The amorphous character assigned to the new world of terrorism justifies an ever-enlarging power of state.

Don’t fear enemies; fear those who tell you about enemies

Real patriotism is a commitment to the wellness of all fellow creatures.

Commitment to a flag, to a piece of paper, or to a myth of exceptionalism, is a cognitive trap sold to you, that you may dance in the game of global domination, and hate your brothers whose wellbeing stands in the way of wealth for the few

We live within an economic system that is designed to allow the exploration of the many in the service of the few.

Yet we are surprised that we have mediocre healthcare, the greatest private debt in the world, longer working hours than any other civilized nation, 3.5 million people in prison, 850 military bases around the globe, decaying infrastructure, and millions of poor, hungry, and undereducated citizens.

The glory of a civilization should be measured in its benefit to the populous, not in its willingness to step upon the people in the service of the masters.

A normie gets a paycheck for doing his job all day.

**Proof of work**

A 1%er receives rents for controlling the means of production.

**Proof of stake**

Chris Hedges: Journalists Abandoned Julian Assange and Slit Their Own Throats

https://www.mintpressnews.com/chris-hedges-journalists-abandoned-julian-assange-slit-throats/285250/

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.

— George Orwell, 1984

This is excellent. On many occasions I have wrestled with the desire to start a cooperative of some sort. Maybe a public internet library. Maybe a homeschooling cooperative. Maybe a drainage company. I don’t know; it’s the structure that frees workers from wage slavery that most interests me.

One of the problems I run into is the management of funds and finding a voting structure that doesn’t rely on a centralized party to approve community decisions. I can’t wait to try this out

“This is how the financial sector operates. It tricks the host economy’s brain—the educational system and the government as planner and lawmaker—to make it think that the way to grow is to promote a financial oligarchy.”

Finance Capitalism and its Discontents.

Michael Hudson

#bitcoin erodes the financial oligarchy

The University has been remodeled from a study model, and is quickly becoming a credentialing model. Man’s desire to improve his life makes him a ready market for the elite to sell those credentials to him for a life of debt.

The perpetual need to hop investments is past. Mathematics, usability, and glaring improvement on the shortcomings of the largest industry (finance), make Bitcoin growth inevitable

That’s the success of American Capitalism. To prioritize business profits over social good. That’s what it’s all about.

Let us question all the establishments that are so ingrained in our lives that their existence is assumed to be normal, rather than parasitic.

“the West faces the dreadful prospect that it could become the standard-bearer of a new regime type: a socially totalizing, surveilling, information-monopolizing, biopolitical, and martial regime disguised in the feel-good casing of liberal democracy”

https://www.agonmag.com/p/the-crisis-of-liberal-modernity-and

The way to sell a book:

1. Find an eager audience

2. Find an audience with a minimal understanding of the topic

2. Tell them what they want to hear

3. Appeal to emotion

4. Never mind that your tenets do not support your conclusion.

#Saif.

#Read better books.

I don’t blame the victim. I blame a system that values the extraction of profit and information over the natural rights of the public.

I retroactively salute those who participated in the Occupy movement, who understood that participatory democracy is about sit-ins, riots, strikes, pickets, and speeches.

Whatever your opinion, do not accept that your vote is the proper and only outlet for amending the government’s actions.

I lived in NY during the Occupy Wall Street movement.

At the time, I did not appreciate how participatory democracy has essentially vanished. It has been replaced with a mere ceremonial form of democracy that relies on voting as a tool of legitimation, but that so effectively fragments the public and stifles and replaces any mass sense of civic responsibility, that the public has been removed from its role as grantor of power to a servant government.

It is self-subverting for the managers of democracy to subordinate egalitarian convictions to the pursuit of expansive politics

I don’t know a thing about that scale, but I’m delighted to have something new to read about today at work!

The closest I get to Carl Sagan is to read Lynn Margulis (his ex-wife) and her works on symbiogenesis

And your endocrinologist