chet's phone conversations can be recorded, transcribed and monitored. Companies
use this information to find subject matter experts and measure productivity. Even conference
room discussions and meetings can now be recorded and analyzed by software.
At the end of the day, if Chet goes to the gym or for a run, the company will know that too
and just how many calories he has burned: his fitness tracker logs how many steps he takes and
what exercise, if any, he is doing. Companies then use that information to determine how
frequently employees are exercising and whether or not they should be paying for health and
fitness services.
They retain firms that track us on our social media accounts. Supposedly to defend against
workplace violence threats. And then there are the cameras. We never really know. Just do my
job and keep personal use of company resources to a minimum.
The operation known as "LifeLog" was replaced the very day that Face Book came into
being?
Life Log : The objective of the LifeLog concept was "to be able to trace the 'threads' of
an individual's life in terms of events, states, and relationships", and it has the ability
to "take in all of a subject's experience, from phone numbers dialed and e-mail messages
viewed to every breath taken, step made and place gone". [1]
My takeaway from all this is that many, perhaps most, human institutions are corrupt and
that there is no basis from which most people are able to discern truth from lies or right
from wrong. This explains the ability of the Power Elite to easily divide people against each
other. For example, you cannot debate a Liberal because they have their basis for truth on
their personal feeling or emotions. Many conservatives do as well, but they are closer in
their thingking to the foundation from which truth sits upon.
Edward Snowden, former NSA employee. Snowden is an absolute supporter of encryption of all
stored and transmitted content. Now there are many applications that have encryption
features. And among them there are common and well-known messengers, such as, for example,
WhatsApp, Telegram and others.
The former NSA agent also advises to secure his computer, in particular, the hard drive.
On the Internet you can find instructions on how to do this. Usually used special software.
For example, for Windows, there is a program preinstalled in advanced versions of the OS --
BitLocker, for Mac -- FileVault. Thus, if the computer is stolen, the attacker will not be
able to read your data.
Password Managers A useful thing that most people do not even think about. Such programs
allow you to keep your passwords in order - to create unique keys and store them. According
to Snowden, one of the most common problems with online privacy is leaks.
Tor. The former NSA official calls the anonymous Tor network "the most important
technological project to ensure the confidentiality of those currently used." He stated that
he uses it on a daily basis. Tor allows you to "cover up traces" on the Internet, that is, it
provides anonymity, making it difficult to determine the person's IP address and
location.
Also, Snowden told how to avoid total surveillance. For example, special services that can
remotely turn on a microphone or camera on a smartphone and start listening. The answer is
simple - pull out the microphone and camera modules from the device. Instead, it is proposed
to use an external accessory and disconnect from the selfie and never use it.
The only safe way is to abstain as much as possible, which is now next to impossible.
Security is only as protected as the weakest link. Consider a person who uses their smart
phone giving Google or Apple the permissions needed to use their OS's and apps; we do not
even know exactly how much info we agreed to give away. Consider all the contact info that
your friends, relatives, work or other organizations you associate with have on their devices
and how vulnerable they make it; they are not as cautious as you and some people using these
things do not even think about security; it never occurs to them.. .. just some musing on my
part.
Jeez, I used to sign a quarterly affirmation that I complied with all of the companies
electronic communication monitoring policies...and they made us sign that we understood that
they had climbed up our *** and pitched a tent.
One of the reasons they had to find a replacement for me when I quit.
If you're using your employer's devices, facilities, or networks, you should assume they
are tracking what you're doing, and they have every right to do so. When I buy your company's
products or services, I don't want to have to pay for your time spent messing around at
work.
I can't read the article since it's behind a paywall, but I don't see how your waking and
sleeping time and "work life balance" could be tracked unless you are using your employer's
devices or networks outside of work. Which is friggin stupid if you do it.
Actually it doesnt work like that... Chet isn't informed of this happening. The fact that
the company does this is buried in vague language in the 500 page employee handbook that Chet
has to sign when he is hired. Chet is just like anyone else with a company provided
electronic device. All companies monitor and track everything they can with the electronic
devices they provide. If you have one and th think your company doesnt do it... you are
naive.
Chet has the ability to determine when and where he uses the work-provided devices. And
why does work have access to his fitness tracker? Supplied by his employer too? Really, Chet
had options
Not with me... I have a personal phone and when I am not at work I keep my work phone at
home turned off. My emails are forwarded to my personal device and any voicemail I get also
gets forwarded to my personal device. I never place personal calls with my work phone and I
turn it off the second I leave work to go home.
What a waste of resources. If you want to see what I do, just ask. I'll show you how I
accomplish my work-related duties. How I manage my time at work. Where I go to cry and regret
my life choices.
"... Huxley died at 5:20pm, London time, on 22 November 1963. About ten minutes later, CS Lewis died. Just under an hour after that, of course, JFK was shot and killed in Dallas. There may never have been a deadlier 70 minutes for celebrity ..."
"... Fifty years ago, three great men died within a few hours of each other: C. S. Lewis, John F. Kennedy and Aldous Huxley. In 1982, philosophy professor Peter Kreeft imagined the three of them in conversation after their deaths. ..."
"... I think there's a good deal to be said for this this point of view in in regard to the permanence of any dictatorship. " ..."
Poor old Aldous Huxley. In other circumstances, his name would be all over the place today, the 50th anniversary of his death.
Yet, just moments after his demise, the Brave New World author had the misfortune, if that's the right word, of becoming a key
member of the "eclipsed celebrity death club".
Huxley died at 5:20pm, London time, on 22 November 1963. About ten minutes later, CS Lewis died. Just under an hour after that,
of course, JFK was shot and killed in Dallas. There may never have been a deadlier 70 minutes for celebrity
A book has been written about these three deaths on the same day by Peter Kreeft. He imagines them talking together in the heavens.
Fifty years ago, three great men died within a few hours of each other: C. S. Lewis, John F. Kennedy and Aldous Huxley. In
1982, philosophy professor Peter Kreeft imagined the three of them in conversation after their deaths.
Positioning Lewis as a proponent of ancient Western theism, Kennedy as a modern Western humanist, and Huxley as an ancient Eastern
pantheist, Kreeft wrote a conversational book entitled Between Heaven and Hell: A Dialog Somewhere Beyond Death with John F.
Kennedy, C. S. Lewis & Aldous Huxley. "
Aldous Huxley said something that points exactly what happening in the world now. We are lead by a wild species. The Zios don't
want to be domesticated by freedom of speech. Spare the rod ( of freedom of speech) spoil the child. The Zios want to be wild forever.
They want to do whatever they want on earth with no scolding feedback.
This question and answer talk was at Berkeley Univ. on March
20 1962. This fear of being domesticated is why the ADL went crazy on 6/6/19, closing down websites and videos all over the internet.
Another point which was made by Sir Charles Darwin in his book "The Next Million Years" which I think was one would with
in different terms .
I envisaged in brave new world .I mean here
he points out that the human species is still a wild species, it has never been domesticated .
I mean domesticated species is
one which has been tamed by another species. Well, until we get an invasion from Mars we shall not be tamed by another species.
All we can do is to try to tame ourselves.
An oligarchy tries to tame ourselves but the oligarchy still remains wild. I mean
however much it succeeded in taming the domesticating the rest of the race it from it must remain wild. And this was the part
of the fable the dramatic part of the fable of brave new world is that the people in the upper hierarchy who were not ruthlessly
conditioned could break down.
I mean this Charles Darwin insists that because man is wild he can never expect to domesticate
himself because the people on top would always be undomesticated sooner or later always run wild. I think there's a good deal
to be said for this this point of view in in regard to the permanence of any dictatorship. "
1984, Brave New World, and Idiocracy look more and more like Documentaries now.
Notable quotes:
"... Describing the protagonist Winston Smith's frugal London flat, he mentions an instrument called a 'telescreen', which sounds strikingly similar to the handheld 'smartphone' that is enthusiastically used by billions of people around the world today. ..."
"... At the same time, the denizens of 1984 were never allowed to forget they were living in a totalitarian surveillance state, under the control of the much-feared Thought Police. Massive posters with the slogan 'Big Brother is Watching You' were as prevalent as our modern-day advertising billboards. Today, however, such polite warnings about surveillance would seem redundant, as reports of unauthorized spying still gets the occasional lazy nod in the media now and then. ..."
"... In fact, just in time for 1984's anniversary, it has been reported that the National Security Agency (NSA) has once again been illicitly collecting records on telephone calls and text messages placed by US citizens. ..."
"... Another method of control alluded to in 1984 fell under a system of speech known as 'Newspeak', which attempted to reduce the language to 'doublethink', with the ulterior motive of controlling ideas and thoughts. ..."
"... Another Newspeak term, known as 'facecrime', provides yet another striking parallel to our modern situation. Defined as "to wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself a punishable offense." It would be difficult for the modern reader to hear the term 'facecrime' and not connect it with 'Facebook', the social media platform that regularly censors content creators for expressing thoughts it finds 'hateful' or inappropriate. ..."
"... 'Hate speech' is precisely one of those delightfully vague, subjective terms with no real meaning that one would expect to find in the Newspeak style guide. Short of threatening the life of a person or persons, individuals should be free to criticize others without fear of reprisal, least of all from the state, which should be in the business of protecting free speech at all cost. ..."
"... Another modern phenomenon that would be right at home in Orwell's Oceania is the obsession with political correctness, which is defined as "the avoidance of forms of expression or action that are perceived to exclude, marginalize, or insult groups of people who are socially disadvantaged or discriminated against." But since so many people today identify with some marginalized group, this has made the intelligent discussion of controversial ideas – not least of all on US college campuses , of all places – exceedingly difficult, if not downright dangerous. Orwell must be looking down on all of this madness with much surprise, since he provided the world with the best possible warning to prevent it. ..."
70 years ago, the British writer George Orwell captured the essence of technology in its ability to shape our destinies in his
seminal work, 1984. The tragedy of our times is that we have failed to heed his warning.
No matter how many times I read 1984, the feeling of total helplessness and despair that weaves itself throughout Orwell's masterpiece
never fails to take me by surprise. Although usually referred to as a 'dystopian futuristic novel', it is actually a horror story
on a scale far greater than anything that has emerged from the minds of prolific writers like Stephen King or Dean Koontz. The reason
is simple. The nightmare world that the protagonist Winston Smith inhabits, a place called Oceania, is all too easily imaginable.
Man, as opposed to some imaginary clown or demon, is the evil monster.
In the very first pages of the book, Orwell demonstrates an uncanny ability to foresee future trends in technology. Describing
the protagonist Winston Smith's frugal London flat, he mentions an instrument called a 'telescreen', which sounds strikingly similar
to the handheld 'smartphone' that is enthusiastically used by billions of people around the world today.
Orwell describes the ubiquitous device as an "oblong metal plaque like a dulled mirror" affixed to the wall that "could be dimmed,
but there was no way of shutting it off completely." Sound familiar?
It is through this gadget that the rulers of Oceania are able
to monitor the actions of its citizens every minute of every day.
At the same time, the denizens of 1984 were never allowed to forget
they were living in a totalitarian surveillance state, under the control of the much-feared Thought Police. Massive posters with
the slogan 'Big Brother is Watching You' were as prevalent as our modern-day advertising billboards. Today, however, such polite
warnings about surveillance would seem redundant, as reports of unauthorized spying still gets the occasional lazy nod in the media
now and then.
In fact, just in time for 1984's anniversary, it has been
reported that the National Security
Agency (NSA) has once again been illicitly collecting records on telephone calls and text messages placed by US citizens. This latest
invasion
of privacy has been casually dismissed as an "error" after an unnamed telecommunications firm handed over call records the NSA
allegedly "hadn't requested" and "weren't approved" by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. In 2013, former CIA employee
Edward Snowden blew the whistle on the NSA's intrusive surveillance operations, yet somehow the government agency is able to continue
– with the help of the corporate sector – vacuuming up the private information of regular citizens.
Another method of control alluded to in 1984 fell under a system of speech known as 'Newspeak', which attempted to reduce the
language to 'doublethink', with the ulterior motive of controlling ideas and thoughts. For example, the term 'joycamp', a truncated
term every bit as euphemistic as the 'PATRIOT Act', was used to describe a forced labor camp, whereas a 'doubleplusgood duckspeaker'
was used to praise an orator who 'quacked' correctly with regards to the political situation.
Another Newspeak term, known as 'facecrime', provides yet another striking parallel to our modern situation. Defined as "to wear
an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself a punishable offense."
It would be difficult for the modern reader to hear the term 'facecrime' and not connect it with 'Facebook', the social media platform
that regularly censors content creators
for expressing thoughts it finds 'hateful' or inappropriate. What social media users need is an Orwellian lesson in 'crimestop',
which Orwell defined as "the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought." Those
so-called unacceptable 'dangerous thoughts' were determined not by the will of the people, of course, but by their rulers.
And yes, it gets worse. Just this week, Mark Zuckerberg's 'private company'
agreed to give French authorities the "identification
data" of Facebook users suspected of spreading 'hate speech' on the platform, in what would be an unprecedented move on the part
of Silicon Valley.
'Hate speech' is precisely one of those delightfully vague, subjective terms with no real meaning that one would expect to find
in the Newspeak style guide. Short of threatening the life of a person or persons, individuals should be free to criticize others
without fear of reprisal, least of all from the state, which should be in the business of protecting free speech at all cost.
Another modern phenomenon that would be right at home in Orwell's Oceania is the obsession with political correctness, which is
defined as "the avoidance of forms of expression or action that are perceived to exclude, marginalize, or insult groups of people
who are socially disadvantaged or discriminated against." But since so many people today identify with some marginalized group, this
has made the intelligent discussion of controversial ideas – not least of all on US college
campuses , of all places – exceedingly difficult,
if not downright dangerous. Orwell must be looking down on all of this madness with much surprise, since he provided the world with
the best possible warning to prevent it.
For anyone who entertains expectations for a happy ending in 1984, be prepared for serious disappointment (spoiler alert, for
the few who have somehow not read this book). Although Winston Smith manages to finally experience love, the brief romance – like
a delicate flower that was able to take root amid a field of asphalt – is crushed by the authorities with shocking brutality. Not
satisfied with merely destroying the relationship, however, Smith is forced to betray his 'Julia' after undergoing the worst imaginable
torture at the 'Ministry of Love'.
The book ends with the words, "He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother." Will we too declare, like Winston Smith,
our love for 'Big Brother' above all else, or will we emerge victorious against the forces of a technological tyranny that appears
to be just over the horizon? Or is Orwell's 1984 just really good fiction and not the instruction manual for tyrants many have come
to fear it is?
An awful lot is riding on our answers to those questions, and time is running out.
Thanks for the tip about the author Douglas Reed . He appears to have been
stifled so well that even learning he ever existed is accidental. By the way, most of his
books seem to be on the Internet Archive site, and I've downloaded all I can find. Want to
get a feeling for what kind of man he was. (In Nazis I have no interest)
Reed gives a record of his travels in the United States. With unusual flair and uncanny
prophetic insight, Reed takes us on a journey of the historical and political side of
America. So controversial was this book on Communism and Zionism that it sent the author
into indefinite retirement and forced his publisher out of business. 398 Pages.
"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."
Who could have predicted that 70 years after Orwell typed the final words to his dystopian novel, "He loved Big Brother," we would
fail to heed his warning and come to love Big Brother.
"To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone
-- to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the
age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink -- greetings!"
-- George Orwell
1984 portrays a global society of total control in which people are not allowed to have thoughts that in any way disagree
with the corporate state. There is no personal freedom, and advanced technology has become the driving force behind a surveillance-driven
society. Snitches and cameras are everywhere. People are subject to the Thought Police, who deal with anyone guilty of thought crimes.
The government, or "Party," is headed by Big Brother who appears on posters everywhere with the words: "Big Brother is watching you."
We have arrived, way ahead of schedule, into the dystopian future dreamed up by not only Orwell but also such fiction writers
as Aldous Huxley, Margaret Atwood and Philip K. Dick.
"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."
―George Orwell
Much like Orwell's Big Brother in 1984 , the government and its corporate spies now watch our every move. Much like Huxley's
A Brave New World , we are churning out a society of watchers who "have their liberties taken away from them, but rather enjoy
it, because they [are] distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing." Much like Atwood's
The Handmaid's Tale , the
populace is now taught to "know their place and their duties, to understand that they have no real rights but will be protected up
to a point if they conform, and to think so poorly of themselves that
they will
accept their assigned fate and not rebel or run away ."
And in keeping with Philip K. Dick's darkly prophetic vision of a dystopian police state -- which became the basis for
Steven
Spielberg's futuristic thriller Minority Report -- we are now trapped in a world in which the government is all-seeing,
all-knowing and all-powerful, and if you dare to step out of line, dark-clad police SWAT teams and pre-crime units will crack a few
skulls to bring the populace under control.
What once seemed futuristic no longer occupies the realm of science fiction.
Incredibly, as the various nascent technologies employed and shared by the government and corporations alike -- facial recognition,
iris scanners, massive databases, behavior prediction software, and so on -- are incorporated into a complex, interwoven cyber network
aimed at tracking our movements, predicting our thoughts and controlling our behavior, the
dystopian visions of past writers is fast becoming
our reality .
"People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf."
―George Orwell
The courts have
shredded the Fourth Amendment's protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. In fact, SWAT teams battering down doors
without search warrants and FBI agents acting as a secret police that investigate dissenting citizens are common occurrences in contemporary
America. And bodily privacy and integrity have been utterly eviscerated by a prevailing view that Americans have no rights over what
happens to their bodies during an encounter with government officials, who are allowed to search, seize, strip, scan, spy on, probe,
pat down, taser, and arrest any individual at any time and for the slightest provocation.
"The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible
to say which was which."
We are increasingly ruled by multi-corporations wedded to the police state.
What many fail to realize is that the government is not operating alone. It cannot. The government requires an accomplice. Thus,
the increasingly complex security needs of the massive federal government, especially in the areas of defense, surveillance and data
management, have been met within the corporate sector, which has shown itself to be a powerful ally that both depends on and feeds
the growth of governmental overreach.
In fact, Big Tech wedded to Big Government has become Big Brother, and we are now ruled by the Corporate Elite whose tentacles
have spread worldwide. For example, USA Today reports that five years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the homeland security
business was booming to such an extent that it
eclipsed mature
enterprises like movie-making and the music industry in annual revenue. This security spending to private corporations such as
Google, Amazon, Microsoft and others is
forecast to exceed
$1 trillion in the near future.
The government now has at its disposal technological arsenals so sophisticated and invasive as to render any constitutional protections
null and void. Spearheaded by the NSA, which has shown itself to care little to nothing for constitutional limits or privacy, the
"security/industrial complex" -- a marriage of government, military and corporate interests aimed at keeping Americans under constant
surveillance -- has come to dominate the government and our lives. At three times the size of the CIA, constituting one third of
the intelligence budget and with its own global spy network to boot, the NSA has a long history of spying on Americans, whether or
not it has always had the authorization to do so.
Money, power, control. There is no shortage of motives fueling the convergence of mega-corporations and government. But who is
paying the price? The American people, of course.
Orwell understood what many Americans, caught up in their partisan flag-waving, are still struggling to come to terms with: that
there is no such thing as a government organized for the good of the people. Even the best intentions among those in government inevitably
give way to the desire to maintain power and control over the citizenry at all costs. As Orwell explains:
The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power,
pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know
what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian
Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended,
perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there
lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know what no one ever seizes power with the intention
of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution;
one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture
is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.
"The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it."
― George Orwell
How do you change the way people think? You start by changing the words they use.
In totalitarian regimes -- a.k.a. police states -- where conformity and compliance are enforced at the end of a loaded gun, the
government dictates what words can and cannot be used. In countries where the police state hides behind a benevolent mask and disguises
itself as tolerance, the citizens censor themselves, policing their words and thoughts to conform to the dictates of the mass mind.
Dystopian literature shows what happens when the populace is transformed into mindless automatons. In
Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451
, reading is banned and books are burned in order to suppress dissenting ideas, while televised entertainment is used to anesthetize
the populace and render them easily pacified, distracted and controlled.
In Huxley's Brave New World
, serious literature, scientific thinking and experimentation are banned as subversive, while critical thinking is discouraged through
the use of conditioning, social taboos and inferior education. Likewise, expressions of individuality, independence and morality
are viewed as vulgar and abnormal.
And in Orwell's 1984
, Big Brother does away with all undesirable and unnecessary words and meanings, even going so far as to routinely rewrite history
and punish "thoughtcrimes." In this dystopian vision of the future, the Thought Police serve as the eyes and ears of Big Brother,
while the Ministry of Peace deals with war and defense, the Ministry of Plenty deals with economic affairs (rationing and starvation),
the Ministry of Love deals with law and order (torture and brainwashing), and the Ministry of Truth deals with news, entertainment,
education and art (propaganda). The mottos of Oceania: WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, and IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.
All three -- Bradbury, Huxley and Orwell -- had an uncanny knack for realizing the future, yet it is Orwell who best understood
the power of language to manipulate the masses. Orwell's Big Brother relied on Newspeak to eliminate undesirable words, strip such
words as remained of unorthodox meanings and make independent, non-government-approved thought altogether unnecessary. To give a
single example, as psychologist Erich Fromm illustrates in his afterword to 1984 :
The word free still existed in Newspeak, but it could only be used in such statements as "This dog is free from lice" or
"This field is free from weeds." It could not be used in its old sense of "politically free" or "intellectually free," since political
and intellectual freedom no longer existed as concepts .
Where we stand now is at the juncture of OldSpeak (where words have meanings, and ideas can be dangerous) and Newspeak (where
only that which is "safe" and "accepted" by the majority is permitted). The power elite has made their intentions clear: they will
pursue and prosecute any and all words, thoughts and expressions that challenge their authority.
This is the final link in the police state chain.
"Until they became conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious."
-- George Orwell
Americans have been
conditioned to accept routine incursions on their privacy rights . In fact, the addiction to screen devices -- especially cell
phones -- has created a hive effect where the populace not only watched but is controlled by AI bots. However, at one time, the idea
of a total surveillance state tracking one's every move would have been abhorrent to most Americans. That all changed with the 9/11
attacks. As professor Jeffrey Rosen observes, "Before Sept. 11, the idea that Americans would voluntarily agree to live their lives
under the gaze of a network of biometric surveillance cameras, peering at them in government buildings, shopping malls, subways and
stadiums, would have seemed unthinkable,
a dystopian fantasy of a society that
had surrendered privacy and anonymity ."
Having been reduced to a cowering citizenry -- mute in the face of elected officials who refuse to represent us, helpless in the
face of police brutality, powerless in the face of militarized tactics and technology that treat us like enemy combatants on a battlefield,
and naked in the face of government surveillance that sees and hears all -- we have nowhere left to go.
We have, so to speak, gone from being a nation where privacy is king to one where nothing is safe from the prying eyes of government.
In search of so-called terrorists and extremists hiding amongst us -- the proverbial "needle in a haystack," as one official termed
it -- the Corporate State has taken to monitoring all aspects of our lives, from cell phone calls and emails to Internet activity
and credit card transactions. Much of this data is being fed through
fusion centers across the
country, which work with the Department of Homeland Security to make threat assessments on every citizen, including school children.
These are state and regional intelligence centers that collect data on you.
"Big Brother is Watching You."
―George Orwell
Wherever you go and whatever you do, you are now being watched, especially if you leave behind an electronic footprint. When you
use your cell phone, you leave a record of when the call was placed, who you called, how long it lasted and even where you were at
the time. When you use your ATM card, you leave a record of where and when you used the card. There is even a video camera at most
locations equipped with facial recognition software. When you use a cell phone or drive a car enabled with GPS, you can be tracked
by satellite. Such information is shared with government agents, including local police. And all of this once-private information
about your consumer habits, your whereabouts and your activities is now being fed to the U.S. government.
The government has nearly inexhaustible resources when it comes to tracking our movements, from electronic wiretapping devices,
traffic cameras and biometrics to radio-frequency identification cards, satellites and Internet surveillance.
Speech recognition technology now makes it possible for the government to carry out massive eavesdropping by way of sophisticated
computer systems. Phone calls can be monitored, the audio converted to text files and stored in computer databases indefinitely.
And if any "threatening" words are detected -- no matter how inane or silly -- the record can be flagged and assigned to a government
agent for further investigation. Federal and state governments, again working with private corporations, monitor your Internet content.
Users are profiled and tracked in order to identify, target and even prosecute them.
In such a climate, everyone is a suspect. And you're guilty until you can prove yourself innocent. To underscore this shift in
how the government now views its citizens, the FBI uses its wide-ranging authority to investigate individuals or groups, regardless
of whether they are suspected of criminal activity.
"Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull."
― George Orwell
Here's what a lot of people fail to understand, however: it's not just what you say or do that is being monitored, but how you
think that is being tracked and targeted. We've already seen this play out on the state and federal level with hate crime
legislation that cracks down on so-called "hateful" thoughts and expression, encourages self-censoring and reduces free debate on
various subject matter.
Total Internet surveillance by the Corporate State, as omnipresent as God, is used by the government to predict and, more importantly,
control the populace, and it's not as far-fetched as you might think. For example, the NSA is now designing an artificial intelligence
system that is designed to anticipate your every move. In a nutshell, the NSA will feed vast amounts of the information it collects
to a computer system known as Aquaint (the acronym
stands for Advanced QUestion Answering for INTelligence), which the computer can then use to detect patterns and predict behavior.
No information is sacred or spared.
Everything from cell phone recordings and logs, to emails, to text messages, to personal information posted on social networking
sites, to credit card statements, to library circulation records, to credit card histories, etc., is collected by the NSA and shared
freely with its agents in crime: the CIA, FBI and DHS. One NSA researcher actually quit the Aquaint program, "citing concerns over
the dangers in placing such a powerful weapon in the hands of a top-secret agency with little accountability."
Thus, what we are witnessing, in the so-called name of security and efficiency, is the creation of a new class system comprised
of the watched (average Americans such as you and me) and the watchers (government bureaucrats, technicians and private corporations).
Clearly, the age of privacy in America is at an end.
"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face -- for ever."
-- Orwell
So where does that leave us?
We now find ourselves in the unenviable position of being monitored, managed and controlled by our technology, which answers not
to us but to our government and corporate rulers. This is the fact-is-stranger-than-fiction lesson that is being pounded into us
on a daily basis.
It won't be long before we find ourselves looking back on the past with longing, back to an age where we could speak to whom we
wanted, buy what we wanted, think what we wanted without those thoughts, words and activities being tracked, processed and stored
by corporate giants such as Google, sold to government agencies such as the NSA and CIA, and used against us by militarized police
with their army of futuristic technologies.
To be an individual today, to not conform, to have even a shred of privacy, and to live beyond the reach of the government's roaming
eyes and technological spies, one must not only be a rebel but rebel.
Even when you rebel and take your stand, there is rarely a happy ending awaiting you. You are rendered an outlaw.
So how do you survive in the American surveillance state?
We're running out of options.
As I make clear in my book
Battlefield
America: The War on the American People , we'll soon have to choose between self-indulgence (the bread-and-circus distractions
offered up by the news media, politicians, sports conglomerates, entertainment industry, etc.) and self-preservation in the form
of renewed vigilance about threats to our freedoms and active engagement in self-governance.
Yet as Aldous Huxley acknowledged in
Brave New World Revisited
: "Only the vigilant can maintain their liberties, and only those who are constantly and intelligently on the spot can hope to govern
themselves effectively by democratic procedures. A society, most of whose members spend a great part of their time, not on the spot,
not here and now and in their calculable future, but somewhere else, in the irrelevant other worlds of sport and soap opera, of mythology
and metaphysical fantasy, will find it hard to resist the encroachments of those would manipulate and control it."
"... America just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable. ..."
"... And after all our idiotic overcomplicated plots and schemes, they are but to mask simple truths ..."
"... What is more compelling than the average person captured in a truthful narrative, as counterpoint to a society that delves into the celebrity, the spectacle, the idiocy as Jason puts forth in his piece, "The Idiot." ..."
"... Yet, my friend, Joe the Farmer from Merced, hits the nail on the head by providing his own retort to example after example of the cruelty of capitalism and the US of I -- United States of Idiots? ..."
"... What in the fuck is wrong with this country? The republicans enact cruel legislation to protect criminal enterprises, slash taxes for the obscenely rich, while removing any social or environmental protections for the population, (the Flint Michigan water system for example). ..."
"... The democrats response to Trump is to promote Joe Biden, a compilation of Bill and Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Strom Thurman and just about every other corporate whore they could steal parts off of to make their democratic very own version of Donald Trump. ..."
"... As if there were no real journalists working on all the pre-September 11 illegalities of the republican party and then the post-September 11 evisceration of the few rights the people of the world and USA had before full spectrum war on our planet. ..."
"... As if journalists hadn't cracked open the Koch brothers, the fake think tanks, all the pre-Truman/post-Truman lies of empire, from Roy Cohen, through to the rigged systems of oppression. Way before any trivial Hollywood wannabe open her eyes. ..."
"... Entertainment and a few laughs at the expense of millions of bombed-dead people, millions more suffering-a-lingering-death daily because of Hollywood and USA policies and the evangelicals and the Crypto-Christo-Zionists bombing "the other" back to the stone age. The movie, Vice. ..."
"... What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies , the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy . ..."
"... As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984 , Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World , they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us. ..."
"... The greatest triumphs of propaganda have been accomplished, not by doing something, but by refraining from doing. Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. ..."
"... Huxley was right -- " Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly -- they'll go through anything. You read and you're pierced." Brave New World , "Chapter 4" ..."
America just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing
anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.
Now I think poetry will save nothing from oblivion, but I keep writing about the ordinary because for me it's the home of the
extraordinary, the only home.
I'm digging the DV piece, " The Idiot " by
Jason Holland, since in a critical mass sort of black hole kind of way, his main thesis is reflective of the experiences many of
us in the bloody trenches of dying capitalism see/feel/believe minute by minute.
And after all our idiotic overcomplicated plots and schemes, they are but to mask simple truths the idiot facade tries so desperately
to avoid; the inner torments of being afraid of not being good enough, not measuring up to our peers, not meeting arbitrary expectations
we either accept from others or set for ourselves, or quite simply feeling like we are not worthy of love. So we play these pointless
high stakes games which have a rewards as meaningless and worthless as a plastic trophy just to prove our worth. The idiot is
a temporal state of being, although many are finer long term examples of displaying the behaviors of the idiot; however none of
us are the perfect idiot. To avoid the affectations of being in an idiotic state it takes conscious effort to live our lives moment
to moment with authenticity, to be in a state of awareness of our actions, to always be willing to suffer for something worthwhile
and to be consistently well reasoned examiners of what constitutes something worthwhile.
That authenticity, moment to moment existence -- and it should be a reveling of life -- is good, but there is a bifurcating of
sorts when many of us are still subject to the masters of Big Brother and Big Business. We are suffering the dualism of the Century,
and the more we know, the more we seek and the more we grapple, well, the more emancipated we are, but in that freedom comes some
pretty harsh treatment by the masters and their sub-masters and all the Little Eichmann's that keep the Capitalist's trains moving
like clockwork toward the global demise set in their plastic worlds!
And some of us think Dachau and Auschwitz were bad! We have already seen a hundred of them since 1945.
For me, I have the benefit of being a writer, and at this time, I have this new gig I created myself to bring to the Oregon Coast
a sense of the people who are here living or who come here to set down their own stories . . . people who do things to make this
world better and themselves better. Something in the draw that brings my subjects for my pieces here to the coast of Oregon. These
are people, and they are not perfections or cut-outs or pulverized remnants of humanity that Capitalism mostly demands in it shark
tank of inane media manipulation and marketing.
I crack open humanity and get people's contexts -- entire stories upon stories laid down, strata by strata, and cover their own
formula for the art of living in harmony in a world of disharmony. Reading my stuff, I hope, will allow readers of this rag, Oregon
Coast Today , and its on-line version a better sense of authenticity via people they may or may not even run across in their
own lives of being the consummate busy tourist and consumer.
A few of the pieces will be worthy of DV display, and I hope that my attempt at drilling down and "getting people" for
who they are and how they got here will better the world, in some small shape. Really small, but small wonders sometimes are the
ionic glue of a bettering world.
What is more compelling than the average person captured in a truthful narrative, as counterpoint to a society that delves into
the celebrity, the spectacle, the idiocy as Jason puts forth in his piece, "The Idiot."
In many ways, talking to people who have lived authentic (albeit struggle-prone) lives, or who are just embarking on a nascent
stage of multiple iterations of living, I get my sense of grounding in a very flummoxed world of inanity and crass disassociation,
as in the disease of pushing away humanity and pushing away the natural world to hitch oneself to the perversions of the billionaire
class.
Time and time again, daily, my friends who are still in struggle -- still trying to make sense of the perverted world of idiots
controlling the message, the economy, the environment, the culture, and the mental-physical-spiritual health of the world, as if
this is it, Trump 2.0 -- give me news feed after news feed of the quickening of not only idiocy that capitalism and consumerism and
war engender in our species, but also examples of the inhumanity driving the agendas of the Fortune 500 Class, the Davos crowd, the
Aspen Institute gatherings, et al .
Yet, my friend, Joe the Farmer from Merced, hits the nail on the head by providing his own retort to example after example of
the cruelty of capitalism and the US of I -- United States of Idiots?
If this doesn't slap the Hell out of you and rub your nose into the proverbial dog shit of what a criminally insane, inhumane,
cruel and thuggish enterprise our government has become, then there is absolutely no hope for your soul. The truth tellers like
Manning, Assange, Snowden and others, the brave young guys like Tim DeChristopher that monkey wrenched the sale of oil leases
to public lands to try and protect the environment, this fellow that is showing his human side by providing water and aid for
those dying in the desert sun, are all facing prison terms or maybe even the death penalty. Their crime? Being a compassionate
human being.
What in the fuck is wrong with this country? The republicans enact cruel legislation to protect criminal enterprises, slash
taxes for the obscenely rich, while removing any social or environmental protections for the population, (the Flint Michigan water
system for example).
The republicans are ruthlessly attacking the environment and endangered species, turning their backs on infrastructure that
is endangering peoples lives, while the spineless democrats sit idly by, wringing their hands. The democrats won't take action
against the most openly corrupt president we have ever had, that is daily destroying everything in this country as well as the
rest of the world with his insane military budgets, trade wars and climate policies. The democrats response to Trump is to promote
Joe Biden, a compilation of Bill and Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Strom Thurman and just about every other corporate whore they
could steal parts off of to make their democratic very own version of Donald Trump.
Both the republicans and the democrats promote austerity for the working people and the poor, while stuffing the oligarchs
pockets with gold. Both political Parties support endless war and war profiteers but slash budgets for schools, infrastructure,
health care and the elderly. Both political Parties shower money on the police state and a corrupt system of justice and private
prisons. Both political Parties are turning their heads to what the oil industry is doing to our water and air with fracking and
are in fact have promoted legislation to let the oil industry off the hook when it causes unbelievable environmental damage. Both
political Parties are doing nothing to check the nuclear industry that is a environmental time bomb waiting to go off and have
promoted legislation to limit the industries liability when it does.
What is wrong with the American people that they sit on their collective asses and do nothing while all this is happening?
Are they that fucking stupid? Are they that lacking in human decency? Are they that politically dumbed-down that they won't even
fight for their own interests?
The fact that this government corruption has been allowed to go on for years evidently proves that Americans are that stupid
and lacking of compassion and politically dumbed-down. Thank God for guys like Dr. Warren the others that are trying to slap some
sense into the American public to show us what courage and being humane is all about. Dr. Warren and company shouldn't be put
in jail but our so called leaders sure as Hell should be for their crimes against humanity.
He's talking about a desert saint of sorts, Scott Warren, who has the power of his call to duty to give water in milk cartons
to anyone crossing the Arizona desert. Now that is a hero, yet, he is facing decades in prison. America!
The charges against Warren "are an unjust criminalization of direct humanitarian assistance" and "appear to constitute a politically
motivated violation of his protected rights as a Human Rights Defender," states Amnesty International's Americas regional director
Erika Guevara-Rosas .
"Providing humanitarian aid is never a crime," Guevara-Rosas added in a statement last week. "If Dr. Warren were convicted
and imprisoned on these absurd charges, he would be a prisoner of conscience, detained for his volunteer activities motivated
by humanitarian principles and his religious beliefs."
Yet how many humans in this crime country even give a rat's ass about one man who is doing the good that all men and women should
be doing?
So, here, whatever will come of my new column, "Deep Dive: Go Below the Surface with Paul Haeder," starting June 7, well, I hope
people reading this rag -- 18,000 and counting and as they are compelled to hit each longer version of each of my profiles on line,
Oregon Coast Today -- will understand that
life is the sum total of one's search for meaning and worthy work and community involvement.
Maybe this compulsion toward narrative has always been inside me during my early root setting living in Canada, Maryland, Paris,
Edinburgh, Arizona . . . then on that walkabout throughout Latin America, Europe, Vietnam, USA, Central America!
When times get tough, the storyteller gets writing. Ha. Believe you me, the stories we all have collected in this Marquis de Sade
world of capital and artery-clogging entertainment and constant death spiral the elites have banked as their Appian Way to Complete
Dominance, they make for so much more validation of humanity than anything Hollywood could make.
Point of fact -- I attempted to watch the film, Vice, about Dick Cheney, his perverse family, the perversity of neocons
fornicating with neoliberalism. It was one of Hollywood's "cutting edge" dramas. Written and directed by a Saturday Night Live
writer. All the usual suspects with Hollywood multi-millions stuffed in their jowls -- Christian Bale, Amy Adams, et al .
It wasn't that good, but I sensed that the filmmakers were all about trying to make something that was "different." I didn't nod
off during the viewing. But, I unfortunately had the DVD so I went to the extras section, and then, the behind-the-scenes of the
making of Vice . This is when things went south real quickly with neoliberal, Democrat-leaning Hollywood creeps. We get every
goofy platitude about each and every department's genius in making this film. Every actor fawns the other actor for his or her amazing
performance.
Then the Limey, Christian Bale, yammers on and on about he was all about making Dick Cheney human, going into his good side, being
cognizant of Cheney, the human. Rubbish and this is the quality of men, adults, in our society -- multimillionaires with gobs of
limelight and credit and awards and houses and yachts thrown at them, and they can't even begin to attack the cause -- capitalism,
rampant competitiveness, droll I-got-mine-too-bad-you-can't-get-yours thinking. Hollywood is the anti-culture, the flagging bumbling
money changers, the money makers, the money grubbers, and well, everything is about the pockets and the suits and the "executive
producers," i.e. Bankers.
Oh god, what a trip going into these Hollywood people's hot yoga, macrobiotic diet, four-hour-a-day workout minds. The director,
McKay, actually thinks this drama -- make-believe -- has given the world new stuff, new insights, new news about the Cheney-Rumsfeld-Bush-Reagan-Bush
world of prostitute politics.
As if there were no real journalists working on all the pre-September 11 illegalities of the republican party and then the post-September
11 evisceration of the few rights the people of the world and USA had before full spectrum war on our planet.
As if journalists hadn't cracked open the Koch brothers, the fake think tanks, all the pre-Truman/post-Truman lies of empire,
from Roy Cohen, through to the rigged systems of oppression. Way before any trivial Hollywood wannabe open her eyes.
Entertainment and a few laughs at the expense of millions of bombed-dead people, millions more suffering-a-lingering-death daily
because of Hollywood and USA policies and the evangelicals and the Crypto-Christo-Zionists bombing "the other" back to the stone
age. The movie, Vice.
Racists, misogynists, misanthropes, one and all. Yet, we gotta love these democrat-leaning guys and gals making films, having
millions stuffed up every possible orifice until their brains gel.
Insight into the flippancy that is Hollywood the Power Broker! Watching people like Amy Adams and Steve Carell and Sam Rockwell
play this soft-shoe goofball show, and then in the little "Making of the Movie Vice" documentary (sic-infomercial) blathering
on and on about the greatness of the script and every cog of the machine that churns out this pabulum, well, it steels me to continue
my small-time, no-fame, big-effing-deal gig writing people profiles to bring some sense to a world captured by capital . . . idiocy!
Oh, how we fall in line. Over at
Counterpunch
, that cloistered world of writers has the countdown for 2018 -- Best Films of the Year, as in the most conscious, socially (give
me a effing break!) that is. Nothing in American society once it floats on the offal barrel is sacred, socialist, communist.
Peak TV is creating more opportunities for independent film directors, and for new stories to be told. More films from around
the world are released on streaming every day, and Netflix spent an estimated 13 billion dollars on content just this year. More
cash available can sometimes mean more stories by and about communities of color, women, transgender and gender nonconforming
people, and other communities Hollywood has long ignored. But the movie industry is still primarily about making profit, and it's
main business is reinforcing the status quo, including churning out films that glorify capitalism, war, and policing.
Below are 2018's top ten conscious films that made it through these barriers, plus twenty more released this year that you
may want to check out.
[ ]
Hollywood doesn't have a great record in covering presidential politics (remember Kevin Costner in Swing Vote ?).
Vice , comedy director Adam McKay's follow up to The Big Short , explores the Bush/Cheney presidency, attempting to
make history and polemic accessible to a wide audience. It's not as effective as his previous film, but it's a good history, especially
for those less familiar with the ins and outs of the early 2000s corporate power grab.
Lighten up already , many a friend and acquaintance tell me. "You are going to burn out like one of the bulbs you use underwater
to do your night dives. Way too much shining the hoary light onto the more hoary caverns of American society. Let things go."
Ha, well, how can we? We are entertained to death, as
Neil Postman
states:
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for
there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those
who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed
from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture.
Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies , the orgy porgy, and
the centrifugal bumblepuppy .
As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert
to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984 , Orwell added,
people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World , they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short,
Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us.
This book [ Amusing Ourselves to Death ] is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.
And so it goes, as I trail the acrid dust devil of injustice -- my own and the veterans' and families' I helped just months ago
in Portland as a social worker for, drum roll, homeless veterans (and some came with families, including babies and service dogs).
I've written about it here and elsewhere -- the Starvation Army. The deceitful, unethical, possibly murderous Starvation Army.
You see, where I worked, I had these insane Nurse Ratched's lording over grown men and women treating them like criminals, and infantiles,
and the constant berating and recriminations. It was anything but social work 101. Anything but trauma-informed care. Anything but
caring people, enlightened helpers; instead, think mean, warped people who within their own broken self's, do all the wrong things
for veterans.
I decided to jump ship, and, alas, a few lawyers advised me I couldn't get far with a hostile workplace complaint until I went
through the state of Oregon's, Bureau of Labor and Industries (BOLI) quasi-judicial pathway.
There was great harm put upon the veterans, great harm put upon the staff, because a director was all into herself and her self-described
Jesus Saves bullshit, yammering on about her former cocaine addiction and booze abuse and 350 pounds of flesh, as well as her own
failings as a mother. This place has 100 people living in it temporarily, while Starvation Army receives taxpayer money, all part
of the poverty pimping Starvation/Salvation Army's SOP.
In the end, relying on idiots in any state bureaucracy to carry forth an investigation was not my idea of justice. I did my due
diligence and filed grievances, first with the Starvation Army, and, then with BOLI. I contacted VA officials, state politicians,
and the media. To no avail. They too are accomplices!
To make a long and stupid Byzantine story short, my prediction of zero assistance and zero admonishing from the state to the executive
director and the higher ups of the Starvation Army played out. BOLI is a toothless and empty-hearted agency, staffed by soulless
Little Eichmann's counting their paychecks and amassing points to their state sourced pension fund.
I have moved on, as usual, and the injustice perpetrated upon me is minor in the scheme of things. The veterans, however, already
foisted with trauma, PTSD, administrative rape, etc., are still vulnerable to the Nurse Ratched's of the inhumane social services
that serves (sic) non-profits and religious crime syndicates like the Starvation Army.
Here , "How the Salvation Army Lives Off (and thrives with) a Special Brand of Poverty Pimping"
Here , "Alcohol, Atheism, Anarchy: The Triple A Threat to the Pro-Capitalist Salvation Army"
I have since my departure been in contact with a few veterans, and talked a few off the proverbial ledge -- several that wanted
to off themselves because of the Nurse Ratched's they encounter at the Starvation Army, in the VA, and in non-profits. This is the
reality, and it's sick, in real perverted American time -- "Hundreds witness veteran shoot and kill himself in VA waiting room"
In December, Marine Col. Jim Turner, 55, put his service uniform on, drove to the Bay Pines Department of Veterans Affairs,
and shot himself outside the medical center, leaving a note next to his body. "I bet if you look at the 22 suicides a day you
will see VA screwed up in 90 percent,"
it read.
This is Trump, this is Biden, this is Clinton, this is the lot of them, callous and broken capitalists, who have sold their souls
to the devil and brains to Jeff Bezos, et al . And it ain't going to get fixed until we cut away the cancer. Really cut away,
daily, in small acts of defiance, great collective acts of beating the system. Not sure what that great director Ava Duvernay says
about more and more movies like her 13th or this new Netflix mini-series on the
Central Park Five , When They See Us will do to eventually get enough Americans (70 percent are racist to the core) to
demand change in the criminal injustice system of private prisons, Incarceration Complex, Profitable Prosecutions. That all those
cops, dailies, elites, deplorables, Trumpies, and Trump said terrible terrible things about these 5 juveniles, calling them animals,
or super predators like the Clinton Klan, well, imagine, an insane 2016 runner for the highest crime lord position of the land, POTUS,
Donald Trump, after these five men were released after all the evidence found them innocent, sputtering with his big fat billionaire's
fourth grader's words that the Central Park Five are guilty, guilty, guilty.
The press coverage was biased. There was a study done by Natalie Byfield, one of the journalists at the time for the New York
papers who later wrote a book about covering the case, and it saw that a little more than 89 percent of the press coverage at
the time didn't use the word "alleged," that we had irresponsibility in the press corps at the time not to ask second questions
and literally take police and prosecutor talking points and turn those into articles that people read as fact, and proceeded to
shape their opinions about this case that essentially spoils the jury pool, so that these boys were never given a chance.
Trump's comments in his ads that he took out in 1989 were taken out just two weeks after the crime was announced -- they hadn't
even gone to trial, so it was impossible for them to have an impartial jury pool. The printing of their names in the papers for
minors, and where they lived, was a jaw-dropper. All of this was done by "reputable" papers in New York that we still read, so
I'm curious how these papers take responsibility for their part in this, and also possibly use this to review the part they play
in other cases that may not be as famous as this.
Thus, she makes my case -- the callous and racist and sexist and xenophobic US Press, and here we are today, 2019, enter Amusing
Ourselves to Death and a Brave New World .
The greatest triumphs of propaganda have been accomplished, not by doing something, but by refraining from doing. Great is
truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.
-- Aldous Huxley, Brave New World , "Preface"
Alas, though, we have to keep those words coming, even sent to the great gray hearts and souls populating those state agencies
whose workers are supposed to investigate the workplace safety concerns of workers, and are supposed to prevent workplace harassment.
I write to break through the fog, and to envelop a new way of seeing my world, for me and for the few readers that dabble in even
attempting to start, let alone finish, these missives.
Huxley was right -- " Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly -- they'll go through anything. You read and you're pierced."
Brave New World , "Chapter 4"
Paul Kirk Haeder has been a journalist since 1977. He's covered police, environment, planning and zoning, county and city politics,
as well as working in true small town/community journalism situations in Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Mexico and beyond. He's been
a part-time faculty since 1983, and as such has worked in prisons, gang-influenced programs, universities, colleges, alternative
high schools, language schools, as a private contractor-writing instructor for US military in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and Washington.
He organized Part-time faulty in Washington State. His book, Reimagining Sanity: Voices Beyond the Echo Chamber (2016), looks at
10 years of his writing at Dissident Voice . Read his autobiography, weekly or bi-weekly musings and hard hitting work in
chapter installments, at LA Progressive
. He blogs from Otis, Oregon. Read other articles by Paul
, or visit Paul's website .
The trade in oil, gas, gems, metals and rare earth minerals wreaks havoc in Africa. During
the years when Brazil, India, China and the other "emerging markets" have transformed their
economies, Africa's resource states remained tethered to the bottom of the industrial supply
chain. While Africa accounts for about 30 per cent of the world's reserves of hydrocarbons and
minerals and 14 per cent of the world's population, its share of global manufacturing stood in
2011 exactly where it stood in 2000: at 1 percent.
Shaxson's introduction and preliminary chapters immediately prove that he is a bona fide
Africa expert. Having extensively lived and worked there, getting closely acquainted with the
politicians, industrialists and average joes, he knows his topic better than any ivory tower
academic or think tank regional "expert." His anecdotes and insights are accurate, concise
and reasonably centrist. His writing is excellent. And yet he failed to earn 5 stars because
the book itself delves too far into specific biographies of pivotal politicos and activists.
Shaxson is sharp and experienced enough to produce a country-by-country analytical handbook
documenting oil's impact on 21st Century Africa but instead he chose to take the
conversational, journalistic feature-article format. For professionals and novices seeking
accurate and timely information on Africa, this is a good start. Lutz Kleveman's "New Great
Game" was equally readable and informal but a far more informative example for Shaxson to
follow in his next book.
The book is very well written.It documents the authors expereinces with various African
countries in relation to the oil business and provides an insightful analysis of the impacts
of the sleazy dealings within the oil industry on the continent. An excellent read!!
Read more
Of the current crop of "what is wrong with Africa" books including "The Shackled
Continent", "The White Man's Burden" and "The Trouble with Africa", Nicholas Shaxson's
analysis and prescriptions for change are the most radical and on-the-money. Shaxson's book
should be widely read and discussed. Unfortunately, too much invested in the status quo by
all concerned to see much likelihood of change within the next few decades.
Every responsible reader and serious seeker of "enlightenment" usually applies a
"credibility check" to new information.
When author Nicholas Shaxson, in the opening chapter of his book, "Poisoned Wells," badly
mischaracterized the Biafra-Nigeria War of 1967-1970, I could not read any further.
In trying to support his assertion that Oil is the root cause (or at least, a major cause) of
post-colonial Africa's problems, he force-fits that terrible war into "Oil" context. How do I
know? Well, I was there: was old enough to live in Nigeria up to the War, live through that
War fighting in it on the Biafran side, and live after the war in Nigeria, until decided that
I am truly Biafran, not Nigerian.
This book has failed a critical credibility test.
Please send my comments to this author.
Oguchi Nkwocha, MD.
Nwa Biafra
A Biafran Citizen.
In this informative book, journalist Nicholas Shaxson looks at some African countries that
have suffered the curse of foreign-owned oil - Nigeria, Equatorial Guinea, Angola, Gabon, the
Congo Republic and São Tomé e Principe. In 1970, before the oil boom, 19
million Nigerians were poor; after $400 billion of oil earnings, 90 million (of a 130 million
population) were poor.
Each week sub-Saharan Africa's oil fields produce more than $1 billions' worth of oil. But
the oil money promotes not investment and development but capital flight and poverty. Greedy
foreign oil corporations ally with corrupt rulers.
The struggle of rival imperialisms for oil strips Africa bare. In 2005 the USA imported
more oil from Africa than from the Middle East, and it is intervening in Africa to control
its supplies, as now with its illegal attack on Libya. Oil comprises 87 per cent of US
imports from Africa. Angola is China's biggest source of imported oil.
France too is scheming and warmongering to keep its hold on Africa. France's former
colonies have to keep two-thirds of their reserves in France's treasury. Their central banks'
HQs are in Paris. Much EU `aid' funds French companies in Africa.
Shaxson also looks at the curse of tax havens. More than half of world trade passes
through tax havens. Over half of all banking assets and a third of foreign direct investment
by giant corporations are routed offshore. Terrorists and drug smugglers use the same
offshore system that corporations use.
Offshore finance is centred on Britain, the EU and the USA. The City of London runs half
the world's tax havens and holds more than $3.2 trillion in offshore bank deposits, half the
world total. When the Labour government signed the UN Convention against Corruption in 2000,
it exempted all the Crown Dependencies and British Overseas Territories.
The West's banks, mainly from the USA and Britain, take their cut too. They force
countries further into debt by making them take out new loans to pay off old ones, at ever
higher rates. The bankers make private gains out of public losses.
Well, this is a book that has all the attributes of a well researched book. It is
informative, entertaining but didn't dwell well enough on the historical perspectives that
gave rise to Africa's debilitating circumstances. The author's privileged upbringing may not
have accorded him the opportunities of seeing things with the eyes of the ordinary
dispossessed, repressed and oppressed African whose life is badly structured within the bogus
and fraudulent concept of Nation State. A concept that has robbed him of his due place and
left him stranded in cyclical malady of frightening dimensions! On the whole, the book is
worth reading!!
When I decided to read this book, I did so with the expectation of learning something only after wading through a great degree
of partisan political rhetoric. It did not take me long to realize that Mr. Roberts' book is not what I had expected.
He makes this complex issue accessible to the layman looking to familiarize himself with not only oil, but the energy economy.
Rather choose a side and engage in partisan sniping, he tells the good, the bad, and the ugly of the policies advocated by every
party involved in the energy debate. Not only does he analyze our present situation, but he also studies our several possible
ways forward into a new energy economy.
If I were pressed to make a complaint, it would be that I read the original hardcover edition of the book. A lot of the speculation
regarding "worst case" scenarios involve $50 a barrel oil. Now that we are nearly $100 past that worst case, the educated speculation
portrayed in the book should be coming to pass in the market. I would like to see either a completely updated 2008 edition or
at least one with an updated preface.
A prequel to "The End of Food", this is a most informative book that discusses our dependence on oil; its history, its politics
and its economics. After reading this piece there is much that is more easily understood. Much of international politics and economics
is more clear. The development of new energy sources and their tardiness, and the dependence of many sectors of the economy on
oil is more transparent.
Roberts' sequel, "The End of Food" is highly recommended after you read this book as the interdependence of these two great
industries is amazing.
Paul Roberts does an excellent job in not only telling about the coming troubles with oil, but doing so with an, at times,
humorous style.
He makes no assumptions about the reader's knowledge, and spends the first part of the book explaining how the world got to
be in this mess we are in, by deliniating the different energy eras throughout human history.
Common themes arise, in each era, and they combine to help the reader gain a perspective upon why things are they way they
are.
Mr. Roberts did his research well, with an extensive foot note and bibliography section, yet in the course of this research
he did more than just peruse reports and other books on the matter. He managed to gain access to the indutry leaders, talking
and touring the facilties of the Russians and the Saudis.
If there is any fault, it is that the last chapeters of the book, wherein he extrapolates from his knowledge and research what
he forsees occuring, seems a little less well developed than the earlier chapters. True, they are based upon fact and not prgnostication,
but the writing seems at times rushed, and not up to the level of some of the earlier chapters.
Regardless, this is a book that I highly recommend reading, and is one that I have bought extra copies of for insertion into
my "lending library" of books I share and recommend to friends.
I read this good book, here in Brazil.This book has many excellent parts.To example, about Hirohito, on page 39, this tells
the true:Hirohito was Japan's Hitler and ordered the attack to Pearl Harbor, China and rest of Asia.
On page 176, this book tell that more than 90% of new power plants in the USA burn gas.About american culture, the page 263 has
writen:"By contrast, although car manufactures offer more than thirty car models with with fuel economy of thirty miles for gallon
or better, the ten most fuel-efficient models sold in the United States make up just 2 percent of the sales."
Americans love the SUVs, but to combat the blood of islamic terrorism, the petro-dollars, has no place in american hearts.
About the corrupt and also supporter of terrorism Saudi Arabia, this book is correct.
**************************************************************
This book is weak, when forgets Brazil, that only on page 56 is remebered only one time, without no detail at all.I don't agree,
with this failure only because I'm a brazilian, but also because Brazil is among the world's leaders in oil reserves.See to example,
the site [...] to read about this fact.
About nuclear energy, this book is very weak.On part III, there's talks about replacement of coal and gas for electric energy,but
there's nothing about the fact that France, more than 20 years ago, closed all its coal and gas power plants an replaced all of
them for nuclear power plants.
About ethanol, there's almost nothing.Only on page 340, ethanol is remebered, without any detail.I'm an agronomist and I think
that biofuels are the answer for oil , at least on transportation.My family uses ethanol cars for more than 25 years, without
no problem.
Very readable....Roberts does an excellent job of presenting opinions fairly and from many pro/contra angles. He has fully
immersed himself in his topic and the book is chocked-full of fascinating energy facts.
What to do about our energy future has become as politically polarized as abortion - Conservatives favor fossil fuels and the
Moderate - Liberal folks want to go Renewable.
Roberts is bare-knuckled about what he feels the agendas are behind the current debate, which leads him to a (slightly) reserved
pessimism about our chances of making it out of the mess we've made, by putting all our energy eggs in one basket. He does not
hide his contempt for later-day politicians who can't see the forest for the trees and won't take action to avert the coming energy
drought.
"... "A century after World War I, the great war for oil is still raging, with many of the same fronts as before and also a few new ones. Throughout it all -- whether waged by realists, neoliberals, or neocons -- war has been extremely good for business" (225). ..."
The premise of this book is to say what most of the world's public has probably been thinking since the War on Terror began,
or that it is a "war for natural resources -- and that terrorism has little to do with it. Once the military became mechanized,
oil quickly became the most sought-after commodity on the planet, and the race for energy was eventually framed as a matter of
national security."
John Maszka argues that the "oil conglomerates" are the real "threats to national security". Demonizing "an entire religion"
is a repercussion of this policy. My own research in Rebellion as Genre a few years ago also attempted to point out the misuse
of the term terrorism in its current application, or as a weapon against one's enemies rather than as a reference to a type of
attacks intended to terrorize. Governments that accuse others of terrorism while legitimizing their own "acts of violence" as
"retributive" are clearly breaking human rights agreements and their stated commitments to freedom.
Maszka's perspective is of particular interest because he teaches this subject at the Higher Colleges of Technology in Abu
Dhabi, and has published widely his criticisms of the War on Terror, including Terrorism and the Bush Doctrine.
Many of the books I have read on terrorism from American supporters of this pro-War on Terror doctrine are troubling in their
references to spreading Christianity and other similarly questionable ideologies, so it is refreshing to hear from somebody with
a fresh perspective that is more likely to bring about world peace. The preface acknowledges that this book contrasts with the
bulk of other books in this field. It also explains that it focuses primarily on two "Islamic militant organizations -- al-Qaeda
and the Islamic State".
He explains that perception has a lot to do with who a country is willing to commit violence against, giving the example of
Nazis being able to commit violence on Jews in the Holocaust because of this blindness. Thus, violence against Muslims by the
West in the past two decade is shown as possibly a new Holocaust where the militaries are carrying out orders because Muslims
have been demonized.
Terrorism has historically been the work of a few extremists, or terms like "war" or "revolution" is employed to describe large
groups of such fighters; so it is strange that the West has entered the War on Terror with entire Muslim-majority countries, killing
so many civilians that it is not a stretch to call these Holocaust-like.
The Islamic State targets Muslims as well, also showing dehumanized traits that are even harder to explain (x-xi). The preface
also acknowledges that the author will be using "contractions and anecdotal digressions" as "intentional literary devices", shooing
the standard scholarly style (this is troubling for me personally, as I'm allergic to digressions, but at least he tells readers
what to expect).
As promised, Chapter One begins with a poet's story about the Tree of Life, then discusses the Boston Marathon bombings from
the perspective of the author as he worked in Kyrgyzstan, and goes off on other tangents before reaching this conclusion -- the
marathon's bombers were not terrorists: "They had no political aspirations. They weren't attempting to obtain concessions from
the government or provoke a reaction. They simply believed that they were 'wave sheaves' -- first fruits of God -- and that they
would be instrumental in ushering in the apocalypse" (5).
This conclusion explains the relationship between all of the digressions across this section, so these digressions were necessary
to prove this point, and thus are suitable for a scholarly book. And this is exactly the type of logical reasoning that is missing
in most of the oratory on terrorism. The entire book similarly uses specific acts of supposed terrorism to explain what really
happened and working to understand th motivations of the actors.
Since the author's digressions into his own life are typically very relevant to the subject, they are definitely helpful: "I
was stationed in Riyadh at an American military base that was attacked by an al-Qaeda suicide bomber" (135).
It would actually be unethical if Maszka did not explain that he has been personally affected by al-Qaeda in this context;
and since he has seen this War as a civilian living in the affected countries and as a member of the military that is attaching
these "terrorists", his opinions should be trustworthy for both sides. Given how emotional writing this book with detachment and
carefully crafted research must have been for somebody who has been bombed, it is only fitting that the final chapter is called,
"The Definition of Insanity."
And here is the final chapter:
"A century after World War I, the great war for oil is still raging, with many of the same fronts as before and also
a few new ones. Throughout it all -- whether waged by realists, neoliberals, or neocons -- war has been extremely good for
business" (225).
Very powerful words that are justly supported. I would strongly recommend that everybody in the West's militaries who is responsible
for making decisions in the War on Terror read this book before they make their next decision. Who are they shooting at? Why?
Who is benefiting? Who is dying? Are they committing war crimes as serious as the Nazis? If there is any chance these allegations
are true what kind of a military leader can proceed without understanding the explanations that Maszka offers here? This would
probably also work well in an advanced graduate class, despite its digressions, it will probably help students write better dissertations
on related topics.
The world is about to run out of cheap oil and change dramatically. Within the next few years, global production will peak. Thereafter,
even if industrial societies begin to switch to alternative energy sources, they will have less net energy each year to do all the
work essential to the survival of complex societies. We are entering a new era, as different from the industrial era as the latter
was from medieval times.
In The Party's Over , Richard Heinberg places this momentous transition in historical context, showing how industrialism
arose from the harnessing of fossil fuels, how competition to control access to oil shaped the geopolitics of the twentieth century
and how contention for dwindling energy resources in the twenty-first century will lead to resource wars in the Middle East, Central
Asia and South America. He describes the likely impacts of oil depletion and all of the energy alternatives. Predicting chaos unless
the United States -- the world's foremost oil consumer -- is willing to join with other countries to implement a global program of
resource conservation and sharing, he also recommends a "managed collapse" that might make way for a slower-paced, low-energy, sustainable
society in the future.
More readable than other accounts of this issue, with fuller discussion of the context, social implications and recommendations
for personal, community, national and global action, Heinberg's updated book is a riveting wake-up call for human-kind as the oil
era winds down, and a critical tool for understanding and influencing current US foreign policy.
Richard Heinberg , from Santa Rosa, California, has been writing about energy resources issues and the dynamics of cultural
change for many years. A member of the core faculty at New College of California, he is an award-winning author of three previous
books. His Museletter was nominated for the Best Alternative Newsletter award by Utne in 1993.
Well, how to describe something that is so drastic in predictions as to make one quiver? Heinberg spells out a future for humans
that is not very optimistic but sadly, is more accurate than any of us would like. The information and research done by the author
is first rate and irrefutable, which is as it should be. The news: dire. This is my first in a series of his work and indeed,
it's a love/hate experience since there is a lot of hopelessness in the outcome of our current path. Be that as it may, this is
a book to cherish and an author to admire.
Surprizingly its not about the rising cost of the energy that you personally use. Its about the whole economy that has been
built on using a non-replenishable energy supply. You know how those economists always count on the 3% growth in the GDP. Well
the book argues that this long term growth is fundamentally driven by our long term growth in energy usage, which everyone knows
will have to turn around at some point.
The other surprizing fact is that the turning point is long before you run out of oil. Heinberg shows data that indicates that
half of the oil is still left in the ground when the returns start to diminish. And it appears that that we are within a few years
of reaching that point.
So we've used up about half the "available" ( i.e. feasible to extract from an energy perspective ) oil. Now oil production
starts to decrease. What happens next is anyone's guess, but Heinburg presents some detailed discussions on the possiblities.
Don't assume that a coal, nuclear, or "hydrogen" economy are going to be as easy and profitable as the petroleum economy we are
leaving behind.
I've read lots of books about energy and the environment, and this is definitely one of the best.
Part history and part prophesy, this book is an outstanding summary of many major issues facing Western industrial society.
Author Richard Heinberg provides a scholarly critique of modern industrialism, focusing on its current use of energy, and a sobering
forecast based on predictable trends.
The key point of the book is that the Earth's crust can provide mankind with an essentially finite amount of fossil fuel energy,
with primary reference to oil. Drawing on the relatively unknown, and oft-misunderstood, concept of "peak oil," the book addresses
the imminent shortfall of petroleum that will not be available on world markets. That day of reckoning is far closer than most
people think. "Peak oil" is a global application of Geologist M. King Hubbert's (1903-1989) studies of oil production in "mature"
exploration districts. That is, exploration for oil in sedimentary basins at first yields substantial discoveries, which are then
produced. Additional exploration yields less and less "new" oil discovered, and that level of discovery coming at greater and
greater effort. Eventually, absent additional significant discovery, production "peaks" and then commences an irreversible decline.
This has already occurred in the U.S. in the 1970's, and is in the process of occurring in oil-producing nations such as Mexico,
Britain, Egypt, Indonesia and Malaysia. Ominously, "peak" production can be forecast in the next few years in such significant
producing nations as Saudi Arabia and Iraq (in addition to all of the other problems in those unfortunate nations.)
Much of the rise of industrial society was tied to increasing availability of high energy-density fuel, particularly oil. Western
society, and its imitators in non-Western lands, is based upon access to large amounts of energy-dense fuel, and that fuel is
oil. With respect to the U.S., the domestic decline in oil production has been made up, over the past thirty years, by increasing
imports from other locales, with concomitant political risk. When the world production "peaks" in the next few years, the competition
for energy sources will become more fierce than it already is. This book addresses issues related to what are commonly thought
of as "substitutes" for oil, such as coal, natural gas and natural gas liquids, and shatters many myths. The author also delves
deeply into energy sources such as "tar sand," "oil shale," nuclear and renewable sources. And thankfully, the author offers a
number of proposals to address the looming problem (although these proposals are probably not what an awful lot of people want
to hear.)
A book like this one could easily descend into a tawdry level of "chicken-little" squawks and utter tendentiousness. But thankfully
it does not do so. This is a mature, well-reasoned and carefully footnoted effort. I could take issue with some of the author's
points about "big business" and how decisions are made at high political levels, but not in this review. Instead I will simply
congratulate Mr. Heinberg for writing an important contribution to social discourse. I hope that a lot of people read this book
and start to look at and think about the world differently.
Maybe the most important book since Charles Darwin's "The Origin of Species". This volume represents THE wakeup call for a
world society quite literally addicted to crude oil for its continuation, and, in most cases, it's very survival.
Heinberg has done his homework, and this volume should be required reading for anyone in an industrialized nation, or one just
getting started down that road. It is a proven scientific fact that within a few years, we will begin to run out of oil, and it
will be pretty much gone within 5 or 6 decades. Considering that we have built our entire society around an oil economy, the implications
are dire - far, far beyond not being able to drive through the coffee shop with the kids in your SUV on the way home from the
mall. Alternative energy sources? Dream on - read on.
The book is thoroughly researched, well-thought and organized and presents the often dissenting views at every side of this
hugely important issue. It is also delightfully written and composed, and is fun and quick to read.
I highly recommend this book, and I hope at least one person reads what I'm writing and buys this book. And I hope they tell
someone, too.
"... Surveillance cameras are everywhere. Government agents listen in on our telephone calls and read our emails. Political correctness -- a philosophy that discourages diversity -- has become a guiding principle of modern society. ..."
"... We are increasingly ruled by multi-corporations wedded to the police state. ..."
"... What many fail to realize is that the government is not operating alone. It cannot. The government requires an accomplice. Thus, the increasingly complex security needs of the massive federal government, especially in the areas of defense, surveillance and data management, have been met within the corporate sector, which has shown itself to be a powerful ally that both depends on and feeds the growth of governmental overreach. ..."
"... In fact, Big Tech wedded to Big Government has become Big Brother, and we are now ruled by the Corporate Elite whose tentacles have spread worldwide. For example, USA Today reports that five years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the homeland security business was booming to such an extent that it eclipsed mature enterprises like movie-making and the music industry in annual revenue. This security spending to private corporations such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft and others is forecast to exceed $1 trillion in the near future. ..."
"... Everything from cell phone recordings and logs, to emails, to text messages, to personal information posted on social networking sites, to credit card statements, to library circulation records, to credit card histories, etc., is collected by the NSA and shared freely with its agents in crime: the CIA, FBI and DHS. One NSA researcher actually quit the Aquaint program, "citing concerns over the dangers in placing such a powerful weapon in the hands of a top-secret agency with little accountability." ..."
"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." -- George Orwell, 1984
Who could have predicted that 70 years after Orwell typed the final words to his dystopian novel, "He loved Big Brother," we would
fail to heed his warning and come to love Big Brother.
"To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone
-- to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the
age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink -- greetings!" -- George Orwell
1984 portrays a global society of total control in which people are not allowed to have thoughts that in any way disagree
with the corporate state. There is no personal freedom, and advanced technology has become the driving force behind a surveillance-driven
society. Snitches and cameras are everywhere. People are subject to the Thought Police, who deal with anyone guilty of thought crimes.
The government, or "Party," is headed by Big Brother who appears on posters everywhere with the words: "Big Brother is watching
you."
We have arrived, way ahead of schedule, into the dystopian future dreamed up by not only Orwell but also such fiction writers
as Aldous Huxley, Margaret Atwood and Philip K. Dick.
"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."―George Orwell
Much like Orwell's Big Brother in 1984 , the government and its corporate spies now watch our every move. Much like Huxley's
A Brave New World , we are churning out a society of watchers who "have their liberties taken away from them, but rather enjoy
it, because they [are] distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing." Much like Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale
, the populace is now taught to "know their place and their duties, to understand that they have no real rights but will be protected
up to a point if they conform, and to think so poorly of themselves that
they will
accept their assigned fate and not rebel or run away ."
And in keeping with Philip K. Dick's darkly prophetic vision of a dystopian police state -- which became the basis for
Steven
Spielberg's futuristic thriller Minority Report -- we are now trapped in a world in which the government is all-seeing,
all-knowing and all-powerful, and if you dare to step out of line, dark-clad police SWAT teams and pre-crime units will crack a few
skulls to bring the populace under control.
What once seemed futuristic no longer occupies the realm of science fiction.
Incredibly, as the various nascent technologies employed and shared by the government and corporations alike -- facial recognition,
iris scanners, massive databases, behavior prediction software, and so on -- are incorporated into a complex, interwoven cyber network
aimed at tracking our movements, predicting our thoughts and controlling our behavior, the
dystopian visions of past writers is fast becoming
our reality .
"People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf."―George
Orwell
The courts have
shredded the Fourth Amendment's protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. In fact, SWAT teams battering down doors
without search warrants and FBI agents acting as a secret police that investigate dissenting citizens are common occurrences in contemporary
America. And bodily privacy and integrity have been utterly eviscerated by a prevailing view that Americans have no rights over what
happens to their bodies during an encounter with government officials, who are allowed to search, seize, strip, scan, spy on, probe,
pat down, taser, and arrest any individual at any time and for the slightest provocation.
"The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible
to say which was which."―George Orwell, Animal Farm
We are increasingly ruled by multi-corporations wedded to the police state.
What many fail to realize is that the government is not operating alone. It cannot. The government requires an accomplice.
Thus, the increasingly complex security needs of the massive federal government, especially in the areas of defense, surveillance
and data management, have been met within the corporate sector, which has shown itself to be a powerful ally that both depends on
and feeds the growth of governmental overreach.
In fact, Big Tech wedded to Big Government has become Big Brother, and we are now ruled by the Corporate Elite whose tentacles
have spread worldwide. For example, USA Today reports that five years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the homeland security
business was booming to such an extent that it
eclipsed mature
enterprises like movie-making and the music industry in annual revenue. This security spending to private corporations such as
Google, Amazon, Microsoft and others is
forecast to exceed
$1 trillion in the near future.
The government now has at its disposal technological arsenals so sophisticated and invasive as to render any constitutional protections
null and void. Spearheaded by the NSA, which has shown itself to care little to nothing for constitutional limits or privacy, the
"security/industrial complex" -- a marriage of government, military and corporate interests aimed at keeping Americans under constant
surveillance -- has come to dominate the government and our lives. At three times the size of the CIA, constituting one third of
the intelligence budget and with its own global spy network to boot, the NSA has a long history of spying on Americans, whether or
not it has always had the authorization to do so.
Money, power, control. There is no shortage of motives fueling the convergence of mega-corporations and government. But who is
paying the price? The American people, of course.
Orwell understood what many Americans, caught up in their partisan flag-waving, are still struggling to come to terms with: that
there is no such thing as a government organized for the good of the people. Even the best intentions among those in government inevitably
give way to the desire to maintain power and control over the citizenry at all costs. As Orwell explains:
The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power,
pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know
what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian
Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended,
perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there
lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know what no one ever seizes power with the intention
of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution;
one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture
is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.
"The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it." ― George Orwell
How do you change the way people think? You start by changing the words they use.
In totalitarian regimes -- a.k.a. police states -- where conformity and compliance are enforced at the end of a loaded gun, the
government dictates what words can and cannot be used. In countries where the police state hides behind a benevolent mask and disguises
itself as tolerance, the citizens censor themselves, policing their words and thoughts to conform to the dictates of the mass mind.
Dystopian literature shows what happens when the populace is transformed into mindless automatons. In
Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 , reading is banned
and books are burned in order to suppress dissenting ideas, while televised entertainment is used to anesthetize the populace and
render them easily pacified, distracted and controlled.
In Huxley's Brave New World , serious literature,
scientific thinking and experimentation are banned as subversive, while critical thinking is discouraged through the use of conditioning,
social taboos and inferior education. Likewise, expressions of individuality, independence and morality are viewed as vulgar and
abnormal.
And in Orwell's 1984 , Big Brother does
away with all undesirable and unnecessary words and meanings, even going so far as to routinely rewrite history and punish "thoughtcrimes."
In this dystopian vision of the future, the Thought Police serve as the eyes and ears of Big Brother, while the Ministry of Peace
deals with war and defense, the Ministry of Plenty deals with economic affairs (rationing and starvation), the Ministry of Love deals
with law and order (torture and brainwashing), and the Ministry of Truth deals with news, entertainment, education and art (propaganda).
The mottos of Oceania: WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, and IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.
All three -- Bradbury, Huxley and Orwell -- had an uncanny knack for realizing the future, yet it is Orwell who best understood
the power of language to manipulate the masses. Orwell's Big Brother relied on Newspeak to eliminate undesirable words, strip such
words as remained of unorthodox meanings and make independent, non-government-approved thought altogether unnecessary. To give a
single example, as psychologist Erich Fromm illustrates in his afterword to 1984 :
The word free still existed in Newspeak, but it could only be used in such statements as "This dog is free from lice" or
"This field is free from weeds." It could not be used in its old sense of "politically free" or "intellectually free," since political
and intellectual freedom no longer existed as concepts .
Where we stand now is at the juncture of OldSpeak (where words have meanings, and ideas can be dangerous) and Newspeak (where
only that which is "safe" and "accepted" by the majority is permitted). The power elite has made their intentions clear: they will
pursue and prosecute any and all words, thoughts and expressions that challenge their authority.
This is the final link in the police state chain.
"Until they became conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious." --
George Orwell
Americans have been
conditioned to accept routine incursions on their privacy rights . In fact, the addiction to screen devices -- especially cell
phones -- has created a hive effect where the populace not only watched but is controlled by AI bots. However, at one time, the idea
of a total surveillance state tracking one's every move would have been abhorrent to most Americans. That all changed with the 9/11
attacks. As professor Jeffrey Rosen observes, "Before Sept. 11, the idea that Americans would voluntarily agree to live their lives
under the gaze of a network of biometric surveillance cameras, peering at them in government buildings, shopping malls, subways and
stadiums, would have seemed unthinkable,
a dystopian fantasy of a society that
had surrendered privacy and anonymity ."
Having been reduced to a cowering citizenry -- mute in the face of elected officials who refuse to represent us, helpless in the
face of police brutality, powerless in the face of militarized tactics and technology that treat us like enemy combatants on a battlefield,
and naked in the face of government surveillance that sees and hears all -- we have nowhere left to go.
We have, so to speak, gone from being a nation where privacy is king to one where nothing is safe from the prying eyes of government.
In search of so-called terrorists and extremists hiding amongst us -- the proverbial "needle in a haystack," as one official termed
it -- the Corporate State has taken to monitoring all aspects of our lives, from cell phone calls and emails to Internet activity
and credit card transactions. Much of this data is being fed through
fusion centers across the
country, which work with the Department of Homeland Security to make threat assessments on every citizen, including school children.
These are state and regional intelligence centers that collect data on you.
"Big Brother is Watching You."―George Orwell
Wherever you go and whatever you do, you are now being watched, especially if you leave behind an electronic footprint. When you
use your cell phone, you leave a record of when the call was placed, who you called, how long it lasted and even where you were at
the time. When you use your ATM card, you leave a record of where and when you used the card. There is even a video camera at most
locations equipped with facial recognition software. When you use a cell phone or drive a car enabled with GPS, you can be tracked
by satellite. Such information is shared with government agents, including local police. And all of this once-private information
about your consumer habits, your whereabouts and your activities is now being fed to the U.S. government.
The government has nearly inexhaustible resources when it comes to tracking our movements, from electronic wiretapping devices,
traffic cameras and biometrics to radio-frequency identification cards, satellites and Internet surveillance.
Speech recognition technology now makes it possible for the government to carry out massive eavesdropping by way of sophisticated
computer systems. Phone calls can be monitored, the audio converted to text files and stored in computer databases indefinitely.
And if any "threatening" words are detected -- no matter how inane or silly -- the record can be flagged and assigned to a government
agent for further investigation. Federal and state governments, again working with private corporations, monitor your Internet content.
Users are profiled and tracked in order to identify, target and even prosecute them.
In such a climate, everyone is a suspect. And you're guilty until you can prove yourself innocent. To underscore this shift in
how the government now views its citizens, the FBI uses its wide-ranging authority to investigate individuals or groups, regardless
of whether they are suspected of criminal activity.
"Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull." ― George Orwell
Here's what a lot of people fail to understand, however: it's not just what you say or do that is being monitored, but how you
think that is being tracked and targeted. We've already seen this play out on the state and federal level with hate crime
legislation that cracks down on so-called "hateful" thoughts and expression, encourages self-censoring and reduces free debate on
various subject matter.
Total Internet surveillance by the Corporate State, as omnipresent as God, is used by the government to predict and, more importantly,
control the populace, and it's not as far-fetched as you might think. For example, the NSA is now designing an artificial intelligence
system that is designed to anticipate your every move. In a nutshell, the NSA will feed vast amounts of the information it collects
to a computer system known as Aquaint (the acronym
stands for Advanced QUestion Answering for INTelligence), which the computer can then use to detect patterns and predict behavior.
No information is sacred or spared.
Everything from cell phone recordings and logs, to emails, to text messages, to personal information posted on social networking
sites, to credit card statements, to library circulation records, to credit card histories, etc., is collected by the NSA and shared
freely with its agents in crime: the CIA, FBI and DHS. One NSA researcher actually quit the Aquaint program, "citing concerns over
the dangers in placing such a powerful weapon in the hands of a top-secret agency with little accountability."
Thus, what we are witnessing, in the so-called name of security and efficiency, is the creation of a new class system comprised
of the watched (average Americans such as you and me) and the watchers (government bureaucrats, technicians and private corporations).
Clearly, the age of privacy in America is at an end.
"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face -- for ever." -- Orwell
So where does that leave us?
We now find ourselves in the unenviable position of being monitored, managed and controlled by our technology, which answers not
to us but to our government and corporate rulers. This is the fact-is-stranger-than-fiction lesson that is being pounded into us
on a daily basis.
It won't be long before we find ourselves looking back on the past with longing, back to an age where we could speak to whom we
wanted, buy what we wanted, think what we wanted without those thoughts, words and activities being tracked, processed and stored
by corporate giants such as Google, sold to government agencies such as the NSA and CIA, and used against us by militarized police
with their army of futuristic technologies.
To be an individual today, to not conform, to have even a shred of privacy, and to live beyond the reach of the government's roaming
eyes and technological spies, one must not only be a rebel but rebel.
Even when you rebel and take your stand, there is rarely a happy ending awaiting you. You are rendered an outlaw.
So how do you survive in the American surveillance state?
We're running out of options
As I make clear in my book
Battlefield America: The
War on the American People , we'll soon have to choose between self-indulgence (the bread-and-circus distractions offered
up by the news media, politicians, sports conglomerates, entertainment industry, etc.) and self-preservation in the form of renewed
vigilance about threats to our freedoms and active engagement in self-governance.
Yet as Aldous Huxley acknowledged in Brave New World Revisited : "Only the vigilant can maintain their liberties, and only
those who are constantly and intelligently on the spot can hope to govern themselves effectively by democratic procedures. A society,
most of whose members spend a great part of their time, not on the spot, not here and now and in their calculable future, but somewhere
else, in the irrelevant other worlds of sport and soap opera, of mythology and metaphysical fantasy, will find it hard to resist
the encroachments of those would manipulate and control it."
-----------------------------------------------------
The corrupt establishment will do anything to suppress sites like the Burning Platform from revealing the truth. The corporate media
does this by demonetizing sites like mine by blackballing the site from advertising revenue. If you get value from this site, please
keep it running with a donation. [Jim Quinn - PO Box 1520
Every hour taxpayers in the United States are paying $32,077,626 for
Total Cost of Wars Since 2001.
I'm going through a Department of Defense background check right now and it's not so bad. The thing is they already know everything
damn there is to know about me. How do I know this ? Because I can pull up on their computers what they already know. It's to
help guys like me pass or at least that's what they say.
They got us by the balls now . How can you fight something like this Unless you take down the whole electric grid. Only God knows
the horror that would bring.
"The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it." – Orwell
Galatians 4:16 KJB "Am I therefore become your enemy, because I tell you the truth?" – Paul
Boat Guy
It is serious concern the move from a free republic to a corporate state with armed government badge wearing just doing my
job minions existing in comfort thanks to the confiscatory tax and asset forfeiture programs in play by the circle jerk of Wall
Street to K-Street to Capitol Street .
Sadly the people of honor and integrity that could initiate a Nuremberg style justice system upon those in power and control will
quickly be stricken down by minions unaccountable thanks to nonsense like the patriot act and FISA courts . So much for the bill
of Rights that is supposed to be the impenetrable shield protecting Americans from government . Our alleged honor and oath bound
representatives have been able to turn it into Swiss cheese !
Refuse & Resist , Forget Me Not !
"... In the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four , there is an all-encompassing surveillance state that keeps a watchful eye on everyone, in search of possible rebels and points of resistance. ..."
"... Censorship is the norm in this world, and is so extreme that individuals can become "unpersons" who are essentially deleted from society because their ideas were considered dangerous by the establishment. This is an idea that is very familiar to activists and independent journalists who are being removed from the public conversation for speaking out about government and corporate corruption on social media. ..."
"... Orwell is famous for coining the term "double-speak," which is a way to describe the euphemistic language that government uses to whitewash their most dirty deeds. For example, in Orwell's story, the ministry of propaganda was called the Ministry of Truth, just as today the government agency that was once known as "The Department of War," is now called the "Department of Defense." ..."
"... "Sometimes the man who looks happiest in town, with the biggest smile, is the one carrying the biggest load of sin. There are smiles and smiles; learn to tell the dark variety from the light. The seal-barker, the laugh-shouter, half the time he's covering up. He's had his fun and he's guilty. And men do love sin, oh how they love it, never doubt, in all shapes, sizes, colors, and smells." ..."
"... Unfortunately, just like in Orwell's book, people in the modern world are so distracted by entertainment and the divided by politics that they have no idea they are living in a tyrannical police state. ..."
"... "We are not at war with Eurasia. You are being made into obedient, stupid slaves of the Party." -Emmanuel Goldstein ..."
This month, George Orwell's legendary novel
Nineteen Eighty-Four turns
70 years old, and the warnings contained within the story are now more relevant than ever. Orwell's predictions were so spot on that
it almost seems like it was used as some type of accidental instruction manual for would-be tyrants.
In the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four , there is an all-encompassing surveillance state that keeps a watchful eye on everyone,
in search of possible rebels and points of resistance.
Censorship is the norm in this world, and is so extreme that individuals can become "unpersons" who are essentially deleted
from society because their ideas were considered dangerous by the establishment. This is an idea that is very familiar to activists
and independent journalists who are being removed from the public conversation for speaking out about government and corporate corruption
on social media.
Orwell is famous for coining the term "double-speak," which is a way to describe the euphemistic language that government
uses to whitewash their most dirty deeds. For example, in Orwell's story, the ministry of propaganda was called the Ministry of Truth,
just as today the government agency that was once known as "The Department of War," is now called the "Department of Defense."
There was also never-ending war in Orwell's story, the conditions of which would change on a regular basis, keeping the general
population confused about conflicts so they give up on trying to understand what is actually going on. Some of these predictions
were merely recognitions of patterns in human history, since the idea of "unpersons" and war propaganda is nothing new. However,
Orwell had an incredible understanding of how technology was going to progress over the 20th century, and he was able to envision
how technology would be used by those in power to control the masses.
The technological predictions made in the book were truly uncanny, as they give a fairly accurate description of our modern world.
Orwell described "telescreens," which acted as both an entertainment device and a two-way communication device. This type of technology
was predicted by many futurists at the time, but Orwell's prediction was unique because he suggested that these devices would be
used by the government to spy on people, through microphones and cameras built into the devices.
Unfortunately, just like in Orwell's book, people in the modern world are so distracted by entertainment and the divided by politics
that they have no idea they are living in a tyrannical police state. This police state was also a strong deterrent in the world of
Nineteen Eighty-Four , because although many of the citizens in the book had a positive opinion of "big brother," it was still something
that they feared, and it was a force that kept them in control. Of course, this is not much different from the attitude that the
average American or European has when confronted with police brutality and government corruption.
Many of the ideas about power and authority that were expressed in Orwell's classic are timeless and as old as recorded history
; but his analysis of how technology would amplify the destructive nature of power was incredibly unique, especially for his time.
Not to stray too far, I always liked the part in Ray Bradbury's "Something Wicked This Way Comes":
"Sometimes the man who looks happiest in town, with the biggest smile, is the one carrying the biggest load of sin.
There are smiles and smiles; learn to tell the dark variety from the light. The seal-barker, the laugh-shouter, half the time
he's covering up. He's had his fun and he's guilty. And men do love sin, oh how they love it, never doubt, in all shapes,
sizes, colors, and smells."
The laugh shouter is one of those government or corporate chuckle-heads that goes along, gets along, and usually spends less
than an hour a day actually doing his job. You see them on TV and in every office. Everything out of their mouths has to be punctuated
with a chuckle.
The thing I remember from the novel was the "versificator" which was a typewriter-like device that allowed historical events
to be changed as needed . . . very much like the networked computer.
Facebook recently made me an UnPerson, not joking. I had deleted my acct some years ago, re-registered to man a business page
and...haha they rejected me, recent photo and all.
There are a few other books and booklets and letters that also seem eerily prescient. Following modern-day protocols, however,
it's best not to mention them in polite company. ;-)
Unfortunately, just like in Orwell's book, people in the modern world are so distracted by entertainment and the divided
by politics that they have no idea they are living in a tyrannical police state.
Exactly...
"We are not at war with Eurasia. You are being made into obedient, stupid slaves of the Party." -Emmanuel Goldstein
I plan on voting in the local elections, especially for Sheriff and the bond issues. Also, I still think that voting for the
quality Libertarian candidates is a better option than not voting, but I do understand your point. But when all else fails, you
better be prepared to vote from the rooftops...
You're welcome. Two other titles I was going to recommend you watching for at your library
are these:
"From Haven To Conquest" by Walid Khalidi and The Transfer Agreement by
Edwin Black
The former is a 900 page source book which includes 80 short pieces, one of which is from
Jeffries "Palestine: The Reality". The second is about the agreement Hitler made with the
Zionists to evade a world-wide Jewish boycott of Germany at a time when this would have
hurt . Neither book is inexpensive, so I was surprised to see both of them at the
Internet Archive available for downloading.
This is just a short magazine article from 1939 describing life in a Jewish town in
Palestine. The last two pages give a hint of the way the Zionists used violence and even
terror against their fellow Jews to keep them in line.
Another topic altogether, but this 1854 newspaper essay gives a taste of what the South
planned for Central and South America. The Northern victory in the Civil War turned out to be
badly flawed, but a Southern one would have brought on evils beyond imagining.
Fukuyama offers a general theory of prosperity that provides provocative answers to certain
of the questions he raised in The End of History and the Last Man (1992).
While conceding that neoclassical economists have uncovered important truths about markets
and money, the RAND Corp. analyst argues that they give a poor account of human behavior. In
search of links missed by these practioners of the dismal science, Fukuyama probes the impact
of culture (broadly speaking, any society's inherited ethical habits) on economic life.
Focusing on such factors as trust (a community's shared expectation of honest, cooperative
behavior outside the family) and social capital (the values created by tradition, religion, or
other means), the author examines the ability of various peoples to organize effectively for
commercial purposes without relying on blood ties or government intervention. Fukuyama surveys
emergent as well as established industrial powers (the US, Canada, China, Germany, Italy,
Japan, Korea, et al.) to determine which might have superior reserves of social capital.
These reserves are important, he points out, because market-oriented societies in which
there is a high degree of moral consensus and cooperation have lower transaction costs and
hence greater competitiveness.
The author puts paid to any idea that the US is a nation of rugged individualists; indeed,
Americans are joiners without peer. He warns, though, that ongoing deterioration in the ties
that bind (e.g., declines in church attendance and membership in fraternal or voluntary
organizations), coupled with a persistent rise in divorce rates and special-interest groups,
could deplete the nation's social capital and over time levy an economic toll.
In turn, he cautions, the weakening of civil authority could strengthen the state's
judiciary and executive branches, an outcome that, he says, is in nobody's best interest.
A challenging, elegant exegesis that puts intellectual meat on the bones of Benjamin
Franklin's tip to his fellow revolutionaries at the signing of the Declaration of Independence:
"We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately."
"... In Orwell's imagination, society was ruled in the future by Big Brother. It wasn't a computer, but rather the collective expression of the Party. But not like the Republicans; this Party was an autonomous bureaucracy and advanced surveillance state interested only in perpetuating itself as a hierarchy. In this dystopia, "the people" had become insignificant, without the power of "grasping that the world could be other than it is." ..."
"... Concepts like freedom were perverted by a ruthless Newspeakperpetuated by the Party through the media. A Goodthinker was someone who followed orders without thinking. Crimestop was the instinctual avoidance of any dangerous thought, and Doublethink was the constant distortion of reality to maintain the Party's image of infallibility. ..."
"... Writing in 1948, Orwell was projecting what could happen in just a few decades. By most measures, even 70 years later we're not quite there yet. But we do face the real danger that freedom and equality will be seriously distorted by a new form of Newspeak, a Trumpian version promoted by the administration and its allies through their media. We already have Trumpian Goodthinkers -- the sychophantic surrogates who follow his lead without thinking, along with Crimestop -- the instinctual avoidance of "disloyal" thought, and Doublethink -- the constant distortion of reality to maintain Trump's insatiable ego and image of infallibility. Orwellian ideas are simply resurfacing in a post-modern/reality TV form. ..."
"... As community life unravels and more institutions fall into disrepute, media have become among of the few remaining that can potentially facilitate some social cohesion. Yet instead they fuel conflict and crisis. It's not quite Crimestop, but does often appeal to some of the basest instincts and produce even more alienation and division. ..."
"... In 1980, Ralph Nader called the race for president at that time -- between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan -- a choice between mediocrity and menace. It was funny then, but now we can see what real menace looks like. Is Trump-ism what Orwell warned us about? Not quite, though there are similarities. Like Trump, you can't talk to Big Brother. And he rarely gives you the truth, only doublespeak. But Trump is no Big Brother. More like a Drunk Uncle with nukes. ..."
"... Security is tight and hard to avoid, on or offline. There are cameras everywhere, and every purchase and move most people make is tracked by the state. Still, there are four bombings in the first week of the Games. There is also another kind of human tragedy. Four runners collapse during preliminary rounds as a result of a toxic mix -- heat and pollution. ..."
"... Greg Guma is the Vermont-based author of Dons of Time, Uneasy Empire, Spirits of Desire, Big Lies, and The People's Republic: Vermont and the Sanders Revolution. ..."
"... This article was originally published by Greg Guma: For Preservation & Change . ..."
More people are becoming alienated, cynical, resentful or resigned, while too much of
mass and social media reinforces less-than-helpful narratives and tendencies. The frog's in the
frying pan and the heat is rising.
On the big screens above us beautiful young people demonstrated their prowess. We were
sitting in the communications center, waiting for print outs to tell us what they'd done before
organizing the material for mass consumption. Outside, people were freezing in the snow as they
waited for buses. Their only choice was to attend another event or attempt to get home.
The area was known as the Competition Zone, a corporate state created for the sole purpose
of showcasing these gorgeous competitors. Freedom was a foreign idea here; no one was more free
than the laminated identification card hanging around your neck allowed.
Visitors were more restricted than anyone. They saw only what they paid for, and had to wait
in long lines for food, transport, or tickets to more events. They were often uncomfortable,
yet they felt privileged to be admitted to the Zone. Citizens were categorized by their
function within the Organizing Committee's bureaucracy. Those who merely served -- in jobs like
cooking, driving and cleaning -- wore green and brown tags. They could travel between their
homes and work, but were rarely permitted into events. Their contact with visitors was also
limited. To visit them from outside the Zone, their friends and family had to be screened.
Most citizens knew little about how the Zone was actually run, about the "inner community"
of diplomats, competitors and corporate officials they served. Yet each night they watched the
exploits of this same elite on television.
The Zone, a closed and classified place where most bad news went unreported and a tiny elite
called the shots through mass media and computers, was no futuristic fantasy. It was Lake
Placid for several weeks in early 1980 -- a full four years before 1984.
In a once sleepy little community covered with artificial snow, the Olympics had brought a
temporary society into being. Two thousand athletes and their entourage were its royalty, role
models for the throngs of spectators, townspeople and journalists. This convergence resulted in
an ad hoc police state, managed by public and private forces and a political elite that
combined local business honchos with an international governing committee. They dominated a
population all too willing to submit to arbitrary authority.
Even back then, Lake Placid's Olympic "village" felt like a preview of things to come. Not
quite George Orwell's dark vision, but uncomfortably close.
In Orwell's imagination, society was ruled in the future by Big Brother. It wasn't a
computer, but rather the collective expression of the Party. But not like the Republicans; this
Party was an autonomous bureaucracy and advanced surveillance state interested only in
perpetuating itself as a hierarchy. In this dystopia, "the people" had become insignificant,
without the power of "grasping that the world could be other than it is."
Concepts like freedom were perverted by a ruthless Newspeakperpetuated by the Party through
the media. A Goodthinker was someone who followed orders without thinking. Crimestop was the
instinctual avoidance of any dangerous thought, and Doublethink was the constant distortion of
reality to maintain the Party's image of infallibility.
Writing in 1948, Orwell was projecting what could happen in just a few decades. By most
measures, even 70 years later we're not quite there yet. But we do face the real danger that
freedom and equality will be seriously distorted by a new form of Newspeak, a Trumpian version
promoted by the administration and its allies through their media. We already have Trumpian
Goodthinkers -- the sychophantic surrogates who follow his lead without thinking, along with
Crimestop -- the instinctual avoidance of "disloyal" thought, and Doublethink -- the constant
distortion of reality to maintain Trump's insatiable ego and image of infallibility. Orwellian
ideas are simply resurfacing in a post-modern/reality TV form.
Our fast food culture is also taking a long-term toll. More and more people are becoming
alienated, cynical, resentful or resigned, while too much of mass and social media reinforces
less-than-helpful narratives and tendencies. The frog's in the frying pan and the heat is
rising.
Much of what penetrates and goes viral further fragments culture and thought, promoting a
cynicism that reinforces both rage and inaction. Rather than true diversity, we have the mass
illusion that a choice between polarized opinions, shaped and curated by editors and networks,
is the essence of free speech and democracy. In reality, original ideas are so constrained and
self-censored that what's left is usually as diverse as brands of peppermint toothpaste.
When the Bill of Rights was ratified, the notion that freedom of speech and the press should
be protected meant that the personal right of self-expression should not be repressed by the
government. James Madison, author of the First Amendment, warned that the greatest danger to
liberty was that a majority would use its power to repress everyone else. Yet the evolution of
mass media and the corporate domination of economic life have made these "choicest privileges"
almost obsolete.
As community life unravels and more institutions fall into disrepute, media have become
among of the few remaining that can potentially facilitate some social cohesion. Yet instead
they fuel conflict and crisis. It's not quite Crimestop, but does often appeal to some of the
basest instincts and produce even more alienation and division.
In general terms, what most mass media bring the public is a series of images and anecdotes
that cumulatively define a way of life. Both news and entertainment contribute to the illusion
that competing, consuming and accumulating are at the core of our aspirations. Each day we are
repeatedly shown and told that culture and politics are corrupt, that war is imminent or
escalating somewhere, that violence is random and pervasive, and yet also that the latest
"experts" have the answers. Countless programs meanwhile celebrate youth, violence, frustrated
sexuality, and the lives of celebrities.
Between the official program content are a series of intensely packaged sales pitches. These
commercial messages wash over us, as if we are wandering in an endless virtual mall, searching
in vain for fulfillment as society crumbles.
In 1980, Ralph Nader called the race for president at that time -- between Jimmy Carter and
Ronald Reagan -- a choice between mediocrity and menace. It was funny then, but now we can see
what real menace looks like. Is Trump-ism what Orwell warned us about? Not quite, though there
are similarities. Like Trump, you can't talk to Big Brother. And he rarely gives you the truth,
only doublespeak. But Trump is no Big Brother. More like a Drunk Uncle with nukes.
So, is it too late for a rescue? Will menace win this time? Or can we still save the
environment, reclaim self-government, restore communities and protect human rights? What does
the future hold?
It could be summer in Los Angeles in 2024, the end of Donald Trump's second term. The
freeways are slow-moving parking lots for the Olympics. Millions of people hike around in the
heat, or use bikes and cycles to get to work. It's difficult with all the checkpoints, not to
mention the extra-high security at the airports. Thousands of police, not to mention the
military, are on the lookout for terrorists, smugglers, protesters, cultists, gangs, thieves,
and anyone who doesn't have money to burn or a ticket to the Games.
Cash isn't much good, and gas has become so expensive that suburban highways are almost
empty.
Security is tight and hard to avoid, on or offline. There are cameras everywhere, and every
purchase and move most people make is tracked by the state. Still, there are four bombings in
the first week of the Games. There is also another kind of human tragedy. Four runners collapse
during preliminary rounds as a result of a toxic mix -- heat and pollution.
... ... ...
Greg Guma is the Vermont-based author of Dons of Time, Uneasy Empire, Spirits of Desire,
Big Lies, and The People's Republic: Vermont and the Sanders Revolution.
"... Time Warner already offers Nomorobo as a free service, and the only reason I tried the Sentry was to eliminate the one ring you get for blacklisted callers when you're using Nomorobo). ..."
I am an electrical
engineer, and I can tell you I searched high and low for the best device to defeat robocalls.
Forget the other devices like nomorobo that compare the incoming phone number to a big
blacklist..... telemarketers are just faking random caller id's.
This device has a recording that immediately tells callers to hit the '0' key while a robot
dialer is still searching for a telemarketer to connect the call to after it has been
answered.
Since the telemarketer doesn't hear that message, they never press '0', and the call is
never connected to you.
Once your friends and family press '0' and are in the system, their calls are passed through
directly to you without interruption.
The device also has a huge blacklist number memory for blocking certain numbers.
The unit also has a two memory answering machine function which ONLY works after a caller
has pressed '0'. Your regular answering machine will pick up all other legit calls. (The device
manual does not mention this feature.)
The Sentry-3 has been in service for one month. Black listed callers have been blocked and
white listed callers have rung through normally. Callers on neither list have been greeted by a
custom recorded message inviting them to press "zero" to ring my home phone. Only one caller
has pressed zero, rang through, and left a desired recorded message on my home recorder. The 35
other callers who did not press "zero" were blocked, and then I added them to the black list.
In short, the Sentry-3 handled all calls flawlessly.
Two items which warrant improvement are 1) the poor audio quality of the built-in incoming
and outgoing voice message recorders and 2) the surprisingly scanty and inadequate unit
operations documentation. Many of the needed Sentry-3 installation and operational details that
are not covered clearly, or not covered at all, can be gleaned from reading and interpolating
the documentation for the earlier Sentry models and by reading the reviews/questions/answers
for all of the models.
Initially I installed the base station of my Panasonic cordless phone system in series with
the S-3 as illustrated in the S-3 manual. With this arrangement no caller identifications or
numbers were displayed on any of the phones. After noting that an optional parallel S-3 setup
was mentioned in the earlier S-2 documentation I converted to a parallel setup and then the
Caller ID and number data were displayed.
To minimize the inconvenience and time required for a real person, not on the white or black
lists, to connect to my home phone I recorded this brief OGM: "This is (given name)" [Hopefully
the party would recognize the name and voice and not hang up without listening further]; "To
ring my home phone" [This is what they intended to do]; "Press zero, hang up, and redial my
number. Thank you". To improve the likelihood that the caller would be able to understand my
message I chose not to speak in conversational tones but instead pronounced each word as loudly
and as clearly as I could without yelling. This approach in effect partially compensated for
the poor quality of the voice recorder.
The two needed performance improvement items described earlier are of minor import compared
with the truly impressive ability of the S3 to eliminate unwanted calls. The unit does perform
as advertised. In my opinion it is fairly priced and offers a blocking capability not found in
any other landline blocker of which I am aware. Based on my experience to date I do recommend
it for consideration by anyone seeking an effective landline call blocker.
This is about my fourth edit of this review. Unfortunately, at this point
the unit is being returned, but it shows great promise and it's possible, if not likely, that my
home phone set up was the problem and others will not experience the same issues I did.
Initially, the Sentry 3 introduced significant background static when I inserted it inline
between my wall jack and my base phone and I thought it would have to go back. I'm on Time Warner
VOIP in NYC, and I'm using a Panasonic modular system with a base unit, so I thought that one of
those might have been the problem. But, after some more trial and error, the problem appeared to
have been because I introduced the Sentry Unit too far down the line, so to speak, in my interior
wiring. Once I installed it directly to the cable modem, and ran my complicated internal wiring
(which splits later on) directly out of the Sentry Unit at that initial point, the static was
gone. So that was good.
Unfortunately, this morning, I picked up my phone line and it was full of static and clicks
until I disconnected the Sentry. So then, based on someone else's review, I searched for the
instructions for the Sentry 2, which shows how to set up the unit in parallel (I've uploaded a
picture of it). Basically you just use a splitter to add the Sentry, but you don't run your
connection through it. This cleared all the static and clicks and returned my clarity of
sound.
But it comes at a cost. Because of the parallel wiring (and unlike when the unit was set up
in-line), my home phone rings at least once before the Sentry unit kicks in (notwithstanding that
I have the Sentry ringer setting, accessed by holding the ringer button down from the home
screen, set to "allow 0 rings"). For me, but maybe not for others, this defeats the purpose of
the system.
Time Warner already offers Nomorobo as a free service, and the only reason I tried
the Sentry was to eliminate the one ring you get for blacklisted callers when you're using
Nomorobo).
But if your system is different from mine (the Sentry, per its FAQs, seems to like AT&T
and VTech phones), you might want to give it a try. In which case, a few other notes.
First, Caller ID continued to come through on my Panasonic system.
Second, notwithstanding other reviews here, I thought the Sentry instructions were
straight-forward and fine. But, if you are having problems, there's a video on their web site
that walks you through the basics. I easily recorded my own custom message (e.g., "we're blocking
all Robocalls, but if you're a live person that we might want to talk to, please press zero,
hang-up, and redial and you'll be put through. You'll only have to do this one time"), and easily
entered a bunch of whitelisted numbers (without a prefix 1 in my case -- test whether you need it
before you enter all your whitelisted numbers!).
My custom message requires some explanation: you don't have to tell people to hang up and
redial -- if they press 0, then the Sentry unit will begin ringing -- I counted 9 very loud rings
(there doesn't seem to be way to change either the number of rings or the volume), before it
beeps (which the caller can hear) and its message machine kicks in -- and, if you pick up on your
own phone before this point (which does NOT ring in this context), you're connected. And,
regardless of whether you picked up or not, the caller is whitelisted for next time by having
pressed 0.
I didn't want this sequence -- specifically, the need to work with 2 answering machines -- or
the possibility of hearing the Sentry's rather obnoxious sounding ring -- hence the message to
hang up and call back.
As others have said, two improvements would make this a 5 star device (assuming it works with
your set-up): 1) better recording and playback quality on the OGM -- it's really a chore to get
it even reasonably clear and audible, and 2) the ability to have a caller press 0 and directly
ring your own phone. One star deducted for those flaws. And one star deducted for, when it's set
up in parallel, not being able to keep your phone from ringing once (although I'm not sure that's
technically feasible on Sentry's end given the signal is split and hitting both units at the same
time).
But, all in all, if it works with your set up, and you're willing to do the whitelist set-up
work and maybe have the occasional overlooked caller have to go through the 0 pressing process to
be added, it's a pretty amazing device for ending the plague that our home phone lines have
become thanks to all the telemarketers and scam artists.
Jeff 4 months ago
Report abuse Blocking the 1st ring in parallel isn't possible. Sentry uses the 1st ring to
recognize that there is an incoming call, so setting it to pickup on ring 0 is like saying pick
up before the call actually arrives. However, as someone else suggested, you can check your phone
to see if it has the option to not ring on the first ring... or buy one that does have this
feature. I think most of the current Panasonic phones do.
Manufacturer Account of Tel-Sentry Inc. 1 year ago
Report abuse Hi.
Thank you for your valuable feedback. Your suggestions for how we can improve are always
welcomed and appreciated. We also wanted to apologize that the device could not accommodate to
your preference. We are truly grateful that you gave our product a try. Should you have any questions or would
like to share some thoughts regarding your experience, please feel free to contact us. Thank
you.
Sincerely,
Michael Sentry Call Screener Support (714)-361-4615 M-Fr 9am-4pm PST [email protected]
It does effectively block both robo calls and telelmarketing calls by the use of "Accept"
and "Reject" lists and an "Advanced" mode for callers not on either list. In "Advanced" mode, a
pre-recording asks live telemarketers to remove your number from their list, and then leaves
the option for important callers to press "0".
If a caller chooses to press "0", the first time the caller presses "0", only the Sentry
device rings and the caller's number automatically gets saved to the whitelist. This is new
with version 2. The reasoning for the auto save is that important calls from live people (such
as family and friends) aren't totally blocked out from reaching you, but that on a second try,
they will get through and not get stopped by the pre-recorded screening. Of course, this opens
up the possibility that a persistent telemarketer or former friend can press "0" to
automatically get on your whitelist. Yet, if they do, placing them on the reject list manually
is as easy as scrolling to that number on the call list or accept list and holding down the
reject button until the "done" indicator shows up on the LCD.
From an email response received from the manufacturer, according the them, live
telemarketers rarely, if ever go to the effort of pressing "0" when encountering the
pre-recording.
Though made in China (aren't most things today?), the call blocker is designed in the USA.
The call blocker is actually quite intuitive and easy to use. The instruction sheet is only a
few pages and contains instructions on how to set up and use the different features. There are
easy to read lettering indicating a button's function above or below each button. The buttons
on the device doesn't feel cheap as in breaking anytime soon. The buttons are responsive and
don't feel like they are about to cave in when pressed.
Version 2 of the Sentry call blocker tackles many of the concerns of the earlier model.
First, now there are 3 ways to have numbers added to the whitelist. They are (a) view the
call list and press the "Accept" button (this is the same method as with version 1), (b) Add
whitelist numbers directly using the buttons on the device (the instructions are straight
forward. I was able to add about 20 numbers in 30 minutes), and (c) in "Advanced" mode, a
caller presses "0". This automatically saves the caller's number to the whitelist.
Second, by using the Down button, it's easy to toggle the Sentry ringer on or off.
Third, the screen brightness is easier to adjust. There are three levels and the LCD screen
is easy to read during adjustment.
Fourth, the recorded Sentry greeting no longer uses a British sounding male voice, but
instead has an authoritative sounding American male voice which clearly says to the caller that
this number is screened by Sentry and only if the caller has a valid reason, then press
"0".
Fifth, if receiving a call, and the caller presses "0", the alarm rings as usual. But unlike
the Sentry 1 version where the alarm rings even after pick up, with Sentry 2, once the phone is
picked up, the alarm stops and one can talk to the caller freely.
Sixth, to correct issues of the Sentry needing to reset due to power fluctuations (the
Sentry 1 version ran strictly off the phone line's power), the Sentry 2 version, in addition to
using the phone line, uses two AAA batteries as a back up power source, which should last about
6 months before needing a change. Not only does using batteries eliminate the need to unplug
and plug back in occasionally with the Sentry 1 model, but this is also handy when inputting
numbers on the whitelist as now one can do so without being connected to the phone line.
In summary, here is what I like and dislike about the Sentry Call Blocker version 2:
Likes
-----
- Effective call blocking, easy to use, should last, competitively priced
- a large capacity limit (9999 each) of numbers for both "Accept" and "Reject" calls
- Advanced mode blocks automated, robo calls
- (new with version 2) Battery backup eliminates freeze up and resetting issues. Can use device
cord free to input whitelist numbers
- Numbers are retained even if phone line disconnected
- (new with version 2) clear, American accented greeting (though I kinda of miss the English
butler's voice!)
- (new with version 2) ability to add numbers to the call blocker directly to the device
- (new with version 2) auto save to white list gives important callers not yet on the white
list a
second chance to reach you
- (new with version 2) easier to use LCD setting. Even during set up, as long as three is
surrounding light, the LCD isn't too dim to read. The LCD display shows a sharper contrast
- (new with version 2) ability to turn off the ringer
Dislikes
--------
- Only captures the phone number and not the name
- In darker areas, LCD may be a bit dim, would like a backlight button, especially now since
there is battery backup
Overall, I really like the Sentry call blocker, version 2. It feels nice reminding myself
that the phone usage belongs to me and not the telemarketers. In other words, "bring it on"
robo callers and telemarketers, the sheriff is ready for you!
Verified Purchase I just got my Sentry 2 call blocker
and so far I am very excited about this device. There was some confusing terminology about
this device before I purchased that has become clear to me now that I own the device. To
clarify the situation for others, the Sentry 2 works a couple of independent modes that make
the documentation confusing. The documentation referees to dual mode. But there seems to be
more then one dual mode. So which dual mode they are referring to at this point is unknown.
the parallel versus series modes
The first mode pair I will talk about is the parallel versus series modes. This means
there are two ways you can hook up the Sentry 2 to your home phones.
In parallel mode, the Sentry 2 acts like another handset, and you will hear the first ring
of every call that comes in. That means every call. Black listed, white listed, or unknown.
You plug the Sentry 2 into an unused phone jack. Or if you don't have an open phone jack, you
will need to use a splitter. A splitter did not come in my box which is strange because
parallel mode is probably the most common mode people will be able to hook up with. When a
call comes in, all your phones in your house ring instantly just like before. Caller ID with
names show up on all the phones which is a good situation.
The Sentry 2 monitors the Caller ID that comes in during the first ring and if it doesn't
like the number, it will "pick up the phone" and either play it's message or (if the number
is on the block list) hangs up immediately.
If the Sentry 2 is playing it's message, you still have a chance to pick up a phone
elsewhere in your house. This should stop the message playback and you can immediately talk
to the caller. After your call is done, you can then walk over to the Sentry 2 and accept the
last call (in the call history) into your white list, or stick it in the black list.
In series mode, the Sentry 2 sits between your incoming phone line and the rest of the
telephones in your house. In this mode, you will not hear the first ring of every call
because it appears the Sentry 2 will block the ring of every call until it gets a chance to
see the caller ID. This mode would probably make most people happy since more silence is good
right? Let me say right off if you have multiple phone brands scattered throughout your house
like I do chances are most likely you will not be able to use series mode. It seems if you
have even one incompatible phone in your system, or perhaps just too many phones in your
house, series mode probably will not work. While I would have hoped that I could have used
series mode (avoiding the first ring) I am still very glad to have a well functioning
parallel mode setup.
The other mode pair is the basic versus advanced modes.
The so called basic mode is like a standby mode or as it reads on the display of the
device it is the "off" mode. In basic (or "off") mode, all calls are let through except for
black listed numbers which still get blocked. So the part that is "off" is the white listing
capability. You may want to use this mode if your white list is incomplete, or if you are
expecting a call from someone who you don't know their phone number. For example, if you call
a refrigerator repair man. The operator tells you the repair man will call 15 minutes before
he arrives. You can then stick the Sentry 2 into basic "off" mode so that the repair man's
call gets let through. Basic mode can also be used to collect phone numbers from friends and
family, so you don't have to enter them in manually. Just leave Sentry 2 in basic (off) mode
for a few weeks. As the Sentry 2 collects numbers in it's call history, you can scroll
through the call history and add the numbers to your white (or black) list.
The other mode is called advanced mode. Advanced mode is when "off" is not displayed in
the upper right hand corner of the display. Let's be honest. Advanced mode is why we all
decided to purchase the Sentry 2. Advanced mode means the white list is actively checked.
White listed phone numbers are allowed to ring your phones. The black list is also checked.
Black listed numbers get an instant automatic good bye slam and no apology either.
Unknown numbers get a long somewhat annoying message telling them to go away, or press
"0" to be added to the white list. So why is it called advance mode anyway? Well to be
honest, most people will not want their friends or family members to encounter the Sentry 2's
go away message.
If someone presses "0" the Sentry 2 does not hang up. It will stop playing it's message
and the caller will hear silence. This will probably confuse the caller, since the Sentry 2
just told them to hang up. The Sentry 2 will then make a noise, like an alarm which the
caller can't hear. If you are fortunate enough to be able to hear the alarm, then you can
pick up a phone and start talking.
"Sometimes [two and two are four], Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are
three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become
sane."
One of the key themes from George Orwell's dystopic novel 1984 is that the Party can do and
say whatever it wants.
And more importantly, you must believe it, with all your heart. No matter how absurd.
That's doublethink . It is impossible for two plus two to equal three, four, and five
simultaneously. But if the Party says it is so, it is so.
If you can't make yourself believe two contradictory facts simultaneously, that makes you a
thought criminal– an enemy of the Party.
Thoughtcrime is thinking any thought that contradicts the Party.
Facecrime is when you have the wrong expression on your face. For instance, if captured
enemy soldiers are being paraded through the streets, looking sympathetic is a facecrime.
Newspeak is the language of the Party–one that has painstakingly been removed of
unnecessary words, or words that might contradict the Party's ideals.
"Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end
we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to
express it."
During daily two minutes hate , citizens shout and curse whatever enemies the Party shows
them.
And the face of the Party, Big Brother , is watching you. He helps you be a better
citizen.
This isn't just some random literature lesson. Understanding Orwell's 1984 will help you
understand 2019 America.
For instance, one California state senator is working on her own version of Newspeak.
She has banned the members of her committee from using gender pronouns, such as he, she,
her, and him. Instead they must use "they and them" to respect non-binary gender choices.
So Billy Joel's famous song "She's always a woman" would become "They're always a non-binary
gender. . ." Somehow that just doesn't ring with the same sweetness.
Last month a high school student famously committed a facecrime when he stood, apparently
smirking, while a Native American activist beat a drum in his face.
The 16-year-old was then subjected to "two minutes hate" by the entire nation. The Party
labeled him an enemy, and Twitter obliged.
Of course when I reference the 'Party', I don't mean to imply that all these Orwellian
developments are coming from a single political party.
They've ALL done their parts to advance Orwellian dystopia and make it a reality.
Senators Chuck Schumer and Bernie Sanders want to
limit corporate stock buybacks and share payouts. But the tax code already has the
accumulated profits tax, which punishes corporations for NOT engaging in stock buybacks and
share payouts
It's like doublethink you have to simultaneously pay and not pay out dividends.
When Matt Damon pointed out that we should not conflate a pat on the butt with rape, he was
met with "two minutes hate" for expressing the wrong opinion.
"... Administration bloat and academic decline is another prominent feature of the neoliberal university. University presidents now view themselves as CEO and want similar salaries. ..."
This book is the collection of more than dozen of essays of various authors, but even the
Introduction (Privatizing the Public University: Key Trends, Countertrends, and Alternatives)
is worth the price of the book
Trends in neo-liberalization of university education are not new. But recently they took a
more dangerous turn. And they are not easy to decipher, despite the fact that they are
greatly affect the life of each student or educator. In this sense this is really an
eyes-opening book.
In Europe previously higher education as assessable for free or almost free, but for
talented student only. Admission criteria were strict and checked via written and oral
entrance exams on key subjects. Now the tend is to view university as business that get
customers, charge them exorbitant fees and those customers get diploma as hamburgers in
McDonalds at the end for their money. Whether those degree are worth money charged, or not
and were suitable for the particular student of not (many are "fake" degrees with little or
no chances for getting employment) is not university business. On the contrary marketing is
used to attract as many students as possible and many of those student now remain in debt for
large part of their adult life.
In other words, the neoliberalization of the university in the USA creates new, now
dominant trend -- the conversion of the university into for-profit diploma mills, which are
essentially a new type of rent-seeking (and they even attract speculative financial capital
and open scamsters, like was in case of "Trump University" ). Even old universities with more
than a century history more and more resemble diploma mills.
This assault on academic freedom by neoliberalism justifies itself by calling for
"transparency" and "accountability" to the taxpayer and the public. But it operates used
utter perversion of those terms. In the Neoliberal context, they mean "total surveillance"
and "rampant rent-seeking."
Neoliberalism has converted education from a public good to a personal investment in the
future, a future conceived in terms of earning capacity. As this is about your future earning
potential, it is logical that for a chance to increase it you need to take a loan.
Significantly, in the same period per capita, spending on prisons increased by 126 percent
(Newfield 2008: 266). Between the 1970s and 1990s there was a 400 percent increase in charges
in tuition, room, and board in U.S. universities and tuition costs have grown at about ten
times the rate of family income (ibid.). What these instances highlight is not just the
state's retreat from direct funding of higher education but also a calculated initiative to
enable private companies to capture and profit from tax-funded student loans.
The other tendency is also alarming. Funds now are allocated to those institutions that
performed best in what has become a fetishistic quest for ever-higher ratings. That creates
the 'rankings arms-race.' It has very little or nothing to do with the quality of teaching of
students in a particular university. On the contrary, the curriculums were "streamlines" and
"ideologically charged courses" such as neoclassical economics are now required for
graduation even in STEM specialties.
In the neoliberal university professors are now under the iron heel of management and
various metrics were invented to measure the "quality of teaching." Most of them are very
perverted or can be perverted as when a measurement becomes a target; teachers start to focus
their resources and activities primarily on what 'counts' rather than on their wider
competencies, professional ethics and societal goals (see Kohn and Shore, this volume).
Administration bloat and academic decline is another prominent feature of the neoliberal
university. University presidents now view themselves as CEO and want similar salaries. The
same is true for the growing staff of university administrators. The recruitment of
administrators has far outpaced the growth in the number of faculty – or even students.
Meanwhile, universities claim to be struggling with budget crises that force to reduce
permanent academic posts, and widely use underpaid and overworked adjunct staff – the
'precariat' paid just a couple of thousand dollars per course and often existing on the edge
of poverty, or in real poverty.
Money now is the key objective and the mission changed from cultural to "for profit"
business including vast expenses on advancement of the prestige and competitiveness of the
university as an end in itself. Ability to get grants is now an important criteria of getting
the tenure.
Bill said that the thing killing off the textbook
is very same invention which helped make his fortune: Software.
"When I told you about this type of software in previous letters, it was mostly speculative.
But now I can report that these tools have been adopted in thousands of U.S. classrooms from
kindergarten through high school. Zearn, i-Ready, and LearnZillion are examples of digital
curricula used by students and teachers throughout the US," he writes.
War, Peace, and the Social Order. By Brian E. Fogarty. Westview Press, 2000.
236 pp. Cloth, $65.00; paper, $23.00.
A tank could be driven through the cleft of resources available for teaching about the
intersection of peace, war, and military instructions from a sociological perspective.
Filling this pedagogical gap is especially important in the so-called post-Cold War era where
lines between war and peace have become increasingly blurred.
War, Peace, and Social Order (WPSO) begins to fill the gap. WPSO contains a list of
acronyms, two hemispheric maps of the world, six tables, 11 figures, an index, and eight
chapters. Each chapter concludes with a brief chapter summary, a list of questions for
review, and references for further reading.
WPSO begins by making the sociological link between war and peace with emphasis on how war
and peace are created. Chapter 2 provides depth on the social definition of war contrasting
it with violence. Further, peace is defined not as the absence of war, but more as
intersubjective -- a social process that occurs at multiple levels of society. The next
chapter explains war from numerous social and political approaches. This chapter anchors war
in Functional, Marxian, Feminist, International Relations, and Internal-Control theories as
well as more inductive and "human-nature" approaches. Chapter 4 discusses militarism at the
intersection of social institutions including education, popular culture, mass media, sports,
and economics. The relationship between the family and the military is not addressed despite
the knowledge of military families providing a disproportionate number of young people for
careers in military service. (Morris Janowitz [1960/71] The Professional Soldier: A Social
and Political Portrait . Free Press.)
Chapter 5, "The Military Industrial Complex," is the longest and most dense chapter. Here
Fogarty's six years working as an army civilian aircraft buyer and cost analyst shine
through. He deftly navigates the reader through the complex maze of defense spending and
acquisition. He provides simple figures and charts, focuses on the process as wasteful,
exploits five complementary explanations to elucidate defense waste spending, and guides the
reader home by connecting the analysis to both functional and conflict theory.
The next three chapters focus more on the peace process and include a chapter on avoiding
war, promoting peace, and empowering people to make peace. Of special note in the first of
these is the discussion of nonsovereign forms of steering clear of war such as
nongovernment organizations (NGOs) and civilian-based defense ineterventions , for
example Peace Brigades International. The chapter on promoting peace is unique for couching
Ghandi's nonviolent action in sociological terms and noting that a number of social movements
have since used this technique successfully, including Martin Luther King Jr. Fogarty could
have promoted the little-known fact that a very young King earned a B.A. in Sociology at
Morehouse College in 1948. The final chapter inspires the reader with ways of becoming active
through both education and experiences.
The strengths of WPSO for students are many. Foremost, he substantively links the study of
war and peace. Second, the book is well organized, with tight chapters, numerous headings and
subheadings, and a summary concluding each chapter. In addition, but beginning with chapter
3, key terms ( N = 37) are italicized in each of the summary sections.
Some chapters are denser than others. Fogarty also is less attentive to referencing
chapters related to war than in chapters related to peace. For example, other than noting a
film and novel, there are no references in the section on the social psychology of combat
despite a rich research tradition dating back to and including WWII on the social psychology
of war. Finally, the focus may be too American in orientation for some sociologists.
WPSO is oriented toward upper-level undergraduate students and newcomers to the peace and
war literature. It is an excellent supplemental or primary reader for Peace Studies. It could
make a refreshing contribution to Military Sociology courses that have traditionally focused
on peacekeeping/peace enforcing from a military institution perspective (including my own).
The book could be stretched to use in Organization Studies courses and...
My G600 (which I used for the left hand although it is not ambidextrous) died (right button
became "flaky" after three years of daily use; and that's typical for G600 -- it just does
not last that long) and I bought this one saving ,say, $15.
But there is no free lunch and one important defect of this mouse is that the wheel does
not have "clicks" for left and right tilt ) like say all expensive mice from Logitech, and
thus you can't assign macros to tilts. For those who do not use them it's OO, but for m this
is a big shortcoming. I deducted one star for this.
Please be aware that this mouse looks cheap in comparison wit, say $36 Logitech mice like
G602 , but it does work and is more conviniet to use with the left hand.
But you simply can't compare "look and feel" quality to G600 of G602 to this "student"
model. You can still use 6 macros with it and Logitech Gaming Software which allows you to
program macros in Lua, which are individualized for each application you use (not just games,
but any application)
As such this mouse is not only for gamers. It is perfectly suitable, for example, for Unix
sysadmins as it allows execute complex macros in Windows Terminal emulator such as
Teraterm.
Also helps for people with RSI who need to change hands in order give affected with RSI
hand time to recover.
I wish the industry would produce more models of ambidextrous mouse, as RSI is a real
epidemic among heavy computer users and professionals, but we have what we have.
Boot this mini pc and press "Delete" key -- -- Enter into "BIOS Interface" -- -- Select
"Boot" in the interface -- -- Select "Automatic Power On" -- -- Select "Enabled" -- -- "Save
& Exit"
Restore Factory Settings:
Boot this mini pc and press "Alt + F10" -- -- Choose an option -- -- Troubleshoot -- --
Reset this PC -- -- Keep my files or Remove everything -- -- Just remove my files or Fully
clean the drive -- -- Reset -- -- Star reset and wait for 100% completed -- -- Enter Text
Interface and choose "Esc" -- -- Waiting for "Installing Windows" finished. The whole process
will lasts for more than 2 hours. Please be patient.
The AP34 device is an N3450 SOC system. I had some troubles with the AP34 because the video
is only 1080p (and thus some older monitors and older TV's can't sync the video). I also had
issues with getting Ubuntu/Linux running or installed.
The seller provided an email with instructions that helped.
BUT there is a guy who wants to run linux on every smart device (search for Ian MORRISON
(Linuxium)).
Ian has Linux repacked distros that boot, work and install.
I am now running Ubuntu 17.10 with Cinnamon! It is beautiful. The AP34 hardware is a great
fit for Linux. I have added an M.2 drive based on instructions found on the Kodlix website.
Overall, this is a good buy for the sub $200 market.
If you are willing to spend 10-20% more, you might look at a N4200 mini-pc.
I'm a left handed gamer and as all us lefties know, there are no gaming mice made for us. The
best available are "ambidextrous" mice. Which drives me nuts since there is no reason for an
ambidextrous mouse. An ambidextrous person could use either a right or left handed mouse. An
ambidextrous mouse is just a poor compromise between the two, so why not just make a real
left handed mouse?
I tied many and while this mouse leaves much to be desired, its probably the best that can
be hoped for. At least all the buttons are accessible, if not entirely comfortable. It lacks
any thumb buttons, which means all nine buttons are most easily pressed with the index and
middle fingers. Some are really quite well placed and comfortable, other not so much.
However, it is much faster and easier than using key binds on the keyboard, and that is
what's important.
Otherwise the mouse is really nice. The software installs easily and is intuitive. The LED
color on the side can be changed. Its light, moves smoothy. All buttons feel solid and have a
positive response. It works great for gaming as well as les intense internet surfing and word
processing.
"... The title of the book is from Parkinson's statement that "Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion." He explains that "an elderly lady of leisure can spend the entire day in writing and dispatching a postcard to her niece at Bognor Regis." In contrast if all you have is five minutes to write a postcard, it takes just five minutes to write the postcard. ..."
Parkinson's Law, written by C. Northcote Parkinson, is a wonderful book which explores the realities of human behavior within
a bureaucracy. The author doesn't pay attention to theories or the idealized world, but instead writes about how people really
function in organizations.
The title of the book is from Parkinson's statement that "Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion."
He explains that "an elderly lady of leisure can spend the entire day in writing and dispatching a postcard to her niece at Bognor
Regis." In contrast if all you have is five minutes to write a postcard, it takes just five minutes to write the postcard.
At a higher level this idea applies to many situations. For example people's stuff expands to fill their house and use up their
income. Or in the computer world: Data expands to fill the space available for storage
Parkinson writes that it takes great discipline to fight the tendency to use up all the time available to do some job. And
likewise it takes great discipline to save some of your income, or to avoid buying stuff just because you have room for it.
Parkinson has a number of other interesting observations. For example in his Law of Triviality he explains how a group of managers
might spend hours on selecting a coffeepot and minutes on deciding matters of much greater importance.
I also appreciated his explanation on the effective size of a governing group. He says that the right number of people to lead
an organization, like a business or a country, is about five. As the group gets larger, it takes longer and longer to get together
and to agree on matters.
There are many other insightful comments on a variety of topics related to organizations. This is a great book to have teenagers
read, and then to be reread every couple years. Just over a hundred pages it is a quick read, as well as being enjoyable.
If you haven't read Parkinson's Law before, I encourage you to read it this week.
I first received a copy of "Parkinson's Law" from a retired three-star general. Since that time, I've seen copies on the shelves
of almost every powerful person I know, from professors and deans to lawyers and businesspeople. Based on this wide-spread popularity,
I can safely conclude that C. Northcote Parkinson has written something that transcends his time and profession to become a true
classic. He has written, in short, the definitive work on bureaucracy.
Chapter one contains the titular law, which is frequently misquoted. The actual law gives a mathematical formula for how fast
an office will grow, simply by observing that every bureaucrat will demand two subordinates at certain times. Parkinson backs
this up with analysis of various British government bodies. The Colonial Office, for instance, more than doubled in size even
as the number of colonies was shrinking. This is a rock-solid rule, as far as I can tell, and particularly relevant to an America
where we somehow spend $728 billion despite having fewer actual soldiers than at any time in the past sixty years.
Chapter three famously looks at budget meetings. The conclusion is that up to a certain point, committees will spend more time
on items that cost less. Some trivially small item, such as coffee, is easily understood, so every committee member has an opinion
about it. On the other hand, nobody really understands expensive items such as reactors, so nobody has much to say about them.
This is a phenomenon which I've seen arising in real life time and time again.
Chapter four is perhaps the most fascinating and devastatingly accurate one in the book. The hypothesis is that whenever an
organization builds a fancy new headquarters, its time is up. Parkinson offers mainly British examples, but we can see the truth
of this in America. The Sears Tower went up at precisely the moment when the Sears Corporation went down. When construction began
on the AOL Time Warner Center in 2000, that should have been our indication that the dot-com boom was on its last legs.
There are ten chapters in all, but I'll let you discover the delights of the later ones on your own. For sure, some chapters
aren't quite so hard-hitting. Chapter two on the French Parliament may strike some as no longer relevant, while chapter nine on
crime and economics in China contains some cringe-inducing racism. But on the whole, "Parkinson's Law" is a delightful little
book (150 pages) that will explain while it amuses you. "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People" and "Who Moved My Cheese"
may rule the bestseller lists, but C. Northcote Parkinson has the real answers for the business world.
Cyril Northcote Parkinson was a naval historian and writer with experience in the British Civil Service in 1955, when he wrote
a humorous article for the "Economist" on the idiosyncrasies of administration. Parkinson was Raffles Professor of History at
the University of Malaya in Singapore during this time, and, two years later, he expanded on that essay with the publication of
"Parkinson's Law and Other Studies in Administration". "Heaven forbid that students should cease to read books on the science
of public or business administration -provided that these works are classified as fiction," he says. Parkinson's own satirical
take on the subject provides, "for those interested, a glimpse of reality."
There are 10 short chapters, each dedicated to a different quirk of business or public administration, beginning with the one
we all know: Parkinson's Law: "Work expands so as to fill the time available for completion." -which the author reduces to a mathematical
formula. Parkinson claims, tongue in cheek, to omit the statistical proof of his laws and observations out of consideration for
space, but he often provides examples from the British military and civil service that do, indeed, seem to support his analysis.
That's why this book has been popular for 50 years. Like all great satire, it distills the truth rather than creating a fiction.
Some other subjects that Parkinson addresses are: the function of British Parliament dictated by the seating arrangements,
the Law of Triviality ("the time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum involved"), a committee's
power diminishes as its numbers grow, a well-designed building is a sure sign of the institution's demise, "injelititis" (organizational
paralysis due to "induced inferiority"), and how to force older workers to retire in time for their successors to have a career.
Some of this stuff is peculiar to the time and place it was written. For example, I have no idea if comments on how wealthy Chinese
vs British evade taxes had any truth to them. But most aspects of administration haven't changed in 50 years, and Parkinson's
take is still laugh-out-loud funny.
I've always considered Parkinson's Law to be the chief weapon of inept managers who "schedule aggressively" in an attempt
to squeeze blood from stones, and thus compromise their project's effeciency, morale, and the like. After reading this book I've
discovered that Parkinson's Law is *not* the often misquoted "Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion"
but (paraphrasing:) "the number of administrators in an organization will grow at a steady rate irrespective of the amount of
work that organization needs to do." Not only does Parkinson never suggest that we should "schedule aggressively" (he never suggests
that work can contract indefinitely no matter how little time is made available), he ridiculues nice offices, large meetings,
top-heavy management, insecure leadership, penny-wiseness and pound-foolishness, typical hiring practices, and more.
While reading most of this book I had a wry grin on my face, and I laughed loud belly laughs at a couple of points. My only
complaints stem from the last two chapters, which indulged in both racism and ageism, respectively. I only skimmed those. Still,
an enjoyable and motivational read, and useful knowledge when confronted by a manager who thinks of themself as Parkinsonian but
hasn't actually read (or understood) Parkinson.
Parkinson's Law is a classic work concerning the dynamics of large administrative organizations. The vernacular of the book
often felt dated to this reader, based it is on the inner workings of the British Empire, but that in no way took away from its
overall impact and timeless message. This is a marvelously honest and insightful, also delightfully sardonic, look at how human
nature and institutional politics really work on a grand scale.
The book starts with the most well-known of Parkinson's laws, which is, "work expands to fill the time allotted to it." But
there are several other chapters in this very short book with other wonderful information as well. There's a whole chapter devoted
to how to phrase a help wanted ad in order to get only one perfect candidate for the job. One chapter explains why bureaucracies
grow at a standard rate of 5% a year regardless of workload. There are also wonderfully complex formulas concerning how to calculate
the correct age of retirement, which has a lot to do with the age of the person who is hoping to edge you out and take your place
as soon as possible. The mathematical analysis of at what time the truly powerful people arrive and leave a cocktail party was
also a lot of fun.
While this is a fairly short book, my version was only 101 pages, I found I could not read it straight through because each
chapter was so enlightening, I had to take a break in between. But that is hardly a complaint.
It's not so much the specific information that makes this book what it is. What makes the book is its honest appraisal of human
nature. A wonderful thing to be reminded of as you go to that next meeting. A now somewhat forgotten classic, highly recommended.
"Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion." Another way of saying "people spend what they can afford".
That statement makes certain simplifying assumptions in describing the action. Parkinson claims that Administrator A will, when
overworked, call for subordinates C and D. And each of these, when overworked, call for two subordinates. Perhaps only a third
subordinate E is more likely to be hired? Unless its a monopoly running on a "cost plus" economy.
The increase in Admiralty officials may be due to political decisions that reflect the feudal system and its pride in larger
numbers. This increase from 1914 to 1928 may reflect the rise needed for The Great War, and a reluctance to cut back afterwards.
The author notes the growth in the Colonial Office from 1935 to 1954, while the size of the Empire decreased. But it assumes
there was no longer any involvement in the colonies, and no new work assigned to them. Perhaps a need for political appointees?
In Chapter Four the author discusses the optimal number of members in a committee: somewhere between 3 and 21. Assume a committee
meets to do work, not to make work. There is a limited number of hours in a day; if each member speaks for 15 minutes, then 12
will take up half a work day. Time constraints will limit the number who will speak; those who only listen can be given a printed
report. Somebody must control the topics and meeting.
Chapter Five answers the question: why are students of the "Liberal Arts" generally considered for top positions? The answer
is the adoption of the Chinese system for competitive examinations. Those with a Classics background were perceived as fittest
to rule; those with a scientific background were perceived as followers. The author does not discuss the class differences usually
covered by this distinction. His comments on advertising positions is interesting, but ignores the fact that an acceptable candidate
may chose another firm. His final advice on choosing a Prime Minister is not always followed.
Chapter Six claims the health of an institution can be gauged by its buildings, and cites St. Peter's in Rome. A more modern
edition might cite the former AT&T and IBM buildings in midtown Manhattan, instead of the Palace of Nations in Geneva. But office
buildings are recyclable commodities. A monumental edifice can be the mausoleum of an organization. Does this apply to the Department
of Agriculture building in Washington?
Chapter Seven shows his wit and powers of observation by summarizing the cocktail parties that he attended. Chapter Eight discusses
the question of why organizations decline. One way to judge an organization is by the quality of their cafeteria. Chapter Ten
claims the compulsory retirement age is set at 3 years past the age when people begin to decline. More simplifying assumptions
and playing with numbers? If not, what objective facts were used to arrive at this conclusion?
The value of this book is its observations on the common activities that are not often studied.
Basically, this book may be distilled down into a few statements (below). The examples used are from the late 1950's, and not
in touch with the culture of 2007.
**The work expands to fill the time available.
**People will attempt to hire more subordinates regardless of workload.
**Large committees will spend more time arguing over small line item expenses they understand, as opposed to huge expenditures
they don't.
**Have two issue supporters sit next to and kibitz an undecided yahoo -- this will sway the yahoo into voting their way.
**Approximately five - eight people are the ideal number to run a huge endeavor.
**The best want-ad will only be answered by one (qualified) person.
**Rich men avoid taxes.
**Younger people force older conservatives to retire.
If you are interested in Parkinson's Law, I'd suggest buying a later edition with examples more in tune with modern computerized
business. This older edition is for collector's and has limited business value. 6 people found this helpful
This was a popular book in the late 1950s. It is a collection of essays with a humorous look at common events. Parkinson criticizes
the writers of text books who have an idealistic view about management (`Preface'). [Doesn't this fault still go on?] Chapter
1 claims "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion". This is stated without supporting facts, so it just
anecdotes. Does a growing number of civil servants reflect more work being done? Not if jobs are created for friends or relatives.
No mention of a budget or bottom line here. Who approved this? ["Charlie Wilson's War" provides one example.] Those Admiralty
Statistics suggest that some Officers in the R.N. were redeployed as Dockyard or Admiralty officials (p.8). The increase in the
Colonial Office could represent more redeployment (p.11). [Statistics can't be trusted unless you understand the facts that were
used or avoided.] Seating representatives in a half-circle is the rational rule used in most countries (Chapter 2). It allows
better hearing, as in a theatre.
Chapter 3 discusses proposals before a Committee. The big ticket items are approved [the fix is in], the small items do not
have as much support (p.29). Chapter 4 discusses the size of a Cabinet as it relates to its power; more members dilute its power.
Chapter 5 discusses the best way to select candidates for a job. Parkinson recommends an advertisement phrased so only a few apply.
But what if an important qualification can't be measured on paper (p.58)? There is a way to measure the status of an institution
(Chapter 6). But this perfect layout is a sign of impending collapse (p.60). [Think of those Wall Street firms in 2008.] That
big Department of Agriculture building in Washington DC marked the decline of family farms. One reason for this may be a perfected
building no longer has the operational flexibility to expand (or contract) for current needs.
Parkinson explains how a cocktail party can reveal the real importance of the guests. The people who matter circulate with
the general movement (Chapter 7), and arrive 30 minutes late. They cluster around an area at the far right, then leave. Chapter
8 discusses the "palsied paralysis" of organizations. The man at the top seeks to eliminate any possible rivals or successors.
The result after about 20 years is failures when the leader grows senile or dies (p.81). That is why there are takeovers, or company
subsidiaries are sold off. Can you judge an institution by its cafeteria (p.850? [If the managers have a separate dining room,
beware.] Parkinson's advice on taking over an institution seems unrealistic (p.90). Corporations do buy up other businesses and
integrate their buildings and personnel. This may be to eliminate competition.
Chapter 9 imagines the anthropological study of the rich. [Those who study primitive people are likely investigating mineral
wealth.] He suggests a solution for lower taxes, but its only a theory. Chapter 10 discusses the mandatory retirement age. Parkinson
claims that a person starts to decline three years before this age. [No proofs are given.] He suggests a method to force a retirement:
nearly constant travel to foreign lands, and filling in forms like customs declaration. [This may tell you more about Parkinson
than as a general statement.] This must be the least entertaining of these humorous essays.
These articles provide humor, they are not a scientific or practical guide. They should not be used for any college course.
This same type of humor was found in "Freakonomics", whose essays are based on the "post hoc ergo propter hoc" logical fallacy
(after this therefore because of this). They are not a reliable guide to knowledge.
This book attempts to decrypt the enigma of hierarchies in a far too simplistic manner. One sentence to describe the whole
book would be 'we keep getting promoted at work because we know how to do the job we are assigned, and stop getting promoted when
we don't know how to'. The book is elaborate with supporting arguments.
One concept this book seem to assume is, all of us have a set of competencies and it is fixed. That is why we stop growing.
But, in reality our skills continue to improve throughout our life time. Hence, accepting Peter Principle as a fact may be detrimental
to our career, thus fulfilling his prophecy. I choose to accept his principle as a fact, only if I stop expanding my competencies
(probably by freezing my brain). If I keep expanding my competencies, there is nothing but endless growth for everyone.
For the first time in over 20 years, on January 1, 2019, published works will enter the US
public domain. 1
Works from 1923 will be free for all to use and build upon, without permission or fee. They
include dramatic films such as The Ten Commandments , and comedies featuring Charlie
Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Harold Lloyd. There are literary works by Robert Frost, Aldous
Huxley, and Edith Wharton, the "Charleston" song, and more. And remember, this has not happened
for over 20 years. Why? Works from 1923 were set to go into the public domain in 1999, after a
75-year copyright term. But in 1998 Congress hit a two-decade pause button and extended their
copyright term for 20 years, giving works published between 1923 and 1977 an expanded term of
95 years. 2
But now the drought is over. How will people celebrate this trove of cultural material?
Google Books will offer the full text of books from that year, instead of showing only snippet
views or authorized previews. The Internet Archive will add books, movies, music, and more to
its online library. Community theaters are planning screenings of the films. Students will be
free to adapt and publicly perform the music. Because these works are in the public domain,
anyone can make them available, where you can rediscover and enjoy them. (Empirical studies
have shown that public domain books are less expensive, available in more editions and formats,
and more likely to be in print -- see
here , here , and here .) In addition, the
expiration of copyright means that you're free to use these materials, for education, for
research, or for creative endeavors -- whether it's translating the books, making your own
versions of the films, or building new music based on old classics.
Here are some of the works that will be entering the public domain in 2019. A fuller (but
still partial) listing of over a thousand works that we have researched can be found
here .
Films
Safety Last! , directed by Fred C. Newmeyer and Sam Taylor, featuring Harold Lloyd
The Ten Commandments , directed by Cecil B. DeMille
The Pilgrim , directed by Charlie Chaplin
Our Hospitality , directed by Buster Keaton and John G. Blystone
The Covered Wagon , directed by James Cruze
Scaramouche , directed by Rex Ingram
Books
Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan and the Golden Lion
Agatha Christie, The Murder on the Links
Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis
e.e. cummings, Tulips and Chimneys
Robert Frost, New Hampshire
Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet
Aldous Huxley, Antic Hay
D.H. Lawrence, Kangaroo
Bertrand and Dora Russell, The Prospects of Industrial Civilization
Carl Sandberg, Rootabaga Pigeons
Edith Wharton, A Son at the Front
P.G. Wodehouse, works including The Inimitable Jeeves and Leave it to
Psmith
March 12, 1993, Page 00019
The New York Times Archives
C. Northcote Parkinson, the British historian and writer who propounded the notion that "work expands so as to fill the
time available for its completion," died Tuesday at a clinic near his home in Canterbury, England. He was 83.
The cause of death was not announced.
Mr. Parkinson first put forth his famous dictum in an article for The Economist magazine in 1955. The article brought him
considerable attention, and in 1958 he published an expanded version, "Parkinson's Law."
The book, which included the corollary that work expands to occupy the people available for its completion, became a
best-seller. Mr. Parkinson once expressed surprise that the book seemed to be so well received by its implicit targets,
business executives and government officials, at a time when corporate and state bureaucracies were growing rapidly. Where
Six Do the Work of One
Mr. Parkinson said the theory had its roots in his experience in World War II, when he worked in training and
administration for the War Office and the Royal Air Force.
"I observed, somewhat to my surprise, that work which could be done by one man in peacetime, was being given to about six
in wartime," he told The Times of London. "I think this was mainly because there wasn't the same opportunity for other
people to criticize. You could always riposte: 'Don't you know there's a war on?' "
His work was a mixture of serious economic analysis and satire. He argued that administrators and executives tend to make work
for each other, and that because executives prefer to have subordinates rather than rivals, they create and perpetuate
bureaucracies in which power is defined by the number of subordinates.
A committee, he said, "grows organically, flourishes and blossoms, sunlit on top and shady beneath, until it dies, scattering the
seeds from which other committees will spring."
No matter how much work is actually getting accomplished, Mr. Parkinson wrote, the number of workers in an organization would
relentlessly expand at a rate that he calculated, perhaps tongue in cheek, between 5.7 percent and 6.56 percent a year. From
Cambridge to Singapore
Cyril Northcote Parkinson was born on July 30, 1909, in northern England. He attended Cambridge University and received a
doctorate in history from Kings College in London.
He taught at Cambridge and at a private boys' school in the late 1930's, before his wartime service. After the war he became a
lecturer in naval history at the University of Liverpool, then moved to Singapore in 1950, where he became the Raffles Professor
of History at the University of Malaya. After the publication of "Parkinson's Law," he went on to complete scholarly works,
including "British Intervention in Malaya, 1867 to 1877."
He wrote more than 60 books, including "Mrs. Parkinson's Law" (1968), which applied his principle to the household level. He also
wrote business histories and fiction, including "Jeeves: a Gentleman's Personal Gentleman" (1979), the "biography" of the hero of
the P. G. Wodehouse novels.
Mr. Parkinson is survived by his third wife, Iris Hilda Waters, whom he married in 1985, a son and a daughter from his first
marriage and two sons and a daughter from his second marriage.
" New Book by C. Northcote Parkinson ",
a review by Carroll Quigley in The Washington Sunday Star , November 18, 1963,
of a book:
EAST AND WEST ,
by C. Northcote Parkinson.
Houghton Mifflin: New York, 1963
"New Book by C. Northcote Parkinson"
East and West, by C. Northcote Parkinson
(Houghton, Mifflin, 1963, $5.00),
a history of the contact of Europe and Asia since the fall of Troy, is the author's thirteenth
book.
Carroll Quigley, author of The Evolution of Civilizations, teaches history at Georgetown
University.
C. Northcote Parkinson, one-time Professor at the University of Malaya (but now removed from
academic halls to the more remunerative work of an economic consultant in London), has produced
more than a dozen books over the last 29 years. Most of these sank with scarcely a ripple,
until, in 1957, his Parkinson's Law roused widespread enthusiasm. Its attack on bureaucracy and
Big Government was kept afloat in a sea of jokes which helped to conceal the fact that the
author's basic outlook was contemporary with Herbert Spencer (1820-1903). Three years later,
Parkinson shifted his attention from politics to economics, and, in The Law and the Profits ,
attacked the basic principle of twentieth century taxation from a Spencerian (or John Birchite)
point of view. He deplored the graduated income tax and any tax of over 25 per cent. This book,
with fewer and poorer jokes, revealed its author's old-fashioned outlook to anyone who reads
with both eyes.
Now Mr. Parkinson has shifted his field once again, this time to history. Lacking his
earlier camouflage of jokes, except in isolated spots, East and West shows that Parkinson's
historical training is as dated as his politics and economics, almost pure Oxbridge, vintage
1880. And unfortunately, not one of the better samples of that year. Except for its length,
this work might pass for an undergraduate tutorial essay worthy of a "gentleman's C" or of a
Third Class in the Final Schools examination.
The characteristics of a mediocre book are not very much different from those of a merely
"passing" undergraduate essay and are fully evident in this volume: (1) underlying confusion of
thought, and thus of organization; (2) inadequate knowledge of the evidence; (3) limited
reading of up-to-date authorities; and (4) masses of factual information without strict control
of its relevancy.
For Parkinson, as for his Victorian contemporaries, the meeting of East and West begins with
the Iliad (on page 1) and advances chronologically, based on the writings of Herodotus,
Xenophon, Plutarch, and the lesser historians of the wars against Carthage and the achievements
of the Caesars, with much borrowing from that up to date writer, Edward Gibbon. More than half
the volume is concerned with the period from the fall of Troy to the fall of Constantinople,
and much of the rest is a prosaic account of the expansion of Europe to Asia (especially
southern Asia) since the fifteenth century. The period before 1000 B.C., the immense impact of
archaeological discoveries since 1880, the newer literary evidence obtained from the twentieth
century's deciphering of papyrus and archaeological inscriptions are ignored. As a result,
Parkinson believes (galley 45) that the "first wave of oriental influence to reach Europe came
from Persia....Zoroaster [about 500 B.C.]" Such a statement wipes aside almost the whole of
European, including Greek, culture as non-existent even when, like the alphabet, it was called
by an Asiatic name. Parkinson has a whole chapter on Alexander the Great, but ignores all
recent work on the subject going back to W. W. Tarn (1938). His extensive attention to military
exploits may seem to reflect the present (1963) concern with military history, but Parkinson's
approach is biographical not tactical, and his treatment of war recalls my own happy days
reading G. A. Henty. There are scattered footnote references to books on the history of
armaments but no evidence that Parkinson really read them, for he tells us such untruths as
that the crossbow could be "shot with accuracy from a horse ridden at a gallop" (gal. 59), that
"the real cavalryman" was invented by Macedonia before Alexander the Great's time (galley 21)
(when real cavalry could, in fact, come into action only with the invention of stirrups many
centuries after Alexander).
Much of the amorphous character of this volume arises from failure to define its terms. The
first five words of the Introduction read, "This book deals with civilizations," but there is a
firm refusal to demark any civilizations or culture areas. Instead, it soon appears that the
author is thinking of Asia and Europe as geographic areas (which he mistakenly divides at the
Ural Mountains and the Caspian Sea instead of at the Pripet Marshes, which form the only
meaningful boundary.) This two-part division leads to great confusion because the situation can
hardly be understood in terms any simpler than a four-factor mélange (Western, Asiatic,
northern steppe grasslands, and Semitic). Culturally the optimistic and balanced empiricism of
the West and the resigned Heraclitean flux of Asia have been separated by the rationalistic,
dualistic, and often extremist, outlooks of the Indo-Europeans and the Semites. The former of
these buffers left its imprint most strongly on Iran (Zoroaster and Mani) and on Greece
(Plato), carried on through Byzantium and Russia. It is a fundamental fact in any history of
the contacts of Asia and the West that many of these contacts were filtered through the two
buffers of the Indo-European and the Semite cultural heritages.
Even on the simple level of contact between two geographic areas, Parkinson's attempt to
show the interaction of Europe and Asia is almost a total failure. This results from his
neglect of the most obvious interchanges and of the whole of the early (and most significant)
period and from his failure to establish a chronological outline based on the factors which
impelled such interchanges. These factors have rested on the interaction of climate changes and
technology, with the former dominating the situation in the more remote past (by influencing
the ability of the grasslands of Central Asia and Arabia to support herds of grazing animals
and the human populations which used these herds as food) and the latter dominating the
situation in recent centuries, with a lengthy period (500 B.C.-1700) of transition in between.
Lacking any conception of this interplay of forces, Parkinson has no real conception of why the
interactions occurred and falls back on quite unconvincing explanations based on personal
reactions and personal revenge. The Persian invasion of Greece in 490 B.C. is explained as a
reaction to the Greek capture of Troy in 1184 B.C.! (galley 2 and 8)
Even in Parkinson's day under the great Queen Victoria every school boy knew Ex Oriente Lux
. Europe's peoples and languages came from the east as did the very basic attributes of
European life: its food (wheat, beef, lamb, swine, fowls), its textiles (wool, linen, cotton,
silk), its systems of measures (12 eggs in a dozen, 12 inches in a foot, 12 hours in the day
and in the night, 60 minutes in the hour), its basic technology (writing, the wheel, paper,
printing type, gun powder, the plow, the number system), and those three major targets of
Parkinson's antipathy, governmental bureaucracy, taxation, and state regulation of economic
life. Even today, a London economic consultant wears trousers and a jacket slashed in the rear
so that the sides will hang straight as he sits on his horse, attire derived from a Turkic
cultural predecessor in the central Asian grasslands of two millennia ago.
This volume contains scores, possibly hundreds of gross factual errors. If these were based
only on the ignorance and prejudices of 1880, we might pass over them in silence, but when they
join the current campaign to corrupt our youth with the myths of John Birch they should be
pointed out. Parkinson tells us (galley 67) that the decline of Asia after A.D. 1000 was
fundamentally due to biological decadence but the "immediate cause was of course, excessive
taxation." We are solemnly informed (galley 102) that Marxism, like Marx himself, is "a
religion derived ultimately from Judaism." Or again (galley 76), of British "administrative
talent...the best always went overseas, leaving only the dregs in Whitehall." As long ago as
the time of Alexander the Great, Greek ascendency in Asia meant that "democracy had to go"
(galley 21). And of course, the fall of Rome in the West was due to "overtaxation" (galley
47).
These numerous outbursts of personal prejudice are buried in great masses of simple factual
errors. Parkinson's knowledge of geography, despite his personal travels, is woefully
deficient. Roman military control of the Balkans in the 3rd century, he says (galley 47)
required "the reconquest of Dacia and Mesopotamia", a statement which is not only nonsense, but
implies that Rome had previously held Mesopotamia. Or again (galley 51), he tells us that the
Arabs, about 800, controlled the whole trade route between Canton and Cordova -- "from end to
end."
Among numerous factual errors are statements: 1. that the Hittites taught Babylon to train
horses (gal. 1; it was the Mittani); 2. that the people east of the Halys River in Asia Minor
were "of Semitic character" (gal. s; they were largely Hurrian); 3. that the Hittites first
coined money (gal. 6; it was the Lydians almost 800 years later); that all "Phoenician"
literature was lost in the destruction of Carthage by Rome (gal. 13); 5. that no Greek would
discard his possessions to become a beggar (gal. 17; there was a whole school of Greeks, the
Cynics); 6. that the militarization of Spartan life was not based on "necessity" but on
"self-respect" (gal. 17; it was based on the need to keep down ten times as numerous Helots);
7. that "the Greeks ceased to be discoverers when they became teachers" under Alexander (gal.
22; this ignores the amazing achievements of Hellenistic science, such as Hipparchus or
Archimedes); 8. that the middle classes were "a Greek invention" (gal. 26; the Phoenicians were
more middle class than the Greeks and much earlier); 9. that Rome obtained its original culture
from the Greeks (gal. 30; it was from the Etruscans); 10. that the Greeks had a belief in
Progress (gal. 39; on the contrary, the Greeks believed in retrogression from a remote "Golden
Age"); 11. that the "pastoral type of economy" was earlier than the rise of agriculture (gal.
1; it was several thousand years later); 12. that Indo-European invaders about 1600 made
Babylon "the center of the Hittite Empire" (gal. 2; Babylon was never a Hittite city); 13. that
Alexander's Empire brought four "of the five known civilizations...in a single monarchy" (gal.
27; it did not include either India or China); 14. that Roman ships reached India (gal. 37);
15. that the Russian choice of Byzantine Christianity [presumably over the Latin type] brought
Russia "into the western rather than the Eastern Camp" (gal. 48); 16. that "Gothic architecture
is plainly Islamic" (gal. 58); 17. that the United States "began to look on the Chinese and the
Japanese as possible customers and converts" because of the completion of the trans-continental
railway in 1869 (gal. 73; American merchant ships were trading extensively with both peoples
before the Civil War); and 18. that "discoveries in navigation did not precede but followed the
great voyages of discovery" (gal. 81; in fact, the compass, rudder, sails, hull construction,
and methods of determining latitude were all in use before the great navigations.)
Fortunately Parkinson does not launch this myriad of errors on the reader without fair
warning, for in the Preface we may read, "Given a more suitable diet, as recommended by the
food reformers (plain food, uncooked, and Spartan) I might perhaps have had the energy to
ransack libraries....Instead I have relied upon the results of desultory reading...." Surely an
honest statement, but without scholarship, the volume certainly needs more jokes!
Cyril Northcote Parkinson, writer, historian and economist, born 30 July 1909, Raffles Professor of History University of Malaya
1950-58, books include Edward Pellew, Viscount Exmouth 1934, The Rise of the Port of Liverpool 1952, Parkinson's Law: the pursuit
of progress 1958, British Intervention in Malaya 1867-1877 1960, Mrs Parkinson's Law 1968, The Law of Delay 1971, Industrial Disruption
1973, Britannia Rules 1977, Jeeves: a gentleman's personal gentleman 1979, The Guernseyman 1982, The Fur-Lined Mousetrap 1984, married
1943 Ethelwyn Graves (one son, one daughter; marriage dissolved), 1952 Elizabeth Ann Fry (died 1983; one daughter), 1985 Ingrid Waters,
died Canterbury 9 March 1993.
ASK ANYONE if they have heard of 'Parkinson's Law' and they will probably answer, 'Yes, but I can't call it to mind.' Tell them
that 'Work expands to fill the time available for its completion' and they will laugh and say with feeling that they most certainly
have heard of the law, and understand its effects completely. C. Northcote Parkinson coined the phrase which is now known and quoted
by frustrated business people (indeed, anyone trying to find 'spare' time) all over the world.
'Granted that work (and especially paper-work),' he wrote, 'is . . . elastic in its demands on time, it is manifest that there
need be little or no relationship between the work to be done and the size of the staff to which it may be assigned. A lack of real
activity does not, of necessity, result in leisure. A lack of occupation is not necessarily revealed by a manifest idleness. The
thing to be done swells in importance and complexity in a direct ratio with the time to be spent.'
Parkinson first presented his formula in a humorous and paradoxical article for the Economist in 1958. This and a further series
of essays were published by John Murray as Parkinson's Law in the same year with illustrations by Osbert Lancaster (it remains in
print as a Penguin Business 'Management Classic'). He based his law, aimed largely but not only at the workings of bureaucracy, on
experience gained in the Second World War with an Officer Cadet Training Unit in the RAF, and as a War Office staff officer.
General recognition of his law, he wrote, 'is shown in the proverbial phrase 'It is the busiest man who has time to spare.' Thus
an elderly lady of leisure can spend the entire day in writing and dispatching a postcard to her niece at Bognor Regis. An hour will
be spent in finding the postcard, another in hunting for spectacles, half an hour in a search for the address, an hour and a quarter
in composition, and 20 minutes in deciding whether or not to take an umbrella when going to the pillar box in the next street. The
total effort that would occupy a busy man for three minutes all told may in this fashion leave another person prostrate after a day
of doubt, anxiety, and toil.'
Most of Cyril Northcote Parkinson's large output as a writer disguises this wonderful sense of humour. As an authority on maritime
history, in particular the Napoleonic era, he has a wealth of informative books to his name, including Trade in the Eastern Seas
(1937), The Trade Winds (1948), The Rise of the Port of Liverpool (1952), War in the Eastern Seas (1954), as well as an imaginary
biography, The Life and Times of Horatio Hornblower (1970). As with the Hornblower biography, he used his historical knowledge to
write the 'Delancey' saga, naval historical novels about a young midshipman in the Napoleonic wars, and his rise through the ranks
eventually to become Admiral of the Fleet.
An unassuming man, Parkinson lived the latter part of his life modestly, if elegantly, in a Canterbury close, continuing to write
on the subjects he loved most. His middle years, however, after the phenomenal success of Parkinson's Law, were taken up with lecturing
and after-dinner speaking. He found it hugely amusing that he should be so appreciated in this way, and yet his easy manner and witty
turn of phrase invited the attention of the most reluctant listener.
His early life was 'rather dull', he thought: educated at St Peter's School, York, he went on to study History at Cambridge. He
left to become a historian, and took a further degree in London. After returning to Cambridge to do research, he could see only a
dull future. 'There seemed to be nothing ahead but a series of professorships', he said. 'So I began to write books on naval history
instead.' His first teaching post - arranged around his writing - was at Blundell's School, Tiverton. He wrote a book about it, attracted
particularly by - as he explained - 'the school's most distinguished pupil, Guy Fawkes'. He later lectured in naval history at the
Royal Naval College, Dartmouth, a post he held at the outbreak of the Second World War, and assisted in the formation of the National
Maritime Museum.
His service career had begun in the Territorial Army, which he loved passionately, but it seemed to disappoint him that he never
took part in active service. With a twinkle in his eye, he recounted that although he would have been a willing to play his part,
he seemed to complete the war 'without killing or even seriously annoying any Germans'. He went on to say that the most dangerous
episode of his war years was getting married. Then, to add 'insult to injury', his regiment disbanded at the time. 'I think they
had a sort of grudge against me.'
He restored and lived for many years at Elham Manor, in Kent, while continuing to write books and lecture on naval and maritime
history.
In 1950 he experienced a complete change when he accepted a chair as Raffles Professor of History at the University of Malaya,
a post he held for eight years. The end of his time in Malaya came soon after the publication of the book which was to transform
his life. With obvious delight he reported what Enoch Powell said of him: 'He's like a man who found an oil-well in his back garden.'
The first publisher to which the book was offered returned it promptly. The second, Parkinson said, 'threw it in the wastepaper basket,
but later retrieved it and thought again'.
After the success of Parkinson's Law, he entered the world of after-dinner lecturing and continued to be amazed that so many people
wanted to hear him speak; he was often asked to give hour- long lectures to audiences of up to 8,000. After Leaving Malaya he held
visiting professorships at Harvard University, in 1958, and the universities of Illinois and California in 1959-60. Thereafter he
gave up his 'proper job' as an academic to devote his time to writing through the winter and lecturing across the United States in
the summer.
It was with relief that he eventually gave up the lecturing circuit to live quietly with his third wife, in Canterbury, having
moved there in 1989. Here he relaxed in peace in the shadow of the cathedral, and worked on his final project, his autobiography,
A Law Unto Myself.
'The inexorable working of Parkinson's law ensures that appointments have constantly to be made and the question is always how
to choose the right candidate . . . Past methods fall into two main categories, the British and the Chinese . . . The British method
(old pattern) depended upon an interview in which the candidate had to establish his identity. He would be confronted by elderly
gentlemen seated round a mahogany table who would presently ask him his name. Let us suppose that the candidate replied, 'John Seymour'.
One of the gentlemen would then say, 'Any relation to the Duke of Somerset?' To this the candidate would say, quite possibly, 'No,
sir.' Then another gentleman would say, 'Perhaps you are related, in that case, to the Bshop of Warminster?' If he said 'No, sir'
again, a third would ask in despair, 'To whom then are you related?' ' Illustration by Osbert Lancaster for Parkinson's Law
"... I see this in young people all around, 25-35 year old's saddled with $50-100k in debt defining every action and option they have (or don't!). Not everyone gets themselves into this bind, people make poor decisions, but our higher educational institutions readily promote without ample warning and education and the result is what's rumored to be a $1 Trillion student loan debt bubble. This isn't sustainable ..."
"... Educational institutions should not be seen as a profit making enterprise, education should be attainable to all without the fear of untenable costs. ..."
A very scholarly and educational read, well researched and documented. It is very in-depth,
perhaps not for the light hearted but I learned quite a bit about education philosophies
world-wide, their origins, how that effects current thoughts and practices, etc. And how the
United States higher educational institutions have gotten to where they are today, money
printing machines with unsustainable growth and costs being pushed onto those just seeking to
potentially better themselves.
I see this in young people all around, 25-35 year old's
saddled with $50-100k in debt defining every action and option they have (or don't!). Not
everyone gets themselves into this bind, people make poor decisions, but our higher
educational institutions readily promote without ample warning and education and the result
is what's rumored to be a $1 Trillion student loan debt bubble. This isn't sustainable
My years in oversea schools took place long ago, I can't testify nor draw direction
comparisons to the situation we face today. But I can say, that with three young kids
approaching college age we remain highly concerned to terrified what the costs and our kids
futures.
Educational institutions should not be seen as a profit making enterprise, education
should be attainable to all without the fear of untenable costs.
"... Neoliberalism's presence in higher education is making matters worse for students and the student debt crisis, not better. ..."
"... Cannan and Shumar (2008) focus their attention on resisting, transforming, and dismantling the neoliberal paradigm in higher education. They ask how can market-based reform serve as the solution to the problem neoliberal practices and policies have engineered? ..."
"... What got us to where we are (escalating tuition costs, declining state monies, and increasing neoliberal influence in higher education) cannot get us out of the SI.4 trillion problem. And yet this metaphor may, in fact, be more apropos than most of us on the right, left, or center are as yet seeing because we mistakenly assume the market we have is the only or best one possible. ..."
"... We only have to realize that the emperor has no clothes and reveal this reality. ..."
"... Indeed, the approach our money-dependent and money-driven legislators and policymakers have employed has been neoliberal in form and function, and it will continue to be so unless we help them to see the light or get out of the way. This book focuses on the $1.4+ trillion student debt crisis in the United States. It doesn't share hard and fast solutions per se. ..."
"... In 2011-2012, 50% of bachelor's degree recipients from for-profit institutions borrowed more than $40,000 and about 28% of associate degree recipients from for-profit institutions borrowed more than $30,000 (College Board, 2015a). ..."
Despite tthe fact that necoliberalism brings poor economic growth, inadequate availability
of jobs and career opportunities, and the concentration of economic and social rewards in the
hands of a privileged upper class resistance to it, espcially at universities, remain weak to
non-existant.
The first sign of high levels of dissatisfaction with neoliberalism was the election of
Trump (who, of course, betrayed all his elections promises, much like Obma before him). As a
result, the legitimation of neoliberalism based on references to the efficient
and effective functioning of the market (ideological legitimation) is
exhausted while wealth redistribution practices (material legitimation) are
not practiced and, in fact, considered unacceptable.
Despite these problems, resistance to neoliberalism remains weak.
Strategics and actions of opposition have been shifted from the sphere of
labor to that of the market creating a situation in which the idea of the
superiority and desirability of the market is shared by dominant and
oppositional groups alike. Even emancipatory movements such as women,
race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation have espoused individualistic,
competition-centered, and meritocratic views typical of ncolibcral dis-
courses. Moreover, corporate forces have colonized spaces and discourses
that have traditionally been employed by oppositional groups and move-
ments. However, as systemic instability' continues and capital accumulation
needs to be achieved, change is necessary. Given the weakness of opposi-
tion, this change is led by corporate forces that will continue to further
their interests but will also attempt to mitigate socio-economic contra-
dictions. The unavailability of ideological mechanisms to legitimize
ncolibcral arrangements will motivate dominant social actors to make
marginal concessions (material legitimation) to subordinate groups. These
changes, however, will not alter the corporate co-optation and distortion of
discourses that historically defined left-leaning opposition. As contradic-
tions continue, however, their unsustainability will represent a real, albeit
difficult, possibility for anti-neoliberal aggregation and substantive change.
Connolly (2016) reported that a poll shows that some graduated student loan borrowers
would willingly go to extremes to pay off outstanding student debt. Those extremes include
experiencing physical pain and suffering and even a reduced lifespan. For instance, 35% of
those polled would take one year off life expectancy and 6.5% would willingly cut off their
pinky finger if it meant ridding themselves of the student loan debt they currently held.
Neoliberalism's presence in higher education is making matters worse for students and
the student debt crisis, not better. In their book Structure and Agency in the
Neoliberal University, Cannan and Shumar (2008) focus their attention on resisting,
transforming, and dismantling the neoliberal paradigm in higher education. They ask how can
market-based reform serve as the solution to the problem neoliberal practices and policies
have engineered?
It is like an individual who loses his keys at night and who decides to look only beneath
the street light. This may be convenient because there is light, but it might not be where
the keys are located. This metaphorical example could relate to the student debt crisis.
What got us to where we are (escalating tuition costs, declining state monies, and
increasing neoliberal influence in higher education) cannot get us out of the SI.4 trillion
problem. And yet this metaphor may, in fact, be more apropos than most of us on the right,
left, or center are as yet seeing because we mistakenly assume the market we have is the only
or best one possible.
As Lucille (this volume) strives to expose, the systemic cause of our problem is "hidden
in plain sight," right there in the street light for all who look carefully enough to see.
We only have to realize that the emperor has no clothes and reveal this reality. If
and when a critical mass of us do, systemic change in our monetary exchange relations can
and, we hope, will become our funnel toward a sustainable and socially, economically, and
ecologically just future where public education and democracy can finally become realities
rather than merely ideals.
Indeed, the approach our money-dependent and money-driven legislators and policymakers
have employed has been neoliberal in form and function, and it will continue to be so unless
we help them to see the light or get out of the way. This book focuses on the $1.4+ trillion
student debt crisis in the United States. It doesn't share hard and fast solutions per
se. Rather, it addresses real questions (and their real consequences). Are collegians
overestimating the economic value of going to college?
What are we, they, and our so-called elected leaders failing or refusing to sec and why?
This critically minded, soul-searching volume shares territory with, yet pushes beyond, that
of Akers and Chingos (2016), Baum (2016), Goldrick-Rab (2016), Graebcr (2011), and Johannscn
(2016) in ways that we trust those critically minded authors -- and others concerned with our
mess of debts, public and private, and unfulfilled human potential -- will find enlightening
and even ground-breaking.
... ... ...
In the meantime, college costs have significantly increased over the past fifty years. The
average cost of tuition and fees (excluding room and board) for public four-year institutions
for a full year has increased from 52,387 (in 2015 dollars) for the 1975-1976 academic year,
to 59,410 for 2015-2016. The tuition for public two-year colleges averaged $1,079 in
1975-1976 (in 2015 dollars) and increased to $3,435 for 2015-2016. At private non-profit
four-year institutions, the average 1975-1976 cost of tuition and fees (excluding room and
board) was $10,088 (in 2015 dollars), which increased to $32,405 for 2015-2016 (College
Board, 2015b).
The purchasing power of Pell Grants has decreased. In fact, the maximum Pell Grants
coverage of public four-year tuition and fees decreased from 83% in 1995-1996 to 61% in
2015-2016. The maximum Pell Grants coverage of private non-profit four-year tuition and fees
decreased from 19% in 1995-1996 to 18% in 2015-2016 (College Board, 2015a).
... ... ....
... In 2013-2014, 61% of bachelor's degree recipients from public and private non-profit
four-year institutions graduated with an average debt of $16,300 per graduate. In
2011-2012, 50% of bachelor's degree recipients from for-profit institutions borrowed more
than $40,000 and about 28% of associate degree recipients from for-profit institutions
borrowed more than $30,000 (College Board, 2015a).
Rising student debt has become a key issue of higher education finance among many
policymakers and researchers. Recently, the government has implemented a series of measures
to address student debt. In 2005, the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act
(2005) was passed, which barred the discharge of all student loans through bankruptcy for
most borrowers (Collinge, 2009). This was the final nail in the bankruptcy coffin, which had
begun in 1976 with a five-year ban on student loan debt (SLD) bankruptcy and was extended to
seven years in 1990. Then in 1998, it became a permanent ban for all who could not clear a
relatively high bar of undue hardship (Best 6c Best, 2014).
By 2006, Sallie Mae had become the nation's largest private student loan lender, reporting
loan holdings of $123 billion. Its fee income collected from defaulted loans grew from $280
million in 2000 to $920 million in 2005 (Collinge, 2009). In 2007, in response to growing
student default rates, the College Cost Reduction Act was passed to provide loan forgiveness
for student loan borrowers who work full-time in a public service job. The Federal Direct
Loan will be forgiven after 120 payments were made. This Act also provided other benefits for
students to pay for their postsecondary education, such as lowering interest rates of GSL,
increasing the maximum amount of Pell Grant (though, as noted above, not sufficiently to meet
rising tuition rates), as well as reducing guarantor collection fees (Collinge, 2009).
In 2008, the Higher Education Opportunity Act (2008) was passed to increase transparency
and accountability. This Act required institutions that are participating in federal
financial aid programs to post a college price calculator on their websites in order to
provide better college cost information for students and families (U.S. Department of
Education |U.S. DoE|, 2015a). Due to the recession of 2008, the American Opportunity Tax
Credit of 2009 (AOTC) was passed to expand the Hope Tax Credit program, in which the amount
of tax credit increased to 100% for the first $2,000 of qualified educational expenses and
was reduced to 25% of the second $2,000 in college expenses. The total credit cap increased
from $1,500 to $2,500 per student. As a result, the federal spending on education tax
benefits had a large increase since then (Crandall-Hollick, 2014), benefits that, again, are
reaped only by those who file income taxes.
"Emmanuel Goldstein is a fictional character in George Orwell's dystopian novel
Nineteen Eighty-Four. He is the principal enemy of the state according to the Party of the
totalitarian Oceania. He is depicted as the head of a mysterious (and possibly fictitious)
dissident organization called "The Brotherhood" and as having written the book The Theory and
Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism. He is only seen and heard on telescreen, and he may be a
fabrication of the Ministry of Truth, the State's propaganda department." (from
Wikipedia)
Yet Orwell wrote the following words in The Road to Wigan Pier :
"there is the horrible -- the really disquieting -- prevalence of cranks wherever
Socialists are gathered together. One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words
'Socialism' and 'Communism' draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker,
nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, 'Nature Cure' quack, pacifist, and feminist in
England."
And:
"The ordinary man may not flinch from a dictatorship of the proletariat, if you offer it
tactfully; offer him a dictatorship of the prigs, and he gets ready to fight."
In the first of these excerpts, we see a perfect delineation of today's "Cultural
Marxism," and in the second, a perfect explanation of the support for Donald Trump. The
"deplorables" are those who resent and fight the dictatorship of the prigs. I'm somewhat
surprised that no one has written a history of the rise and advance of political correctness
in American public life and entitled it "The Dictatorship of the Prigs." I hope someone
does.
Brave New World has had a funny way of growing more interesting with age. Lenina
Crowne, the vacuous Future Woman, has leaped out of the pages of Huxley's novel and into our
real lives. Just give Lenina some tattoos and piercings, dye her hair an unnatural color and
put a smart phone on her fashionable Malthusian belt, and she would fit right into our world.
I think the author a little unfair to Huxley when he criticises him for no sense of social
"Class". The issue here is that class, in BNW, has been hard wired into each grouping (ie
deltas etc). Genetic engineering has predetermined all class AND individual desires &
interests. The sophistications of language, mind control etc in Orwell are thus unnecessary
& superseded.
The distinction between the inner party, outer party and proles does seem to be absolutely
crucial to Orwell (at least in 1984) and is often neglected by people debating Orwell vs
Huxley. Still, I tend to agree with those dissidents who have observed that there really is
no inner party. It is outer party buffoons all the way up.
George Orwell also beat his coolies "in moments of rage" as he put it in his autobiography.
He had first-hand experience as a repressive British colonial police officer in Burma,
1922-1927. He knew the autocratic mindset well, because he had lived it.
" Trump is the only non-establishment candidate to get elected President since Andrew Jackson
and therefore almost the exact opposite of the idea of top-down tyranny"
That was good for a laugh. What's the difference between governed from the top by liberal
slime career opportunist and governed from the top by the moron womanizer opportunist
comparable to the governor played by Mel Brooks in Blazing Saddles? The difference is top
down slime versus top down idiocy.
There is a misapprehension at the core of this article; Huxley wrote from a liberal
'anything goes' perspective of morality, comparable to today's 'it's all about me' MTV
generation. A deeper understanding of Huxley's profound distaste and preoccupation with this
is afforded in his novel 'Point, Counter Point.' Orwell, on the other hand, aptly projects a
future social conservatism that is better compared to the extremes of a cloistered and
tightly policed ultra religious right.
It's not a matter of who was more 'right.' They are describing separate trajectories of
human social phenomena we see playing out today. The two were peering down different avenues
into the future.
But, despite this, this debate exists not only on the Dissident Right but further
afield. Believe it or not, even Left-wingers and Liberals debate this question, as if they
too are under the heel of the oppressor's jackboot.
Some left-wingers are. Think of poor Julian Assange!
'All of a sudden, as many commentators have pointed out, there were almost daily
echoes of Orwell in the news The most obvious connection to Orwell was the new
president's repeated insistence that even his most pointless and transparent lies were in
fact true, and then his adviser Kellyanne Conway's explanation that these statements were
not really falsehoods but, rather, "alternative facts."'
The counter to this is that Trump is the only non-establishment candidate to get elected
President since Andrew Jackson and therefore almost the exact opposite of the idea of
top-down tyranny.
Exactly. In 1984, 'Big Brother' actually controlled the media; Trump clearly doesn't, so
he is not Big Brother. He is Emmanuel Goldstein: a leader of the resistance but alas,
probably not real.
Oh dear no, big mistake -- it's Two Minutes Hate, not three as stated here. Orwell is
superior by far, since he was serious and more humane in his understanding of the effects of
totalitarianism on human psychology. But as a Morrissey song puts it, "I know you love one
person, so why can't you love two?"
@George F.
Held Goldstein isn't Orwell's hero. There is nothing in the book to show that Goldstein
even exists. All he could be is a propaganda construct (as I believe ISIS Caliph Abu Bakr al
Baghdadi is in real life). And Goldstein's Jewishness, apart from his name, is non-existent.
When I read 1984 for the first time (in 1986, as it happens), I didn't realise that he was
even meant to be a Jew.
Lots of Jews are against the racist apartheid colonial settler zionazi pseudostate in
Occupied Palestine and its financial backers in New York, but we wouldn't want to disturb you
with facts, would we now.
Orwell, who finished his 1984 shortly after the liquidation of Palestine in 1947,
[1st printing was 1950], never saw the Elephant (Zionist Elephant). No one is perfect.
Orwell, who during WW II, was an employee for Churchill's Government, and labored in
Churchill's Propaganda Department (different official title), loyally reflected (most of)
that propaganda.
Few visionaries in 1947, understood or opposed the imperialist Oligarchs (financial
banking power), who supported the establishment of a so-called Jewish Nation – in
someone else's Nation. (The Balfour Declaration was issued during WW I and the liquidation of
one of the Peoples of the Middle East was in the planning stages). The Palestinians became
the – final victims of World War II.
The Palestinian General Strike (for independence) of 1936 , followed by an
insurrection was brutally suppressed by King George (the British Empire Oligarchs – who
had long (at least since 1815), become the Minions of the Zionist Bankers.
After WW II, Orwell, chose to ignore the crimes against the Palestinians, and possibly, to
get his books published/circulated. Who controls Hollywood-and the Mainstream Media?
For this anarchist, Orwell remains a visionary, a courageous soldier who served in
army of the POUM (Partido Obrero Unida Marxista -Trotskyist), and was wounded while defending
the same Spanish Republic as Durruti's Anarchists. Orwell's wife served as a Nurse in
Spain.
Recommend Orwell's fine book, His HISTORY, " Homage to Catalonia ."
Orwell had courage.
We American Citizen Patriots must display the same courage – as we Restore Our
Republic.
@Justsaying
" In fact, control by proxy seems to have generated a two-tiered control phenomenon where the
leaders are the puppets of puppeteers of a Zionist entity. "
Indeed my idea: Morgenthau Wilson, Baruch FDR, Bilderberg conferences, Soros Brussels,
Merkel, with whom exactly I do know, but it does not matter, Macron Rothschild, Tony Blair
Murdoch.
The catholic countries resist: Poland, Hungary, etc., maybe S Germany and Austria in this
respect also can be seen as catholic.
Trump, put your money where your mouth is, Soros, the Koch brothers, they did, but money
seeems to have failed in the last USA elections.
Must have been a shock, Solsjenytsyn writes that each jewish community in tsarist Russia
always had money for bribes.
@Durruti
Palestine and the Balfour declaration was a bit more complicated, the British saw an
opportunity to keep France, that had Syria and Lebanon, away from Egypt.
Mandate of course was just a fig leaf for colonialism.
@Ronald Thomas
West " What's the difference between governed from the top "
Possibly what is the theory of prof Laslo Maracs, UVA univrsity Amsterdam, that eight years
Obama have driven China and Russia so together that Khazakstan now is the economic centre of
the world, and that the present USA president understand this.
Khazakstan has the land port for trains to and from St Petersburg Peking.
Four days travel.
Do not hope this railway will have the same effect as the Berlin Bagdad: WWI.
@Fiendly
Neighbourhood Terrorist This isn't a top-ten contest. The reality we find ourselves in
seems to consist largely of billion-shades-of-grey continuums, not black-and-white absolutes.
Full-frontal assault (Orwell's state brutality) generally stimulates defensive action.
Tangential, obtuse assault (Huxley's anaesthetising hedonia) doesn't alert the defensive
posture, the immune response. Tipping points, inflection points, exist, but stealthy wolves
in sheeps' clothing, are more effective. The Venus fly trap, the carrion flower, convince
prey to approach trustingly. Brave New World's disguised depredation – the
nanny/welfare state, etc. – paves the way for Orwell's naked totalitarianism. It's the
friendly inmate offering the scared, lonely new prisoner a Snicker's bar and a smoke.
Why limit Orwell to "1984"? His "Animal Farm" is a great work, too. Although much shorter, it
captured the essence of all totalitarian societies even better. "All animals are equal, but
some animals are more equal than others" expresses the "democratic" rule of the 1% better
than anything.
Sail-Dog's favorite movie, Idiocracy is pretty good prescient too; especially the part about
president Camacho, who, by the way, and rather incredibly, most of you voted for two years
ago.
@Fiendly
Neighbourhood Terrorist Consider these excerpts:
1.All the rest had by that time been exposed as traitors and counter-revolutionaries.
Goldstein had fled and was hiding no one knew where, and of the others, a few had simply
disappeared, while the majority had been executed after spectacular public trials at which
they made confession of their crimes. Among the last survivors were three men named Jones,
Aaronson, and Rutherford. It must have been in 1965 that these three had been arrested.
2. 'It is called wine,' said O'Brien with a faint smile. 'You will have read about it in
books, no doubt. Not much of it gets to the Outer Party, I am afraid.' His face grew solemn
again, and he raised his glass: 'I think it is fitting that we should begin by drinking a
health. To our Leader: To Emmanuel Goldstein.'
Winston took up his glass with a certain eagerness. Wine was a thing he had read and dreamed
about. . . . The truth was that after years of gin-drinking he could barely taste it. He set
down the empty glass.
'Then there is such a person as Goldstein?' he said.
'Yes, there is such a person, and he is alive. Where, I do not know.'
'And the conspiracy -- the organization? Is it real? It is not simply an invention of the
Thought Police?'
'No, it is real. The Brotherhood, we call it. You will never learn much more about the
Brotherhood than that it exists and that you belong to it. I will come back to that
presently.'
Whether Goldstein exists is an issue raised in the novel itself, but that he (obviously
Jewish like another member of the Brotherhood, Aaronson) is presented sympathetically as a
libertarian enemy of the oppressive government is certain. Orwell's novel presents Jews
sympathetically as liberators of themselves and others.
And that presentation is historically false: Jews throughout history are the oppressors, not
the oppressed.
It is interesting to note that today's voice activated computer interfaces (Alexa, etc.) are
equivalent to Orwell's "telescreens" that monitor all activity within a household. Add to
that, the present push to implement "chipping"–the implantation of microchips into
humans, ostensibly for "convenience" and identification that cannot be lost–the "mark
of the beast" in biblical parlance.
The sad part is that much of the population is openly embracing these technologies instead of
being wary (and aware) that these are monitoring technologies which will lead to no good.
@Che Guava
The woman truck driver was the protagonist's love object and inspired what little plot
exists. He was supposed to save her, or so he thought. Everything else was window-dressing
(albeit quite imaginative), possibly the product of his growing insanity
"One of the frequent comparisons that comes up in the Dissident Right is who was more
correct or prescient, Orwell or Huxley".
This is the first lie by this author trying to co-opt both these writers for his agenda.
Orwell was an anti-imperialist and thats evident if you read 'Down and out in Paris or
London' or the 'Road to Wigan Pier'.
Burgess' politics and views can readily be known by reading 'Clockwork Orange' or 'The brave
New World'.
The world today is topsy turvy and what was the left then is now the right but both were anti
fascists.
If the comment posted is wrong , it's because the first paragraph was blatantly misleading
and stopped me from going any further.
One thing that most people in America leave out of consideration is the reality and power of
secret societies. Recently Freemasonry celebrated its 300th anniversary with a big bash in
England. In Europe, the Catholics are aware of its power and effectiveness. Democracy is a
total illusion anyway; oligarchs always rule.
Another good one was Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. It also has Alexa-type screens that allow the
viewer to participate, feel like a "star" and acquire instant fame. Firemen start fires
instead of putting them out. Books (good books anyway) cause people to discover and share
another more meaningful world. Ergo, old books must be rooted out and destroyed. The war on
whiteness and patriarchy in today's parlance.
Nineteen Eighty-Four should be required reading in high schools. One of the most
creative and prophetic novels of all time. EN LEAVES, etc. But because of its socio-political
themes, BNW became part of high school canon. In contrast, 1984 maybe Orwell's greatest work.
It's like Anthony Burgess often said A CLOCKWORK ORANGE is the least of his works, but it's
his most famous novel because it was made into a classic movie and dealt with relevant social
themes of crime and psychology.
Still, even though 1984 has stuff about control of the populace through drugs and
pornography, the vision of BNW is closer to our world in this sense. We live in a world of
plenty than scarcity. So, whereas vice is allowed by the state in 1984 as an outlet for a
bored and tired public, vice is at the center of life in BNW. The world of 1984 allows some
kind of vice but is nevertheless essentially a puritanical, spartan, and moralistic state.
Also, vice, even if legal and state-sanctioned, is to be enjoyed behind closed doors. In
contrast, the world of BNW has vice of sex and drugs all over the place. Indeed, it is so
pervasive that it's not even regarded as vice but the New Virtue. And in this, our world is
like BNW. Gambling was once a vice but now a virtue. We are told it is fun, it offers
reparations to Indians, and creates jobs. And Las Vegas is like Disneyland for the entire
family. Disney Corp has turned into a Brothel, but it's still promoted as Family
Entertainment. Trashy celebs who indulge in hedonism and market excessive behavior are held
up as role models. Whether it's Hillary with Miley Cyrus or Trump with Kanye, it seems Vice
is the new Virtue. (I finally heard a Kanye album on youtube, and it began with a song along
the lines of 'suck my dic*'.)
Orwell was insightful about the power of language, but he thought that the totalitarian
state would simplify language to create conformity of mind. Such as 'doubleplusgood'. It
would be increasingly anti-intellectual and anti-poetic. But the PC manipulation of language
works the other way. It keeps on creating fancy, pseudo-intellectual, or faux-sophisticated
terms for what is total rot. So many people are fooled because they go to college and are fed
fancy jargon as substitute for thought.
Btw, as the 84 in 1984 was the reverse of 48, the year in which the book was written, many
literary critics have said the book was not about the future but the present, esp. Stalinist
Russia(though some elements were taken from Nazi Germany and even UK). As such, it was a
testament and a warning than a prophecy. Besides, Orwell had pretty much laid out the logic
of totalitarianism in ANIMAL FARM. Perhaps, the most distressing thing about 1984 is that the
hero embodies the very logic that led to the Repressive System in the first place. When asked
if he would commit any act of terror and violence to destroy the System, Winston Smith
answers yes. It's an indication that the System was long ago created by people just like him,
idealists who felt they were so right that they could do ANYTHING to create a just order. But
the result was totalitarianism.
One area where the current order is like 1984. The hysterical screaming mobs and their
endless minutes of hate. It's like Rule by PMS.
@AnneOne thing that most people in America leave out of consideration is the reality and power
of secret societies.
One reason why BNW and 1984 fail as future-visions is they assume that the West will
remain white. Both are about white tyranny, white systems, white everything. So, the tyranny
is ideological, systemic, philosophical, and etc. It's about the rulers and the ruled. It's
about systems and its minions. Same with A CLOCKWORK ORANGE. As ugly as its future vision is,
at least UK is still white in the novel and movie. But look at London today. It's turning
Third World. And white droogs and gangs are getting their ass whupped by black thugs.
Something happened in the West after WWII. Jews gained supreme power and eventually aided
homos to be their main allies. And Negroes gained supreme status as idols of song, sports,
and sex. This has complicated matters. The group-personalities of Jews and whites are
different. Jews are more aware and anxious; whites are more earnest and trusting. There is a
huge difference between Chinese elites manipulating Chinese masses AND Jewish elites
manipulating non-Jewish masses. Chinese elites think in terms of power. Jewish elites think
in terms of power over the Other. There is bound to be far less trust in the latter case,
therefore more need to twist logic in so many ways.
As for Negroes, their attitudes are very different from that of whites. In some ways, blacks
are the single most destructive force against order and civilization. Look at Detroit and
Baltimore. Haiti and Africa. And yet, the rulers of the Current Order elevate blackness as
the holiest icon of spiritual magic and coolest idol of mass thrills. This lead to the
madonna-ization of white women. Whore-ship as worship. It leads to cucky-wuckeriness among
white men. But if whites submit to blackness, their civilization will fall.
But because Jewish power needs to suppress white pride and power with 'white guilt'(over what
was done to Negro slaves) and white thrill(for blacks in sports, song, and dance), it
promotes blackness. So, on the one hand, Jewish Power is invested in maintaining the Order in
which they have so much. But in order for Jews to remain on top, whites must be instilled
with guilt and robbed of pride. And blackness is the most potent weapon in this. But in
promoting blackness, the West will be junglized. The future of France looks dire with all
those blacks coming to kick white male butt and hump white women. And when it all falls
apart, Jews will lose out too, at least in Europe. US might be spared from total black
destruction with brown-ization. Browns may not have stellar talent but they not crazy like
the Negroes.
1984 and BNW are about people lording over others. There isn't much in the way of minority
power. But today's world is about Minority Rule, especially that of Jews and Homos. And it's
about minorities of blacks in the West taking the mantle of Manhood and Pride from white guys
who are cucky-wucked.
Now, the thing about BNW is that its vision has been fulfilled yet. While one can argue
that Stalinism pretty much achieved the full extent of Orwellianism, humanity has yet to see
the rise of clones and bio-engineering. So, to fully appreciate Huxley, it might take a 100
to 200 yrs. Maybe women will stop giving birth. Maybe the idea of 'mother' will seem funny.
Maybe future beings will be cloned. And maybe different castes will be produced to do
different jobs. That way, there will be happiness. Today, people are still born naturally,
and each person wants to be 'equal'. But what if certain people are bio-engineered to be
submissive and happy to do menial work?
Also, mass cloning may be the only way a nation like Japan can sustain itself as they are
not breeding anymore.
The world today is topsy turvy and what was the left then is now the right but both were
anti fascists.
Orwell doesn't seem anything at all like the anti-fascists we see today I'd say my
politics hover around where Orwell's were but I get called a Nazi not infrequently.
Truly "war is (now) peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength."
Most forget that the three great rats (snitches) of the 20th century were Eric Blair aka
Orwell (his famous list of Stalinist media simps), Ron Reagan (Commie Hollywoodites) , and
Tim Leary (Weathmen who broke him out of jail). Blair never imagined 99% of the population
would willingly invite a telescreen into their homes, and even pay a monthly fee to be dumbed
down and manipulated. He visualized the screen correctly to be just an advanced means of
propaganda and enslavement. Maybe it is time for an updated version of 1984. Call it 2024.
Big Jew (giant orange bloated comb over head on screen) could replace Big Brother, and say
Spencer UnzSailer could replace the mythical Goldstein. Dershowitz could replace O'Brien and
torment the hapless Winston Anglin and his tatted blowup doll, Julia.
Lesson: It is a Jewish question which we need not bother ourselves about, one way or the
other. Therefore, no rules for or against BDS, no influence from AIPAC, no aid to Israel or
Palestine, etc. etc. In other words, let's learn from our Jewish friends for once, and play a
game of "let's you and him fight."
@Tyrion 2Orwell doesn't seem anything at all like the anti-fascists we see today I'd say my
politics hover around where Orwell's were but I get called a Nazi not infrequently.
Oddly enough, what we have in the West is actually repression by
sacro-ethno-corporatism.
Jews are disproportionately immensely powerful. So, there is an ethnic angle to the
current power.
But if Jews were merely rich and powerful, they could be critiqued and challenged like Wasps
still are. But they are untouchable because of the sacro-element. As the Children of Shoah,
opposition to Jewish Power is 'antisemitic' or 'nazi'.
Also, Globo-Shlomo-Homo Power owes to capitalism, not socialism or communism. Now,
corporate tyranny can't be as total as statist tyranny. Even with all the deplatforming and
etc, the current power can't do to dissidents what Stalin, Mao, and Hitler did. Still,
considering that a handful corporations dominate so much and that so many Americans are
either apathetic or rabid-with-PC, the current tyranny is formidable. After all, one doesn't
need to control EVERYTHING to keep the power. One only needs control of elite institutions,
flow of information, main narratives & icons/idols, and majority support(as US has a
winner-takes-all political system). As all such are concentrated in few institutions and
industries, the elites own pretty much everything.
With their power of media and academia, Jews have persuaded enough whites that it's virtuous
to be anti-white. And with mass-immigration-invasion, the combined votes of white cucks and
non-white hordes tip the majority toward the Globo-Shlomo-Homo Party. Unless there is total
collapse, this system can go on for a long long time.
Also, corporate power pretty much determines state power since most politicians are whores
of donors. And most people who serve in the Deep State were raised from cradle to idolize
certain figures and symbols as sacrosanct. As toadies and servants of the Power, they've
absorbed these lessons uncritically, and they are afraid to raise their kids with truly
critical mindset because asking Big Questions will derail their chance of entering the
corridors of privilege. Those in the Deep State bureaucracies are not necessarily corrupt.
They may be hardworking and committed to their service to the state, but they are essentially
flunkies since they never questioned the central shibboleths that govern today's PC. I don't
think people like James Comey are corrupt in the conventional sense. They probably sincerely
believe they are committed to the proper functioning of the state. But lacking in imagination
and audacity to question beyond the Dominant Narrative and Dogma, they can only be lackeys no
matter how smart or credentialed they are.
US and Israel are both essentially fascist states, but the differences is Israel is an
organic-fascist state whereas the US is an gangster-fascist state. If not for Israel's
Occupation of West Bank and bad behavior to its neighbors, its form of fascist-democratic
nationalism would be sound. It is a majority Jewish nation where the Jewish elites have an
organic bond with the majority of the people. Also, Jews have a ancestral and spiritual bond
with the territory, the Holy Land. Also, there is a balance of capitalism and socialism, and
the main theme is the preservation and defense of the homeland for Jews. So,
identity/inheritance is served by ideology, not the other way around. As such, Israel is a
pretty good model for other nations(though it could treat Palestinians somewhat better; but
then, Arabs IN Israel have it pretty good.) Israel need not be a gangster-fascist state
because there is natural, historical, and cultural bond between the rulers and the ruled.
But in the US, there is no such bond between the Jewish elites and the masses of goyim.
That being the case, it is most unnatural for the US to be Jewish-dominated. It's one thing
for Jews to be successful and disproportionately represented in US institutions and
industries due to higher IQ and achievement. But the idea of the Jewish elites serving as the
Dominant Ruling Elites in a nation where they are only 2% is ridiculous. It's like Turkey has
successful minority communities of Greeks, Armenians, and some Jews, but clearly the Turks
are in control. But in the US, Jews have the top power, and furthermore, Jews want to keep
the power and make all Americans suck up to Jewish power. But this can only work via
gangster-fascism since there is no organic bond between Jews and non-Jews. If Jewish elites
in Israel think and act in terms of "What can we do to empower all of us Jews as one united
people?", Jewish elites in the think in terms of "What can we do to bribe, browbeat,
threaten, silence, blacklist, and/or brainwash the goy masses to make them do our bidding?"
One if borne of love and trust, the other of contempt and fear.
Whatever problems exist in Israel, I'm guessing there is genuine love between Jewish elites
and Jewish masses. But there is a lot of hatred, fear, and anxiety among Jewish elites when
it comes to the goyim. The result is outrageous policy like hoodwinking white Christian
soldiers to smash 'terrorist muzzie' nations and then bringing over Muslims and embracing
them as 'refugees' against 'white supremacist bigots'.
Another problem with globo-shlomo-homo(and-afro) world order is that it's leading to
Mono-everything. It's leading to mono-financial rule by Wall Street. As Wall Street is so
dominant, it is effectively taking over all financial markets. And as the US military is so
dominant, the world is ending up with Mono-Militarism. The US continues to encircle China,
Russia, and Iran. And it's leading to Mono-Manhood. Prior to mass-migration-invasion, Europe
was all white. So, even though white men tend to lose to blacks in world competition, every
white nation had its white local-national hero. Its manhood was defined and represented by
its own men. The world had poly-manhood, or plurality of manhood. Even if white men lost to
blacks in world competition, they were the dominant men in their own nations. But with
Negroes entering every white nation, the result is Mono-Manhood(that of the Negro) in every
white nation. This is now spreading to Japan as well, as Japanese women now travel around the
world to fill up their wombs with black babies. And of there is Mono-Media. The world
communicates through English, but most English media are dominated by Jews. European nations
may censor American Media, but it's never the mainstream media. It's always alternative
media, and these censorship is done at the pressure of globalist Jewish groups. Jewish
globalists pressure Europe to allow ONLY mainstream US media while banning much of
alternative media that dares speak truth to power about Jewish power and race-ism(aka race
realism).
Why does the one have to be 'superior' to the other as they both make a lot of sense?
Why not a combination of both?
How about a society that controls people with a velvet glove by allowing for and promoting
every Brave New Worldish (often fatuous) personal pleasure while simultaneously, should a
person get out of line from the state's dictates, maintaining in the background the iron fist
of a full blown Orwellian police state?
The present society, though not there yet, is not that far away from that now.
Regarding 1984 I've always thought the Michael Radford film version starring
Richard Burton, John Hurt, and the luscious Suzanna Hamilton, filmed in an around London from
April – June, 1984, the exact time and setting of Orwell's novel, to have been
outstanding.
9/23/1975 Tom Charles Huston Church Committee Testimony
Tom Charles Huston testified before the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental
Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, commonly known as the Church Committee,
on the 43-page plan he presented to the President Nixon and others on ways to collect
information about anti-war and "radical" groups, including burglary, electronic surveillance,
and opening of mail.
In my estimation, That Hideous Strength, the final novel of the science fiction trilogy of C.
S. Lewis, is the best and most prescient dystopian novel written – largely because it
is so much more than just a dystopian novel. It combines great characters, imaginative
fantasy from modern to medieval, and is a truly creepy horror story as well – with a
hilarious happy ending which illustrates God's very own sense of humor.
"... Huxley's main insight, namely that control can be maintained more effectively through "entertainment, distraction, and superficial pleasure rather than through overt modes of policing and strict control over food supplies" is not actually absent in 1984 . ..."
"... In fact, exactly these kind of methods are used to control the Proles, on whom pornography is pushed and prostitution allowed. In fact porn is such an important means of social control that the IngSoc authorities even have a pornography section called "PornSec," which mass produces porn for the Proles. ..."
"... One of the LOL moments in Michael Radford's film version is when Mr. Charrington, the agent of the thought police who poses as a kindly pawnbroker to rent a room to Winston and Julia for their sexual trysts, informs them on their arrest that their surveillance film will be 'repurposed' as porn. ..."
"... But while 1984 includes almost everything that Brave New World contains in terms of controlling people through sex, drugs, and distractions, it also includes much, much more, especially regarding how censorship and language are used to control people and how tyranny is internalised. The chapter from which the above quote comes, shows how Winston, a formerly autonomous agent, has come to accept the power of the system so much that he no longer needs policing. ..."
"... But most brilliant of all is Orwell's prescient description of how language is changed through banning certain words and the expression of certain ideas or observations deemed "thought crime," to say nothing of the constant rewriting of history. The activities of Big Tech and their deplatforming of all who use words, phrases, and ideas not in the latest edition of their "Newspeak" dictionary, have radically changed the way that people communicate and what they talk about in a comparatively short period of time. ..."
"... Orwell's insights into how language can be manipulated into a tool of control shows his much deeper understanding of human psychology than that evident in Huxley's novel. The same can be said about Orwell's treatment of emotions, which is another aspect of his novel that rings particularly true today. ..."
"... Colin Liddell is one of the founders of the Alt-Right, which he now disavows, and currently blogs at Affirmative Right . He recently published a book "Interviews and Obituaries," available on Amazon . ..."
One of the frequent comparisons that comes up in the Dissident Right is who was more correct
or prescient, Orwell or Huxley.
In fact, as the only truly oppressed intellectual group, the Dissident Right are the only
ones in a position to offer a valid opinion on this, as no other group of intellectuals suffers
deplatforming, doxxing, and dismissal from jobs as much as we do. In the present day, it is
only the Dissident Right that exists in the 'tyrannical space' explored in those two dystopian
classics.
But, despite this, this debate exists not only on the Dissident Right but further afield.
Believe it or not, even Left-wingers and Liberals debate this question, as if they too are
under the heel of the oppressor's jackboot. In fact, they feel so oppressed that some of them
are even driven to discuss it in the pages of the New York Times at the despotically
high rate of pay which that no doubt involves.
In both the Left and the Dissident Right, the consensus is that Huxley is far superior to
Orwell, although, according to the New York Times article just alluded to, Orwell has
caught up a lot since the election of Donald Trump. Have a look at this laughable, "I'm
literally shaking"
prose from New York Times writer Charles McGrath :
And yet [Huxley's] novel much more accurately evokes the country we live in now,
especially in its depiction of a culture preoccupied with sex and mindless pop entertainment,
than does Orwell's more ominous book, which seems to be imagining someplace like North Korea.
Or it did until Donald Trump was inaugurated.
All of a sudden, as many commentators have pointed out, there were almost daily echoes of
Orwell in the news The most obvious connection to Orwell was the new president's repeated
insistence that even his most pointless and transparent lies were in fact true, and then his
adviser Kellyanne Conway's explanation that these statements were not really falsehoods but,
rather, "alternative facts." As any reader of "1984" knows, this is exactly Big Brother's
standard of truth: The facts are whatever the leader says they are.
those endless wars in "1984," during which the enemy keeps changing -- now Eurasia, now
Eastasia -- no longer seem as far-fetched as they once did, and neither do the book's
organized hate rallies, in which the citizenry works itself into a frenzy against nameless
foreigners.
The counter to this is that Trump is the only non-establishment candidate to get elected
President since Andrew Jackson and therefore almost the exact opposite of the idea of top-down
tyranny.
But to return to the notion that Huxley is superior to Orwell, both on the Left and the
Dissident Right, this is based on a common view that Huxley presents a much more subtle,
nuanced, and sophisticated view of soft tyranny more in keeping with the appearance of our own
age. Here's McGrath summarizing this viewpoint, which could just as easily have come out of the
mouth of an Alt-Righter, Alt-Liter, or Affirmative Righter:
Orwell didn't really have much feel for the future, which to his mind was just another
version of the present. His imagined London is merely a drabber, more joyless version of the
city, still recovering from the Blitz, where he was living in the mid-1940s, just before
beginning the novel. The main technological advancement there is the two-way telescreen,
essentially an electronic peephole.
Huxley, on the other hand, writing almost two decades earlier than Orwell (his former Eton
pupil, as it happened), foresaw a world that included space travel; private helicopters;
genetically engineered test tube babies; enhanced birth control; an immensely popular drug
that appears to combine the best features of Valium and Ecstasy; hormone-laced chewing gum
that seems to work the way Viagra does; a full sensory entertainment system that outdoes
IMAX; and maybe even breast implants. (The book is a little unclear on this point, but in
"Brave New World" the highest compliment you can pay a woman is to call her "pneumatic.")
Huxley was not entirely serious about this. He began "Brave New World" as a parody of H.G.
Wells, whose writing he detested, and it remained a book that means to be as playful as it is
prophetic. And yet his novel much more accurately evokes the country we live in now,
especially in its depiction of a culture preoccupied with sex and mindless pop entertainment,
than does Orwell's more ominous book, which seems to be imagining someplace like North
Korea.
It is easy to see why some might see Huxley as more relevant to the reality around us than
Orwell, because basically "Big Brother," in the guise of the Soviet Union, lost the Cold War,
or so it seems.
But while initially convincing, the case for Huxley's superiority can be dismantled.
Most importantly, Huxley's main insight, namely that control can be maintained more
effectively through "entertainment, distraction, and superficial pleasure rather than through
overt modes of policing and strict control over food supplies" is not actually absent in
1984 .
In fact, exactly these kind of methods are used to control the Proles, on whom pornography
is pushed and prostitution allowed. In fact porn is such an important means of social control
that the IngSoc authorities even have a pornography section called "PornSec," which mass
produces porn for the Proles.
One of the LOL moments in Michael Radford's film version is when
Mr. Charrington, the agent of the thought police who poses as a kindly pawnbroker to rent a
room to Winston and Julia for their sexual trysts, informs them on their arrest that their
surveillance film will be 'repurposed' as porn.
In fact, Orwell's view of sex as a means of control is much more dialectical and
sophisticated than Huxley's, as the latter was, as mentioned above, essentially writing a
parody of the naive "free love" notions of H.G.Wells.
While sex is used as a means to weaken the Proles, 'anti-Sex' is used to strengthen the
hive-mind of Party members. Indeed, we see today how the most hysterical elements of the Left
-- and to a certain degree the Dissident Right -- are the most undersexed.
Also addictive substances are not absent from Orwell's dystopian vision. While Brave New
World only has soma, 1984 has Victory Gin, Victory Wine, Victory Beer, Victory
Coffee, and Victory Tobacco -- all highly addictive substances that affect people's moods and
reconcile them to unpleasant realities. Winston himself is something of a cigarette junkie and
gin fiend, as we see in this quote from the final chapter:
The Chestnut Tree was almost empty. A ray of sunlight slanting through a window fell on
dusty table-tops. It was the lonely hour of fifteen. A tinny music trickled from the
telescreens.
Winston sat in his usual corner, gazing into an empty glass. Now and again he glanced up
at a vast face which eyed him from the opposite wall. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the
caption said. Unbidden, a waiter came and filled his glass up with Victory Gin, shaking into
it a few drops from another bottle with a quill through the cork. It was saccharine flavoured
with cloves, the speciality of the cafe
In these days he could never fix his mind on any one subject for more than a few moments
at a time. He picked up his glass and drained it at a gulp.
But while 1984 includes almost everything that Brave New World contains in
terms of controlling people through sex, drugs, and distractions, it also includes much, much
more, especially regarding how censorship and language are used to control people and how
tyranny is internalised. The chapter from which the above quote comes, shows how Winston, a
formerly autonomous agent, has come to accept the power of the system so much that he no longer
needs policing.
But most brilliant of all is Orwell's prescient description of how language is changed
through banning certain words and the expression of certain ideas or observations deemed
"thought crime," to say nothing of the constant rewriting of history. The activities of Big
Tech and their deplatforming of all who use words, phrases, and ideas not in the latest edition
of their "Newspeak" dictionary, have radically changed the way that people communicate and what
they talk about in a comparatively short period of time.
Orwell's insights into how language can be manipulated into a tool of control shows his much
deeper understanding of human psychology than that evident in Huxley's novel. The same can be
said about Orwell's treatment of emotions, which is another aspect of his novel that rings
particularly true today.
In 1984 hate figures, like Emmanuel Goldstein, and fake enemies, like Eastasia and
Eurasia, are used to unite, mobilise, and control certain groups. Orwell was well aware of the
group-psychological dynamics of the tribe projected to the largest scale of a totalitarian
empire. The concept of "three minutes hate" has so much resonance with our own age, where
triggered Twitter-borne hordes of SJWs and others slosh around the news cycle like emotional
zombies, railing against Trump or George Soros.
In Huxley's book, there are different classes but this is not a source of conflict. Indeed
they are so clearly defined -- in fact biologically so -- that there is no conflict between
them, as each class carries out its predetermined role like harmonious orbit of Aristotlean
spheres.
In short, Brave New World sees man as he likes to see himself -- a rational actor,
controlling his world and taking his pleasures. It is essentially the vision of a well-heeled
member of the British upper classes.
Orwell's book, by contrast, sees man as the tribal primitive, forced to live on a scale of
social organisation far beyond his natural capacity, and thereby distorted into a mad and cruel
creature. It is essentially the vision of a not-so-well-heeled member of the British middle
classes in daily contact with the working class. But is all the richer and more profound for
it.
Colin Liddell is one of the founders of the Alt-Right, which he now disavows, and
currently blogs at Affirmative
Right . He recently published a book "Interviews and Obituaries," available on Amazon
.
"... Orwell grew up in a time of increasing scale, Managerialism, and atomization. His thinking narrates the moral discourse shaped by that anti-social environment and its effects (mass wars) but dresses it up in an emancipatory narrative. One is immediately struck by his lack of foresight in predicting how power would operate as the 20th century wore on (Foucault and and Huxley are a lot closer the truth), and his inability to grapple with the essence of power and its moral and conceptual implications as a whole. ..."
"... Orwell proceeds to demand by implication we view the ancestral efforts which secured our position in the present day as illegitimate, since they conformed to emergent anthropological patterns of conflict and conquest instead of categorical laws plucked out of thin air by self-styled 'enlightened' big-brains during the 18th century. ..."
"... Had we actually lived by these 'standards', those of us left would be a marginalized set of tribes pushed to the far north of Europe, regularly getting shafted by whatever Magian civilization moved in. As a matter of fact, that's happening right now as these self-critical ideas have installed themselves within our cultural substrate. ..."
"... But if you have a decline and you have a desire to assert yourself to arrest the decline, and you have to apologize to yourself about even having the idea of assertion to arrest decline, you're not going to get anywhere, are you? ..."
Orwell's intellect is overrated, and his aphorisms have become thought-ending cliches. Look at the string of assumptions in quote
above. Do individuals really 'choose' to 'sink' their consciousness into a greater body? What makes far more sense is that at
the 'core' of I there is a 'we', which is conditioned by prior forms of particularity - religion, ethnicity, language, race, and
culture. This is the basis of a harmonious common good, and a meaningful lifeworld.
Orwell grew up in a time of increasing scale, Managerialism, and atomization. His thinking narrates the moral discourse
shaped by that anti-social environment and its effects (mass wars) but dresses it up in an emancipatory narrative. One is immediately
struck by his lack of foresight in predicting how power would operate as the 20th century wore on (Foucault and and Huxley are
a lot closer the truth), and his inability to grapple with the essence of power and its moral and conceptual implications as a
whole.
In reality, power is a moral imperative, and its acquisition and application the inaugural raison d'être of the state and the
concomitant society. Hence, the cogito subject at the heart of Orwell's evaluative presuppositions is itself a product of prior
systems of power, upstream from personal judgment and value sets.
Orwell proceeds to demand by implication we view the ancestral efforts which secured our position in the present day as
illegitimate, since they conformed to emergent anthropological patterns of conflict and conquest instead of categorical laws plucked
out of thin air by self-styled 'enlightened' big-brains during the 18th century.
Had we actually lived by these 'standards', those of us left would be a marginalized set of tribes pushed to the far north
of Europe, regularly getting shafted by whatever Magian civilization moved in. As a matter of fact, that's happening right now
as these self-critical ideas have installed themselves within our cultural substrate.
These pious set of mere assertions are deployed by the ruling globalist cabal to justify the replacement of Western founding
stocks. Yet they are so ingrained among our senior cohort, when their *own people actually under attack* seek to affirm themselves
without contradiction in *response*, they are viewed as the root menace. But if you have a decline and you have a desire to
assert yourself to arrest the decline, and you have to apologize to yourself about even having the idea of assertion to arrest
decline, you're not going to get anywhere, are you?
Those who feel uncomfortable about this should have worked harder to prevent the erosion of the historic American nation, and
if there is nothing they could have done against the DC Behemoth, abstain from opposing the instinctive response of the cultural
immune system.
I'm not American, but i'm 5th generation in an Anglo-setter nation. The implication here is that i'm an ungrateful you whipper-snapper
who just doesn't grasp the sacrifices and horrors of the 20th century. Exactly when does my generation get the moral cachet
entitling us to input directions into the civilizational compass? Arguments predicated on commitment to a cause haven no inherent
validity. I'm certainly not disparaging or denying here, but you're putting us in a position where our ambit of choice is circumscribed
by the ideology that justified post-War US hegemony (for which people from my community were still dying until very recently
in Afghanistan).
I have long thought that NATO should have been abolished after the fall of the USSR. Go your own way. I am not concerned with
you foreigners in Europe or anywhere else. I am concerned with the state of mind of my own people who should wise up and forget
about Europe except as a trading partner and a tourist destination.
Well, I would love to do that Col., but unfortunately Western civilization as a whole goes the way of Washington, New York,
Brussels, and maybe Paris and Moscow. What happens to weaker power centres without the strong ones? What has happened Tibet,
that's what.
Thinking in terms of elites tied to specific nations is no longer a good model to conceive of politics. Formal institutions
like NATO are an expression of that. We have to address transnational networks of soft power that bind together and enculturate
the ruling class. I have more in common with a Trump voter from flyover country and he with me than either of us with our respective
'national' elites.
An important distinction, thank you for forcing us to consider the difference.
The two are not always easy to distinguish and a 'My country right or wrong' mindset seems to be dangerously on the rise.
I was considering the use of the national flag on homes in the US and UK. It surprised me how common it seemed in the States
and assumed it was a show of Patriotic fervor when I see it in the UK it sends a shiver down my spine as (with the exception
of major international sporting events) I interpret it as extreme Nationalism often associated with racist or Neo-Nazi sympathies.
Conflation of the two seems much the same as that of Anti-Israeli, Anti-Zionist and Anti-Semitic again three very distinct
mindsets.
... Look, mostly this whole patriotism/nationalism word game is just sadly funny. You are a patriot if you think like me. You
are a nationalist if you don't. Patriotism is good, nationalism is bad. If I am a patriot, I am good, if you are a nationalist,
you must be bad.
I think that the wisdom of Humpty Dumpty when speaking to Alice fits here:
"When I use a word..it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less."
"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."
"The question is which is to be master -- that's all."
By both its supporters and detractors, neoliberalism is usually considered an economic
policy agenda. Neoliberalism's Demons argues that it is much more than that: a complete
worldview, neoliberalism presents the competitive marketplace as the model for true human
flourishing. And it has enjoyed great success: from the struggle for "global competitiveness"
on the world stage down to our individual practices of self-branding and social networking,
neoliberalism has transformed every aspect of our shared social life. The book explores the
sources of neoliberalism's remarkable success and the roots of its current decline.
Neoliberalism's appeal is its promise of freedom in the form of unfettered free choice. But
that freedom is a trap: we have just enough freedom to be accountable for our failings, but not
enough to create genuine change. If we choose rightly, we ratify our own exploitation. And if
we choose wrongly, we are consigned to the outer darkness -- and then demonized as the cause of
social ills. By tracing the political and theological roots of the neoliberal concept of
freedom, Adam Kotsko offers a fresh perspective, one that emphasizes the dynamics of race,
gender, and sexuality. More than that, he accounts for the rise of right-wing populism, arguing
that, far from breaking with the neoliberal model, it actually doubles down on neoliberalism's
most destructive features.
skeptic
This book tried to integrate the results of previous research of neoliberalism by such
scholars as David Harvey, Philip Mirowski, and Wendy Brown into a more coherent framework. He
has some brilliant insights about neoliberalism as secular religion scattered within the
book. For example "I have claimed that the political-theological root of neoliberalism is
freedom and have characterized its vision of freedom as hollow." His theological notion of
"neoliberalism demons" ( the dark forces unleashed by neoliberalism) also represents a very
valuable insight as neoliberalism explicitly violates Christian morality postulates ("greed
is good").
"Liberal democracy under neoliberalism represents a forced choice between two fundamentally
similar options, betraying its promise to provide a mechanism for rational and
self-reflective human agency. The market similarly mobilizes free choice only to subdue and
subvert it, "responsibilizing" every individual for the outcomes of the system while
radically foreclosing any form of collective responsibility for the shape of society. And
any attempt to exercise human judgment and free choice over social institutions and
outcomes is rejected as a step down the slippery' slope to totalitarianism. To choose in
any strong sense is always necessarily to choose wrongly, to fall into sin."
In the introduction, he correctly states that the academic workforce is now
deeply affected by neoliberalization.
Every academic critique of neoliberalism is an unacknowledged memoir. We academics occupy a
crucial node in the neoliberal system. Our institutions are foundational to neoliberalism's
claim to be a meritocracy, insofar as we are tasked with discerning and certifying the
merit that leads to the most powerful and desirable jobs. Yet at the same time, colleges
and universities have suffered the fate of all public goods under the neoliberal order. We
must, therefore "do more with less," cutting costs while meeting ever-greater demands. The
academic workforce faces increasing precarity and shrinking wages even as it is called on
to teach and assess more students than ever before in human history -- and to demonstrate
that we are doing so better than ever, via newly devised regimes of outcome-based
assessment. In short, we academics live out the contradictions of neoliberalism every day.
The author explains his use of the term "theology" instead of "ideology in such a way: "
theology' has always been about much more than God. Even the simplest theological systems
have a lot to say about the world we live in, how it came to be the way it is, and how it
should be. Those ideals are neither true nor false in an empirical sense, nor is it fair to
say that believers accept them blindly. "
He justifies the use of this term in the following way:
Here the term theology is likely to present the primary difficulty, as it seems to
presuppose some reference to God. Familiarity with political theology as it has
conventionally been practiced would reinforce that association. Schmitt's Political
Theology and Kantorowicz's The King's Two Bodies both focused on the parallels between God
and the earthly ruler,3 and much subsequent work in the field has concentrated on the
theological roots of political concepts of state sovereignty'. Hence the reader may justly
ask whether I am claiming that neoliberalism presupposes a concept of God.
The short answer is no. I am not arguing, for example, that neoliberalism "worships" the
invisible hand, the market, money, wealthy entrepreneurs, or any other supposed "false
idol," nor indeed that it is somehow secretly "religious" in the sense of being fanatical
and unreasoning. Such claims presuppose a strong distinction between the religious and the
secular, a distinction that proved foundational for the self-legitimation of the modern
secular order but that has now devolved into a stale cliché. As I will discuss in
the chapters that follow, one of the things that most appeals to me about political
theology as a discipline is the way that it rejects the religious/secular binary.
The author correctly point s out that "Neoliberalism likes to hide", Like Philip Mirowski
he views neoliberalism as a reaction on the USSR socialism which in my view integrates much
of Trotskyism. Replacing the slogan "Proletarians of all countries, unite!", with the slogan
"financial elites of all countries unite."
While most authors consider that neoliberalism became the dominant political force with
the election of Reagan, the author argues that it happened under Nixon: " Nixon's decision in
1971 to go off the gold standard, which broke with the Bretton Woods settlement that had
governed international finance throughout the postwar era and inadvertently cleared the space
for the fluctuating exchange rates that proved so central to the rise of contemporary finance
capitalism. "
He contrasts approaches of Harvey, Mirowski and Brown pointing out that real origin of
neoliberalism and Trotskyism style "thought collective" – intellectual vanguard that
drives everybody else, often using deception to final victory of neoliberalism.
It is this group that Mirowski highlights with his notion of the Neoliberal Thought
Collective. One could walk away from Harvey's account viewing the major figures of
neoliberalism as dispensable figureheads for impersonal political and economic forces. By
contrast, the most compact possible summary of Mirowski s book would be: "It's people!
Neoliberalism is made out of people!" In this reading, there was nothing inevitable about
neoliberalism's rise, which depended on the vision and organization of particular nameable
individuals.
Brown portrays neoliberalism as an attempt to extinguish the political -- here
represented by the liberal democratic tradition of popular sovereignty and self-rule -- and
consign humanity to a purely economic existence. In the end Brown calls us to take up a
strange kind of metapolitical struggle against the economic enemy, in defense of politics
as such. Meanwhile, Jodi Dean, who agrees that neoliberalism has a depoliticizing tendency,
argues that this depoliticization actually depends on the notion of democracy and that
appeals to democracy against neoliberalism arc therefore doomed in advance.9
He also points out neoliberalism tendency to create markets using the power of the
state:
"Obamacare effectively created a market in individual health insurance plans, an area where
the market was previously so dysfunctional as to be essentially nonexistent. The example of
Obamacare also highlights the peculiar nature of neoliberal freedom. One of its most
controversial provisions was a mandate that all Americans must have health insurance
coverage. From a purely libertarian perspective, this is an impermissible infringement on
economic freedom -- surely if i am free to make my own economic decisions, I am also free
to choose not to purchase health insurance. Yet the mandate fits perfectly with the overall
ethos of neoliberalism.
Overall, then, in neoliberalism an account of human nature where economic competition is
the highest value leads to a political theory where the prime duty of the state is to
enable, and indeed mandate, such competition, and the result is a world wherein
individuals, firms, and states are all continually constrained to express themselves via
economic competition. This means that neoliberalism tends to create a world in which
neoliberalism is "true." A more coherent and self-reinforcing political theology can
scarcely be imagined -- but that, I will argue, is precisely what any attempt to create an
alternative to neoliberalism must do.
He points out on weaknesses of Marxist analysts and by Harvey's own "recognition
of the fact that classes have been profoundly changed during the process of
neo-liberalization" -- meaning that the beneficiaries cannot have planned the neoliberal push
in any straightforward way. More than that, an economic-reductionist account ignores the
decisive role of the state in the development of the neoliberal order: "To believe that
'financial markets' one fine day eluded the grasp of politics is nothing but a fairy tale. It
was states, and global economic organizations, in close collusion with private actors, that
fashioned rules conducive to the expansion of market finance."'' In other words,
neoliberalism is an example where, contrary to Marxism, political forces directly transform
economic structures.
He also points out that Polanyi views on the subject supports this thesis:
Polanyi famously characterized the interplay between market forces and society as a "double
movement": when market relations threaten to undermine the basic foundations of social
reproduction, society (most often represented by state institutions) intervenes to prevent
or at least delay the trend set in motion by the market. Compared with Aristotle's
distribution of categories between the political and economic realms, Polanyi's account is
itself a "great transformation" on the conceptual level. Where Aristotle distinguished
state and household and placed both legitimate economic management and unrestrained
accumulation in the latter, Polanyi's "society" combines the household and the state,
leaving only out-of-control acquisition in the purely economic realm. And in this schema,
the society represents the spontaneous and natural, while the economic force of the market
is what is constructed and deliberate.
The legacy of Polanyi should already be familiar to us in the many analyses of
neoliberalism that see the state, nationalism, and other similar forces as extrinsic
"leftovers" that precede or exceed neoliberal logic. Normally such interpretations first
point out the supposed irony or hypocrisy that neoliberalism comes to require these
exogenous elements for its functioning while claiming that those same "leftover"
institutions can be sites of resistance. Hence, for instance, one often hears that the left
needs to restore confidence in state power over against the market, that socialism can only
be viable if a given country isolates itself from the forces of the global market, or in
Wendy Brown's more abstract terms, that the left must reclaim the political to combat the
hegemony of the economic.
He makes an important point that "neoliberalism does not simply destroy some
preexisting entity known as "the family," but creates its own version of the family, one that
fits its political-economic agenda, just as Fordism created the white suburban nuclear family
that underwrote its political-economic goals."
Following Wendy Brown he views victimization of poor as an immanent feature of
neoliberalism:
"The psychic life of neoliberalism, as so memorably characterized by Mark Fisher in
Capitalist Realism, is shot through with anxiety and shame. We have to be in a constant
state of high alert, always "hustling" for opportunities and connections, always planning
for every contingency (including the inherently unpredictable vagaries of health and
longevity). This dynamic of "responsibilization," as Wendy Brown calls it, requires us to
fritter away our life with worry and paperwork and supplication, "pitching"ourselves over
and over again, building our "personal brand" -- all for ever-lowering wages or a
smattering of piece-work, which barely covers increasingly exorbitant rent, much less
student loan payments."
He also points out that under neoliberalism "Under normative neoliberalism "neoclassical
economics becomes a soft constitution for government or 'governance' in its devolved forms"
the point that Philip Mirowski completely misses.
While correctly pointing out that neoliberalism is in decline and its ideology collapsed
after 2008 (" Neoliberalism has lost its aura of inevitability"), it is unclear which forces
will dismantle neoliberalism. And when it will be sent to the dustbin of the history. The
chapter of the book devoted to "After Neoliberalism" theme is much weaker than the chapters
devoted to its analysis.
For example, the author thinks that Trump election signifies a new stage of neoliberalism
which he calls "punitive neoliberalism." I would call Trumpism instead "national
neoliberalism" with all associated historical allusions.
Elegance is one of those things that can be difficult to define. I know it when I see it,
but putting what I see into a terse definition is a challenge. Using the Linux diet
command, Wordnet provides one definition of elegance as, "a quality of neatness and ingenious
simplicity in the solution of a problem (especially in science or mathematics); 'the simplicity
and elegance of his invention.'"
In the context of this book, I think that elegance is a state of beauty and simplicity in
the design and working of both hardware and software. When a design is elegant,
software and hardware work better and are more efficient. The user is aided by simple,
efficient, and understandable tools.
Creating elegance in a technological environment is hard. It is also necessary. Elegant
solutions produce elegant results and are easy to maintain and fix. Elegance does not happen by
accident; you must work for it.
The quality of simplicity is a large part of technical elegance. So large, in fact that it
deserves a chapter of its own, Chapter 18, "Find the Simplicity," but we do not ignore it here.
This chapter discusses what it means for hardware and software to be elegant.
Yes, hardware can be elegant -- even beautiful, pleasing to the eye. Hardware that is well
designed is more reliable as well. Elegant hardware solutions improve reliability'.
I find it both fun and informative to learn about the history' of Unix and Linux. Earlier in
this book, I have referred to two books in particular that I have found helpful in my
understating of Linux and its philosophy'.
Linux and the Unix Philosophy 1 by' Mike Ganearz has been particularly'
interesting in terms of the philosophy'. The second book, The Art of Unix Programming - by'
Eric S. Raymond, provides fascinating insider historical perspective on Unix and Linux
programming and history'. This second book is also available in its entirety' at no charge on
the Internet. 3
I recommend reading both of these books if you have not already. They' provide a historical
and philosophical basis for much of what I have written in this book.
Context is important and this tenet, "Always use shell scripts," should be considered in the
context of our jobs as SysAdmins.
The SysAdmin's job differs significantly from those of developers and testers. In addition
to resolving both hardware and software problems, we manage the day-to-day operation of the
systems under our care. We monitor those systems for potential problems and make all possible
efforts to prevent those problems before they impact our users. We install updates and perform
full release level upgrades to the operating system. We resolve problems caused by our
users.
SysAdmins develop code to do all of those tilings and more; then we test that code; and then
we support that code in a production environment.
Many of us also manage and maintain the networks to which our systems are connected. In
other cases we tell the network guys where the problems are located and how to fix them because
we find and diagnose them first.
We SysAdmins have been devops far longer than that term has been around. In fact, the
SysAdmin job is more like dev-test-ops-net than just devops. Our knowledge and daily task lists
cover all of those areas of expertise.
In this context the requirements for creating shell scripts are complex, interrelated, and
many times contradictory'. Let's look at some of the typical factors SysAdmins must consider
when writing shell scripts.
"... Every academic critique of neoliberalism is an unacknowledged memoir. We academics occupy a crucial node in the neoliberal system. Our institutions are foundational to neoliberalism's claim to be a meritocracy, insofar as we are tasked with discerning and certifying the merit that leads to the most powerful and desirable jobs. Yet at the same time, colleges and universities have suffered the fate of all public goods under the neoliberal order. We must therefore "do more with less," cutting costs while meeting ever-greater demands. The academic workforce faces increasing precarity and shrinking wages even as it is called on to teach and assess more students than ever before in human history -- and to demonstrate that we are doing so better than ever, via newly devised regimes of outcome-based assessment. In short, we academics live out the contradictions of neoliberalism every day. ..."
"... Whereas classical liberalism insisted that capitalism had to be allowed free rein within its sphere, under neoliberalism capitalism no longer has a set sphere. We are always "on the clock," always accruing (or squandering) various forms of financial and social capital. ..."
Every academic critique of neoliberalism is an unacknowledged memoir. We academics
occupy a crucial node in the neoliberal system. Our institutions are foundational to
neoliberalism's claim to be a meritocracy, insofar as we are tasked with discerning and
certifying the merit that leads to the most powerful and desirable jobs. Yet at the same time,
colleges and universities have suffered the fate of all public goods under the neoliberal
order. We must therefore "do more with less," cutting costs while meeting ever-greater demands.
The academic workforce faces increasing precarity and shrinking wages even as it is called on
to teach and assess more students than ever before in human history -- and to demonstrate that
we are doing so better than ever, via newly devised regimes of outcome-based assessment. In
short, we academics live out the contradictions of neoliberalism every day.
... ... ...
On a more personal level it reflects my upbringing in the suburbs of Flint, Michigan, a city
that has been utterly devastated by the transition to neoliberalism. As I lived through the
slow-motion disaster of the gradual withdrawal of the auto industry, I often heard Henry Ford s
dictum that a company could make more money if the workers were paid enough to be customers as
well, a principle that the major US automakers were inexplicably abandoning. Hence I find it
[Fordism -- NNB] to be an elegant way of capturing the postwar model's promise of creating
broadly shared prosperity by retooling capitalism to produce a consumer society characterized
by a growing middle class -- and of emphasizing the fact that that promise was ultimately
broken.
By the mid-1970s, the postwar Fordist order had begun to breakdown to varying degrees in the
major Western countries. While many powerful groups advocated a response to the crisis that
would strengthen the welfare state, the agenda that wound up carrying the day was
neoliberalism, which was most forcefully implemented in the United Kingdom by Margaret Thatcher
and in the United States by Ronald Reagan. And although this transformation was begun by the
conservative part)', in both countries the left-of-centcr or (in American usage) "liberal"party
wound up embracing neoliberal tenets under Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, ostensibly for the
purpose of directing them toward progressive ends.
With the context of current debates within the US Democratic Party, this means that Clinton
acolytes are correct to claim that "neoliberalism" just is liberalism but only to the extent
that, in the contemporary United States, the term liberalism is little more than a word for
whatever the policy agenda of the Democratic Party happens to be at any given time. Though
politicians of all stripes at times used libertarian rhetoric to sell their policies, the most
clear-eyed advocates of neoliberalism realized that there could be no simple question of a
"return" to the laissez-faire model.
Rather than simply getting the state "out of the way," they both deployed and transformed
state power, including the institutions of the welfare state, to reshape society in accordance
with market models. In some cases creating markets where none had previously existed, as in the
privatization of education and other public services. In others it took the form of a more
general spread of a competitive market ethos into ever more areas of life -- so that we are
encouraged to think of our reputation as a "brand," for instance, or our social contacts as
fodder for "networking." Whereas classical liberalism insisted that capitalism had to be
allowed free rein within its sphere, under neoliberalism capitalism no longer has a set sphere.
We are always "on the clock," always accruing (or squandering) various forms of financial and
social capital.
From the semi-serious to the confusingly
ironic, the business world is not short of pseudo-scientific principles, laws and management theories
concerning how organisations and their leaders should and should not behave.
CIO UK
takes a look at
some sincere, irreverent and leftfield management concepts that are relevant to CIOs and all business leaders.
The Peter Principle
A concept formulated by Laurence J Peter in 1969, the
Peter Principle
runs that in a
hierarchical structure, employees are promoted to their highest level of incompetence at which point they are
no longer able to fulfil an effective role for their organisation.
In the
Peter Principle
people are promoted when they excel, but this process falls down
when they are unlikely to gain further promotion or be demoted with the logical end point, according to Peter,
where "every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out its duties" and that
"work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence".
To counter the
Peter Principle
leaders could seek the advice of Spanish liberal philosopher
José Ortega y Gasset.
While he died 14 years before the
Peter Principle
was
published, Ortega had been in exile in Argentina during the Spanish Civil War and prompted by his observations
in South America had quipped: "All public employees should be demoted to their immediately lower level, as they
have been promoted until turning incompetent."
Parkinson's Law
Cyril Northcote Parkinson's eponymous law, derived from his extensive experience in the British Civil
Service, states that:
"Works expands so as to fill the time available for its completion."
The first sentence of a humorous essay published in
The Economist
in 1955,
Parkinson's Law
is familiar with CIOs, IT teams, journalists, students, and every other occupation that can learn from
Parkinson's mocking of pubic administration in the UK. The corollary law most applicable to CIOs runs that
"data expands to fill the space available for storage", while Parkinson's broader work about the
self-satisfying uncontrolled growth of bureaucratic apparatus is as relevant for the scaling startup as it is
to the large corporate.
Flirting with the ground between flippancy and seriousness, Parkinson argued that boards and members of an
organisation give disproportional weight to trivial issues and those that are easiest to grasp for non-experts.
In his words:
"The time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum of money
involved."
Parkinson's anecdote is of a fictional finance committee's three-item agenda to cover a £10 million contract
discussing the components of a new nuclear reactor, a proposal to build a new £350 bicycle shed, and finally
which coffee and biscuits should be supplied at future committee meetings. While the first item on the agenda
is far too complex and ironed out in two and a half minutes, 45 minutes is spent discussing bike sheds, and
debates about the £21 refreshment provisions are so drawn out that the committee runs over its two-hour time
allocation with a note to provide further information about coffee and biscuits to be continued at the next
meeting.
The Dilbert Principle
Referring to a 1990s theory by popular Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams, the
Dilbert Principle
runs that companies tend to promote their least competent employees to management roles to curb the amount of
damage they are capable of doing to the organisation.
Unlike the
Peter Principle
, which is positive in its aims by rewarding competence, the
Dilbert Principle
assumes people are moved to quasi-senior supervisory positions in a
structure where they are less likely to have an effect on productive output of the company which is performed
by those lower down the ladder.
Hofstadter's Law
Coined by Douglas Hofstadter in his 1979 book
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid,
Hofstadter's Law
states:
"It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account
Hofstadter's Law."
Particularly relevant to CIOs and business leaders overseeing large projects and transformation programmes,
Hofstadter's Law
suggests that even appreciating your own subjective pessimism in your
projected timelines, they are still worth re-evaluating.
An old adage and without basis in any scientific laws or management principles,
Murphy's Law
is always worth bearing in mind for CIOs or when undertaking thorough scenario planning for adverse situations.
It's also perhaps worth bearing in mind the corollary principle
Finagle's Law
, which states:
"Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong - at the worst possible moment."
Lindy Effect
Concerning the life expectancy of non-perishable things, the
Lindy Effect
is as relevant to
CIOs procuring new technologies or maintaining legacy infrastructure as it is to the those buying homes, used
cars, a fountain pen or mobile phone.
Harder to define than other principles and laws, the
Lindy Effect
suggests that mortality
rate decreases with time, unlike in nature and in human beings where - after childhood - mortality rate
increases with time. Ergo, every day of server uptime implies a longer remaining life expectancy.
A corollary effect related to the
Lindy Effect
which is a good explanation is the
Copernican Principle
, which states that the future life expectancy is equal to the current age, i.e.
that barring any addition evidence on the contrary, something must be halfway through its life span.
The
Lindy Effect
and the idea that older things are more robust has specific relevance to
CIOs beyond servers and IT infrastructure with its association with source code, where newer code will in
general have lower probability of remaining within a year and an increased likelihood of causing problems
compared to code written a long time ago, and in project management where the lifecycle of a project grows and
its scope changes, an Agile methodology can be used to mitigate project risks and fix mistakes.
The Jevons Paradox
Wikipedia offers the best economic
description of the
Jevons Paradox
or Jevons effect, in which a technological progress increases efficiency
with which a resource is used, but the rate of consumption of that resource subsequently rises because of
increasing demand.
Think email, think Slack, instant messaging, printing, how easy it is to create Excel reports,
coffee-making, conference calls, network and internet speeds, the list is endless. If you suspect demand in
these has increased along with technological advancement negating the positive impact of said efficiency gains
in the first instance, sounds like the paradox first described by William Stanley Jevons in 1865 when observing
coal consumption following the introduction of the Watt steam engine.
Ninety-Ninety Rule
A light-hearted quip bespoke to computer programming and software development, the
Ninety-Ninety
Rule
states that: "The first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time. The
remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other 90% of the development time." See also,
Hofstadter's
Law
.
Related to this is the
Pareto Principle
, or the 80-20 Rule, and how it relates to software,
with supporting anecdotes that "20% of the code has 80% of the errors" or in load testing that it is common
practice to estimate that 80% of the traffic occurs during 20% of the time.
Pygmalion Effect and Golem Effect
Named after the Greek myth of Pygmalion, a sculptor who fell in love with a statue he carved, and relevant
to managers across industry and seniority, the
Pygmalion Effect
runs that higher expectations
lead to an increased performance.
Counter to the Pygmalion Effect is the
Golem effect
, whereby low expectations result in a
decrease in performance.
Dunning-Kruger Effect
The
Dunning-Kruger Effect
, named after two psychologists from Cornell University, states
that incompetent people are significantly less able to recognise their own lack of skill, the extent of their
inadequacy, and even to gauge the skill of others. Furthermore, they are only able to acknowledge their own
incompetence after they have been exposed to training in that skill.
At a loss to find a better visual representation of the
Dunning-Kruger Effect
, here is
Simon Wardley's graph with
Knowledge
and
Expertise
axes - a warning as to why self-professed
experts are the worst people to listen to on a given subject.
Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not
manage and those who manage what they do not understand. --Putt's Law
If
you are in IT and are not familiar with Archibald Putt, I suggest you stop reading this blog
post, RIGHT NOW, and go buy the book
Putt's Law and the Successful Technocrat. How to Win in the Information Age . Putt's
Law , for short, is a combination of Dilbert and
The Mythical Man-Month . It shows you exactly how managers of technologists think, how they
got to where they are, and how they stay there. Just like Dilbert, you'll initially laugh, then
you'll cry, because you'll realize just how true Putt's Law really is. But, unlike Dilbert,
whose technologist-fans tend to have a revulsion for management, Putt tries to show the
technologist how to become one of the despised. Now granted, not all of us technologists have a
desire to be management, it is still useful to "know one's enemy."
Two amazing facts:
Archibald Putt is a pseudonym and his true identity has yet to be revealed. A true "Deep
Throat" for us IT guys.
Putt's Law was written back in 1981. It amazes me how the Old IT Classics (Putt's Law,
Mythical Man-Month, anything by Knuth) are even more relevant today than ever.
Every technical hierarchy, in time, develops a competence inversion. --Putt's
Corollary
Putt's Corollary says that in a corporate technocracy, the more technically competent people
will remain in charge of the technology, whereas the less competent will be promoted to
management. That sounds a lot like The Peter Principle (another timeless
classic written in 1969).
People rise to their level of incompetence. --Dave's Summary of the Peter Principle
I can tell you that managers have the least information about technical issues and they
should be the last people making technical decisions. Period. I've often heard that managers
are used as the arbiters of technical debates. Bad idea. Arbiters should always be the
[[benevolent dictators]] (the most admired/revered technologist you have). The exception is
when your manager is also your benevolent dictator, which is rare. Few humans have the
capability, or time, for both.
I see more and more hit-and-run managers where I work. They feel as though they are the
technical decision-makers. They attend technical meetings they were not invited to. Then they
ask pointless, irrelevant questions that suck the energy out of the team. Then they want status
updates hourly. Eventually after they have totally derailed the process they move along to some
other, sexier problem with more management visibility.
I really admire managers who follow the MBWA ( management by walking around
) principle. This management philosophy is very simple...the best managers are those who leave
their offices and observe. By observing they learn what the challenges are for their teams and
how to help them better.
So, what I am looking for in a manager
He knows he is the least qualified person to make a technical decision.
He is a facilitator. He knows how to help his technologists succeed.
Everyone's heard of the Peter
Principle - that employees tend to rise to their level of incompetence - a concept that walks
that all-too-fine line between humor and reality.
We've all seen it in action more times than we'd like. Ironically, some percentage of you
will almost certainly be promoted to a position where you're no longer effective. For some of
you, that's already happened. Sobering thought.
Well, here's the thing. Not only is the Peter Principle alive and well in corporate America,
but contrary to popular wisdom, it's actually necessary for a healthy capitalist
system. That's right, you heard it here, folks, incompetence is a good thing. Here's why.
Robert Browning
once said, "A man's reach should exceed his grasp." It's a powerful statement that means you
should seek to improve your situation, strive to go above and beyond. Not only is that an
embodiment of capitalism, but it also leads directly to the Peter Principle because, well, how
do you know when to quit?
Now, most of us don't perpetually reach for the stars, but until there's clear evidence that
we're not doing ourselves or anyone else any good, we're bound to keep right on reaching. After
all, objectivity is notoriously difficult when opportunities for a better life are staring you
right in the face.
I mean, who turns down promotions? Who doesn't strive to reach that next rung on the ladder?
When you get an email from an executive recruiter about a VP or CEO job, are you likely to
respond, "Sorry, I think that may be beyond my competency" when you've got to send two kids to
college and you may actually want to retire someday?
Wasn't America founded by people who wanted a better life for themselves and their children?
God knows, there were plenty of indications that they shouldn't take the plunge and, if they
did, wouldn't succeed. That's called a challenge and, well, do you ever really know if you've
reached too far until after the fact?
Perhaps the most interesting embodiment of all this is the way people feel about CEOs. Some
think pretty much anyone can do a CEO's job for a fraction of the compensation. Seriously, you
hear that sort of thing a lot, especially these days with class warfare being the rage and
all.
One The
Corner Office reader asked straight out in an email: "Would you agree that, in most
cases, the company could fire the CEO and hire someone young, smart, and hungry at 1/10 the
salary/perks/bonuses who would achieve the same performance?"
Sure, it's easy: you just set the direction, hire a bunch of really smart executives, then
get out of the way and let them do their jobs. Once in a blue moon you swoop in, deal with a
problem, then return to your ivory tower. Simple.
Well, not exactly.
You see, I sort of grew up at Texas Instruments in the 80s when the company was nearly run
into the ground by Mark Shepherd and J. Fred Bucy - two CEOs who never should have gotten that
far in their careers.
But the company's board, in its wisdom, promoted Jerry Junkins and, after his untimely
death, Tom Engibous , to the CEO post. Not only were those guys competent, they revived the
company and transformed it into what it is today.
I've seen what a strong CEO can do for a company, its customers, its shareholders, and its
employees. I've also seen the destruction the Peter Principle can bring to those same
stakeholders. But, even now, after 30 years of corporate and consulting experience, the one
thing I've never seen is a CEO or executive with an easy job.
That's because there's no such thing. And to think you can eliminate incompetency from the
executive ranks when it exists at every organizational level is, to be blunt, childlike or
Utopian thinking. It's silly and trite. It doesn't even make sense.
It's not as if TI's board knew ahead of time that Shepherd and Bucy weren't the right guys
for the job. They'd both had long, successful careers at the company. But the board did right
the ship in time. And that's the mark of a healthy system at work.
The other day I read a truly fantastic story in Fortune about the rise and fall of
Jeffrey Kindler
as CEO of troubled pharmaceutical giant Pfizer . I remember when he suddenly stepped down
amidst all sorts of rumor and conjecture about the underlying causes of the shocking news.
What really happened is the guy had a fabulous career as a litigator, climbed the corporate
ladder to general ounsel of McDonald's and then Pfizer, had some limited success in operations,
and once he was promoted to CEO, flamed out. Not because he was incompetent - he wasn't. And
certainly not because he was a dysfunctional, antagonistic, micromanaging control freak - he
was.
He failed because it was a really tough job and he was in over his head. It happens. It
happens a lot. After all, this wasn't just some everyday company that's simple to run.
This was Pfizer - a pharmaceutical giant with its top products going generic and a dried-up
drug pipeline in need of a major overhaul.
The guy couldn't handle it. And when executives with issues get in over their heads, their
issues become their undoing. It comes as no surprise that folks at McDonald's were surprised at
the way he flamed out at Pfizer. That was a whole different ballgame.
Now, I bet those same people who think a CEO's job is a piece of cake will have a similar
response to the Kindler situation at Pfizer. Why take the job if he knew he couldn't handle it?
The board should have canned him before it got to that point. Why didn't the guy's executives
speak up sooner?
Because, just like at TI, nobody knows ahead of time if people are going to be effective on
the next rung of the ladder. Every situation is unique and there are no questions or test that
will foretell the future. I mean, it's not as if King Solomon comes along and writes who the
right guy for the job is on the wall.
The Peter Principle works because, in a capitalist system, there are top performers, abysmal
failures, and everything in between. Expecting anything different when people must
reach for the stars to achieve growth and success so our children have a better life than ours
isn't how it works in the real world.
The Peter Principle works because it's the yin to Browning's yang, the natural outcome of
striving to better our lives. Want to know how to bring down a free market capitalist system?
Don't take the promotion because you're afraid to fail.
Putt's Law, Peter Principle, Dilbert Principle of Incompetence &
Parkinson's Law
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June 10, 2015
Putt's Law, Peter Principle,
Dilbert Principle of Incompetence & Parkinson's Law
I am a big fan of Scott
Adams & Dilbert Comic Series.
I realize that these laws
and principles - the Putt's law, Peter Principle, the Dilbert Principle, and Parkinson's Law
- aren't necessarily founded in reality. It's easy to look at a manager's closed doors and
wonder he or she does all day, if anything. But having said that and having come to realize
the difficulty and scope of what management entails. It's hard work and requires a certain
skill-set that I'm only beginning to develop. One should therefore look at these principles
and laws with an acknowledgment that they most likely developed from the employee's
perspective, not the manager's.
Take with a pinch of salt!
Source: Google Images
The Putt's law:
·
Putt's Law: "
Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what
they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand.
"
·
Putt's Corollary: "
Every technical hierarchy, in time, develops a competence inversion.
" with
incompetence being "flushed out of the lower levels" of a technocratic hierarchy, ensuring
that technically competent people remain directly in charge of the actual technology while
those without technical competence move into management.
The Peter Principle:
The Peter Principle states
that "
in a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level
of incompetence."
In other words, employees who perform their roles with competence are
promoted into successively higher levels until they reach a level at which they are no longer
competent. There they remain.
For example, let's say you
are a brilliant programmer. You spend your days coding with amazing efficiency and prowess.
After a couple of years, you're promoted to lead programmer, and then promoted to team
manager. You may have no interest in managing other programmers, but it's the reward for your
competence. There you sit -- you have risen to a level of incompetence. Your technical skills
lie dormant while you fill your day with one-on-one meetings, department strategy meetings,
planning meetings, budgets, and reports.
The Dilbert Principle
The principle states that
companies tend to promote the most incompetent employees to
management as a form of damage control
. The principle argues that leaders, specifically
those in middle management, are in reality the ones that have little effect on productivity.
In order to limit the harm caused by incompetent employees who are actually not doing the
work, companies make them leaders.
The Dilbert Principle
assumes that "the majority of real, productive work in a company is done by people lower in
the power ladder." Those in management don't actually do anything to move forward the work.
How it happens?
The Incompetent Leader
Stereotype often hits new leaders, specifically those who have no prior experience in a
particular field. Often times, leaders who have been transferred from other departments are
viewed as mere figureheads, rather than actual leaders who have knowledge of the work
situation. Failure to prove technical capability can also lead to a leader being branded
incompetent.
Why it's bad?
Being a victim of the
incompetent leader stereotype is bad. Firstly, no one takes you seriously. Your ability to
insert input into projects is hampered when your followers actively disregard anything you
say as fluff. This is especially true if you are in middle management, where your power as a
leader is limited. Secondly, your chances of rising ranks are curtailed. If viewed as an
incompetent leader by your followers, your superiors are unlikely to entrust you with further
projects which have more impact.
How to get over it
Know when to concede. As a
leader, no one expects you to be competent in every area; though basic knowledge of every
section you are leading is necessary. Readily admitting incompetency in certain areas will
take out the impact out of it when others paint you as incompetent. Prove competency
somewhere. Quickly establish yourself as having some purpose in the workplace, rather than
being a mere picture of tokenism. This can be done by personally involving yourself in
certain projects.
Parkinson's Law
Parkinson's Law states that
"
work expands so as to fill the time available for its
completion
." Although this law has application with procrastination, storage capacity,
and resource usage, Parkinson focuses his law on Corporate lethargy. Parkinson says that
lethargy swell for two reasons:
(1) "A manager wants to
multiply subordinates, not rivals" and (2) "Managers make work for each other."
In other words, a team size
may swell not because the workload increases, but because they have the capacity and
resources that allow for an increased workload even if the workload does not in fact
increase. People without any work find ways to increase the amount of "work" and therefore
add to the size of their lethargy.
My Analysis
I know none of these
principles or laws gives much credit to management. The wrong person fills the wrong role,
the role exists only to minimize damage control, or the role swells unnecessarily simply
because it can.
I find the whole topic of
management somewhat fascinating, not because I think these theories apply to my own managers.
These management theories
are however relevant. Software coders looking to leverage coding talent for their projects
often find themselves in management roles, without a strong understanding of how to manage
people. Most of the time, these coders fail to engage. The project leaders are usually
brilliant at their technical job but don't excel at management.
However the key principle to
follow should be this:
put individuals to work in their core
competencies
. It makes little sense to take your most brilliant engineer and have him or
her manage people and budgets. Likewise, it makes no sense to take a shrewd consultant, one
who can negotiate projects and requirements down to the minutest detail, and put that
individual into a role involving creative design and content generation. However, to
implement this model, you have to allow for reward without a dramatic change in job
responsibilities or skills.
"... In this book, I provide a somewhat cumbersome definition of neoliberalism and a pithier one, both of which inform the argument running throughout this book. The cumbersome one is as follows: 'the elevation of marked-based principles and techniques of evaluation to the level of state-endorsed norms'. ..."
In this book, I provide a somewhat cumbersome definition of neoliberalism and a pithier
one, both of which inform the argument running throughout this book. The cumbersome one is as
follows: 'the elevation of marked-based principles and techniques of evaluation to the level of
state-endorsed norms'.
What this intends to capture is that, while neoliberal states have extended and liberated
markets in certain areas (for instance, via privatisation and anti-union legislation), the
neoliberal era has been marked just as much by the reform of non-market institutions, so as to
render them market-like or business-like. Consider how competition is deliberately injected
into socialised healthcare systems or universities. Alternatively, how protection of the
environment is pursued by calculating a proxy price for natural public goods, in the
expectation that businesses will then value them appropriately (Fourcade, 2011). It is economic
calculation that spreads into all walks of life under neoliberalism, and not markets as such.
This in turn provides the pithier version: neoliberalism is 'the disenchantment of politics by
economics'.
The crisis of neoliberalism has reversed this ordering. 2008 was an implosion of technical
capabilities on the part of banks and financial regulators, which was largely unaccompanied by
any major political or civic eruption, at least until the consequences were felt in terms of
public sector cuts that accelerated after 2010, especially in Southern Europe. The economic
crisis was spookily isolated from any accompanying political crisis, at least in the beginning.
The eruptions of 2016 therefore represented the long-awaited politicization and publicisation
of a crisis that, until then, had been largely dealt with by the same cadre of experts whose
errors had caused it in the first place.
Faced with these largely unexpected events and the threat of more, politicians and media
pundits have declared that we now need to listen to those people 'left behind by
globalization'. Following the Brexit referendum, in her first speech as Prime Minister, Theresa
May made a vow to the less prosperous members of society, 'we will do everything we can to give
you more control over your lives. When we take the big calls, we'll think not of the powerful,
but you.' This awakening to the demands and voices of marginalized demographics may represent a
new recognition that economic policy cannot be wholly geared around the pursuit of 'national
competitiveness' in the 'global race', a pursuit that in practice meant seeking to prioritise
the interests of financial services and mobile capital. It signals mainstream political
acceptance that inequality cannot keep rising forever. But it is still rooted in a somewhat
economistic vision of politics, as if those people 'left behind by globalisation' simply want
more material wealth and opportunity', plus fewer immigrants competing for jobs. What this
doesn't do is engage with the distinctive political and cultural sociology of events such as
Brexit and Trump, which are fuelled by a spirit of rage, punishment and self-punishment, and
not simply by a desire to get a slightly larger slice of the pie.
This is where, 1 think, we need to pay close attention to a key dimension of neoliberalism,
which 1 focus on at length in this book, namely competition. One of my central arguments here
is that neoliberalism is not simply reducible to 'market fundamentalism', even if there are
areas (such as financial markets) where markets have manifestly attained greater reach and
power since the mid1970s. Instead, the neoliberal state takes the principle of competition and
the ethos of competitiveness (which historically have been found in and around markets), and
seeks to reorganise society around them. Quite how competition and competitiveness are defined
and politically instituted is a matter for historical and theoretical exploration, which is
partly what The Limits of Neoliberalism seeks to do. But at the bare minimum, organising social
relations in terms of 'competition' means that individuals, organisations, cities, regions and
nations are to be tested in terms of their capacity to out-do each other. Not only that, but
the tests must be considered fair in some way, if the resulting inequalities are to be
recognised as legitimate. When applied to individuals, this ideology is often known as
'meritocracy''.
The appeal of this as a political template for society is that, according to its advocates,
it involves the discovery of brilliant ideas, more efficient business models, naturally
talented individuals, new urban visions, successful national strategies, potent entrepreneurs
and so on. Even if this is correct (and the work of Thomas Piketty on how wealth begets wealth
is enough to cast considerable doubt on it) there is a major defect: it consigns the majority
of people, places, businesses and institutions to the status of'losers'. The normative and
existential conventions of a neoliberal society stipulate that success and prowess are things
that are earned through desire, effort and innate ability, so long as social and economic
institutions are designed in such a way as to facilitate this. But the corollary of this is
that failure and weakness are also earned: when individuals and communities fail to succeed,
this is a reflection of inadequate talent or energy on their part.
This has been critically
noted in how 'dependency' and 'welfare' have become matters of shame since the conservative
political ascendency of the 1980s. But this is just one example of how a culture of obligatory
competitiveness exerts a damaging moral psychology, not only in how people look down on others,
but in how they look down on themselves. A culture which valorises 'winning' and
'competitiveness' above all else provides few sources of security or comfort, even to those
doing reasonably well. Everyone could be doing better, and if they're not, they have themselves
to blame. The vision of society as a competitive game also suggests that anyone could very
quickly be doing worse.
Under these neoliberal conditions, remorse becomes directed inwards, producing the
depressive psychological effect (or what Freud termed 'melancholia') whereby people search
inside themselves for the source of their own unhappiness and imperfect lives (Davies, 2015).
Viewed from within the cultural logic of neoliberalism, uncompetitive regions, individuals or
communities are not just 'left behind by globalisation', but are discovered to be inferior in
comparison to their rivals, just like the contestants ejected from a talent show. Rising
household indebtedness compounds this process for those living in financial precarity, by
forcing individuals to pay for their own past errors, illness or sheer bad luck (Davies,
Montgomerie & Wallin, 2015).
In order to understand political upheavals such as Brexit, we need to perform some
sociological interpretation. We need to consider that our socio-economic pathologies do not
simply consist in the fact that opportunity and wealth are hoarded by certain industries (such
as finance) or locales (such as London) or individuals (such as the children of the wealthy),
although all of these things are true. We need also to reflect on the cultural and
psychological implications of how this hoarding has been represented and justified over the
past four decades, namely that it reflects something about the underlying moral worth of
different populations and individuals.
One psychological effect of this is authoritarian attitudes towards social deviance: Brexit
and Trump supporters both have an above-average tendency to support the death penalty, combined
with a belief that political authorities are too weak to enforce justice (Kaufman, 2016).
However, it is also clear that psychological and physical pain have become far more widespread
in neoliberal societies than has been noticed by most people. Statistical studies have shown
how societies such as Britain and the United States have become afflicted by often inexplicable
rising mortality rates amongst the white working class, connected partly to rising suicide
rates, alcohol and drug abuse (Dorling, 2016). The Washington Post identified close geographic
correlations between this trend and support for Donald Trump (Guo, 2016). In sum, a
moral-economic system aimed at identifying and empowering the most competitive people,
institutions and places has become targeted, rationally or otherwise, by the vast number of
people, institutions and places that have suffered not only the pain of defeat but the
punishment of defeat for far too long.
NEOLIBERALISM: DEAD OR ALIVE?
The question inevitably arises, is thus thing called 'neoliberalism' now over? And if not,
when might it be and how would we know? In the UK, the prospect of Brexit combined with the
political priority of reducing immigration means that the efficient movement of capital
(together with that of labour) is being consciously impeded in a way that would have been
unthinkable during the 1990s and early 2000s. 1'he re-emergence of national borders as
obstacles to the flow of goods, finance, services and above all people, represents at least an
interruption in the vision of globalisation that accompanied the heyday of neoliberal policy
making between 1989-2008. If events such as Brexit signal the first step towards greater
national mercantilism and protectionism, then we may be witnessing far more profound
transformations in our model of political economy, the consequences of which could become very
ugly.
Before we reach that point, it is already possible to identify a reorientation of national
economic policy making away from some core tenets of neoliberal doctrine. One of the main case
studies of this book is antitrust law and policy, which has been a preoccupation for neoliberal
intellectuals, reformers and lawyers ever since the 1930s. The rise of the Chicago School view
of competition (which effectively granted far greater legal rights to monopolists, while also
being tougher on cartels) in the American legal establishment from the 1970s onwards, later
repeated in the European Commission, meant that market commitments to neoliberal policy goals
is still less than likely. Free trade areas such as NAETA, policies designed to attract and
please mobile capital, the search for global hegemony surrounding international markets (as
opposed to naked, mercantilist self-interest) may then continue for a few more years. But the
collapse of legitimacy or popularity of these agendas will not be reversed.
Meanwhile, the inability of the Republican Party to defend these policies any longer signals
the ultimate divorce between the political and economic wings of neoliberalism: the
conservative coalition that came into being as Keynesianism declined post-1968, and which got
Ronald Reagan to power, no longer functions in its role of rationalising and de-politicising
economic policy making. If neoliberalism is the 'disenchantment of politics by economics', then
economics is no longer performing its role in rationalising public life. Politics is being
re-enchanted, by images of nationhood, of cultural tradition, of'friends' against enemies, ot
race ana religion, une ot me many political miscalculations mat lea to Brexit was to
under-estimate how many UK citizens would vote for the first time in their lives, enthralled by
the sudden sovereign power that they had been granted in the polling booth, which was entirely
unlike the ritual of representative democracy with a first-past-the-post voting system that
renders most votes irrelevant. The intoxication of popular power and of demagoguery is being
experienced in visceral ways for the first time since 1968, or possibly longer. Wendy Brown
argues that neoliberalism is a 'political rationality'' that was born in direct response to
Fascism during the 1930s and '40s (Brown, 2015). While it would be an exaggeration to say that
the end of neoliberalism represents the re-birth of Fascism, clearly there were a number of
existential dimensions of'the political' that the neoliberals were right to fear, and which we
should now fear once more.
While there is plenty of evidence to suggest that 2016 is a historic turning point indeed as
I've argued here, possibly the second 'book-mark' in the crisis of neoliberalism we need also
to recognise how the seeds of this recent political rupture were sown over time. Indeed, we can
learn a lot about policy paradigms from the way they' go into decline, for they always contain,
tolerate and even celebrate the very activities that later overwhelm or undermine them.
Clearly, the 2008 financial crisis was triggered by activities in the banking sector that were
not fundamentally different from those which had been viewed as laudable for the previous 20
years. Equally, as we witness the return of mercantilism, protectionism, nationalism and
charismatic populism, we need to remember the extent to which neoliberalism accommodated some
of this, up to a point.
The second major case study in this book, in addition to anti-trust policy, is of strategies
for 'national competitiveness'. The executive branch of government has traditionally been
viewed as a problem from the perspective of economic liberalism, seeing as powerful politicians
will instinctively seek to privilege their own territories vis-a-vis others. This is the threat
of mercantilism, which can spin into resolutely anti-liberal policies such as trade tariffs and
the subsidisation of indigenous industries and 'national champions'. These forms of
mercantilism may now be returning, however, the logic of neoliberalism was never quite as
antipathetic to them as orthodox market liberals might have been. Instead, I suggest in Chapter
4, rather than simply seek to thwart or transcend nationalist politics, neoliberalism seizes
and reimagines the nation as one competitive actor amongst many, in a global contest for
'competitiveness', as evaluated by business gurus such as Michael Porter and think tanks such
as the World Economic Eorum. To be sure, these gurus and think tanks have never been anything
but hostile to protectionism; but nevertheless, they have encouraged a form of mild nationalism
as the basis for strategic thinking in economic policy. As David Harvey has argued, 'the
neoliberal state needs nationalism of a certain sort to survive': it draws on aspects of
executive power and nationalist sentiment, in order to steer economic activity towards certain
types of competitive strategies, culture and behaviours and away from others (Harvey, 2005:
85).
There is therefore a deep-lying tension within the politics of neoliberalism between a
'liberal' logic, which seeks to transcend geography, culture and political difference, and a
more contingent, 'violent' logic that seeks to draw on the energies of nationhood and combat,
in the hope of diverting them towards competitive, entrepreneurial production. These two logics
are in conflict with each other, but the story I tell in this book is of how the latter
gradually won out over the long history of neoliberal thought and policy making. Where the
neoliberal intellectuals of the 1930s had a deep commitment to liberal ideals, which they
believed the market could protect, the rise of the post-war Chicago School of economics and the
co-option of neoliberal ideas by business lobbies and conservatives, meant that (what 1 term)
the 'liberal spirit' was gradually lost. There is thus a continuity at work here, in the way
that the crisis of neoliberalism has played out.
Written in 2012-13, the book suggests that neoliberalism has now entered a 'contingent'
state, in which various failures of economic rationality are dealt with through incorporating
an ever broader range of cultural and political resources. The rise of behavioural economics,
for example, represents an attempt to preserve a form of market rationality in the face of
crisis, by incorporating expertise provided by psychologists and neuroscientists. A form of
'neo-communitarianism' emerges, which takes seriously the role of relationships, environmental
conditioning and empathy in the construction of independent, responsible subjects. This remains
an economistic logic, inasmuch as it prepares people to live efficient, productive, competitive
lives. But by bringing culture, community and contingency within the bounds of neoliberal
rationality, one might see things like behavioural economics or 'social neuroscience' and so on
as early symptoms of a genuinely post-liberal politics. Once governments (and publics) no
longer view economics as the best test of optimal policies, then opportunities for post-liberal
experimentation expand rapidly, with unpredictable and potentially frightening consequences. It
was telling that, when the British Home Secretary, Amber Kudd, suggested in October 2016 that
companies be compelled to publicly list their foreign workers, she defended this policy as a
'nudge'.
The Limits of Neoliberalism is a piece of interpretive sociology. It starts from the
recognition that neoliberalism rests on claims to legitimacy, which it is possible to imagine
as valid, even for critics of this system. Inspired by Luc Boltanski, the book assumes that
political-economic systems typically need to offer certain limited forms of hope, excitement
and fairness in order to survive, and cannot operate via domination and exploitation alone. For
similar reasons, we might soon find that we miss some of the normative and political dimensions
of neoliberalism, for example the internationalism that the IiU was founded to promote and the
cosmopolitanism that competitive markets sometimes inculcate. There may be some elements of
neoliberalism that critics and activists need to grasp, refashion and defend, rather than to
simply denounce: this book's Afterword offers some ideas of what this might mean. But if the
book is to be read in a truly post-neoliberal world, 1 hope that in its Interpretive
aspirations, it helps to explain what was internally and normalively coherent about the
political economy known as 'neoliberalism', but also why the system really had no account of
its own preconditions or how to preserve them adequately. The attempt to reduce all of human
life to economic calculation runs up against limits. A political rationality that fails to
recognise politics as a distinctive sphere of human existence was always going to be
dumbfounded, once that sphere took on its own extra-economic life. As Bob Dylan sang to Mr
Jones, so one might now say to neoliberal intellectuals or technocrats: 'something is happening
here, but you don't know what it is'.
... ... ...
Most analyses of neoliberalism have focused on its commitment to 'free markets, deregulation
and trade. I shan't discuss the validity of these portrayals here, although some have
undoubtedly exaggerated the similarities between 'classical' nineteenth-century liberalism and
twentieth-century neoliberalism. The topic addressed here is a different one the character of
neoliberal authority, on what basis does the neoliberal state demand the right to be obeyed, if
not on substantive political grounds? To a large extent, it is on the basis of particular
economic claims and rationalities, constructed and propagated by economic experts. The state
does not necessarily (or at least, not always) cede power to markets, but comes to justify its
decisions, policies and rules in terms that are commensurable with the logic of markets.
Neoliberalism might therefore be defined as the elevation of market-based principles and
techniques of evaluation to the level of state-endorsed norms (Davies, 2013: 37). The authority
of the neoliberal state is heavily dependent on the authority of economics (and economists) to
dictate legitimate courses of action. Understanding that authority and its present crisis
requires us to look at economics, economic policy experts and advisors as critical components
of state institutions.
Since the banking crisis of 2007-09, public denunciations of 'inequality' have increased
markedly. These draw on a diverse range of moral, critical, theoretical, methodological and
empirical resources. Marxist analyses have highlighted growing inequalities as a symptom of
class conflict, which neoliberal policies have greatly exacerbated (Harvey, 2011; Therborn,
2012). Statistical analyses have highlighted correlations between different spheres of
inequality', demonstrating how economic inequality influences social and psychological
wellbeing (Wilkinson & Pickett, 2009). Data showing extreme concentrations of wealth have
led political scientists to examine the US political system, as a tool through which inequality
is actively increased (Hacker & Pierson, 2010). Emergent social movements, such as Occupy,
draw a political dividing line between the '99%' and the '1%' who exploit them. Political
leaders and public intellectuals have adopted the language of'fairness' in their efforts to
justify and criticize the various policy interventions which influence the distribution of
economic goods (e.g. Hutton, 2010).
It is important to recognize that these critiques have two quite separate targets, although
the distinction is often blurred. Firstly, there is inequality that exists within reasonably
delineated and separate spheres of society. This means that there are multiple inequalities,
with multiple, potentially incommensurable measures. The inequality that occurs within the
market sphere is separate from the inequality that occurs within the cultural sphere, which is
separate from the inequality' that occurs within the political sphere, and so on. Each sphere
can either unwelcome politically, or impractical (Davies, 2013). Hayek's support for the
welfare state, Simons' commitment to the nationalization of key industries, the ordo-liberal
enthusiasm for the 'social market' demonstrate that the early neoliberals were offering a
justification for what Walzer terms 'monopoly' (separate inequalities in separate spheres) and
not 'dominance' (the power of one sphere over all others).
As the next chapter explores, it was Coasian economics (in tandem with the Chicago School)
that altered this profoundly. The objective perspective of the economist implicitly working for
a university or state regulator would provide the common standard against which activity could
be judged. Of course economics does not replace the price system, indeed economics is very
often entangled with the price system (Callon, 1998; Caliskan, 2010), but the a priori equality
of competitors becomes presumed, as a matter of economic methodology, which stipulates that all
agents are endowed with equal psychological capacities of calculation. It is because this
assumption is maintained when evaluating all institutions and actions that it massively
broadens the terrain of legitimate competition, and opens up vast, new possibilities for
legitimate inequality and legitimate restraint. Walzerian dominance is sanctioned, and not
simply monopoly. The Coasian vision of fair competition rests on an entirely unrealistic
premise, namely that individuals share a common capacity' to calculate and negotiate, rendering
intervention by public authorities typically unnecessary: the social reality of lawyers' fees
is alone enough to undermine this fantasy. Yet in one sense, this is a mode of economic
critique that is imbued with the 'liberal spirit' described earlier. It seeks to evaluate the
efficiency of activities, on the basis of the assumed equal rationality of all, and the
neutrality of the empirical observer.
Like Coase, Schumpeter facilitates a great expansion of the space and time in which the
competitive process takes place. Various 'social' and 'cultural' resources become drawn into
the domain of competition, with the goal being to define the rules that all others must play
by. Monopoly is undoubtedly the goal of competitiveness. But unlike Coase's economics,
Schumpeter's makes no methodological assumption regarding the common rationality' of all
actors. Instead, it makes a romantic assumption regarding the inventive power of some actors
(entrepreneurs), and the restrictive routines of most others. Any objective judgements
regarding valid or invalid actions will be rooted in static methodologies or rules.
Entrepreneurs have no rules, and respect no restraint. They seek no authority or validation for
what they do, but are driven by a pure desire to dominate. In this sense their own immanent
authority comes with a 'violent threat', which is endorsed by the neoliberal state as Chapter 4
discusses.
These theories of competition are not 'ideological' and nor are they secretive. They are not
ideological because they do not seek to disguise how reality is actually constituted or to
distract people from their objective conditions. They have contributed to the construction and
constitution of economic reality, inasmuch as they provide objective and acceptable reports on
what is going on, that succeed in coordinating various actors. Moreover, they are sometimes
performative, not least because of how they inform and format modes of policy, regulation and
governance. Inequality has not arisen by accident or due to the chaos of capitalism or
'globalization'. Theories and methodologies, which validate certain types of dominating and
monopolistic activity, have provided the conventions within which large numbers of academics,
business people and policy makers have operated. They make a shared world possible in the first
place. But nor are any of these theories secret either. They have been published in
peer-reviewed journals, spread via policy papers and universities. Without shared, public
rationalities and methodologies, neoliberalism would have remained a private conspiracy.
Inequality can be denounced by critics of neoliberalism, but it cannot be argued that in an era
that privileges not only market competition but competitiveness in general inequality is not
publicly acceptable.
These theories of competition are not 'ideological' and nor are they secretive. They are not
ideological because they do not seek to disguise how reality is actually constituted or to
distract people from their objective conditions. They have contributed to the construction and
constitution of economic reality, inasmuch as they provide objective and acceptable reports on
what is going on, that succeed in coordinating various actors. Moreover, they are sometimes
performative, not least because of how they inform and format modes of policy, regulation and
governance. Inequality has not arisen by accident or due to the chaos of capitalism or
'globalization'. Theories and methodologies, which validate certain types of dominating and
monopolistic activity, have provided the conventions within which large numbers of academics,
business people and policy makers have operated. They make a shared world possible in the first
place. But nor are any of these theories secret either. They have been published in
peer-reviewed journals, spread via policy papers and universities. Without shared, public
rationalities and methodologies, neoliberalism would have remained a private conspiracy.
Inequality can be denounced by critics of neoliberalism, but it cannot be argued that in an era
that privileges not only market competition but competitiveness in general inequality is not
publicly acceptable.
The contingent neoliberalism that we currently live with is in a literal sense unjustified.
It is propagated without the forms of justification (be they moral or empirical) that either
the early neoliberals or the technical practitioners of neoliberal policy had employed, in
order to produce a reality that 'holds together', as pragmatist sociologists like to say. The
economized social and political reality now only just about 'holds together', because it is
constantly propped up, bailed out, nudged, monitored, adjusted, data-mincd, and altered by
those responsible for rescuing it. It does not survive as a consensual reality: economic
judgements regarding 'what is going on' are no longer 'objective' or 'neutral', to the extent
that they once were. The justice of inequality can no longer be explained with reference to a
competition or to competitiveness, let alone to a market. Thus, power may be exercised along
the very same tramlines that it was during the golden neoliberal years of the 1990s and early
millennium, and the same experts, policies and agencies may continue to speak to the same
public audiences. But the sudden reappearance of those two unruly uneconomic actors, the
Hobbesian sovereign state and the psychological unconscious, suggests that that the project of
disenchanting politics by economics has reached its limit. And yet crisis and critique have
been strategically deferred or accommodated. What resources are there available for this to
change, and to what extent are these distinguishable from neoliberalism's own critical
capacities?
... ... ...
Neoliberalism, as this book has sought to demonstrate, is replete with its own internal
modes of criticism, judgement, measurement and evaluation, which enable actors to reach
agreements about what is going on. These are especially provided by certain traditions of
economics and business strategy, which privilege competitive processes, on the basis that those
processes are uniquely able to preserve an element of uncertainty in social and economic life.
The role of the expert be it in the state, the think tank or university within this programme
is to produce quantitative facts about the current state of competitive reality, such that
actors, firms or whole nations can be judged, compared and ranked. For Hayek and many of the
early neoliberals, markets would do this job instead of expert authorities, with prices the
only facts that were entirely necessary. But increasingly, under the influence of the later
Chicago School and business strategists, the 'winners' and the 'losers' were to be judged
through the evaluations of economics (and associated techniques and measures), rather than of
markets as such. Certain forms of authority are therefore necessary for this game' to be
playable. Economized law is used to test the validity of certain forms of competitive conduct;
audits derived from business strategy are used to test and enthuse the entrepreneurial energies
of rival communities. But the neoliberal programme initially operated such that these forms of
authority could be exercised in a primarily technical sense, without metaphysical appeals to
the common good, individual autonomy or the sovereignty of the state that employed them. As the
previous chapter argued, various crises (primarily, but not exclusively, the 2007-09 financial
crisis) have exposed neoliberalism's tacit dependence on both executive sovereignty and on
certain moral-psychological equipment on the part of individuals. A close reading of neoliberal
texts and policies would have exposed this anyway. In which case, the recent 'discovery' that
neoliberalism depends on and justifies power inequalities, and not markets as such, may be
superficial in nature. Witnessing the exceptional measures that states have taken to rescue the
status quo simply confirms the state-centric nature of neolibcralism, as an anti-political mode
of politics. As Zizek argued in relation to the Wikileaks' exposures of 2011, 'the real
disturbance was at the level of appearances: we can no longer pretend we don't know what
everyone knows we know' (Zizek, 2011b). Most dramatically, neoliberalism now appears naked and
shorn of any pretence to liberalism, that is, it no longer operates with manifest a priori
principles of equivalence, against which all contestants should be judged. Chapter 2 identified
the 'liberal spirit' of neoliberalism with a Rawlsian assumption that contestants are formally
equal before they enter the economic 'game'. Within the Kantian or 'deontological' tradition of
liberalism, this is the critical issue, and it played a part in internal debates within the
early neoliberal movement. For those such as the ordoliberals, who feared the rationalizing
potential of capitalist monopoly, the task was to build an economy around such an a priori
liberal logic. Ensuring some equality of access to the economic game', via the active
regulation of large firms and 'equality of opportunity' for individuals, is how neoliberalism's
liberalism has most commonly been presented politically. As Chapter 3 discussed, the American
tradition of neoliberalism as manifest in Chicago Law and Economics abandoned this sort of
normative liberalism, in favour of a Benthamite utilitarianism, in which efficiency claims
trumped formal arguments. The philosophical and normative elements of neoliberalism have, in
truth, been in decline since the 1950s.
The 'liberal spirit' of neoliberalism was kept faintly alive by the authority that was
bestowed upon methodologies, audits and measures of efficiency analysis. The liberal a priori
just about survived in the purported neutrality of economic method (of various forms), to judge
all contestants equally, even while the empirical results of these judgements have increasingly
benefited alreadydominant competitors. This notion relied on a fundamental epistemological
inconsistency of neoliberalism, between the Hayekian argument that there can be no stable or
objective scientific perspective on economic activity, and the more positivist argument that
economics offers a final and definitive judgement. American neoliberalism broadens the 'arena'
in which competition is understood to take place, beyond definable markets, and beyond the
sphere of the 'economy', enabling cultural, social and political resources to be legitimately
dragged into the economic 'game', and a clustering of various forms of advantage in the same
hands. Monopoly, in Walter's terms, becomes translated into dominance.
The loss of neoliberalisms pretence to liberalism transforms the type of authority that can
be claimed by and on behalf of power, be it business, financial or state power. It means the
abandonment of the globalizing, universalizing, transcendental branch of neoliberalism, in
which certain economic techniques and measures (including, but not only, prices) would provide
a common framework through which all human difference could be mediated and represented.
Instead, cultural and national difference potentially leading to conflict now animates
neoliberalism, but without a commonly recognized principle against which to convert this into
competitive inequality. What I have characterized as the 'violent threat' of neoliberalism has
come to the fore, whereby authority in economic decision making is increasingly predicated upon
the claim that 'we' must beat 'them'. This fracturing of universalism, in favour of political
and cultural particularism, may be a symptom of how capitalist crises often play out (Gamble,
2009). One reason why neoliberalism has survived as well as it has since 2007 is that it has
always managed to operate within two rhetorical registers simultaneously, satisfying both the
demand for liberal universalism and that for political particularism, so when the former falls
apart, a neoliberal discourse of competitive nationalism and the authority of executive
decision is already present and available.
One lesson to be taken from neoliberalism, for political movements which seek to challenge
it, is that both individual agency and collective institutions need to be criticized and
invented simultaneously. Political reform does not have to build on any 'natural' account of
human beings, but can also invent new visions of individual agency. The design and
transformation of institutions, such as markets, regulators and firms, do not need to take
place separately from this project, but in tandem and in dialogue with it. A productive focus
of critical economic enquiry would be those institutions which neolibcral thought has tended to
be entirely silent on. These are the institutions and mechanisms of capitalism which coerce and
coordinate individuals, thereby removing choices from economic situations. The era of applied
neoliberal policy making has recently started to appear as one of rampant 'financialisation'
(Krippner, 2012). So it is therefore peculiar how little attention is paid within neoliberal
discourse to institutions of credit and equity, other than that they should be priced and
distributed via markets. Likewise, the rising power of corporations has been sanctioned by
theories that actually say very little about firms, management, work or organization, but focus
all their attention on the incentives and choices confronting a few 'agents' and 'leaders' at
the very top. Despite having permeated our cultural lives with visions of competition, and also
permeated political institutions with certain economic rationalities, the dominant discourse of
neoliberalism actually contains very little which represents the day-to-day lives and
experiences of those who live with it. This represents a major empirical and analytical
shortcoming of the economic theories that are at work in governing us, and ultimately a serious
vulnerability.
A further lesson to be taken from neoliberalism, for the purposes of a critique of
neoliberalism, is that restrictive economic practices need to be strategically and inventively
targeted and replaced. In the 1930s and 1940s, 'restrictive economic practices' would have
implied planning, labour organization and socialism. Today our economic freedoms are restricted
in very different ways, which strike at the individual in an intimate way, rather than at
individuals collectively. In the twenty-first century, the experience of being an employee or a
consumer or a debtor is often one of being ensnared, not one of exercising any choice or
strategy. Amidst all of the uncertainty of dynamic capitalism, this sense of being trapped into
certain relations seems eminently certain. Releasing individuals from these constraints is a
constructive project, as much as a critical one: this is what the example of the early
neoliberals demonstrates.
Lawyers willing to rewrite the rules of exchange, employment and finance (as, for instance
the ordo-liberals redrafted the rules of the market) could be one of the great forces for
social progress, if they were ever to mobilize in a concerted w'ay. A form of collective
entrepreneurship, which like individual entrepreneurs saw' economic nonnativity as fluid and
changeable, could produce new forms of political economy, with alternative valuation
systems.
The reorganization of state, society, institutions and individuals in terms of competitive
dynamics and rules, succeeded to the extent that it did because it offered both a vision of the
collective and a vision of individual agency simultaneously. It can appear impermeable to
critique or political transformation, if only challenged on one of these terms. For instance,
if a different vision of collective organization is proposed, the neoliberal rejoinder is that
this must involve abandoning individual 'choice' or freedom. Or if a different vision of the
individual is proposed, the neoliberal rejoinder is that this is unrealistic given the
competitive global context. Dispensing with competition, as the template for all politics and
political metaphysics, is therefore only possible if theory proceeds anew, with a
political-economic idea of individual agency and collective organization, at the same time.
What this might allow is a different basis from which to speak of human beings as paradoxically
the same yet different. The problem of politics is that individuals are both private, isolated
actors, with tastes and choices, and part of a collectivity, with rules and authorities. An
alternative answer to this riddle needs to be identified, other than simply more competition
and more competitiveness, in which isolated actors take no responsibility for the collective,
and the collective is immune to the protestations of those isolated actors.
Publisher: Harvard University Press (March 16, 2018)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 9780674979529
Chosen by Pankaj Mishra as one of the Best Books of the Summer
Neoliberals hate the state. Or do they? In the first intellectual history of neoliberal
globalism, Quinn Slobodian follows a group of thinkers from the ashes of the Habsburg Empire to
the creation of the World Trade Organization to show that neoliberalism emerged less to shrink
government and abolish regulations than to redeploy them at a global level.
Slobodian begins in Austria in the 1920s. Empires were dissolving and nationalism,
socialism, and democratic self-determination threatened the stability of the global capitalist
system. In response, Austrian intellectuals called for a new way of organizing the world. But
they and their successors in academia and government, from such famous economists as Friedrich
Hayek and Ludwig von Mises to influential but lesser-known figures such as Wilhelm Röpke
and Michael Heilperin, did not propose a regime of laissez-faire. Rather they used states and
global institutions―the League of Nations, the European Court of Justice, the World Trade
Organization, and international investment law―to insulate the markets against sovereign
states, political change, and turbulent democratic demands for greater equality and social
justice.
Far from discarding the regulatory state, neoliberals wanted to harness it to their grand
project of protecting capitalism on a global scale. It was a project, Slobodian shows, that
changed the world, but that was also undermined time and again by the inequality, relentless
change, and social injustice that accompanied it.
This is a rather
interesting look at the political and economic ideas of a circle of important economists,
including Hayek and von Mises, over the course of the last century. He shows rather
convincingly that conventional narratives concerning their idea are wrong. That they didn't
believe in a weak state, didn't believe in the laissez-faire capitalism or believe in the power
of the market. That they saw mass democracy as a threat to vested economic interests.
The core beliefs of these people was in a world where money, labor and products could flow
across borders without any limit. Their vision was to remove these subjects (tariffs,
immigration and controls on the movement of money) from the control of the democracy-based
nation-state and instead vesting them in international organizations. International
organizations which were by their nature undemocratic and beyond the influence of democracy.
That rather than rejecting government power, what they rejected was national government power.
They wanted weak national governments but at the same time strong undemocratic international
organizations which would gain the powers taken from the state.
The other thing that characterized many of these people was a rather general rejection of
economics. While some of them are (at least in theory) economists, they rejected the basic
ideas of economic analysis and economic policy. The economy, to them, was a mystical thing
beyond any human understanding or ability to influence in a positive way. Their only real
belief was in "bigness". The larger the market for labor and goods, the more economically
prosperous everyone would become. A unregulated "global" market with specialization across
borders and free migration of labor being the ultimate system.
The author shows how, over a period extending from the 1920s to the 1990s, these ideas
evolved from marginal academic ideas to being dominant ideas internationally. Ideas that are
reflected today in the structure of the European Union, the WTO (World Trade Organization) and
the policies of most national governments. These ideas, which the author calls "neoliberalism",
have today become almost assumptions beyond challenge. And even more strangely, the dominating
ideas of the political left in most of the west.
The author makes the point, though in a weak way, that the "fathers" of neoliberalism saw
themselves as "restoring" a lost golden age. That golden age being (roughly) the age of the
original industrial revolution (the second half of the 1800s). And to the extent that they have
been successful they have done that. But at the same time, they have brought back all the
political and economic questions of that era as well.
In reading it, I started to wonder about the differences between modern neoliberalism and
the liberal political movement during the industrial revolution. I really began to wonder about
the actual motives of "reform" liberals in that era. Were they genuinely interested in reforms
during that era or were all the reforms just cynical politics designed to enhance business
power at the expense of other vested interests. Was, in particular, the liberal interest in
political reform and franchise expansion a genuine move toward political democracy or simply a
temporary ploy to increase their political power. If one assumes that the true principles of
classic liberalism were always free trade, free migration of labor and removing the power to
governments to impact business, perhaps its collapse around the time of the first world war is
easier to understand.
He also makes a good point about the EEC and the organizations that came before the EU.
Those organizations were as much about protecting trade between Europe and former European
colonial possessions as they were anything to do with trade within Europe.
To me at least, the analysis of the author was rather original. In particular, he did an
excellent job of showing how the ideas of Hayek and von Mises have been distorted and
misunderstood in the mainstream. He was able to show what their ideas were and how they relate
to contemporary problems of government and democracy.
But there are some strong negatives in the book. The author offers up a complete virtue
signaling chapter to prove how the neoliberals are racists. He brings up things, like the John
Birch Society, that have nothing to do with the book. He unleashes a whole lot of venom
directed at American conservatives and republicans mostly set against a 1960s backdrop. He does
all this in a bad purpose: to claim that the Kennedy Administration was somehow a continuation
of the new deal rather than a step toward neoliberalism. His blindness and modern political
partisanship extended backward into history does substantial damage to his argument in the
book. He also spends an inordinate amount of time on the political issues of South Africa which
also adds nothing to the argument of the book. His whole chapter on racism is an elaborate
strawman all held together by Ropke. He also spends a large amount of time grinding some sort
of Ax with regard to the National Review and William F. Buckley.
He keeps resorting to the simple formula of finding something racist said or written by
Ropke....and then inferring that anyone who quoted or had anything to do with Ropke shared his
ideas and was also a racist. The whole point of the exercise seems to be to avoid any analysis
of how the democratic party (and the political left) drifted over the decades from the politics
of the New Deal to neoliberal Clintonism.
Then after that, he diverts further off the path by spending many pages on the greatness of
the "global south", the G77 and the New International Economic Order (NIEO) promoted by the UN
in the 1970s. And whatever many faults of neoliberalism, Quinn Slobodian ends up standing for a
worse set of ideas: International Price controls, economic "reparations", nationalization,
international trade subsidies and a five-year plan for the world (socialist style economic
planning at a global level). In attaching himself to these particular ideas, he kills his own
book. The premise of the book and his argument was very strong at first. But by around p. 220,
its become a throwback political tract in favor of the garbage economic and political ideas of
the so-called third world circa 1974 complete with 70's style extensive quotations from
"Senegalese jurists"
Once the political agenda comes out, he just can't help himself. He opens the conclusion to
the book taking another cheap shot for no clear reason at William F. Buckley. He spends alot of
time on the Seattle anti-WTO protests from the 1990s. But he has NOTHING to say about BIll
Clinton or Tony Blair or EU expansion or Obama or even the 2008 economic crisis for that
matter. Inexplicably for a book written in 2018, the content of the book seems to end in the
year 2000.
I'm giving it three stars for the first 150 pages which was decent work. The second half
rates zero stars.
Though it could have been far better if he had written his history of
neoliberalism in the context of the counter-narrative of Keynesian economics and its decline.
It would have been better yet if the author had the courage to talk about the transformation of
the parties of the left and their complicity in the rise of neoliberalism. The author also
tends to waste lots of pages repeating himself or worse telling you what he is going to say
next. One would have expected a better standard of editing by the Harvard Press.
While similar things can, and do, occur in large technical hierarchies, incompetent
technical people experience a social pressure from their more competent colleagues that causes
them to seek security within the ranks of management. In technical hierarchies, there is always
the possibility that incompetence will be rewarded by promotion.
Other Putt laws we love include the law of failure: "Innovative organizations abhor little
failures but reward big ones." And the first law of invention: "An innovated success is as good
as a successful innovation."
Now Putt has revised and updated his short, smart book, to be released in a new edition by
Wiley-IEEE Press ( http://www.wiley.com/ieee ) at the end of this month. There
have been murmurings that Putt's identity, the subject of much rumormongering, will be revealed
after the book comes out, but we think that's unlikely. How much more interesting it is to have
an anonymous chronicler wandering the halls of the tech industry, codifying its unstated,
sometimes bizarre, and yet remarkably consistent rules of behavior.
This is management writing the way it ought to be. Think Dilbert , but with a very
big brain. Read it and weep. Or laugh, depending on your current job situation.
"... Eric Samuelson is the creator of the Confident Hiring System™. Working with Dave Anderson of Learn to Lead, he provides the Anderson Profiles and related services to clients in the automotive retail industry as well as a variety of other businesses. ..."
In 1981, an author in the Research and Development field, writing under the pseudonym
Archibald Putt, penned this famous quote, now known as Putt's Law:
"Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not
manage, and those who manage what they do not understand."
Have you ever hired someone without knowing for sure if they can do the job? Have you
promoted a good salesperson to management only to realize you made a dire mistake? The
qualities needed to succeed in a technical field are quite different than for a leader.
The legendary immigrant engineer Charles Steinmetz worked at General Electric in the early
1900s. He made phenomenal advancements in the field of electric motors. His work was
instrumental to the growth of the electric power industry. With a goal of rewarding him, GE
promoted him to a management position, but he failed miserably. Realizing their error, and not
wanting to offend this genius, GE's leadership retitled him as a Chief Engineer, with no
supervisory duties, and let him go back to his research.
Avoid the double disaster of losing a good worker by promoting him to management failure. By
using the unique Anderson Position Overlay system, you can avoid future regret by comparing
your candidate's qualities to the requirements of the position before saying "Welcome
Aboard".
Eric Samuelson is the creator of the Confident Hiring System™. Working with Dave
Anderson of Learn to Lead, he provides the Anderson Profiles and related services to clients in
the automotive retail industry as well as a variety of other businesses.
Putt's Law and the Successful Technocrat is a book, credited to the pseudonym Archibald Putt, published
in 1981. An updated edition, subtitled How to Win in the Information Age , was published
by Wiley-IEEE
Press in 2006. The book is based upon a series of articles published in
Research/Development Magazine in 1976 and 1977.
Putt's Law: " Technology is dominated by two types of people, those who understand
what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand. "
[3]
Putt's Corollary: " Every technical hierarchy, in time, develops a competence
inversion. " with incompetence being "flushed out of the lower levels" of a technocratic
hierarchy, ensuring that technically competent people remain directly in charge of the actual
technology while those without technical competence move into management. [3]
Jump up
^ Archibald Putt. Putt's Law and the Successful Technocrat: How to Win in the
Information Age , Wiley-IEEE Press (2006), ISBN0-471-71422-4 .
Preface.
^ Jump
up to: ab Archibald Putt. Putt's Law and the Successful Technocrat: How to
Win in the Information Age , Wiley-IEEE Press (2006), ISBN0-471-71422-4 . page
7.
This book is most interesting probably for people who can definitely do well without it – seasoned sysadmins and
educators.
Please ignore the word "philosophy" in the title. Most sysadmins do not want to deal with "philosophy";-). And this book
does not rise to the level of philosophy in any case. It is just collection of valuable (and not so valuable) tips from the
author career as a sysadmin of a small lab, thinly dispersed in 500 pages. Each chapter can serve as a fuel for your own
thoughts. The author instincts on sysadmin related issues are mostly right: he is suspicious about systemd and another
perversion in modern Linuxes, he argues for simplicity in software, and he warns us about PHBs problem in IT departments. In
some cases, I disagreed with the author, or view his treatment of the topic as somewhat superficial, but still, his points
created the kind of "virtual discussion" that has a value of its own. And maybe it is the set of topics that the author
discusses is the main value of the book.
I would classify this book as "tips" book when the author shares his approach to this or that problem (sometimes IMHO
wrong, but still interesting ;-), distinct from the more numerous and often boring, but much better-selling class of "how
to" books. The latter explains in gory details how to deal with a particular complex Unix/Linux subsystem, or a particular
role (for example system administrator of Linux servers). But in many cases, the right solution is to avoid those subsystems
or software packages like the plague and use something simpler. Recently, avoiding Linux flavors with systemd also can
qualify as a solution ;-)
This book is different. It is mostly about how to approach some typical system tasks, which arise on the level of a small
lab (that the lab is small is clear from the coverage of backups). The author advances an important idea of experimentation
as a way of solving the problem and optimizing your existing setup and work habits. As well a very overview of good practices
of using some essential sysadmin tools such as screen and sudo. In the last chapter, the author even briefly mentions (just
mentions) a very important social problem -- the problem micromanagers. The latter is real cancer in Unix departments of
large corporations (and not only in Unix departments)
All chapters contain "webliography" at the end adding to the value of the book. While Kindle version of the book is
badly formatted (and I subtracted one star for that), the references in Kindle version are clickable, and I would recommend
reading some them along with reading the book, including the author articles at opensource.com For example, among others,
the author references a rare and underappreciated, but a very important book "Putt's Law and the Successful Technocrat: How
to Win in the Information Age by Archibald Putt (2006-04-28)". From which famous Putt's Law "Technology is dominated by two
types of people, those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand," and Putt's
Corollary: "Every technical hierarchy, in time, develop a competence inversion" were originated. This reference alone is
probably worth half-price of the book for sysadmins, who never heard about Putt's Law.
Seasoned sysadmins can probably just skim Part I-III (IMHO those chapters are somewhat simplistic. ) For example, you can
skip Introduction to author's Linux philosophy, his views on contribution to open source, and similar chapters that contain
trivial information ). I would start reading the book from Part IV (Becoming Zen ), which consist of almost a dozen
interesting topics. Each of them is covered very briefly (which is a drawback). But they can serve as starters for your own
thought process and own research. The selection of topics is very good and IMHO constitutes the main value of the book.
For example, the author raises a very important issue in his chapter 20: Document Everything, but unfortunately, this
chapter is too brief, and he does not address the most important thing: sysadmin should work on some way to organize your
personal knowledge. For example as a private website. Maintenances of such a private knowledgebase is a crucial instrument of
any Linux sysadmin worth his/her salary and part of daily tasks worth probably 10% of sysadmin time. The quote "Those who
cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it" has a very menacing meaning in sysadmin world.
Linux (as of monstrous RHEL 7 with systemd, network manager and other perversions, which raised the complexity of the OS
at least twice) became a way to complex for a human brain. It is impossible to remember all the important details and lessons
learned from Internet browsing, your SNAFU and important tickets. Unless converted into documentation, most of such valuable
knowledge disappears say in six months or so. And the idea of using corporate helpdesk as a knowledge database is in most
cases a joke.
The negative part of the book is that the author spreads himself too thin and try to cover too much ground. That means
that treatment of most topics became superficial. Also provided examples of shell scripts is more of a classic shell style,
not Bash 4.x type of code. That helps portability (if you need it) but does not allow to understand new features of bash
4.x. Bash is available now on most Unixes, such as Solaris and HP-UX and that solves portability issues in a different, and
more productive, way. Portability was killed by systemd anyway unless you want to write wrappers for systemctl related
functions ;-)
For an example of author writing, please search for his recent (Oct 30, 2018) article "Working with data streams on the
Linux command line" That might give you a better idea of what to expect.
In my view, the book contains enough wisdom to pay $32 for it (Kindle edition price), especially if you can do it at
company expense. The books is also valuable for educators. Again, the most interesting part is part IV:
This book is most interesting probably for people who can definitely do well without it
– seasoned sysadmins and educators.
Please ignore the word "philosophy" in the title. Most sysadmins do not want to deal with
"philosophy";-). And this book does not rise to the level of philosophy in any case. It is just
collection of valuable (and not so valuable) tips from the author career as a sysadmin of a
small lab, thinly dispersed in 500 pages. Each chapter can serve as a fuel for your own
thoughts. In many cases, I disagreed with the author, but still, his points created the kind of
"virtual discussion" that has a value of its own.
I would classify this book as "tips" book when the author shares his approach to this or
that problem (often IMHO wrong, but still interesting;-), distinct from the more numerous and
often boring, but much better-selling class of "how to" books. The latter explains in gory
details how to deal with a particular Unix/Linux subsystem or a particular role (for example
system administrator of Linux servers). But in many cases, the right solution is to avoid those
subsystems or software packages like plague, and use something simpler ;-)
This book is different. It is mostly about tips on how to approach this or that typical
system task, which arises of the level of a small research lab (that is clear from his coverage
of backups). As well a very brief overview of good practices of using some tools. In the last
chapter, the author even briefly mentions (just mentions) a very important social problem --
the problem micromanagers. The latter is real cancer in Unix departments of large corporations
(and not only in Unix departments ;-)
All chapters contain "webliography" at the end adding to the value of the book. While Kindle
version of the book is formatted (and I subtracted one start for that), they are clickable.
The books provide authors views (not always right, but still interesting) on why this or
that particular feature should be used and how it can be combined with other. Seasoned
sysadmins can probably skip Part I-III (IMHO those chapters are simplistic ( for example you
can skip Introduction to the Linux philosophy, contribution to open source, and similar weak
chapters ) and start with Part IV ( Becoming Zen ) , which consist of almost a dozen
interesting topics. They are covered very briefly, just to serve as a starter for your own
thought process. But the selection of topics is very good.
He raises a very important issue in his chapter 20: Document Everything, but unfortunately,
this chapter is too brief and does not address the way to organize your personal
"knowledgebase" which now should be a crucial instrument of any Linux sysadmin worth his/her
salary. Linux (as of monstrous RHEL 7 with systemd and other perversions, which raised the
complexity of the OS at least twice) became a way to complex for your brain to remember all the
important details and lessons learned from Internet browsing, your SNAFU and important
tickets.
The negative part of the book is that the author spreads himself too thin and try to cover
too much ground. That means that treatment of some topics became superficial. Also provided
examples of shell scripts is more of a classic shell style, not Bash 4.x type of code. That
helps portability (if you need it) but does not allow to understand new features of bash 4.x.
Bash is available now on most Unixes, such as Solaris and HP-UX and that solves portability
issues in a different, and more productive, way. Portability was killed by systemd anyway
unless you want to write wrappers for systemctl related functions ;-)
For an example of author writing, please search for his recent (Oct 30, 2018) article
"Working with data streams on the Linux command line" That might give you a better idea of what
to expect.
In my view, the book contains enough wisdom to pay $32 for it (Kindle edition price).
Especially for educators.
This is a better primary book for self-study then Michael Jang and Alessandro Orsaria
This book is a better primary book for self-study then Michael Jang and Alessandro
Orsaria's book. The material is more logically organized and explained and is easier to
follow. The author provides a few valuable tips, which I did not find in any other book.
RHEL 7 looks like a different flavor of Linux, not a continuation of RHEL 6 in many
respects, and first of all due to addition of systemd and replacement of many previously used
daemons (NTP daemon, firewall daemon, etc) as well as inclusion into the exam new topics such
as built-in virtualization capabilities.
That means that the amount of material in RHEL 7 exam is much larger than in RHEL 6 exam
and different topics are stressed (systemd, virtual machines, more complex networking staff
including setting up kickstart, etc.). Michael Jang book is an adaptation of RHEL 6 book.
This book is written for RHEL 7 from the ground up, and this is an important advantage.
As for which book to use, either-or is a naïve approach. You need to use both,
especially, if the exam is paid from your own pocket, as a failure will cost you $400. Just
don't take the failure too seriously -- the table is stacked against self-study folk like you
-- and the second time you will do much better.
I just recommend you to use this one as the primary book. You should use Jang book too, as
some information in it is missing in this book but, for example, I like better how such an
important topic as how to recover root password is explained in this book.
I like his recommendation to use CentOS instead od RHEL for the preparation for the exam.
This is a reasonable approach although there are some low-cost RHEL subscriptions as well.
Using a plain vanilla RHEL without subscription makes the installation of software difficult
as you do not have access to repositories. This is an important plus of this book.
I also noticed the attention to details that can be acquired only by actually working of
RHEL for years, not just writing books -- for example the author mentions -A and -B options
in grep, while Jang does not. Unfortunately, the differences between grep and egrep and when
you need to use egrep (or grep -E) are not explained well in both books.
There are some reviews which concentrate on typos (yes, for example, the option -E typeset
as -e in some examples) but this is a pretty naïve criteria to judge the book on such a
complex topic. Of course, there will be multiple typos, but fixing them is a part of training
and they do not diminish the value of the book, as those readers who can't fix are not ready
to take the exam anyway. And if the person who supposedly passed RHEL 6 exam complains about
such trivial staff, there is something fishy if his/her approach to the topic.
Generally breaking the configuration and then fixing it should be an important part of
training and this book at least gives some hints of how to deal with booting problems (which
are multiplied in RHEL 7 due to systemd craziness)
More important is an implicit level of the author who writes the book. A4nd my impression
is that the level of Sander van Vugt is higher.
Red Hat exam stresses many Red Hat specific topics and as such taking it plunges you into
priorities of Red Hat that were unknown to you. You can expect that some of those
priorities/topics are peripheral to that you are doing at your job, and you will be taken by
surprise the first time you take the exam, even if you deligently stidied the book and did
all exercises. In this sense, it is better to pay for exam twice then to attend more
expensive "Fast track" course, if you are paying money from your own pocket.
There are a lot of posts on the Internet about how easy is to pass this exam -- I do not
trust them. While all materials are entry level and the resulting qualification is also entry
level the mere amount of material is overwhelming and presents substantial difficulties even
for people who administer RHEL and/or CentOS/Oracle Linux/Academic linux for many years.
Zone 23 was one of the best novels I've ever read. I'm a big reader, and Zone 23 stands out
as one of the better fiction books in my lifetime. It is sort of a cross between 1984,
Fahrenheit 451, and Brave New World, but with better, much funnier, dialogue. It also
introduces the corporate-state-hybrid as a menacing enemy.
The Ministries of Love , Peace , Plenty , and Truth are
ministries in George Orwell 's futuristic
dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four , set in
Oceania . [1]
Despite the name, no actual "ministers" are mentioned in the book, and all public attention is
focused on the idealized figurehead Big Brother .
The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the
Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These
contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from ordinary hypocrisy: they are
deliberate exercises in doublethink .
The Ministry of Love ( Newspeak : Miniluv ) serves as Oceania's
interior ministry
. It enforces loyalty to Big Brother through
fear, buttressed through a massive apparatus of security and repression, as well as systematic
brainwashing . The
Ministry of Love building has no windows and is surrounded by barbed wire entanglements, steel
doors, hidden machine-gun nests , and guards armed with
"jointed truncheons ". Referred to as "the
place where there is no darkness", its interior lights are never turned off. It is arguably the
most powerful ministry, controlling the will of the population. The Thought Police are a part of Miniluv.
The Ministry of Love, like the other ministries, is misnamed, since it is largely
responsible for the practice and infliction of misery, fear, suffering and torture . In a sense, however, the name is
apt, since its ultimate purpose is to instill love of Big Brother -- the only form of
love permitted in Oceania -- in the minds of thoughtcriminals as part of the process of
reverting them to orthodox thought. This is typical of the language of Newspeak , in which words and names frequently
contain both an idea and its opposite; the orthodox party member is nonetheless able to resolve
these contradictions through the disciplined use of doublethink .
Room 101 , introduced in the climax of the novel, is the basement torture chamber in the Ministry of
Love, in which the Party attempts to subject a prisoner to his or her own worst nightmare , fear or phobia , with the object of breaking
down their resistance.
You asked me once, what was in Room 101. I told you that you knew the answer already.
Everyone knows it. The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world.
Such is the purported omniscience of the state in the society of Nineteen
Eighty-Four that even a citizen's nightmares are known to the Party. The nightmare, and
therefore the threatened punishment, of the protagonist Winston Smith is to be attacked by rats . This is manifested in Room 101 by
confronting Smith with a wire cage that contains two large rats. The front of the cage is
shaped so that it can fit over a person's face. A trap-door is then opened, allowing the rats
to devour the victim's face. This cage is fitted over Smith's face, but he saves himself by
begging the authorities to let his lover, Julia , suffer this torture instead of him.
The threatened torture, and what Winston does to escape it, breaks his last promise to himself
and to Julia: never to betray her. The book suggests that Julia is likewise subjected to her
own worst fear (although it is not revealed what that fear is), and when she and Winston later
meet in a park, he notices a scar on her forehead. The intent of threatening Winston with the
rats was to force him into betraying the only person he loved and therefore to break his
spirit.
Orwell named Room 101 after a conference room at Broadcasting House where he used to sit
through tedious meetings. [2]
When the original room 101 at the BBC was due to be demolished, a plaster cast of it was made
by artist Rachel
Whiteread and displayed in the cast courts of the
Victoria and
Albert Museum from November 2003 until June 2004. [3][4]
The Ministry of Peace ( Newspeak : Minipax ) serves as the war
ministry of Oceania's government, and is in charge of the armed forces , mostly the navy and army . The Ministry of Peace may be the most vital
organ of Oceania, seeing as the nation is supposedly at an ongoing genocidal war with either
Eurasia or Eastasia and requires the right amount of force not to win the war, but keep it in a
state of equilibrium.
As explained in Emmanuel Goldstein 's book,
The Theory
and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism , the Ministry of Peace revolves around the
principle of perpetual
war . Perpetual war uses up all surplus resources, keeping most citizens in lives of
constant hardship – and thus preventing them from learning enough to comprehend the true
nature of their society. Perpetual warfare also "helps preserve the special mental atmosphere
that a hierarchical society needs." Since that means the balance of the country rests in the
war, the Ministry of Peace is in charge of fighting the war (mostly centered around Africa and
India), but making sure to never tip the scales, in case the war should become one-sided.
Oceanic telescreens
usually broadcast news reports about how Oceania is continually winning every battle it fights,
though these reports have little to no credibility.
As with all the other Nineteen Eighty-Four ministries, the Ministry of Peace is named
the exact opposite of what it does, since the Ministry of Peace is in charge of maintaining a
state of war. The meaning of peace has been equated with the meaning of war in
the slogan of the party, "War is Peace". Like the names of other ministries, it also has a
literal application. Perpetual war is what keeps the "peace" (the status quo) in Oceania and
the balance of power in the world.
The Ministry of Plenty ( Newspeak : Miniplenty ) is in control of
Oceania's planned
economy . It oversees rationing of food , supplies , and goods . As told in Goldstein's book, the
economy of Oceania is very important, and it's necessary to have the public continually create
useless and synthetic supplies or weapons for use in the war, while they have no access to the
means of
production . This is the central theme of Oceania's idea that a poor, ignorant populace is
easier to rule over than a wealthy, well-informed one. Telescreens often make reports on how Big Brother has been able
to increase economic production, even when production has actually gone down (see §
Ministry of Truth ).
The Ministry hands out statistics which are "nonsense". When Winston is adjusting some
Ministry of Plenty's figures, he explains this:
But actually, he thought as he readjusted the Ministry of Plenty's figures, it was not
even forgery. It was merely the substitution of one piece of nonsense for another. Most of
the material that you were dealing with had no connection with anything in the real world,
not even the kind of connection that is contained in a direct lie. Statistics were just as
much a fantasy in their original version as in their rectified version. A great deal of time
you were expected to make them up out of your head.
Like the other ministries, the Ministry of Plenty seems to be entirely misnamed, since it
is, in fact, responsible for maintaining a state of perpetual poverty , scarcity and financial shortages.
However, the name is also apt, because, along with the Ministry of Truth, the Ministry of
Plenty's other purpose is to convince the populace that they are living in a state of perpetual
prosperity. Orwell made a similar reference to the Ministry of Plenty in his allegorical work
Animal Farm
when, in the midst of a blight upon the farm, Napoleon the pig orders the silo to
be filled with sand, then to place a thin sprinkling of grain on top, which fools human
visitors into being dazzled about Napoleon's boasting of the farm's superior economy.
A department of the Ministry of Plenty is charged with organizing state lotteries . These are very popular among the
proles, who buy tickets and hope to win the big prizes – a completely vain hope as the
big prizes are in fact not awarded at all, the Ministry of Truth participating in the scam and
publishing every week the names of non-existent big winners.
The Ministry of Truth ( Newspeak : Minitrue ) is the ministry of propaganda
. As with the other ministries in the novel, the name Ministry of Truth is a misnomer
because in reality it serves the opposite: it is responsible for any necessary falsification of
historical events.
As well as administering truth, the ministry spreads a new language amongst the populace
called Newspeak , in
which, for example, "truth" is understood to mean statements like 2 + 2 = 5 when the situation warrants. In keeping
with the concept of doublethink, the ministry is thus aptly named in that it
creates/manufactures "truth" in the Newspeak sense of the word. The book describes the
doctoring of historical records to show a government-approved version of
events.
Winston Smith ,
the main character of Nineteen Eighty-Four , works at
the Ministry of Truth. [5] It
is an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete rising 300 metres (980 ft) into
the air, containing over 3000 rooms above ground. On the outside wall are the three slogans of
the Party: "WAR IS PEACE," "FREEDOM IS SLAVERY," "IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH." There is also a large
part underground, probably containing huge incinerators where documents are destroyed after
they are put down memory
holes . For his description, Orwell was inspired by the Senate House at the University of London .
[6]
The Ministry of Truth is involved with news media, entertainment, the fine arts and
educational books. Its purpose is to rewrite history to change the facts to fit Party doctrine
for propaganda effect.
For example, if Big
Brother makes a prediction that turns out to be wrong, the employees of the Ministry of
Truth correct the record to make it accurate. This is the "how" of the Ministry of Truth's
existence. Within the novel, Orwell elaborates that the deeper reason for its existence, the
"why", is to maintain the illusion that the Party is absolute. It cannot ever seem to change
its mind (if, for instance, they perform one of their constant changes regarding enemies during
war) or make a mistake (firing an official or making a grossly misjudged supply prediction),
for that would imply weakness and to maintain power the Party must seem eternally right and
strong.
Minitrue plays a role as the news media by changing history, and changing the words in
articles about events current and past, so that Big Brother and his government are always seen
in a good light and can never do any wrong. The content is more propaganda than actual
news.
The novel's popularity has resulted in the term "Room 101" being used to represent a place
where unpleasant things are done.
According to Anna
Funder 's book Stasiland , Erich Mielke , the last Minister of State
Security ( Stasi ) of
East Germany , had
the floors of the Stasi headquarters renumbered so that his second floor office would be
number 101. [7]
In the BBC comedy television series Room 101 , the concept is
radically changed from that of Orwell, and celebrities are invited to discuss their pet hates
and persuade the host to consign them to oblivion, as metaphorically represented by the idea
of Room 101. [ citation needed
]
In the 2005
series of Big
Brother (UK) , a housemate was required to enter a Room 101 to complete tedious and
unpleasant tasks, including sorting different colours of maggots . [ citation needed
]
In The
Ricky Gervais Show , Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant play a game called "Room
102", based on the concept of "Room 101", in which Karl Pilkington has to decide what things
he dislikes enough to put in Room 102. This would result, according to their game, in these
things being erased from existence. [ citation needed ]
The name "Ministry of Peace", and shorthand "Minipax", appear in the US science fiction TV
series Babylon 5 .
The Ministry of Peace first appears in the episode " In the Shadow of Z'ha'dum ". It
is a sinister organisation, created to instill loyalty to the government of Earth and root out
dissent; one of its senior staff is a "Mr Welles". In its role it more closely resembles the
novel's §
Ministry of Love (which is responsible for the Thought Police and the interrogation of
dissidents) than it does the Ministry of Peace depicted in Nineteen Eighty-Four . [
citation
needed ]
In the 2011 Doctor
Who episode " The God Complex ", The Doctor and his companions find
themselves in a hotel full of their own personal Room 101s, each with their greatest fear in
it. [8]
Jump up
^ Stansky, Peter (1994). London's Burning . Stanford: Stanford
University Press. pp. 85–86. ISBN0-8047-2340-0
.
Tames, Richard (2006). London . Oxford Oxfordshire: Oxford University Press. p.
126. ISBN0-19-530953-7
.
Humphreys, Rob (2003). The Rough Guide to London . Rough Guides Limited. p. 146.
ISBN1-84353-093-7
. "Orwell Today,
Ministry of Truth" . Retrieved 2008-08-27 .
"... There is a vast literature analyzing the political prophecy of George Orwell 's Nineteen Eighty-Four . Big Brother, double-speak, telescreens, crimestop, etc. – all applied to our current political situation. The language has become part of our popular lexicon, and as such, has become clichéd through overuse. Blithe, habitual use of language robs it of its power to crack open the safe that hides the realities of life. ..."
"... There is no doubt that Orwell wrote a brilliant political warning about the methods of totalitarian control. But hidden at the heart of the book is another lesson lost on most readers and commentators. Rats, torture, and Newspeak resonate with people fixated on political repression, which is a major concern, of course. But so too is privacy and sexual passion in a country of group-think and group-do, where "Big Brother" poisons you in the crib and the entertainment culture then takes over to desexualize intimacy by selling it as another public commodity. ..."
"... The United States is a pornographic society. By pornographic I do not just mean the omnipresent selling of exploitative sex through all media to titillate a voyeuristic public living in the unreality of screen "life" and screen sex through television, movies, and online obsessions. I mean a commodified consciousness, where everyone and everything is part of a prostitution ring in the deepest sense of pornography's meaning – for sale, bought. ..."
"... As this happens, words and language become corrupted by the same forces that Orwell called Big Brother, whose job is total propaganda and social control. Just as physical reality now mimics screen reality and thus becomes chimerical, language, through which human beings uncover and articulate the truth of being, becomes more and more abstract. People don't die; they "pass on" or "pass away." Dying, like real sex, is too physical. Wars of aggression don't exist; they are "overseas contingency operations." Killing people with drones isn't killing; it's "neutralizing them." There are a "ton" of examples, but I am sure "you guys" don't need me to list any more. ..."
"... This destruction of language has been going on for a long time, but it's worth noting that from Hemingway's WW I through Orwell's WW II up until today's endless U.S. wars against Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Libya, etc., there has been the parallel development of screen and media culture, beginning with silent movies through television and onto the total electronic media environment we now inhabit – the surround sound and image bubble of literal abstractions that inhabit us, mentally and physically. In such a society, to feel what you really feel and not what, in Hemingway's words, "you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel" has become extremely difficult. ..."
"... But understanding the history of public relations, advertising, propaganda, the CIA, the national security apparatus, technology, etc., makes it clear that such hope is baseless. For the propaganda in this country has penetrated far deeper than anyone can imagine, and it has primarily done this through advanced technology and the religion of technique – machines as pure abstractions – that has poisoned not just our minds, but the deepest wellsprings of the body's truths and the erotic imagination that links us in love to all life on earth. ..."
"... Orwell makes it very clear that language is the key to mind control, as he delineates how Newspeak works. I think he is right. And mind control also means the control of our bodies, Eros, our sex, our physical connections to all living beings and nature. Today the U.S. is reaching the point where "Oldspeak" – Standard English – has been replaced by Newspeak, and just "fragments of the literature of the past" survive here and there. ..."
"Christianity gave Eros poison to drink; he did not die of it, certainly, but
degenerated to Vice." – Frederick Nietzsche , Beyond Good and Evil
"Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has
happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little
hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or
scramble over the obstacles. We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen." –
D. H. Lawrence , Lady Chatterley's Lover
"The so-called consumer society and the politics of corporate capitalism have created a
second nature of man which ties him libidinally and aggressively to the commodity form. The
need for possessing, consuming, handling and constantly renewing gadgets, devices, instruments,
engines, offered to and imposed upon the people, for using these wares even at the danger of
one's own destruction, has become a 'biological' need." – Herbert Marcuse , One
Dimensional Man
There is a vast literature analyzing the political prophecy of George Orwell 's Nineteen
Eighty-Four . Big Brother, double-speak, telescreens, crimestop, etc. – all applied
to our current political situation. The language has become part of our popular lexicon, and as
such, has become clichéd through overuse. Blithe, habitual use of language robs it of
its power to crack open the safe that hides the realities of life.
There is no doubt that Orwell wrote a brilliant political warning about the methods of
totalitarian control. But hidden at the heart of the book is another lesson lost on most
readers and commentators. Rats, torture, and Newspeak resonate with people fixated on political
repression, which is a major concern, of course. But so too is privacy and sexual passion in a
country of group-think and group-do, where "Big Brother" poisons you in the crib and the
entertainment culture then takes over to desexualize intimacy by selling it as another public
commodity.
The United States is a pornographic society. By pornographic I do not just mean the
omnipresent selling of exploitative sex through all media to titillate a voyeuristic public
living in the unreality of screen "life" and screen sex through television, movies, and online
obsessions. I mean a commodified consciousness, where everyone and everything is part of a
prostitution ring in the deepest sense of pornography's meaning – for sale, bought.
And
consumed by getting, spending, and selling. Flicked into the net of Big Brother, whose job is
make sure everything fundamentally human and physical is debased and mediated, people become
consumers of the unreal and direct experience is discouraged. The natural world becomes an
object to be conquered and used. Animals are produced in chemical factories to be slaughtered
by the billions only to appear bloodless under plastic wrap in supermarket coolers. The human
body disappears into hypnotic spectral images. One's sex becomes one's gender as the words are
transmogrified and as one looks in the mirror of the looking-glass self and wonders how to
identify the one looking back.
Streaming life from Netflix or Facebook becomes life the movie.
The brilliant perverseness of the mediated reality of a screen society – what Guy Debord
calls The Society of the
Spectacle – is that as it distances people from fundamental reality, it promotes that
reality through its screen fantasies. "Get away from it all and restore yourself at our spa in
the rugged mountains where you can hike in pristine woods after yoga and a breakfast of locally
sourced eggs and artisanally crafted bread." Such garbage would be funny if it weren't so
effective. Debord writes,
The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by
images .Where the real world changes into simple images, the simple images become real beings
and effective motivations of hypnotic behavior.
Thus sex with robots and marrying yourself are not aberrations but logical extensions of a
society where solipsism meets machine in the America dream.
As this happens, words and language become corrupted by the same forces that Orwell called
Big Brother, whose job is total propaganda and social control. Just as physical reality now
mimics screen reality and thus becomes chimerical, language, through which human beings uncover
and articulate the truth of being, becomes more and more abstract. People don't die; they "pass
on" or "pass away." Dying, like real sex, is too physical. Wars of aggression don't exist; they
are "overseas contingency operations." Killing people with drones isn't killing; it's
"neutralizing them." There are a "ton" of examples, but I am sure "you guys" don't need me to
list any more.
Orwell called Big Brother's language Newspeak, and Hemingway preceded him when he so
famously wrote in disgust In a Farewell to Arms ,
"I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice, and the expression
in vain. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene "
This destruction of language has been going on for a long time, but it's worth noting that
from Hemingway's WW I through Orwell's WW II up until today's endless U.S. wars against
Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Libya, etc., there has been the parallel development of screen
and media culture, beginning with silent movies through television and onto the total
electronic media environment we now inhabit – the surround sound and image bubble of
literal abstractions that inhabit us, mentally and physically. In such a society, to feel what
you really feel and not what, in Hemingway's words, "you were supposed to feel, and had been
taught to feel" has become extremely difficult.
... ... ...
But as we learn in 1984 and should learn in the U.S.A. today , "seemed" is the
key word. Their triumph was temporary. For sexual passion reveals truths that need to be
confirmed in the mind. In itself, sexual liberation can be easily manipulated, as it has been
so effectively in the United States. "Repressive de-sublimation" Herbert Marcuse called it
fifty years ago. You allow people to act out their sexual fantasies in commodified ways that
can be controlled by the rulers, all the while ruling their minds and potential political
rebelliousness. Sex becomes part of the service economy where people service each other while
serving their masters. Use pseudo-sex to sell them a way of life that traps them in an
increasingly totalitarian social order that only seems free. This has been accomplished
primarily through screen culture and the concomitant confusion of sexual identity. Perhaps you
have noticed that over the past twenty-five years of growing social and political confusion, we
have witnessed an exponential growth in "the electronic life," the use of psychotropic drugs,
and sexual disorientation. This is no accident. Wars have become as constant as Eros –
the god of love, life, joy, and motion – has been divorced from sex as a stimulus and
response release of tension in a "stressed" society. Rollo May, the great American
psychologist, grasped this:
Indeed, we have set sex over against eros, used sex precisely to avoid the
anxiety-creating involvements of eros We are in flight from eros and use sex as the vehicle for
the flight Eros [which includes, but is not limited to, passionate sex] is the center of
vitality of a culture – its heart and soul. And when release of tension takes the place
of creative eros, the downfall of the civilization is assured.
Because Julia and Winston cannot permanently escape Oceania, but can only tryst, they
succumb to Big Brother's mind control and betray each other. Their sexual affair can't save
them. It is a moment of beauty and freedom in an impossible situation. Of course the
hermetically sealed world of 1984 is not the United States. Orwell created a society in
which escape was impossible. It is, after all, an admonitory novel – not the real world.
Things are more subtle here; we still have some wiggle room – some – although the
underlying truth is the same: the U.S. oligarchy, like "The Party," "seeks power entirely for
its own sake" and "are not interested in the good of others," all rhetoric to the contrary. Our
problem is that too many believe the rhetoric, and those who say they don't really do at the
deepest level. Fly the flag and play the national anthem and their hearts are aflutter with
hope. Recycle old bromides about the next election when your political enemies will be swept
out of office and excitement builds as though you had met the love of your life and all was
well with the world.
But understanding the history of public relations, advertising, propaganda, the CIA, the
national security apparatus, technology, etc., makes it clear that such hope is baseless. For
the propaganda in this country has penetrated far deeper than anyone can imagine, and it has
primarily done this through advanced technology and the religion of technique – machines
as pure abstractions – that has poisoned not just our minds, but the deepest wellsprings
of the body's truths and the erotic imagination that links us in love to all life on earth.
In "Defence of Poetry," Percy Bysshe Shelley writes:
The great secret of morals is love; or a going out of our nature, and an identification of
ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. A man,
to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the
place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasure of his species must become his
own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.
We are now faced with the question: Can we escape the forces of propaganda and mind control
that run so very deep into American life? If so, how? Let's imagine a way out.
Orwell makes it very clear that language is the key to mind control, as he delineates how
Newspeak works. I think he is right. And mind control also means the control of our bodies,
Eros, our sex, our physical connections to all living beings and nature. Today the U.S. is
reaching the point where "Oldspeak" – Standard English – has been replaced by
Newspeak, and just "fragments of the literature of the past" survive here and there.
This is
true for the schooled and unschooled. In fact, those more trapped by the instrumental logic,
disembodied data, and word games of the power elite are those who have gone through the most
schooling, the indoctrination offered by the so-called "elite" universities. I suspect that
more working-class and poor people still retain some sense of the old language and the
fundamental meaning of words, since it is with their sweat and blood that they "earn their
living." Many of the highly schooled are children of the power elite or those groomed to serve
them, who are invited to join in living the life of power and privilege if they swallow their
consciences and deaden their imaginations to the suffering their "life-styles" and ideological
choices inflict on the rest of the world. In this world of TheNew York Times ,
Harvard, The New Yorker , Martha's Vineyard, TheWashington Post , Wall
St., Goldman Sachs, the boardrooms of the ruling corporations, all the corporate media, etc.,
language has become debased beyond recognition. Here, as Orwell said of Newspeak, "a heretical
thought should be literally unthinkable, at least as far as thought is dependent on words. Its
vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every
meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express." The intelligently orthodox, he
adds, must master the art of "doublethink" wherein they hold two contradictory ideas in their
minds simultaneously, while accepting both of them. This is the key trick of logic and language
that allows the power elites and their lackeys in the U.S. today to master the art of
self-deception and feel good about themselves as they plunder the world. In this "Party" world,
the demonization, degradation, and killing of others is an abstraction; their lives are
spectral. Orwell describes doublethink this way:
To tell deliberate lives while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has
become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion
for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while
to take account of the reality one denies – all this is indispensably necessary. Even in
using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink . For by using
the word one admits one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one
erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the
truth.
... ... ...
*
Edward Curtin is a writer whose work has appeared widely; he is a frequent contributor
to Global Research. He teaches sociology at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. His website
is http://edwardcurtin.com/ .
Madeleine Albright is a well known neocon who was instrumental in organizing the invasion of
Yugoslavia
Notable quotes:
"... Every reader will conclude that his or her political enemies fit the bill. ..."
"... And, unfortunately, I fear, she, in one fell swoop of prose, both fuels the fires of division while exiling the book to practical irrelevance. In the end, she will likely only energize both political extremes, and, I suspect, the reader ratings of this book will ultimately reflect that. ..."
"... She notes, for starters, that the Fascist epithet may be appropriate for the US today for reasons having more to do with economics than populism. The Fascist Party of Italy, which gave rise to general use of the term, was the ultimate merger of the corporate and political states. And that is, in fact, what has happened here in the US. ..."
"... The incorporation accelerated greatly during the dot-com 90s when young entrepreneurs were preaching disruption and libertarianism. It is ironic, indeed, that tech's "democratic" perspective has now produced among the biggest and most powerful corporations the world has ever known. And they pulled it off, actually, while the anti-trust regulators in both Republican and Democratic administrations stood by and watched. ..."
"... To me what we have today is not so much analogous to the Fascist or Nazi parties of the mid-20th Century as it is the power of the church in Medieval Europe. The kings and queens of Washington may wear the crowns, but it is the corporate "popes" of Wall Street and Silicon Valley that are really calling the shots. ..."
"... Neither party has defined an agenda that addresses the issues that originally brought Trump to power. And until that happens I believe Albright's Fascist warning will remain valid. ..."
This is a timely book by a brilliant person who had a front row seat to the tragedy that
was Europe in the Mid-20th Century. There is little doubt that the world is starting to look
fearfully like it did at the beginning of those dark hours, starting with the tyranny of
Hitler and Mussolini and culminating in the Cold War and the gulags of the Soviet Union.
Figuratively speaking, this is really three books. The first will be the most divisive and
may, in fact, quite unfortunately, relegate the book to practical irrelevance. The second
book is extremely insightful and informative. And the third book, honestly, is pure gold and
vintage Madeline Albright.
The first book begins with a contradiction. Albright openly acknowledges that Fascism has
become a meaningless epithet, hurled, as it is, by opposing politicians of every stripe and
at parents merely attempting to limit the cell phone usage of their children. She goes on to
defend the titular use of the term, however, by clarifying her use of the term: "To my mind,
a Fascist is someone who identifies strongly with and claims to speak for a whole nation or
group, is unconcerned with the rights of others, and is willing to use whatever means are
necessary -- including violence -- to achieve his or her goals."
At that point, however, she hasn't really narrowed the list of politicians who qualify for
the pejorative label at all. Every reader will conclude that his or her political enemies
fit the bill. She seals the fate of this portion of the book, however, when she asks, on
page 4 of the book, " why, this far into the twenty-first century, are we once again talking
about Fascism?" And answers, "One reason, frankly, is Donald Trump. If we think of Fascism as
a wound from the past that had almost healed, putting Trump in the White House was like
ripping off the bandage and picking at the scab." And she goes on to make thinly veiled
comparisons between Trump, Mussolini, and Joseph McCarthy.
And, unfortunately, I fear, she, in one fell swoop of prose, both fuels the fires of
division while exiling the book to practical irrelevance. In the end, she will likely only
energize both political extremes, and, I suspect, the reader ratings of this book will
ultimately reflect that.
That is most unfortunate because without those opening pages this would be a truly
terrific book. It chronicles both relevant history and the recent past to a degree that few
other people on the planet could.
The second part of the book is devoted to an analysis of recent political events in
Hungary, Poland, Turkey, Venezuela, the Philippines, Russia, North Korea, and, of course, the
United States. All, to varying degrees, she maintains, are showing signs of a slide toward
Fascism and the decline of post-war liberal democracy. It is an informative analysis and
unless you are a political junkie, you will learn a lot.
In the third part of the book she truly hits her stride. She notes, for starters, that
the Fascist epithet may be appropriate for the US today for reasons having more to do with
economics than populism. The Fascist Party of Italy, which gave rise to general use of the
term, was the ultimate merger of the corporate and political states. And that is, in fact,
what has happened here in the US.
The incorporation of America has been going on since the conservative movement of the
1980s, however, and while Trump is carrying the corporate water at the moment, he can hardly
be blamed for allowing Wall Street and Silicon Valley to take control of Washington.
The incorporation accelerated greatly during the dot-com 90s when young entrepreneurs
were preaching disruption and libertarianism. It is ironic, indeed, that tech's "democratic"
perspective has now produced among the biggest and most powerful corporations the world has
ever known. And they pulled it off, actually, while the anti-trust regulators in both
Republican and Democratic administrations stood by and watched.
To me what we have today is not so much analogous to the Fascist or Nazi parties of
the mid-20th Century as it is the power of the church in Medieval Europe. The kings and
queens of Washington may wear the crowns, but it is the corporate "popes" of Wall Street and
Silicon Valley that are really calling the shots.
Which is why both parties, I think, should be fearful of whatever happens in the mid-term
elections. Be careful what you wish for. Neither party has defined an agenda that addresses
the issues that originally brought Trump to power. And until that happens I believe
Albright's Fascist warning will remain valid.
In the final chapters of the book Albright notes that putting American interests first
invites Russia, China, and others to do the same. And it is here that she lowers her partisan
guard (we all have one) and calls for unity through the recognition of our common humanity
and the rejection of extremism that favors one group over another.
It is here that she also seems to soften her position on ideals of post-war democratic
liberalism and focuses more on compassion, integrity, and fairness. I think of it as defining
a new standard of shared obligation and responsibility that includes those countries and
those people that aren't rushing to implement an Electoral College and to copy our form of
bare-knuckle individualism, but those are my words, not hers.
In the end she notes that spend her time on issues like: "purging excess money from
politics, improving civic education, defending journalistic independence, adjusting to the
changing nature of the workplace, enhancing inter-religious dialogue, and putting a saddle on
the bucking bronco we call the Internet." It's a perfect ending to what is a very good book
by an inspiring individual.
An Amazon Best Book of
May 2018: In Bad Blood , the Wall Street Journal 's John Carreyrou takes
us through the step-by-step history of Theranos, a Silicon Valley startup that became almost
mythical, in no small part due to its young, charismatic founder Elizabeth Holmes. In fact,
Theranos was mythical for a different reason, because the technological promise it was founded
upon -- that vital health information could be gleaned from a small drop of blood using
handheld devices -- was a lie. Carreyrou tracks the experiences of former employees to craft
the fascinating story of a company run under a strict code of secrecy, a place where leadership
was constantly throwing up smoke screens and making promises that it could not keep. Meanwhile,
investors kept pouring in money, turning Elizabeth Holmes into a temporary billionaire.
As companies like Walgreens and Safeway strike deals with Theranos, and as even the army
tries to get in on the Theranos promise (there's a brief cameo by James "Mad Dog" Mattis), the
plot thickens and the proverbial noose grows tighter.
Although I knew how the story ended, I found myself reading this book compulsively. –
Chris Schluep
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"U-571" is a pleasing and very exciting movie, one that can be enjoyed by followers and
non-followers of war movies alike. It's one of those all-encompassing movies that has
something in it for everyone: dazzling visual and sound effects for tech junkies, a gripping
story based on similar events of war, and suspense and action for those looking to be
surprised. This is a summer blockbuster that actually pleases its crowds, and certainly a
movie that ranks with some of the best and most well-known war movies in Hollywood.
The movie begins, fittingly enough, in the German submarine after which the movie is named,
and the Germans have just finished bombing an American ship. Soon after, they are set upon by
a destroyer, which depth-charges the fragile vessel and leaves it crippled and in need of
repairs. They send a call our for help, which is found by the Americans. This provides them
with the opportunity to crack the secret code the Germans have been using by boarding the
damaged vessel under the guise of German soldiers and stealing the Enigma, which houses the
codes.
The beginning of the movie allows us to get to know our American characters, with whom we
will be spending a great deal of time during the movie. We are introduced to Captain Andrew
Tyler, who has just found out that he did not receive the position of captain as he had
hoped. His commander, Lieutenant Commander Mike Dahlgren, feels he does not have what it
takes to be a captain at this point, and that his emotional connection to his shipmates would
prevent him from putting them in situations of potential danger.
Soon, our men are on their sub, heading out to sea, where they encounter the German
submarine, take the crew hostage, and swipe the Enigma and code book to bring back to the
attention of the U.S. Armed Forces. However, the German sub that responded to their call for
help destroys the American sub, killing the German hostages and some Americans, leaving the
rest of the crew on the German sub with Tyler as their captain. As their special ops mission
turns into a race for survival, Tyler must make the right decisions in order to keep his crew
alive and ship afloat as they near hostile waters on their way to safety.
The plot of the story follows a pretty basic pattern that is intensified by the suspense of
the action sequences and the way in which Mostow works his magic with the camera. I found
myself guessing what was going to happen in certain scenes of the movie, mainly because after
seeing the trailer, I knew there was more that had to happen than just allowing the sub to
sink and the Germans to win. And as much as the story does for its characters and their will
to survive, I knew that the script would not shortchange them in the long run. This really
doesn't hinder the story, though; it still has a lot to offer.
Mostow has done a masterful job in creating an atmosphere that is tightly cramped and
perilous all at the same time. The lighting used for the insides of the sub is merely the
lights actually shown, not offscreen, giving it an authentic and real feel. The crew finds
themselves huddled tightly together at times during sequences in which depth charges are
deployed to harm the ship, which adds to the sense of small space while also keeping us at
bay with the question of whether or not the vessel will make it through the treachery of the
explosions. The depth charges provide the most ominous threat to the vessel, which is carried
out on film in a most intense manner. The first set of explosions takes place outside of the
vessel, where we can see everything that's going on, while the second set keeps us inside the
sub so that all we can do is hold our breath with the crew and wait for the explosions to
end.
The fact that the movie can set up this kind of connection is a testament to its brilliance.
Mostow is able to bring us into the movie with the characters, giving us bird's-eye views of
the action as well as taking us right into the middle of it. Either way, the effect is truly
awesome, showing us a different kind of warfare that can be just as intense and terrifying as
hand-to-hand and firearm combat on land. When the movie was over, I felt jolted and out of
breath; the movie simply delivers the goods.
The visual and sound effects also help to bring us into the movie's rich canvas as well.
Miniatures and life-size vessels were used in the filming of the actual submarine, and while
the effects that surround it may be digitized, it helps to have something that is real to
harness the look and acuity of the shot. The sound design and use of the elements available
is tremendous and pleasing, with a low bass frequency playing pretty much throughout the
entire movie to create a sense of tension. This is one of those big, loud effects movies
that, even if you don't care for the story, will please on its visuals and sound alone.
Casting is an important factor in bringing out the emotion and depth, and this one, an
all-star ensemble, does just that. Matthew McConaughey is the ambitious Lieutenant Andrew
Tyler, who is the strongest of the characters. He is portrayed as earnest in his endeavors to
save his crew, while keeping the movie from degenerating into a blatant effects show. Harvey
Keitel is Chief Klough, a pivotal character who advises and aides Tyler in some pretty tight
situations. He keeps Tyler from losing his cool, which is important for the movie. Bill
Paxton plays Lieutenant Dahlgren, and while his character has little screen time, he does
well in keeping us informed of the events at hand. Jake Weber is a convincing Lieutenant
Hirsch, who knows everything about the mission and plays his character with integrity and
intelligence.
One of the better war films to come out of Hollywood, "U-571" follows an intense and
gripping storyline that delivers the goods to even those who don't follow the war film trend.
Under the direction of Jonathon Mostow, who also directed the thriller "Breakdown," the film
contains a stellar cast that knows what it's doing and superb visual and sound effects that
add to the atmosphere of suspense.
1953 Best Picture (eight Academy Awards) about Army soldiers dealing with corrupt leadership in Hawaii just prior to the attack
on Pearl Harbor.
Burt Lancaster heads the cast as First Sergeant Milt Warden, a top soldier trapped in an infantry company commanded by the
incompetent and corrupt Captain Dana "Dynamite" Holmes, played by Philip Ober.
Holmes is an incapable officer seeking promotion as the regiment's boxing coach while Warden holds the company together. Conditions
are status quo until Private Robert E. Lee Pruitt, played by Montgomery Clift, arrives from the bugler corps.
Holmes attempts to recruit Pruitt as the new middleweight boxer, but Pruitt refuses for personal reasons. Holmes then embarks
on a campaign of harassment, ordering the other boxers in the company to service Pruitt with frequent punishment and extra work
detail to change his mind. In the meantime, Warden falls for Holmes's wife Karen played by Deborah Kerr, and risks his career
in an adulterous relationship that soon develops into a serious love affair.
Frank Sinatra turns in a great performance as "Maggio," a fellow soldier who becomes Private Pruitt's best friend during the
ordeal. Other marvelous features are the supporting cast providing terrific characters around the main actors, and the production's
location at the historic Schofield Barracks on Oahu. It's easy to see why this was Best Picture in 1953.
One of my all-time favorite films. Superb performances by Burt Lancaster, Frank Sinatra, Donna Reed, and Montgomery Clift in
a gripping tale set in an army base on Hawaii in the period leading up to the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
Frank Sinatra was born
to play the part of Angelo Maggio in what is, along with Manchurian Candidate, his best work.
The most impressive acting is from
Clift. The extended scene with Donna Reed, as she unsuccessfully pleads with him to not attempt to rejoin his unit, is simply
breathtaking. What he does with his eyes and simple gestures so richly reveals his inner torment.
"... Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley ..."
"... Older generations called this kind of fraud "fake it 'til you make it." ..."
"... Nowadays I work 9:30-4:30 for a very good, consistent paycheck and let some other "smart person" put in 75 hours a week dealing with hiring ..."
"... It's not a "kids these days" sort of issue, it's *always* been the case that shameless, baseless self-promotion wins out over sincere skill without the self-promotion, because the people who control the money generally understand boasting more than they understand the technology. ..."
"... In the bad old days we had a hell of a lot of ridiculous restriction We must somehow made our programs to run successfully inside a RAM that was 48KB in size (yes, 48KB, not 48MB or 48GB), on a CPU with a clock speed of 1.023 MHz ..."
"... So what are the uses for that? I am curious what things people have put these to use for. ..."
"... Also, Oracle, SAP, IBM... I would never buy from them, nor use their products. I have used plenty of IBM products and they suck big time. They make software development 100 times harder than it could be. ..."
"... I have a theory that 10% of people are good at what they do. It doesn't really matter what they do, they will still be good at it, because of their nature. These are the people who invent new things, who fix things that others didn't even see as broken and who automate routine tasks or simply question and erase tasks that are not necessary. ..."
"... 10% are just causing damage. I'm not talking about terrorists and criminals. ..."
"... Programming is statistically a dead-end job. Why should anyone hone a dead-end skill that you won't be able to use for long? For whatever reason, the industry doesn't want old programmers. ..."
The author shares what he realized at a job recruitment fair seeking Java Legends, Python Badasses, Hadoop Heroes, "and other
gratingly childish classifications describing various programming specialities.
" I wasn't the only one bluffing my way through the tech scene. Everyone was doing it, even the much-sought-after engineering
talent.
I
was struck by how many developers were, like myself, not really programmers , but rather this, that and the other. A great
number of tech ninjas were not exactly black belts when it came to the actual onerous work of computer programming. So many of
the complex, discrete tasks involved in the creation of a website or an app had been automated that it was no longer necessary
to possess knowledge of software mechanics. The coder's work was rarely a craft. The apps ran on an assembly line, built with
"open-source", off-the-shelf components. The most important computer commands for the ninja to master were copy and paste...
[M]any programmers who had "made it" in Silicon Valley were scrambling to promote themselves from coder to "founder". There
wasn't necessarily more money to be had running a startup, and the increase in status was marginal unless one's startup attracted
major investment and the right kind of press coverage. It's because the programmers knew that their own ladder to prosperity was
on fire and disintegrating fast. They knew that well-paid programming jobs would also soon turn to smoke and ash, as the proliferation
of learn-to-code courses around the world lowered the market value of their skills, and as advances in artificial intelligence
allowed for computers to take over more of the mundane work of producing software. The programmers also knew that the fastest
way to win that promotion to founder was to find some new domain that hadn't yet been automated. Every tech industry campaign
designed to spur investment in the Next Big Thing -- at that time, it was the "sharing economy" -- concealed a larger programme
for the transformation of society, always in a direction that favoured the investor and executive classes.
"I wasn't just changing careers and jumping on the 'learn to code' bandwagon," he writes at one point. "I was being steadily
indoctrinated in a specious ideology."
> The people can do both are smart enough to build their own company and compete with you.
Been there, done that. Learned a few lessons. Nowadays I work 9:30-4:30 for a very good, consistent paycheck and let some other
"smart person" put in 75 hours a week dealing with hiring, managing people, corporate strategy, staying up on the competition,
figuring out tax changes each year and getting taxes filed six times each year, the various state and local requirements, legal
changes, contract hassles, etc, while hoping the company makes money this month so they can take a paycheck and lay their rent.
I learned that I'm good at creating software systems and I enjoy it. I don't enjoy all-nighters, partners being dickheads trying
to pull out of a contract, or any of a thousand other things related to running a start-up business. I really enjoy a consistent,
six-figure compensation package too.
I pay monthly gross receipts tax (12), quarterly withholdings (4) and a corporate (1) and individual (1) returns. The gross
receipts can vary based on the state, so I can see how six times a year would be the minimum.
Nowadays I work 9:30-4:30 for a very good, consistent paycheck and let some other "smart person" put in 75 hours a week
dealing with hiring
There's nothing wrong with not wnting to run your own business, it's not for most people, and even if it was, the numbers don't
add up. But putting the scare qoutes in like that makes it sound like you have huge chip on your shoulder. Those things re just
as essential to the business as your work and without them you wouldn't have the steady 9:30-4:30 with good paycheck.
Of course they are important. I wouldn't have done those things if they weren't important!
I frequently have friends say things like "I love baking. I can't get enough of baking. I'm going to open a bakery.". I ask
them "do you love dealing with taxes, every month? Do you love contract law? Employment law? Marketing? Accounting?" If you LOVE
baking, the smart thing to do is to spend your time baking. Running a start-up business, you're not going to do much baking.
I can tell you a few things that have worked for me. I'll go in chronological order rather than priority order.
Make friends in the industry you want to be in. Referrals are a major way people get jobs.
Look at the job listings for jobs you'd like to have and see which skills a lot of companies want, but you're missing. For
me that's Java. A lot companies list Java skills and I'm not particularly good with Java. Then consider learning the skills you
lack, the ones a lot of job postings are looking for.
You don't understand the point of an ORM do you? I'd suggest reading why they exist
They exist because programmers value code design more than data design. ORMs are the poster-child for square-peg-round-hole
solutions, which is why all ORMs choose one of three different ways of squashing hierarchical data into a relational form, all
of which are crappy.
If the devs of the system (the ones choosing to use an ORM) had any competence at all they'd design their database first because
in any application that uses a database the database is the most important bit, not the OO-ness or Functional-ness of the design.
Over the last few decades I've seen programs in a system come and go; a component here gets rewritten, a component there gets
rewritten, but you know what? They all have to work with the same damn data.
You can more easily switch out your code for new code with new design in a new language, than you can switch change the database
structure. So explain to me why it is that you think the database should be mangled to fit your OO code rather than mangling your
OO code to fit the database?
Stick to the one thing for 10-15years. Often all this new shit doesn't do jack different to the old shit, its not faster, its
not better. Every dick wants to be famous so make another damn library/tool with his own fancy name and feature, instead
of enhancing an existing product.
Or kids who can't hack the main stuff, suddenly discover the cool new, and then they can pretend they're "learning" it, and
when the going gets tough (as it always does) they can declare the tech to be pants and move to another.
hence we had so many people on the bandwagon for functional programming, then dumped it for ruby on rails, then dumped that
for Node.js, not sure what they're on at currently, probably back to asp.net.
How much code do you have to reuse before you're not really programming anymore? When I started in this business, it was reasonably
possible that you could end up on a project that didn't particularly have much (or any) of an operating system. They taught you
assembly language and the process by which the system boots up, but I think if I were to ask most of the programmers where I work,
they wouldn't be able to explain how all that works...
It really feels like if you know what you're doing it should be possible to build a team of actually good programmers and
put everyone else out of business by actually meeting your deliverables, but no one has yet. I wonder why that is.
You mean Amazon, Google, Facebook and the like? People may not always like what they do, but they manage to get things done
and make plenty of money in the process. The problem for a lot of other businesses is not having a way to identify and promote
actually good programmers. In your example, you could've spent 10 minutes fixing their query and saved them days of headache,
but how much recognition will you actually get? Where is your motivation to help them?
It's not a "kids these days" sort of issue, it's *always* been the case that shameless, baseless self-promotion wins out
over sincere skill without the self-promotion, because the people who control the money generally understand boasting more than
they understand the technology. Yes it can happen that baseless boasts can be called out over time by a large enough mass
of feedback from competent peers, but it takes a *lot* to overcome the tendency for them to have faith in the boasts.
And all these modern coders forget old lessons, and make shit stuff, just look at instagram windows app, what a load of garbage
shit, that us old fuckers could code in 2-3 weeks.
Instagram - your app sucks, cookie cutter coders suck, no refinement, coolness. Just cheap ass shit, with limited usefulness.
Just like most of commercial software that's new - quick shit.
Oh and its obvious if your an Indian faking it, you haven't worked in 100 companies at the age of 29.
Here's another problem, if faced with a skilled team that says "this will take 6 months to do right" and a more naive team
that says "oh, we can slap that together in a month", management goes with the latter. Then the security compromises occur, then
the application fails due to pulling in an unvetted dependency update live into production. When the project grows to handling
thousands instead of dozens of users and it starts mysteriously folding over and the dev team is at a loss, well the choice has
be
These restrictions is a large part of what makes Arduino programming "fun". If you don't plan out your memory usage, you're
gonna run out of it. I cringe when I see 8MB web pages of bloated "throw in everything including the kitchen sink and the neighbor's
car". Unfortunately, the careful and cautious way is a dying in favor of the throw 3rd party code at it until it does something.
Of course, I don't have time to review it but I'm sure everybody else has peer reviewed it for flaws and exploits line by line.
Unfortunately, the careful and cautious way is a dying in favor of the throw 3rd party code at it until it does something.
Of course. What is the business case for making it efficient? Those massive frameworks are cached by the browser and run on
the client's system, so cost you nothing and save you time to market. Efficient costs money with no real benefit to the business.
If we want to fix this, we need to make bloat have an associated cost somehow.
My company is dealing with the result of this mentality right now. We released the web app to the customer without performance
testing and doing several majorly inefficient things to meet deadlines. Once real load was put on the application by users with
non-ideal hardware and browsers, the app was infuriatingly slow. Suddenly our standard sub-40 hour workweek became a 50+ hour
workweek for months while we fixed all the inefficient code and design issues.
So, while you're right that getting to market and opt
In the bad old days we had a hell of a lot of ridiculous restriction We must somehow made our programs to run successfully
inside a RAM that was 48KB in size (yes, 48KB, not 48MB or 48GB), on a CPU with a clock speed of 1.023 MHz
We still have them. In fact some of the systems I've programmed have been more resource limited than the gloriously spacious
32KiB memory of the BBC model B. Take the PIC12F or 10F series. A glorious 64 bytes of RAM, max clock speed of 16MHz, but not
unusual to run it 32kHz.
So what are the uses for that? I am curious what things people have put these to use for.
It's hard to determine because people don't advertise use of them at all. However, I know that my electric toothbrush uses
an Epson 4 bit MCU of some description. It's got a status LED, basic NiMH batteryb charger and a PWM controller for an H Bridge.
Braun sell a *lot* of electric toothbrushes. Any gadget that's smarter than a simple switch will probably have some sort of basic
MCU in it. Alarm system components, sensor
b) No computer ever ran at 1.023 MHz. It was either a nice multiple of 1Mhz or maybe a multiple of 3.579545Mhz (ie. using the
TV output circuit's color clock crystal to drive the CPU).
Well, it could be used to drive the TV output circuit, OR, it was used because it's a stupidly cheap high speed crystal. You
have to remember except for a few frequencies, most crystals would have to be specially cut for the desired frequency. This occurs
even today, where most oscillators are either 32.768kHz (real time clock
Yeah, nice talk. You could have stopped after the first sentence. The other AC is referring to the
Commodore C64 [wikipedia.org]. The frequency has nothing
to do with crystal availability but with the simple fact that everything in the C64 is synced to the TV. One clock cycle equals
8 pixels. The graphics chip and the CPU take turns accessing the RAM. The different frequencies dictated by the TV standards are
the reason why the CPU in the NTSC version of the C64 runs at 1.023MHz and the PAL version at 0.985MHz.
Commodore 64 for the win. I worked for a company that made detection devices for the railroad, things like monitoring axle
temperatures, reading the rail car ID tags. The original devices were made using Commodore 64 boards using software written by
an employee at the one rail road company working with them.
The company then hired some electrical engineers to design custom boards using the 68000 chips and I was hired as the only
programmer. Had to rewrite all of the code which was fine...
Many of these languages have an interactive interpreter. I know for a fact that Python does.
So, since job-fairs are an all day thing, and setup is already a thing for them -- set up a booth with like 4 computers at
it, and an admin station. The 4 terminals have an interactive session with the interpreter of choice. Every 20min or so, have
a challenge for "Solve this problem" (needs to be easy and already solved in general. Programmers hate being pimped without pay.
They don't mind tests of skill, but hate being pimped. Something like "sort this array, while picking out all the prime numbers"
or something.) and see who steps up. The ones that step up have confidence they can solve the problem, and you can quickly see
who can do the work and who can't.
The ones that solve it, and solve it to your satisfaction, you offer a nice gig to.
Then you get someone good at sorting arrays while picking out prime numbers, but potentially not much else.
The point of the test is not to identify the perfect candidate, but to filter out the clearly incompetent. If you can't sort
an array and write a function to identify a prime number, I certainly would not hire you. Passing the test doesn't get you a job,
but it may get you an interview ... where there will be other tests.
(I am not even a professional programmer, but I can totally perform such a trivially easy task. The example tests basic understanding
of loop construction, function construction, variable use, efficient sorting, and error correction-- especially with mixed type
arrays. All of these are things any programmer SHOULD now how to do, without being overly complicated, or clearly a disguised
occupational problem trying to get a free solution. Like I said, programmers hate being pimped, and will be turned off
Again, the quality applicant and the code monkey both have something the fakers do not-- Actual comprehension of what a program
is, and how to create one.
As Bill points out, this is not the final exam. This is the "Oh, I see you do actually know how to program-- show me more"
portion of the process. This is the part that HR drones are not capable of performing, due to Dunning-Krueger. Those that are
actually, REALLY competent will do more than just satisfy the requirements of the challenge, they will provide actually working
solutions to the challenge that properly validate their input, and return proper error states if the input is invalid, etc-- You
can learn a LOT about a potential hire by observing their work. *THAT* is what this is really about. The triviality of the problem
is a necessity, because you ***DON'T*** try to get free solutions out of people.
I realize that may be difficult for you to comprehend, but you *DON'T* do that. The job fair is to let people know that you
have a position available, and try to curry interest in people to apply. A successful pre-screening is confidence building, and
helps the potential hire to feel that your company is actually interested in actually hiring somebody, and not just fucking off
in the booth, to cover for "failing to find somebody" and then "Getting yet another H1B". It gives them a chance to show you what
they can do. That is what it is for, and what it does. It also excludes the fakers that this article is about-- The ones that
can talk a good talk, but could not program a simple boolean check condition if their life depended on it.
If it were not for the time constraints of a job fair (usually only 2 days, and in that time you need to try and pre-screen
as many as possible), I would suggest a tiered challenge, with progressively harder challenges, where you hand out resumes to
the ones that make it to the top 3 brackets, but that is not the way the world works.
This in my opinion is really a waste of time. Challenges like this have to be so simple they can be done walking up to a
booth are not likely to filter the "all talks" any better than a few interview questions could (imperson so the candidate can't
just google it).
Tougher more involved stuff isn't good either it gives a huge advantage to the full time job hunter, the guy or gal that
already has a 9-5 and a family that wants to seem them has not got time for games. We have been struggling with hiring where
I work ( I do a lot of the interviews ) and these are the conclusions we have reached
You would be surprised at the number of people with impeccable-looking resumes failing at something as simple as the
FizzBuzz test [codinghorror.com]
The only thing fuzzbuzz tests is "have you done fizzbuzz before"? It's a short question filled with every petty trick the author
could think ti throw in there. If you haven't seen the tricks they trip you up for no reason related to your actual coding skills.
Once you have seen them they're trivial and again unrelated to real work. Fizzbuzz is best passed by someone aiming to game the
interview system. It passes people gaming it and trips up people who spent their time doing on the job real work.
A good programmer first and foremost has a clean mind. Experience suggests puzzle geeks, who excel at contrived tests, are
usually sloppy thinkers.
No. Good programmers can trivially knock out any of these so-called lame monkey tests. It's lame code monkeys who can't do
it. And I've seen their work. Many night shifts and weekends I've burned trying to fix their shit because they couldn't actually
do any of the things behind what you call "lame monkey tests", like:
pulling expensive invariant calculations out of loops using for loops to scan a fucking table to pull rows or calculate an
aggregate when they could let the database do what it does best with a simple SQL statement systems crashing under actual load
because their shitty code was never stress tested ( but it worked on my dev box! .) again with databases, having to
redo their schemas because they were fattened up so much with columns like VALUE1, VALUE2, ... VALUE20 (normalize you assholes!) chatting remote APIs - because these code monkeys cannot think about the need
for bulk operations in increasingly distributed systems. storing dates in unsortable strings because the idiots do not know
most modern programming languages have a date data type.
Oh and the most important, off-by-one looping errors. I see this all the time, the type of thing a good programmer can spot
on quickly because he or she can do the so-called "lame monkey tests" that involve arrays and sorting.
I've seen the type: "I don't need to do this shit because I have business knowledge and I code for business and IT not google",
and then they go and code and fuck it up... and then the rest of us have to go clean up their shit at 1AM or on weekends.
If you work as an hourly paid contractor cleaning that crap, it can be quite lucrative. But sooner or later it truly sucks
the energy out of your soul.
So yeah, we need more lame monkey tests ... to filter the lame code monkeys.
Someone could Google the problem with the phone then step up and solve the challenge.
If given a spec, someone can consistently cobble together working code by Googling, then I would love to hire them. That is
the most productive way to get things done.
There is nothing wrong with using external references. When I am coding, I have three windows open: an editor, a testing window,
and a browser with a Stackoverflow tab open.
Yeah, when we do tech interviews, we ask questions that we are certain they won't be able to answer, but want to see how they
would think about the problem and what questions they ask to get more data and that they don't just fold up and say "well that's
not the sort of problem I'd be thinking of" The examples aren't made up or anything, they are generally selection of real problems
that were incredibly difficult that our company had faced before, that one may not think at first glance such a position would
than spending weeks interviewing "good" candidates for an opening, selecting a couple and hiring them as contractors, then
finding out they are less than unqualified to do the job they were hired for.
I've seen it a few times, Java "experts", Microsoft "experts" with years of experience on their resumes, but completely useless
in coding, deployment or anything other than buying stuff from the break room vending machines.
That being said, I've also seen projects costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, with y
I agree with this. I consider myself to be a good programmer and I would never go into contractor game. I also wonder, how
does it take you weeks to interview someone and you still can't figure out if the person can't code? I could probably see that
in 15 minutes in a pair coding session.
Also, Oracle, SAP, IBM... I would never buy from them, nor use their products. I have used plenty of IBM products and they
suck big time. They make software development 100 times harder than it could be. Their technical supp
That being said, I've also seen projects costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, with years of delays from companies like
Oracle, Sun, SAP, and many other "vendors"
Software development is a hard thing to do well, despite the general thinking of technology becoming cheaper over time, and
like health care the quality of the goods and services received can sometimes be difficult to ascertain. However, people who don't
respect developers and the problems we solve are very often the same ones who continually frustrate themselves by trying to cheap
out, hiring outsourced contractors, and then tearing their hair out when sub par results are delivered, if anything is even del
As part of your interview process, don't you have candidates code a solution to a problem on a whiteboard? I've interviewed
lots of "good" candidates (on paper) too, but they crashed and burned when challenged with a coding exercise. As a result, we
didn't make them job offers.
I'm not a great coder but good enough to get done what clients want done. If I'm not sure or don't think I can do it, I tell
them. I think they appreciate the honesty. I don't work in a tech-hub, startups or anything like that so I'm not under the same
expectations and pressures that others may be.
OK, so yes, I know plenty of programmers who do fake it. But stitching together components isn't "fake" programming.
Back in the day, we had to write our own code to loop through an XML file, looking for nuggets. Now, we just use an XML serializer.
Back then, we had to write our own routines to send TCP/IP messages back and forth. Now we just use a library.
I love it! I hated having to make my own bricks before I could build a house. Now, I can get down to the business of writing
the functionality I want, ins
But, I suspect you could write the component if you had to. That makes you a very different user of that component than someone
who just knows it as a magic black box.
Because of this, you understand the component better and have real knowledge of its strengths and limitations. People blindly
using components with only a cursory idea of their internal operation often cause major performance problems. They rarely recognize
when it is time to write their own to overcome a limitation (or even that it is possibl
You're right on all counts. A person who knows how the innards work, is better than someone who doesn't, all else being equal.
Still, today's world is so specialized that no one can possibly learn it all. I've never built a processor, as you have, but I
still have been able to build a DNA matching algorithm for a major DNA lab.
I would argue that anyone who can skillfully use off-the-shelf components can also learn how to build components, if they are
required to.
1, 'Back in the Day' there was no XML, XMl was not very long ago.
2, its a parser, a serialiser is pretty much the opposite (unless this weeks fashion has redefined that.. anything is possible).
3, 'Back then' we didnt have TCP stacks...
But, actually I agree with you. I can only assume the author thinks there are lots of fake plumbers because they dont cast
their own toilet bowels from raw clay, and use pre-build fittings and pipes! That car mechanics start from raw steel scrap and
a file.. And that you need
Yes, I agree with you on the "middle ground." My reaction was to the author's point that "not knowing how to build the components"
was the same as being a "fake programmer."
If I'm a plumber, and I don't know anything about the engineering behind the construction of PVC pipe, I can still be a good
plumber. If I'm an electrician, and I don't understand the role of a blast furnace in the making of the metal components, I can
still be a good electrician.
The analogy fits. If I'm a programmer, and I don't know how to make an LZW compression library, I can still be a good programmer.
It's a matter of layers. These days, we specialize. You've got your low-level programmers that make the components, the high level
programmers that put together the components, the graphics guys who do HTML/CSS, and the SQL programmers that just know about
databases. Every person has their specialty. It's no longer necessary to be a low-level programmer, or jack-of-all-trades, to
be "good."
If I don't know the layout of the IP header, I can still write quality networking software, and if I know XSLT, I can still
do cool stuff with XML, even if I don't know how to write a good parser.
LOL yeah I know it's all JSON now. I've been around long enough to see these fads come and go. Frankly, I don't see a whole
lot of advantage of JSON over XML. It's not even that much more compact, about 10% or so. But the point is that the author laments
the "bad old days" when you had to create all your own building blocks, and you didn't have a team of specialists. I for one don't
want to go back to those days!
The main advantage is that JSON is that it is consistent. XML has attributes, embedded optional stuff within tags. That was
derived from the original SGML ancestor where is was thought to be a convenience for the human authors who were supposed to be
making the mark-up manually. Programmatically it is a PITA.
I got shit for decrying XML back when it was the trendy thing. I've had people apologise to me months later because they've
realized I was right, even though at the time they did their best to fuck over my career because XML was the new big thing and
I wasn't fully on board.
XML has its strengths and its place, but fuck me it taught me how little some people really fucking understand shit.
And a rather small part at that, albeit a very visible and vocal one full of the proverbial prima donas. However, much of the
rest of the tech business, or at least the people working in it, are not like that. It's small groups of developers working in
other industries that would not typically be considered technology. There are software developers working for insurance companies,
banks, hedge funds, oil and gas exploration or extraction firms, national defense and many hundreds and thousands of other small
They knew that well-paid programming jobs would also soon turn to smoke and ash, as the proliferation of learn-to-code courses
around the world lowered the market value of their skills, and as advances in artificial intelligence allowed for computers
to take over more of the mundane work of producing software.
Kind of hard to take this article serious after saying gibberish like this. I would say most good programmers know that neither
learn-to-code courses nor AI are going to make a dent in their income any time soon.
There is a huge shortage of decent programmers. I have personally witnessed more than one phone "interview" that went like
"have you done this? what about this? do you know what this is? um, can you start Monday?" (120K-ish salary range)
Partly because there are way more people who got their stupid ideas funded than good coders willing to stain their resume with
that. partly because if you are funded, and cannot do all the required coding solo, here's your conundrum:
top level hackers can afford to be really picky, so on one hand it's hard to get them interested, and if you could get
that, they often want some ownership of the project. the plus side is that they are happy to work for lots of equity if they
have faith in the idea, but that can be a huge "if".
"good but not exceptional" senior engineers aren't usually going to be super happy, as they often have spouses and children
and mortgages, so they'd favor job security over exciting ideas and startup lottery.
that leaves you with fresh-out-of-college folks, which are really really a mixed bunch. some are actually already senior
level of understanding without the experience, some are absolutely useless, with varying degrees in between, and there's no
easy way to tell which is which early.
so the not-so-scrupulous folks realized what's going on, and launched multiple coding boot camps programmes, to essentially
trick both the students into believing they can become a coder in a month or two, and also the prospective employers that said
students are useful. so far it's been working, to a degree, in part because in such companies coding skill evaluation process
is broken. but one can only hide their lack of value add for so long, even if they do manage to bluff their way into a job.
All one had to do was look at the lousy state of software and web sites today to see this is true. It's quite obvious little
to no thought is given on how to make something work such that one doesn't have to jump through hoops.
I have many times said the most perfect word processing program ever developed was WordPefect 5.1 for DOS. Ones productivity
was astonishing. It just worked.
Now we have the bloated behemoth Word which does its utmost to get in the way of you doing your work. The only way to get it
to function is to turn large portions of its "features" off, and even then it still insists on doing something other than what
you told it to do.
Then we have the abomination of Windows 10, which is nothing but Clippy on 10X steroids. It is patently obvious the people
who program this steaming pile have never heard of simplicity. Who in their right mind would think having to "search" for something
is more efficient than going directly to it? I would ask the question if these people wander around stores "searching" for what
they're looking for, but then I realize that's how their entire life is run. They search for everything online rather than going
directly to the source. It's no wonder they complain about not having time to things. They're always searching.
Web sites are another area where these people have no clue what they're doing. Anything that might be useful is hidden behind
dropdown menus, flyouts, popup bubbles and intriately designed mazes of clicks needed to get to where you want to go. When someone
clicks on a line of products, they shouldn't be harassed about what part of the product line they want to look at. Give them the
information and let the user go where they want.
This rant could go on, but this article explains clearly why we have regressed when it comes to software and web design. Instead
of making things simple and easy to use, using the one or two brain cells they have, programmers and web designers let the software
do what it wants without considering, should it be done like this?
The tech industry has a ton of churn -- there's some technological advancement, but there's an awful lot of new products turned
out simply to keep customers buying new licenses and paying for upgrades.
This relentless and mostly phony newness means a lot of people have little experience with current products. People fake because
they have no choice. The good ones understand the general technologies and problems they're meant to solve and can generally get
up to speed quickly, while the bad ones are good at faking it but don't really know what they're doing. Telling the difference
from the outside is impossible.
Sales people make it worse, promoting people as "experts" in specific products or implementations because the people have experience
with a related product and "they're all the same". This burns out the people with good adaption skills.
From the summary, it sounds like a lot of programmers and software engineers are trying to develop the next big thing so that
they can literally beg for money from the elite class and one day, hopefully, become a member of the aforementioned. It's sad
how the middle class has been utterly decimated in the United States that some of us are willing to beg for scraps from the wealthy.
I used to work in IT but I've aged out and am now back in school to learn automotive technology so that I can do something other
than being a security guard. Currently, the only work I have been able to find has been in the unglamorous security field.
I am learning some really good new skills in the automotive program that I am in but I hate this one class called "Professionalism
in the Shop." I can summarize the entire class in one succinct phrase, "Learn how to appeal to, and communicate with, Mr. Doctor,
Mr. Lawyer, or Mr. Wealthy-man." Basically, the class says that we are supposed to kiss their ass so they keep coming back to
the Audi, BMW, Mercedes, Volvo, or Cadillac dealership. It feels a lot like begging for money on behalf of my employer (of which
very little of it I will see) and nothing like professionalism. Professionalism is doing the job right the first time, not jerking
the customer off. Professionalism is not begging for a 5 star review for a few measly extra bucks but doing absolute top quality
work. I guess the upshot is that this class will be the easiest 4.0 that I've ever seen.
There is something fundamentally wrong when the wealthy elite have basically demanded that we beg them for every little scrap.
I can understand the importance of polite and professional interaction but this prevalent expectation that we bend over backwards
for them crosses a line with me. I still suck it up because I have to but it chafes my ass to basically validate the wealthy man.
In 70's I worked with two people who had a natural talent for computer science algorithms .vs. coding syntax. In the 90's while at COLUMBIA I worked with only a couple of true computer scientists out of 30 students.
I've met 1 genius who programmed, spoke 13 languages, ex-CIA, wrote SWIFT and spoke fluent assembly complete with animated characters.
According to the Bluff Book, everyone else without natural talent fakes it. In the undiluted definition of computer science,
genetics roulette and intellectual d
Ah yes, the good old 80:20 rule, except it's recursive for programmers.
80% are shit, so you fire them. Soon you realize that 80% of the remaining 20% are also shit, so you fire them too. Eventually
you realize that 80% of the 4% remaining after sacking the 80% of the 20% are also shit, so you fire them!
...
The cycle repeats until there's just one programmer left: the person telling the joke.
---
tl;dr: All programmers suck. Just ask them to review their own code from more than 3 years ago: they'll tell you that
Who gives a fuck about lines? If someone gave me JavaScript, and someone gave me minified JavaScript, which one would I
want to maintain?
I donâ(TM)t care about your line savings, less isnâ(TM)t always better.
Because the world of programming is not centered about JavasScript and reduction of lines is not the same as minification.
If the first thing that came to your mind was about minified JavaScript when you saw this conversation, you are certainly not
the type of programmer I would want to inherit code from.
See, there's a lot of shit out there that is overtly redundant and unnecessarily complex. This is specially true when copy-n-paste
code monkeys are left to their own devices for whom code formatting seems
I have a theory that 10% of people are good at what they do. It doesn't really matter what they do, they will still be
good at it, because of their nature. These are the people who invent new things, who fix things that others didn't even see as
broken and who automate routine tasks or simply question and erase tasks that are not necessary. If you have a software team
that contain 5 of these, you can easily beat a team of 100 average people, not only in cost but also in schedule, quality and
features. In theory they are worth 20 times more than average employees, but in practise they are usually paid the same amount
of money with few exceptions.
80% of people are the average. They can follow instructions and they can get the work done, but they don't see that something
is broken and needs fixing if it works the way it has always worked. While it might seem so, these people are not worthless. There
are a lot of tasks that these people are happily doing which the 10% don't want to do. E.g. simple maintenance work, implementing
simple features, automating test cases etc. But if you let the top 10% lead the project, you most likely won't be needed that
much of these people. Most work done by these people is caused by themselves, by writing bad software due to lack of good leader.
10% are just causing damage. I'm not talking about terrorists and criminals. I have seen software developers who have tried
(their best?), but still end up causing just damage to the code that someone else needs to fix, costing much more than their own
wasted time. You really must use code reviews if you don't know your team members, to find these people early.
I have a lot of weaknesses. My people skills suck, I'm scrawny, I'm arrogant. I'm also generally known as a really good programmer
and people ask me how/why I'm so much better at my job than everyone else in the room. (There are a lot of things I'm not good
at, but I'm good at my job, so say everyone I've worked with.)
I think one major difference is that I'm always studying, intentionally working to improve, every day. I've been doing that
for twenty years.
I've worked with people who have "20 years of experience"; they've done the same job, in the same way, for 20 years. Their
first month on the job they read the first half of "Databases for Dummies" and that's what they've been doing for 20 years. They
never read the second half, and use Oracle database 18.0 exactly the same way they used Oracle Database 2.0 - and it was wrong
20 years ago too. So it's not just experience, it's 20 years of learning, getting better, every day. That's 7,305 days of improvement.
I have a lot of weaknesses. My people skills suck, I'm scrawny, I'm arrogant. I'm also generally known as a really good
programmer and people ask me how/why I'm so much better at my job than everyone else in the room. (There are a lot of things
I'm not good at, but I'm good at my job, so say everyone I've worked with.)
I think one major difference is that I'm always studying, intentionally working to improve, every day. I've been doing that
for twenty years.
I've worked with people who have "20 years of experience"; they've done the same job, in the same way, for 20 years. Their
first month on the job they read the first half of "Databases for Dummies" and that's what they've been doing for 20 years.
They never read the second half, and use Oracle database 18.0 exactly the same way they used Oracle Database 2.0 - and it was
wrong 20 years ago too. So it's not just experience, it's 20 years of learning, getting better, every day. That's 7,305 days
of improvement.
If you take this attitude towards other people, people will not ask your for help. At the same time, you'll be also be not
able to ask for their help.
You're not interviewing your peers. They are already in your team. You should be working together.
I've seen superstar programmers suck the life out of project by over-complicating things and not working together with others.
10% are just causing damage. I'm not talking about terrorists and criminals.
Terrorists and criminals have nothing on those guys. I know guy who is one of those. Worse, he's both motivated and enthusiastic.
He also likes to offer help and advice to other people who don't know the systems well.
"I divide my officers into four groups. There are clever, diligent, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics
are combined. Some are clever and diligent -- their place is the General Staff. The next lot are stupid and lazy -- they make
up 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest
leadership duties, because he possesses the intellectual clarity and the composure necessary for difficult decisions. One must
beware of anyone who is stupid and diligent -- he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always cause only
mischief."
It's called the Pareto Distribution [wikipedia.org].
The number of competent people (people doing most of the work) in any given organization goes like the square root of the number
of employees.
Matches my observations. 10-15% are smart, can think independently, can verify claims by others and can identify and use rules
in whatever they do. They are not fooled by things "everybody knows" and see standard-approaches as first approximations that,
of course, need to be verified to work. They do not trust anything blindly, but can identify whether something actually work well
and build up a toolbox of such things.
The problem is that in coding, you do not have a "(mass) production step", and that is the
In basic concept I agree with your theory, it fits my own anecdotal experience well, but I find that your numbers are off.
The top bracket is actually closer to 20%. The reason it seems so low is that a large portion of the highly competent people are
running one programmer shows, so they have no co-workers to appreciate their knowledge and skill. The places they work do a very
good job of keeping them well paid and happy (assuming they don't own the company outright), so they rarely if ever switch jobs.
at least 70, probably 80, maybe even 90 percent of professional programmers should just fuck off and do something else as they
are useless at programming.
Programming is statistically a dead-end job. Why should anyone hone a dead-end skill that you won't be able to use for
long? For whatever reason, the industry doesn't want old programmers.
Otherwise, I'd suggest longer training and education before they enter the industry. But that just narrows an already narrow
window of use.
Well, it does rather depend on which industry you work in - i've managed to find interesting programming jobs for 25 years,
and there's no end in sight for interesting projects and new avenues to explore. However, this isn't for everyone, and if you
have good personal skills then moving from programming into some technical management role is a very worthwhile route, and I know
plenty of people who have found very interesting work in that direction.
I think that is a misinterpretation of the facts. Old(er) coders that are incompetent are just much more obvious and usually
are also limited to technologies that have gotten old as well. Hence the 90% old coders that can actually not hack it and never
really could get sacked at some time and cannot find a new job with their limited and outdated skills. The 10% that are good at
it do not need to worry though. Who worries there is their employers when these people approach retirement age.
My experience as an IT Security Consultant (I also do some coding, but only at full rates) confirms that. Most are basically
helpless and many have negative productivity, because people with a clue need to clean up after them. "Learn to code"? We have
far too many coders already.
You can't bluff you way through writing software, but many, many people have bluffed their way into a job and then tried to
learn it from the people who are already there. In a marginally functional organization those incompetents are let go pretty quickly,
but sometimes they stick around for months or years.
Apparently the author of this book is one of those, probably hired and fired several times before deciding to go back to his
liberal arts roots and write a book.
I think you can and this is by far not the first piece describing that. Here is a classic:
https://blog.codinghorror.com/... [codinghorror.com]
Yet these people somehow manage to actually have "experience" because they worked in a role they are completely unqualified to
fill.
Fiddling with JavaScript libraries to get a fancy dancy interface that makes PHB's happy is a sought-after skill, for good
or bad. Now that we rely more on half-ass libraries, much of "programming" is fiddling with dark-grey boxes until they work
good enough.
This drives me crazy, but I'm consoled somewhat by the fact that it will all be thrown out in five years anyway.
I've never been a huge fan of soviet cinema until I saw this great movie a few months ago.
Sure Eisenstein is a great director and he made wonderful classics but this is probably the
first Russian movie that I can identify with the characters since the Eisenstein movies and a
few others that I've seen like Earth (Alexander Dovzhenko, 1930) are very political and
showing me a culture and a way of life that is interesting and informative but that I can't
identify with.
This movie tells a simple story about a young couple (Veronika and Boris) that
is separated because Boris as to go to war. I think I love this movie so much because it is
so open and so full of humanity. It is also very poetic particularly when Boris is at the
front and he dreams about his girl back home.
But the thing that I admire the most is the
superior cinematography, the camera angles are stunning and the close-ups (very close) are
almost disturbing because you feel that you are spying on them or following them anywhere
they go.
Also, great scenes with hand held cameras and used wisely not just to use it but at
chosen moments to accentuate dramatic scenes or to show chaos during this time of war.
It
amaze me that a great reference for cinematography like that is not use or missuse in movies
today. If you can, try to catch the movie I am Cuba with the same great director and the same
wonderful cinematography, the story is political but unlike early Russian movies of
Eisenstein and such, the characters are warmer and you can identify with them.
August 14, 2017 Format: DVD | Verified Purchase
Very well shot and produced, great story with a big surprise ending.
Since my Wife is Russian, I have a new found interest in Russian movies. This is an early
film with the lead role being played by the same actor from "Moscow Does Not Believe In
Tears". The movie has a great story, very well shot and produced with a big surprise
ending.
January 20, 2003 Format: DVD | Verified Purchase
A beautiful, well acted movie.
This is one of my favorite movies. It's quality is typical of what I have come to expect
of a Criterion reconstruction. Something along the lines of HDTV black and white. It's that
good.
The story itself is situated at the begining of Russia's Great Patriotic War (WWII).
The story covers every inch of human behaviour including happiness, love, sorrow, deceit,
manipulation, and heroism against all odds.
The last quarter of the movie is a stunning
surprise, as it builds to an ending scene that is nothing less than a grand tribute to the
best of what makes us human.
Even hardcore war movie fans (like me) can expect blurred vision
at the end of this film. Not sappy at all, this film will strike a chord with viewers of any
country, and most generations. It is not a single view disk.
I don't even know if it has an English language soundtrack, as the tonality of the Russian
soundtrack combined with the very well produced English subtitles offers a great connection
to the film even for non Russian speaking people. Buy this disk, you wil enjoy it over and
over.
The movie tells the tragic story of three Frenchmen who a selected to be court marshaled for a Generals bad decision. It also
de
Paths of Glory takes place during World War I. The movie tells the tragic story of three Frenchmen who a selected to be court
marshaled for a Generals bad decision. It also depicts the differences between the old officer class and the foot soldier. In
one scene the General Paul Mireau is talking to Colonel Dax, played by Kirk Douglas about the projected losses when the French
Army will assault the "Ant Hill', a German held position that is well protected. The General is speaking in percentages, but Douglas
talks about the loss of him men. It is plain to see that the General does not really care of the common soldier. WWI saw the death
of the old way of fighting a war and the passing of the old Aristocrat Military leaders who saw war as a way of life. Near the
beginning of the movie Colonel Dax is referred to as one of the Best defense Lawyers in France. He uses all his skills to defend
the three men selected to die. Their fate has already been decided and the trial is only a formality. There is a battle fought
and lost . Watching the three men discuss their fate is painful. The final scene where a young German girl is forced to sing to
the French soldiers is very touching as the men begin to hum to the tune of the song. Some are moved to tears. I highly recommend
this movie.
April 23, 2015 Format: Amazon Video | Verified Purchase
This is a terrific anit-war pic
This is a terrific anit-war pic, one that doesn't bang you over the head with sentimentality or hold back on war's ugliness.
Although there are a lot of films I like that can be accused of glorifying the practice---namely, "The Longest Day", "Glory",
and "Patton" are a few of my favorites--this film stands with "Grand Illusion" and "All Quiet on the Western Front" at bringing
a more critical look at what may have been the least justifiable war of the 20th century (World War I). Kirk Douglas gives a terrific
performance in one of his earlier films, of a commander faced with sending his troops to complete a task he knows is impossible
and fighting the more delusional brass who are insisting upon it. Great performances by George McReady as a general more interested
in his career than the safety of his men, and Adolphe Anjou.
Unlike the consumer equipment, the web interface is informative and responsive. It is easy
to set up and works great. Additionally, I scanned the router and found no security issues;
my former wireless router had unpatched security issues, and Netgear had no plans to upgrade
the firmware. Meanwhile, Peplink still updates the firmware. Since it is enterprise grade, it
stays connected for a long time; I have purchased this wireless router for both my home and a
non-profit; neither unit has lost the connection, nor have they had to be rebooted. I am
surprised this unit is not sold at office supply stores, which only sell the same consumer
grade gear you can get anywhere else. I'm also surprised this unit isn't regularly reviewed
by the computer magazines since it is a higher quality piece of equipment with greater
stability than anything else offered at a consumer-level price point.
Neither Amazon nor Peplink indicates this comes with antennas; Amazon suggests the
purchase of antennas along with the unit. So imagine my surprise when there were antennas in
the box. However, there were no setup instructions in the box -- no paperwork of any kind. I
had to use my phone to get to the Peplink website and didn't find any instructions there
either. Finally, I went to their community forums and got the instructions. (Use an Ethernet
connection initially; browse to 192.168.50.1; UserId: admin; PWD: admin.)
December 27, 2016 Verified Purchase
Great purchase!
Received my MK3 router today. This is the first peplink product that I have dealt with. I
run a computer repair shop and was anxious to try this out to see if I can recommend the MK3
to customers. I am pretty happy with the setup and options that this thing comes with. Best
part about this router is that I can setup wifi networks with ease and then download the
configuration file for backup. No more having to retype all of that stuff for customers when
I have to reset to factory. The incontrol online portal is pretty awesome too. I don't think
I'll ever recommend a store bought router over this handy piece of equipment. Haven't tested
the failover WAN with my phone wifi yet but that's next on my list. A++ so far.
August 3, 2016 Verified Purchase
Great little unit.
Worked as discribed. I connected a Verizin Mifi to the pep link and it boost the signal
all around my house. 1800sq ft. Also got my security camera system hooked to it via Ethernet
and it broadcast clear video footage to the Internet so I can view on my phone.
Make sure you go into the settings and click "max signal boost" and turn on the external
antenna. It don't come set that way from factory.
August 3, 2017 Verified Purchase
So good I set up another one for family
Realized a family member had an old Belkin G series router. No updates, just waiting to
get hit. Ordered this from the 3G store once again (they are really great and friendly) and
had it shipped to their house. Other than them being stuck on Cox I was able to have
everything set up in 10 minutes. Two hours of rebooting the Cox modem to get the phone
service to remain on. Did the update to take the router to version 7 and no complaints about
speed (much faster to all devices), home and devices are much safer, and I can always reach
out to the 3G store staff should I have any issues (did I mention those folks are great and
very friendly!)
February 8, 2016 Verified Purchase
Very good router. Now offered in 801 a/c version. Bought it for it's good security &
support reputation.
UPDATED PREAMBLE TO MY OLDER REVIEW (4/21/2017).
The model currently marketed by Amazon (as of April 20th, 2017) is a "Mark 3" version of
the SOHO which now supports the latest "802.11 ac" Wi-Fi standard. It also now support
Gigabit ports. It only costs 20 dollars more than what I paid for my "N" version a year or so
back - well worth if for the potential performance gains. So this is good news for
consumers.
I'm happy as a clam with my older "N" version of this PEPLINK SOHO router. I'm writing
this "preamble" to my older review because Amazon insists on lumping all the Peplink SOHO
reviews together. I believe the newer MK3 version will provide backwards
compatibility/support for people who still have laptops / devices where their chipsets
transmit / receive 802.11n, 802.11g and 802.11b.
I would guess that, with the revisions in the Mark 3, IF you have Gigabit connectivity
from your ISP and also 802.11ac capable devices (tablet, laptop, gaming, etc) then 4 or 5
people can probably simultaneously "hog down" on 1080p movies and will not experience
stuttering.
My experience with routers and networking spans across multiple commercial (and consumer)
brands This router (RV320) impressed me.
It exceeds my expectations in terms of features:
• Number of VPN tunnels
• Gigabit ports
• Professional networking and configuration options
• Responsiveness of the routing and the router web-based interface
• Dual WAN capability with load balancing
• Professional firewall and associated security options
As you already know this is not a wireless router, however adding wireless to this router is
relatively minor compared to the benefits gained from injecting this router as part of your
solution and overall small business IT strategy.
This is a fan less (quiet) router that appears to stay up (for days now) without issues.
It packs powerful features that can significantly improve security of data in transit.
I always recommend upgrading router firmware (regardless of brand and model) to the latest
version to ensure you are working with the least buggy version.
Overall I would give this router a rating of 5 for its aesthetics value and outstanding
performance/security features that it brings to this business segment at its current
feature-to-cost ratio.
January 15, 2017 Verified Purchase
Cisco isn't what it used to be
This router is fraught with problems:
Poor throughput
Buggy QoS system (IP's that I band limited were using above their limits according to
Wireshark)
Only 2 priorities on QoS (this is not fine grained enough for most enterprise use)
Access rules that straight don't work (IP's that I banned were still communicating with my
network according to Wireshark)
It does have some good feature:
Failover dual-WAN interface works well and ensures constant uptime
Each switch port is highlly configurable (can set Ethernet speed, VLAN tag, mirror content,
etc)
Overall the poor quality software limits the capabilities of excellent hardware.
If you aren't comfortable with CLI nor do you know any Linux/Vyatta commands, this router
likely isn't for you.
However, I feel that this is one of the best routers out there (minus the batch with the
bad flash storage in them - of which I own three of). There are so many options that you can
configure/download for this piece of hardware, the possibilities are almost endless.
I use these for most of the clients I support (businesses with <100 endpoints) paired
with Unifi APs. I started this combo long before the Unifi USG came out, so I'll have to get
one of those to see if they are worth the hassle of a change out.
it will come with the latest pfSense(Username: admin; Password: pfsense). You also can
install OS and software package by yourself. F11 key boot from USB Drive. Delete key enter
BIOS.
This pc can be used as LAN or WAN Router firewall, proxy, wifi access point, VPN
appliance, DHCP Server,etc.
You might already have Git 1 on your
system because it is sometimes installed by default (or another administrator might have
installed it). If you have access to the system as a regular user, you can execute the
following command to determine whether you have Git installed:
If Git is installed, then the path to the git command is provided, as shown in
the preceding command. If it isn't installed, then you either get no output or an error like
the following:
[ocs@centos ~]# which git
/usr/bin/which: no git in
(/usr/lib64/qt-3.3/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:/bin:/sbin:/root/bin)
As an administrator on a Red Hat–based system, you could use the rpm
command to determine whether the git package has been installed:
If you are logged in as the root user on a Red Hat–based system, you can use the
following command to install Git:
yum install git
Consider installing the software package named git-all . This package includes
some additional dependency packages that add more power to Git. Although you might not make use
of these features in this introductory book, having them available when you are ready to
perform more advanced Git functions will be good.
I love these things and have 4
of them at my business. They only draw 2-10 watts, so the electricity cost is substantially less
than a full tower, and yet they can run full 30fps video on 2 4k monitors at the same time.
We run office, surf the web, run smaller (500mb or less) business applications these and they pay
for themselves within a year by the energy savings. Because they are so blazingly fast, (at least
compared to my laptop) they will also save us employee time.
Things I have learned owning them:
1. IF YOU FLIP A SWITCH THAT KILLS POWER TO A UNIT - EVEN WITH WINDOWS PROPERLY SHUTDOWN
BEFOREHAND - IT WILL CORRUPT THE MEMORY ON THE HD OR PARTITIONS UNLESS YOU HAVE TURNED OFF 'FAST
REBOOT' FROM THE POWER OPTIONS IN WINDOWS. THIS IS NOT COMMUNICATED ANYWHERE EXCEPT MINIXFORUM.
2. Because power loss can corrupt the memory, I recommend taking a disk image so you can easily
rebuild the unit if you have powerloss. It might also be a good idea to run the unit on a small
UPS. Longterm, Minix should add a capacitor so the units can shut down safely when there is a
power outage.
2 : Display port is only able to be converted to D-Sub VGA signal. HDMI Port can be converted to
DVI. So, if you want to run two monitors that have D-Sub (VGA) connectors, you will need
HDMI-DVI adapter and one Displayport- VGA Adapter. (Read: displayport CANNOT be converted to HDMI
then run through a HDMI-DVI ADAPTER)
Minix Z83-4 as a media center and central archive
By
S.
Hoff
on
December 16, 2016
Verified Purchase
For the price of $169.00 and how well it has worked for my
media center setup, it is a perfect little machine. We
have thousands of CD's in our music collection and I
wanted to create a system where we could archive the
entire library with have some space for video as a central
media center. It is certainly not a powerful machine by
any stretch if you have more intensive applications such
as games or video editing. However it excels as a media
device which will also easily handle everyday light use
for email, internet, office productivity.
What impresses me about the unit is how much hardware is
packed into the dimensions of 4.8" x 4.8" x 1.2" chassis.
Quad core Atom x7-Z8700 Cherry Trail 1.44 ghz to 1.84 ghz,
4 Gigabytes of DDR3 RAM, 32 gb SSD, Dual band Wifi AC,
Bluetooth 4.0, gigabit Ethernet, 3x2.0 and 1x3.0 USB
ports, HDMI and display port with discreet Broadwell Gen 8
graphics capable of supporting 4K displays, and Windows 10
64 bit. Just having Windows 10 is around $100 for an OEM
license.
When I was putting my media center system together in my
head, some of the major considerations was size, available
ports, responsiveness, and overall power consumption. I
looked at a couple of Intel HDMI stick computers, but the
less expensive unit ($131) had only 2 gb of RAM which is
too low for Windows 10 to operate without hiccups. The
next model of that series ($349.00) has a M3 processor and
more disc space (64 gb) than the Minix (32 gb). The first
was affordable, but unacceptable for my needs and the more
expensive model was too expensive and didn't have an
Ethernet connection.
Out of the box, the unit felt solid and the body being
both plastic and mostly aluminum in construction. Since
this is a passively cooled system, the aluminum helps
disperse the heat from the internal heatsink to the
outside. The processor has a TDP of less than 4 watts and
the overall unit operates from 2-10 watts from idle to
demanding applications. This was ideal because I wanted a
system that can be on 24 hours a day and the power
consumption level is negligible compared to a regular
desktop pc. It puts out very little heat as well!
Setup was attaching the power cord and my various
connections (Ethernet, external hard drive, USB keyboard,
external DVD drive) and startup was a breeze and Windows
10 operates pretty responsively considering the lower end
specifications. It booted up in about 30 seconds.
With the limited 32 gb SSD where the operating system
resides, I attached a 4 terabyte hard drive and the unit
is connected to my living room TV at 1080P. I used JRiver
Media Center 22 which is truly the most feature-rich
program for $50.00 (30 days free trial of a fully
functional program) and it helped me devise an even better
archival system that includes content streaming to any
device on the same network and over the internet on a
different network! That was an unexpected feature that I
didn't know about until I downloaded the program. I have
started ripping the CD's into lossless flac and the JRiver
program has been great with built in metadata editing,
cover art aquistion, and organizes all media . There are
free programs, but the ease and organization of JRiver
made me a convert and I will be paying for it once the 30
period has expired. It is an easy system to use and it
plays anything and at high quality. While I do have it
connected to the TV via HDMI, the media center it has
become only needs the television screen when ripping cd's.
After that everything, including metadata, can be
controlled and edited strictly from my phone or tablet. It
acts both as a remote to the system as well as media
streaming .
The Minix z83-4 has performed beyond my expectations and
is a bridge between a media streaming device like Roku or
Chromecast and a full-fledged Windows computer. For all
intents and purposes, even with hardware limitations, it
is a Windows 10 desktop. For my purposes, I am able to
play CD quality music from it to the stereo and I am also
able to stream my own library to up to 5 devices from any
remote location. Via Gizmo (free) or JRiver Remote ($9.99)
apps, JRiver will stream the original flac quality or
transcode it from low to high quality mp3. Both apps do
the same thing but the JRiver Remote looks more polished.
I tend to stream it at a transcoded 128 kbps if I'm using
mobile data but keep it at flac quality with wifi. With a
4 terabyte drive, it should be able to hold around 10,000
CD's as flac files. I am so pleased with this unit which
has made my dream media center possible for those of us
who have concerns about storing anything with cloud
services. Also, I wanted to get away from MP3's because
they lack warmth and classical music just sounds so much
better at full quality. The the small profile and low
power consumption gave me a discreet and efficient system
where a bulky desktop or laptop would have been too
cumbersome and expensive. For about $300, I was able to
put together a system that can stream any personal media I
archive to anywhere in the world if I have an internet
connection and a Windows, Apple, or Android device!
"... His book Animal Farm was a satire on Stalin and Trotsky and 1984 * gave readers a glimpse into what would happen if the government controlled every detail of a person's life, down to their own private thoughts. (*online bio). The battles in Europe were life and death with the goal of survival. ..."
"... We are now programed (propagandized) from pre school to the home for the elderly. We are initially taught as children, continue through college, and are forever conditioned by media such as TV, Movies, Radio, Newspapers and Advertising our entire lives. The younger generations are not taught to think independently or critically but instead indoctrinated with pre packaged knowledge 'propaganda' while older generations assess outcomes from a different perspective. There is as a result, a clash within the society which we are experiencing today. ..."
"... 1984 was about controlling the news and airwaves. Farenheit 451 was about burning history. The two go hand in hand. ..."
"... The similarity of the major networks evening "news" programs has given rise to a report that, each day, a list of ten or twelve "acceptable" news stories is prepared by British Intelligence in London for the networks, teletyped to Washington, where the CIA routinely approves it, and then delivered to the networks. ..."
"... The "selectivity" of the broadcasters has never been in doubt. Edith Efron, in "The News Twisters," (Manor Books, N.Y., 1972) cites TV Guide's interview with David Brinkley, April 11, 1964, with Brinkley's declaration that "News is what I say it is. It's something worth knowing by my standards." This was merely vainglorious boasting on Brinkley's part, as he merely reads the news stories previously selected for him. ..."
"... "REMEMBER THE MAINE!" That false flag headline is over a century old. ..."
"... Next time you are in a Best Buy.. go up to the Geek Squad guy and say... "So how does it feel to work for the CIA " ..."
"... Fuck the Washington Post. As Katherine Austin Fitts has suggested, it is essentially the CIA's Facebook wall. The same could be said of the NYT as well. ..."
"... James Rosen from Fox, he was at a state dept briefing with that little weasel Kirby, and Kirby stated that the negotiations over the Iran "deal" were all overt and "above the table." He remembered, tho, a briefing years earlier from the witch Psaki, who stated that sometimes, in interests of expedience, aspects of the negotiations are not made public. ..."
"... Rosen goes back to state dept video archives, finds out that his whole exchange with Psaki has been erased. Weasel Kirby, when asked how this happened, who did it, who ordered it, blames it on a "technical glitch." ..."
Snowflakes should also learn the depressing fact that Orwell's 1984 was not a complete work
of fiction, but a successful blueprint for full statist control.
Orwell was dying of tuberculosis when he wrote "1984" and passed away after its publication
in 1949. Once you have their attention and they have read the book, it is time to show snowflakes
the MANY obvious parallels between Orwellian concepts and modern society.
NEWSPEAK AND THOUGHT CRIME
You can start with soft targets like Newspeak (today's examples include gems like cis-gender
labels and other politically correct BS).
Now move to the "thought police" and thought crime in general.
Explain how thought and speech crime keep the globalist model alive and ticking by discouraging
independent thought and discussion.
Explain how state-financed institutions seek to implant these concepts at an early age and
onwards into university education.
Provide real-life newspeak and double-think examples, such as "police-action" "regime-change",
"coalition of the willing" and "collateral damage". Show how these are really just PC euphemisms
for "wars of aggression" and "murder". If you have a picture of a droned wedding party handy,
now is the time to use it.
Also mention people who have been silenced, prosecuted or even killed for committing "hate
crimes" or other political blasphemies. Explain how this often occurs while they are standing
up for or using their constitutionally protected human rights.
Name some of these people: Randy and Vicki Weaver, David Koresh, Marine Le Pen, Geert Wilders,
Julian Assange, William Binney, Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning
Show them how this trend is ongoing both in the USA and abroad, and is primarily being deployed
against populist politicians who promote more individual rights and reduced state control over
citizens. Ask them whether or not they can see a pattern developing here.
Above all, d on't waste time with cheap shots at identity politics and its absurd labelling.
This will just polarize the more brainwashed members of your audience. Stick to the nitty gritty
and irrefutable facts.
And be very careful here, because if they have insufficient vocabulary to understand or critique
what you are saying, you will lose them. Which was the whole point of Newspeak. Of course you
can use this failed learning opportunity to demonstrate just how successful the Newspeak program
has been.
TELESCREENS
Tell them about the real life "Telescreens" that can now listen to you, even when turned off.
Name one of their known manufacturers: Samsung and users: Central Intelligence Agency
Show them how these same telescreens are used to pump out constant lies from the MSM whenever
they are turned on. Name some of these organizations: CNN, BBC, MSNBC, FOX, etc.
MASS SURVEILLANCE and the "PANOPTICON"
Talk to them about the modern surveillance state and how it will always be abused by corporate
globalists and corrupt elites.
Describe how mass-surveillance service providers (MSSPs) and MSM stooges have become obscenely
rich and powerful as the real-life proles (who were 85% of the population in "1984") struggle
to put food on the table, pay their debts, find a decent job or buy a home. Tell them to find
out how much wealth is owned by 8 very wealthy people relative to the poorest half of the world,
and how this trend is accelerating. Name a few of them: Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Carlos Slim,
etc.
Show how the previously enacted, totalitarian US policies, programs and laws have been extensively
deployed, lobbied for, used and abused by the very Big-Brothers (Clinton and Obama) they so adored.
Even George W is swooning progressives again.
Name some of these policies, programs and laws: Patriot Act, SOPA, US Telecommunications Act,
FISA, Echelon, PRISM, and Umbrage
Explain why this whole surveillance system, its operators and proponents must be completely
dismantled and reined in or imprisoned, unless we wish all whistle blowers, dissidents and normal
citizens to end up like Winston Smith.
ETERNAL WAR AND THE BROTHERHOOD
Explain how eternal war keeps the proles from getting too restless and questioning their leaders.
How it leads to modern strategic idiocies like "Osama Bin Laden and the Mujahedeen are steadfast
allies against Russian totalitarianism, which is why the CIA needs to give them Stingers" (aka
Operation Cyclone). Or the illegal provision of arms and funds to countries with questionable
human rights records (KSA, Iran, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Israel.....)
Explain how this leads to, nay requires, state-propagated lies like WMD to justify illegal
military actions against sovereign nation states like Iraq, Libya and Syria.
Show how 9/11 was used to target a former-ally Osama and his Taliban brotherhood and prepare
the terrain for eternal war, even though the real criminals were actually in DC, Riyadh and other
world capitals. Explain how letting Osama escape from Tora Bora was all part of this intricate
plan for the PNAC, until he finally outlived his usefulness as a bogeyman. If they disagree, ask
for their counter-argument and proofs.
Explain how these same criminals then made a financial killing when our real life Oceania went
to war bigly with Eastasia. How this resulted in over a million civilian deaths (half of them
children), around 80,000 terrorists and perhaps 10,000 uniformed soldiers/contractors. Show them
videos where US officials justify this slaughter as "worth it", unimportant or irrelevant. Ask
what kind of individuals could even say these things or let them happen. If they can't answer,
name a few: Madeleine Albright, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.
At this point, you may need to take a break as listeners will soon have trouble distinguishing
between real-life events and those in Orwell's book.
WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
Next, explain how real, imagined or simulated terrorist outrages can be manipulated to influence
electorates. This is done by creating or allowing atrocities that frighten citizens into seeking
"safety". These citizens will then vote in corrupt, globalist leaders who promise to keep them
safe. These same leaders can then curtail freedoms in their previously democratic, freedom-loving
nation states. New terrorist threats can always be used to justify more restrictions on free movement
and state-mandated invasions of personal privacy.
If your snowflakes don't agree with this, name some leaders responsible for bad laws, policies
and the ensuing restrictions on civil liberties:
Tony Blair, George W Bush, Angela Merkel, Theresa May and Francois Hollande.
Name some events as well: Oklahoma City, 911, 7/7 Sandy Hook, 11-M
Also mention that the USA has not waged a single legal, constitutional, Congress-declared war
since 1945. But that the USA has been involved in hot or cold wars for all but 5 of the past 71
years.
HISTORY AND BACKGROUND
Tell them that Orwell's original book title was actually "1944" (already past), but that his
publisher vetoed this choice saying it could hurt sales.
Then explain how 1944-45 was actually the perfect crucible for the divisive, right-left political
paradigm we live in today and many of the concepts presciently described in Orwell's chilling
masterpiece.
EPILOGUE
Tell them everything, until their brains hurt, their eyes water and their ears bleed.
Eventually even the iciest snowflakes will get it.
Of course, some will cry, and some will have temper tantrums and meltdowns.
But a few might just wake up, start reading real books and get a proper education.
This is when the healing can begin.
Those thinking a career in gender-diversity-issue management is still the way forward may figure
it out later, God help them. Until then, we should just pity them.
Ira Levin's "This Perfect Day" (1970) is from the same dystopian mold. In the late Eighties,
my then teenage daughter kept reading it, till it literally fell apart.
How technology has "advanced"! People in this phantasy had to wear bracelets with which they
checked in and out of buildings and areas. Reality always seems to surpass the imaginative powers
of SF-writers.
Your government is not populated by reptilians from outer space. The politicians and the bankers,
lawyers are YOUR sons and daughters. You gave birth to them, you educated them, you taught them
their values.
YOU pull the trigger when the government says KILL! YOU vote Democrat or Republican EVERY TIME.
Yet you have the temerity to blame them when you don't get what you wanted.
Scum,
Hitler didn't kill anyone as fas as we know, in WWII. People [YOU] killed people. You blame
the Jews because the wars they incite you to fight result in blowback to you. Why do you blame
them because YOU jumped when they said JUMP! YOU are the ones flying the fighter jets and firing
the tank shells against foreign populations living 10,000 miles away from your land, and who have
not attacked you. NO ONE does anything unless they wanted to, in the first place. In any case,
YOU are responsible for YOUR actions. This we all know.
Even your own money the US dollar is illegal according to your own US Constitution (Article
1, Section 10) yet you commit mass murder and mass torture throughout the world in order to impose
it on everyone?
The liberals are promoting the book (Nineteen Eighty-Four). IMO, that's great! Orwell's book
is a classic and accurately describes features in our current society.
The downside is that the liberals won't understand it . They are promoting the idea that Trump
is a fascist. They don't see that they themselves are fascists (albeit a different brand of fascism).
Ironic that the book could help them see past the indoctrinated haze of their perspective, but
it won't. The future, from my perspective, is a boot stamping on a human face forever.
I read 1984 in 1960 as a freshman in HS. Spent the next 24 years waiting. I don't remember
details but I do remember it was upsetting at the time to picture my future as depicted by Orwell.
It might be more interesting to me now to go back to the publishing date and study the paradigm
that Orwell lived under to get a perspective of his mindset. He wasn't a US citizen. He was born
in India, moved to England with his mother, had little contact with his father, was sickly and
lonely as a child and suffered from tuberculosis as an adult, served in Burma for five years as
a policeman, fought Soviet backed Communsts in the Spanish Civil War, fought Facism, believed
in Democratic socialism or Classless socialism.
His book Animal Farm was a satire on Stalin and Trotsky and 1984 * gave readers a glimpse into
what would happen if the government controlled every detail of a person's life, down to their
own private thoughts. (*online bio). The battles in Europe were life and death with the goal of
survival.
The European cauldron produced or nurtured, IMO, the seeds of most social evils that exist
today. In Orwell's era society was changing and reacting to the Machine age which was followed
by the Atomic age, the Space age and to the current Information age. He died in 1950 but in his
environment, the Machine age is where he related. The forces (of evil) at work in his era still
exist today with the additions of the changes brought by the later ages. We don't contend with
the physical (at least not initially) conquerors such as the Genghis Khan, Mohamed, Alexander,
Roman conquest etc. of the past but the compulsion of others to control our lives still exists
just in different forms. We as a society react or comply and have the same forces to deal with
as did Orwell but also those that resulted in the later eras. 1984 was actually the preview of
the information age that Orwell didn't experience.
We are now programed (propagandized) from pre school to the home for the elderly. We are initially
taught as children, continue through college, and are forever conditioned by media such as TV,
Movies, Radio, Newspapers and Advertising our entire lives. The younger generations are not taught
to think independently or critically but instead indoctrinated with pre packaged knowledge 'propaganda'
while older generations assess outcomes from a different perspective. There is as a result, a
clash within the society which we are experiencing today.
Through the modern (at least recorded) ages the underlying force no matter what era humans
lived through was the conflict of...religion. In the name or names of God and whose god is the
true god and which god will rule. Even in the most 'godless' societies it is the underlying force.
There are many who do not believe in god or a god and by extension should or do not believe in
satin. Good vs Evil? It's always there, although we are encouraged not to mention it?
Can't say I need another go at 1984 from Costco but I do need another indoor/outdoor vacuum
and right now they have one with a manufacturers discount of $5. See you there!
1984 is really just a knock off of Evgeny Zemyatin's "We," which is frankly a better account
of dystopian authoritarianism from someone who wrote shortly after the Russian Revolution.
This is not true. Orwell's book touched on major points, such as the destruction of people's
ability to communicate real ideas by perversion and simplification of language, that are not discussed
elsewhere. It is a unique and disturbing view of totalitarian regimes.
The similarity of the major networks evening "news" programs has given rise to a report that,
each day, a list of ten or twelve "acceptable" news stories is prepared by British Intelligence
in London for the networks, teletyped to Washington, where the CIA routinely approves it, and
then delivered to the networks.
The "selectivity" of the broadcasters has never been in doubt. Edith Efron, in "The News Twisters,"
(Manor Books, N.Y., 1972) cites TV Guide's interview with David Brinkley, April 11, 1964, with
Brinkley's declaration that "News is what I say it is. It's something worth knowing by my standards."
This was merely vainglorious boasting on Brinkley's part, as he merely reads the news stories
previously selected for him.
Fuck the Washington Post. As Katherine Austin Fitts has suggested, it is essentially the CIA's
Facebook wall. The same could be said of the NYT as well.
Bezos has no problem selling "1984" on Amazon.
https://tinyurl.com/hdmhu75 He's collecting the sales price and sticking it in his pocket. He's not making a joke out of
it. Bezos is a lunatic. The Washington Post is full of shit. End of story.
James Rosen from Fox, he was at a state dept briefing with that little weasel Kirby, and Kirby
stated that the negotiations over the Iran "deal" were all overt and "above the table." He remembered,
tho, a briefing years earlier from the witch Psaki, who stated that sometimes, in interests of
expedience, aspects of the negotiations are not made public.
Rosen goes back to state dept video archives, finds out that his whole exchange with Psaki
has been erased. Weasel Kirby, when asked how this happened, who did it, who ordered it, blames
it on a "technical glitch."
It's a slippery fuckin slope. Only now the progressives are finding relevance in 1984?
"Next time you're at Costco, you can pick up a jumbo bag of Cheetos and a copy of '1984.' Doubleplus
good!"
That's how the Washington Post opened its quick little
entry on Wednesday. Continuing, Ron Charles, editor of Book World for the Post , wrote:
"The discount store is now stocking Orwell's classic novel along with its usual selection of current
bestsellers."
If the significance of the fact that a dystopian masterwork can now be purchased alongside a three-ton
bag of cheese puffs instantly strikes you, it should. Strangely, though, Charles and the Post don't
seem to see it.
In fact, it seemed to be a joke to them. The entry closed in the manner it opened. With humor:
"Appropriately, Costco is offering a reprint of the 2003 edition of '1984,' which has a forward
by Thomas Pynchon. That reclusive satirist must love the idea of hawking Orwell's dystopian novel
alongside towers of discounted toilet paper and radial tires. SHOPPING IS SAVING."
In the one and only instance Charles even approached something that could be considered commentary,
he linked the surge in the book's sales to "alternative" news items :
"Last month, amid talk of 'alternative facts' from the Trump administration, Signet Classics announced
that it had reprinted 500,000 copies, about twice the novel's total sales in 2016."
Note Charles was certain to use the word "alternative" when mentioning Trump. Why? Very clearly,
"fake news" is the man's go-to phrase when speaking of the media. So why go with "alternative" instead?
Hell, the Post
itself was the driving force behind the "fake news" frenzy in the first place.
I could go on about how this is the Washington Post , corporate media juggernaut, attempting,
rather pathetically, to poison the notion of "alternative" in the minds of its readers - or, I should
say, what's left of them - but that's not really what this is about.
What it's really about is journalism. The fact that "1984" is being sold at Costco, the fact that
demand for the classic tale has
skyrocketed , is significant. It's societal. And journalists are supposed to write about things
like that.
And what does the Post do? They make a joke of it.
This is an organization that, as recently as January, has been
busted publishing false news stories. You would think that with its credibility among a growing
division of society hanging on by a thread - at best - the Post would turn an event like this into
social commentary. This was an opportunity to speak about a changing world.
But instead, the Post went for laughs.
Let it sink in, friends. George Orwell's "1984," a dystopian tale about a society being crushed
under the boot of authoritarian regime, is, once again, flying off bookshelves. To the extent that
you can now get it at Costco. Let the significance of that truly dig in deep.
Meanwhile, the Washington Post is talking about Cheetos and toilet paper.
It is truly Orwellian that the sheep only take interest in Orwell when someone challenges Big
Brother. If I had a Facebook account, I'd post this article straight away.
It is truly Orwellian that the sheep only take interest in Orwell when someone challenges Big
Brother. If I had a Facebook account, I'd post this article straight away.
Well, after all the shit is going down, White House is definitely in distress. Trump gets a
taste of his own medicine as he's grabbed by the pussy from all intelligence agencies directions.
Read 'Little Heroes' by Norman Spinrad. It's like the dude had a trip to the future which is
our present, a completly broken society dominated by corporations exploiting the masses of hedonist
mindless snowflakes. In my humble oppinion perfect companion to Orwell's 84.
[...
In the future the class divide between capitalist and worker will have widened to become a
virtually unbridgeable chasm. In HG Wells' The Time Machine (1895) this division has become so
extreme that humanity had split into two species.
The way to keep the underclass under control is to feed them mass-produced pseudo-culture.
If - as in Orwell's 1984 (1949) - the technocratic ruling class can get some kind of computer
or machine to generate this product, so much the better.
In the future, 20th century entertainment forms like TV and movies will have been superseded
by more direct experiences that, ideally, feed directly into the brain or, at least - as with
the 'feelies' in Huxley's Brave New World (1932) - stimulate more senses than simply the visual
and auditory.
And now, here's a book that uses all these themes in one hit, and builds on these classic foundations
by adding rock & roll to the mix.
Set in the early years of the 21st century, it shows us an America decimated by devaluation,
where unemployment is commonplace and rock music is firmly in the grip of accountants and electro-nerds
producing synthesized superstars to keep the proles contented.
Once they notice you, Jason realized, they never completely close the file. You can never get
back your anonymity. It is vital not to be noticed in the first place. -- Philip K Dick
"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control
the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words."
P.K.D., How To Build A Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later
Philip was spot on decades before the advent of the CIA's infestation of cell phones and other
electronic devices.
"There will come a time when it isn't 'They're spying on me through my phone' anymore. Eventually,
it will be 'My phone is spying on me'." Philip K. Dick
"The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above
the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within
the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. 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."
As usual, the face of Emmanuel Goldstein, the Enemy of the People, had flashed on to the screen.
There were hisses here and there among the audience. The little sandy-haired woman gave a squeak
of mingled fear and disgust. Goldstein was the renegade and backslider who once, long ago (how
long ago, nobody quite remembered), had been one of the leading figures of the Party, almost on
a level with Big Brother himself, and then had engaged in counter-revolutionary activities, had
been condemned to death, and had mysteriously escaped and disappeared.
That's actually a waste of time at this point. If anything read Anthony Suttons Wall Street
series for free on the internet, or stay here. You already know more than Orwell will teach you
at this point. Unless your a mouth breather or blind from herpes of the eyeball. Apparently that
is something contracted at birth.
All wars are bankers wars. You can sum 1984 up to that. Actually they didn't even cover that.
They just covered mechanisms. Actually they didn't even cover that, just symptoms.
You're fine. Their lists don't have enough enforcers to do jack shit. By the time the first
raid occurs, all hell would break loose and they'll all die.
The ones most relevant in my mind are the logistics and support as well as the "action" guys
(using that term very loosely).
The military, the CIA and a few other agencies have trained combat arms types that are effective.
The rest are at various stages of competency. In any event, they still don't have enough competent
troops by a long shot. The logistics tail is also very wide and vulnerable.
away humility and restraint. It fosters a sense of
entitlement.
Chris G
said...
February
24, 2017 at 04:48 AM
On the Crooked Timber piece: Quiggin makes a very astute
observation about 'propertarians' and Divine Providence in
his concluding paragraphs. If one takes it as a matter of
faith (religious or secular) that human activity inherently
leads to good outcomes that'll be a huge influence on how you
engage with the world. It blows away humility and restraint.
It fosters a sense of entitlement.
RC AKA Darryl, Ron said in reply to
Chris G
...
Yep. All roads lead to scapegoating. The anti-social
capabilities of base desires and greed are often paled in
comparison to those of detached indifference supported by
abstract high-mindedness. For example, both sides can blame
the robots for the loss of decent blue collar jobs.
RC AKA Darryl, Ron said in reply to RC AKA Darryl, Ron...
Not sure that there are "both sides" any more in elite
circles. There are at least two types though. There is very
little presence among elites on the progressive side.
Reply
Friday, February 24, 2017 at 04:58 AM
Chris G
said in reply to RC AKA Darryl, Ron...
Hard to call this related but worth reading, Why Nothing
Works Anymore -
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/02/the-singularity-in-the-toilet-stall/517551/
Reply
Friday, February 24, 2017 at 05:11 AM
RC AKA Darryl, Ron said in reply to
Chris G
...
[THANKS! This was LOL funny:]
"...When spun on its ungeared
mechanism, an analogous, glorious measure of towel appears
directly and immediately, as if sent from heaven..."
[This was highly relevant to today's lead article "The
Jobs Americans Do:"]
..."Precarity" has become a popular way to refer to
economic and labor conditions that force people-and
particularly low-income service workers-into uncertainty.
Temporary labor and flexwork offer examples. That includes
hourly service work in which schedules are adjusted ad-hoc
and just-in-time, so that workers don't know when or how
often they might be working. For low-wage food service and
retail workers, for instance, that uncertainty makes
budgeting and time-management difficult. Arranging for
transit and childcare is difficult, and even more costly, for
people who don't know when-or if-they'll be working.
Such conditions are not new. As union-supported
blue-collar labor declined in the 20th century, the service
economy took over its mantle absent its benefits. But the
information economy further accelerated precarity. For one
part, it consolidated existing businesses and made efficiency
its primary concern. For another, economic downturns like the
2008 global recession facilitated austerity measures both
deliberate and accidental. Immaterial labor also
rose-everything from the unpaid, unseen work of women in and
out of the workplace, to creative work done on-spec or for
exposure, to the invisible work everyone does to construct
the data infrastructure that technology companies like Google
and Facebook sell to advertisers...
[This was very insightful into its own topic of the
separation of technology "from serving human users to pushing
them out of the way so that the technologized world can
service its own ends," but I would rather classify that as
serving owners of proprietary technology rights.]
...Facebook and Google, so the saying goes, make their users
into their products-the real customer is the advertiser or
data speculator preying on the information generated by the
companies' free services. But things are bound to get even
weirder than that. When automobiles drive themselves, for
example, their human passengers will not become masters of a
new form of urban freedom, but rather a fuel to drive the
expansion of connected cities, in order to spread further the
gospel of computerized automation. If artificial intelligence
ends up running the news, it will not do so in order to
improve citizen's access to information necessary to make
choices in a democracy, but to further cement the supremacy
of machine automation over human editorial in establishing
what is relevant...
[THANKS! It was an exceptionally good article in places
despite that it wandered a bit off into the ozone at times.]
It hits on one of the reasons
why I am less skeptical than Darryl that AI will succeed, an
soon, in all kinds of fields: it may remain stupid in some
ways, but we will adapt to it.
Consider phone answering services. Its simple speech
recognition, which was once at the forefront of artificial
intelligence, has made them ubiquityous. Yet Dante would need
a new circle for a person who said "I just heard you say
5...3...7...is this correct?"
Some of these adaptations subtract from our quality of
life, as the article nicely describes. Some add to it, e.g we
no longer spend time at the mall arranging when and where to
meet if we get separated. Some are interesting and hard to
evaluate, e.g. Chessplayers' relation to the game has changed
radically since computers became good at it.
And there is one I find insidious: the homogeneization of
human activity and even thought. The information we ALL get
on a subject will be what sorts to the top among google
answers; the rest might as well not exist, much like
newspaper articles buried in a back page.
On the political front, Winston will not be necessary,
nobody will click through to the old information, we will all
just know that we were always at war with Eurasia.
And on the economic front, the same homogeneization, with
giant multinationals and crossmarketing deals. You'll be in a
country with great food, like Turkey, get into your rented
Toyota, say "I want dinner", and end up at a Domino's because
they have a deal with Toyota.
The middle third of the twentieth century was hysterical
about the totalitarian state
And the erasure of micro scale cultural heritage
That seems laughable since at least 1965 as lots of old
long dormant memes
Revived in these frightfully "totalized " civil societies
The Motions of human Society reveal underlying dialectics
not mechanics
Reply
Friday, February 24, 2017 at 09:55 AM
Paine said in reply to Paine...
"1984 " is way past it's sell by date
Much like Leviathan and the declaration of independence
Reply
Friday, February 24, 2017 at 09:59 AM
cm said in reply to
Julio
...
There was probably more than one movie about this topic -
people not happy with their "peaceful" but bland, boring, and
intellectually stifling environment.
Huxley had deeply felt apprehensions about the future the developed world might make for
itself. From these, he made some warnings in his writings and talks. In a 1958 televised
interview conducted by journalist
Mike Wallace
,
Huxley outlined several major concerns: the difficulties and dangers of world overpopulation; the
tendency toward distinctly hierarchical social organisation; the crucial importance of evaluating
the use of technology in mass societies susceptible to wily persuasion; the tendency to promote
modern politicians to a naive public as well-marketed commodities.
[32]
Execute Commands Simultaneously
on Multiple Servers
Run the same command at the same time on
multiple systems, simplifying administrative tasks and reducing
synchronization problems
.
If you have multiple servers with similar or identical configurations
(such as nodes in a cluster), it's often difficult to make sure the contents
and configuration of those servers are identical. It's even more difficult
when you need to make configuration modifications from the command line,
knowing you'll have to execute the exact same command on a large number of
systems (better get coffee first). You could try writing a script to perform
the task automatically, but sometimes scripting is overkill for the work to
be done. Fortunately, there's another way to execute commands on multiple
hosts simultaneously.
A great solution for this problem is an excellent tool called
multixterm
,
which enables you to simultaneously open
xterms
to any number of systems, type your commands in a single
central window and have the commands executed in each of the
xterm
windows you've started.
Sound appealing? Type once, execute many-it sounds like a new pipelining
instruction set.
This command will open
ssh
connections to
host1
and
host2
(
Figure
4-1
). Anything typed in the area labeled "stdin window" (which is
usually gray or green, depending on your color scheme) will be sent to both
windows, as shown in the figure.
As you can see from the sample command, the
–xc
option stands for execute command, and it must be followed by the command
that you want to execute on each host, enclosed in double quotation marks.
If the specified command includes a wildcard such as
%n
, each hostname that follows the
command will be substituted into the command in turn when it is executed.
Thus, in our example, the commands
ssh host1
and
ssh host2
were both executed by
multixterm
, each within its own
xterm
window.
See
Also
man
multixterm
"Enable Quick telnet/SSH Connections
from the Desktop"
[Hack #41]
"Disconnect Your Console Without Ending
Your Session"
[Hack #34]
Please note that there are multiple colors of this keyboard and they are treated by Amazon
as separate products. Most reviews are for silver and red variants.
It looks like a standard Pc laptop keyboard . With the standard Windows-style layout as well Esc
and F1-F10 key can be pressed directly without using function keys like on many other keyboards. Attractive
for Windows 8 and 10 users.
Before you use the keyboard for the first time you should charge it and it may take a couple
of hours to charge for the first time. The LED charge light turns red while the keyboard is charging
and go out when it is fully charged. If the battery becomes low the power LED will blink orange to indicate
that it is time to recharge the battery.
The pairing button is at the right upper corner. Pairing is fast and reliable with 7" Samsung tablet
that I tested. Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V work, which alone justifies the price of the keyboard :-)
Android looks almost usable for light office work with this keyboard.
The keyboard has of/off switch at the right upper corner (on the side).
Notable quotes:
"... It is thin and small enough to fit over the top of my laptop keyboard, has a good response
time, has a light for 'Caps Lock', and doesn't take too long to wake up after sleeping. ..."
"... I really appreciate that it has the F1-12 keys, as well as the functionality of a larger keyboard
(print, insert, delete, home, end, etc.). ..."
"... I thought I had a bad one until I realized that I had to click the button that looks like WiFi
in the corner. ..."
IMPORTANT: I was able to connect it to Microsoft Lumia 950 smartphone. You need to press the pairing
button on keyboard and then phone recognizes the keyboard and pairs with it. Before that it was
listed as an Accessory and as there were several of them it was not clear which is what.
NOTE: that there are multiple colors of this keyboard and they are (incorrectly) treated by Amazon
as separate products. Most reviews are for silver and red variants.
From my point of view (and probably from the point of view most of PC users) you want a keyboard
that looks like a standard PC laptop keyboard. This keyboard fits the bill with the only difference
I noticed is that function key is duplicated on the right side of the keyboard. How many keys work with function key pressed I do not know as I did not tested it with the Windows
computer yet, but PgDn, PgUp, Home and End work OK. Selection using shift and arrow keys also
work.
It is extremely attractive option for Android users who want to use Android for light office work
(It not very usable for working with long emails without the keyboard). What is the most important
is that with this keyboard you can use Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V and all similar keys known to
Windows users. That alone justifies the price of the keyboard :-)
I also noticed that on Android the menu key works OK producing menu. I experienced no delay in
displaying symbols. Keys work OK and a spaced like on full size keyboard so there is almost no
adaptation process.
Now you can use Android for working with your email which is not the easy using touch screen alone.
You can add mouse if you wish too. I think this combination beats Chomebook. And I'm not that
sure that it makes sense to overpay for it, if tablet with keyboard and mouse are good enough.
Especially, if you understand that you are paying for the privilege of letting Google harvest
even more of your personal data :-)
Before you use the keyboard for the first time you should charge it for a couple of hours. The
LED charge light turns red while the keyboard is charging and go out when it is fully charged.
Then you need to switch it on (The keyboard has of/off switch at the right upper corner (on the
side)) and pair with the device you use. The pairing button is at the right upper corner above
power light. Pairing is fast and reliable with 7" Samsung tablet that I tested.
If the battery becomes low the power LED will blink red
I just got this keyboard about a week ago, and it has been wonderful so far! I'm using it as
a replacement for my laptop keyboard after shorting out a few keys with windex... I did a lot
of research and this keyboard does everything I wanted it too.
It is thin and small enough to fit over the top of my laptop keyboard, has a good response
time, has a light for 'Caps Lock', and doesn't take too long to wake up after sleeping.
I also needed a keyboard that was rechargeable since i didn't want to constantly replace batteries,
and I needed something fairly mobile.
I think the key response time is a little slower than my laptop keyboard and sometimes a keystroke
gets missed because I didn't press down hard enough or in the center of the key. These problems
don't happen often enough to be annoying though. I'm typing this review on it right now!
The keys are closer together than a traditional keyboard, but aren't too close that I hit more
than one at once (i guess i have fairly thin fingers though).
The only part that took a lot of getting used to is that the Fn and Ctrl keys on the bottom
left are switched on this as compared to my laptop's keyboard. This keyboard has Fn in the bottom
left corner with the Ctrl key to the right of it. Even though, I am basically used to this now
and I've had the keyboard for about a week.
This review is being typed with this keyboard. Its been used for a year and a half and I've
been quite pleased with it. The only downside is that every once in a while it will register a
keypress and input that character multiple times. For example, an "a" might become "aaaaaa." This
doesn't happen too often, or it would have been returned long ago.
I really appreciate that it has the F1-12 keys, as well as the functionality of a larger
keyboard (print, insert, delete, home, end, etc.). It's been used exclusively with a nexus
10 and moto x 2014.
Zora Abernathy on January 17, 2016
Definitely Reccomend
Absolutely love it! The keyboard has arrow keys and such. However, I thought I had a bad
one until I realized that I had to click the button that looks like WiFi in the corner.
The layout of this keyboard is
based on Apple's keyboard. That becomes a problem for Windows users, especially
gamers, because of the location of the ctrl/control key. But that can easily be fixed by
remapping keys.
Do you trust online reviews? Now that Amazon is suing more than 1,000 people who allegedly offered
to write glowing product reviews for cash, you might reasonably be concerned.
Turns out, deceptive reviews are commonplace online — and so are doubts about them. The research
organization Mintel found that 57 percent of surveyed consumers are suspicious of companies or products
that only have positive online reviews. And 49 percent believe companies probably give incentives
for online reviews.
Fortunately, there are a few good techniques that can help you tell truth from fiction.
___
DON'T TRUST YOURSELF
A team of researchers at Cornell University created a computer algorithm for detecting fake hotel
reviews by analyzing the language used in legitimate and phony write-ups. The computer program, Review
Skeptic, is accurate about 90 percent of the time, but humans alone performed poorly at determining
the truth teller.
"People are terrible," said professor Claire Cardie, who helped develop the system. "I was very surprised.
We just cannot tell the difference much more than chance."
___
LISTEN TO THE LANGUAGE
Beware of extremes — overly enthusiastic or negative reviews are red flags. False reviews tend to
use more extreme language to get their message across. So if someone says "It is the most comfortable
bed ever," perhaps in all caps, take pause.
Additionally, the Cornell researchers found that when it comes to hotels, fake reviewers tended not
to talk about the spatial details — such as the floor or bathroom. Instead, they focused on the reason
they were there, such as describing a recent fake vacation or business trip. In practice, this makes
sense because someone who has never been to a location might have a tough time describing it accurately.
___
JUNK THE JARGON
On the flip side, beware of recommendations that read like product manuals. Reviews that repeat the
full product name or model number may be an attempt to game the search engine system. And if they
use excessive technical or marketing jargon, odds are they aren't providing a genuine review — most
real people don't talk like that.
___
REVIEW THE REVIEWER
Check out the profile of the person providing the review, said Louis Ramirez, senior features writer
with online deal site DealNews. If they only write reviews for a particular company, that's a huge
warning sign they could have a vested interest in that business. Some sites let people upload pictures
of the item they bought, which can help add credibility.
Amazon verifies some of its reviewers, indicating they actually bought the product (although some
of the people it's suing allegedly found ways around that). Some other sites only allow posts from
people who've made a purchase there. Look closely on the site for their review policies.
___
PAY ATTENTION TO DETAIL
If you think about your own experiences with an unpleasant experience or product, you can probably
explain exactly why it was bad. Ramirez suggests if you're unsure about a review, put more stock
in someone who provides details of why they didn't like a product ("Oh, the battery only lasted four
hours") that in someone who complains more generally ("I hated this laptop. It was horrible").
The Last but not LeastTechnology is dominated by
two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand ~Archibald Putt.
Ph.D
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In reality, standing alone with election fraud notwithstanding , last October's lockstep decision by an entire news industry to suppress the starkly headline-worthy scandals around Hunter Biden's laptop, along with all other negative stories about Joe Biden, accounts directly for 17% of Biden voters who would have abandoned him " had they known the facts about one or more of these news stories." Because those lost votes "would have changed the outcome in all six of the swing states won by Joe Biden," re-electing Trump, burying those stories was first-degree election interference.
Eric Hoffer in 1967, in the Oval Office , visiting President Lyndon Baines Johnson
(1951), is a work in social psychology which discusses the psychological causes of fanaticism. It is widely considered a classic.
) As Hoffer puts it near the end of his work: "All mass movements irrespective of the doctrine they preach and the program they project, breed fanaticism, enthusiasm, fervent hope, hatred, and intolerance." (p. 141)
If you are in IT and are not familiar with Archibald Putt, I suggest you stop reading this blog post, RIGHT NOW, and go buy the book Putt's Law and the Successful Technocrat. How to Win in the Information Age . Putt's Law , for short, is a combination of Dilbert and The Mythical Man-Month . It shows you exactly how managers of technologists think, how they got to where they are, and how they stay there. Just like Dilbert, you'll initially laugh, then you'll cry, because you'll realize just how true Putt's Law really is. But, unlike Dilbert, whose technologist-fans tend to have a revulsion for management, Putt tries to show the technologist how to become one of the despised. Now granted, not all of us technologists have a desire to be management, it is still useful to "know one's enemy."
Senate House, London , where Orwell's wife worked at the Ministry of Information , was his model for the Ministry of Truth
