Lots to Think About -
and Why?
There is So Much We Simply
DO NOT KNOW
There is nothing
more difficult to plan, more doubtful of success,
nor more dangerous to manage than the creation of a new system.
For the initiator has the enmity of all who would profit by the
preservation of the old system and merely lukewarm defenders
in those who would gain by the new one.
Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, 1513
You never change
things by fighting the existing reality. To change
something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
Buckminster Fuller
In times of change, those who are ready to learn will inherit the world, while hose who believe they know will be marvelously prepared
to deal with a world that has ceased to exist.
Eric Hoffer
Man is the missing link between apes and human beings.
Konrad Lorenz, Nobel Laureate
Sa man's work
is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through
the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images
in
whose presence his heart first opened.
Albert Camus
We are unconcerned but not indifferent.
Inscription on Man Ray's gravestone
The Questions that need Answers:
Whay are there so many of us, and
How Many People Can Be 'Sustained' on Earth?
There are some good possibilities in this paper "Man is an apparition."
by Eliot Porter, April 5, 1989, Tesuque, New Mexico
Population and Environment: A Journal of Interdisciplinary StudiesVolume 12, Number 1, Fall 1990
© 1990 Human Sciences Press
Then, there are the issues of "Logical" Thoughts Vs Faith
Good
And Bad Reasons For Believing
Richard
Dawkins
Dear Juliet,
Now that you are ten, I want to write to you about something that is
important to me. Have you ever wondered how we know the things that we know?
How do we know, for instance, that the stars, which look like tiny pinpricks
in the sky, are really huge balls of fire like the sun and are very far
away? And how do we know that Earth is a smaller ball whirling round one of
those stars, the sun?The answer to these questions is "evidence." Sometimes evidence means
actually seeing ( or hearing, feeling, smelling..... ) that something is
true. Astronauts have travelled far enough from earth to see with their own
eyes that it is round. Sometimes our eyes need help. The "evening star"
looks like a bright twinkle in the sky, but with a telescope, you can see
that it is a beautiful ball - the planet we call Venus. Something that you
learn by direct seeing ( or hearing or feeling..... ) is called an
observation.Often, evidence isn't just an observation on its own, but observation always
lies at the back of it. If there's been a murder, often nobody (except the
murderer and the victim!) actually observed it. But detectives can gather
together lots or other observations which may all point toward a particular
suspect. If a person's fingerprints match those found on a dagger, this is
evidence that he touched it. It doesn't prove that he did the murder, but it
can help when it's joined up with lots of other evidence. Sometimes a
detective can think about a whole lot of observations and suddenly realise
that they fall into place and make sense if so-and-so did the murder.Scientists - the specialists in discovering what is true about the world and
the universe - often work like detectives. They make a guess ( called a
hypothesis ) about what might be true. They then say to themselves: If that
were really true, we ought to see so-and-so. This is called a prediction.
For example, if the world is really round, we can predict that a traveller,
going on and on in the same direction, should eventually find himself back
where he started.When a doctor says that you have the measles, he doesn't
take one look at you and see measles. His first look gives him a hypothesis
that you may have measles. Then he says to himself: If she has measles I
ought to see...... Then he runs through the list of predictions and tests
them with his eyes ( have you got spots? ); hands ( is your forehead hot? );
and ears ( does your chest wheeze in a measly way? ). Only then does he make
his decision and say, " I diagnose that the child has measles. " Sometimes
doctors need to do other tests like blood tests or X-Rays, which help their
eyes, hands, and ears to make observations.The way scientists use evidence to learn about the world is much cleverer
and more complicated than I can say in a short letter. But now I want to
move on from evidence, which is a good reason for believing something , and
warn you against three bad reasons for believing anything. They are called
"tradition," "authority," and "revelation."First, tradition. A few months ago, I went on television to have a
discussion with about fifty children. These children were invited because
they had been brought up in lots of different religions. Some had been
brought up as Christians, others as Jews, Muslims, Hindus, or Sikhs. The man
with the microphone went from child to child, asking them what they
believed. What they said shows up exactly what I mean by "tradition." Their
beliefs turned out to have no connection with evidence. They just trotted
out the beliefs of their parents and grandparents which, in turn, were not
based upon evidence either. They said things like: "We Hindus believe so and so";
"We Muslims believe such and such"; "We Christians believe something else."
Of course, since they all believed different things, they couldn't all be
right. The man with the microphone seemed to think this quite right and
proper, and he didn't even try to get them to argue out their differences
with each other. But that isn't the point I want to make for the moment. I
simply want to ask where their beliefs come from. They came from tradition.
Tradition means beliefs handed down from grandparent to parent to child, and
so on. Or from books handed down through the centuries. Traditional beliefs
often start from almost nothing; perhaps somebody just makes them up
originally, like the stories about Thor and Zeus. But after they've been
handed down over some centuries, the mere fact that they are so old makes
them seem special. People believe things simply because people have believed
the same thing over the centuries. That's tradition.The trouble with tradition is that, no matter how long ago a story was made
up, it is still exactly as true or untrue as the original story was. If you
make up a story that isn't true, handing it down over a number of centuries
doesn't make it any truer!Most people in England have been baptised into the Church of England, but
this is only one of the branches of the Christian religion. There are other
branches such as Russian Orthodox, the Roman Catholic, and the Methodist
churches. They all believe different things. The Jewish religion and the
Muslim religion are a bit more different still; and there are different
kinds of Jews and of Muslims. People who believe even slightly different
things from each other go to war over their disagreements. So you might
think that they must have some pretty good reasons - evidence - for
believing what they believe. But actually, their different beliefs are
entirely due to different traditions.Let's talk about one particular tradition. Roman Catholics believe that
Mary, the mother of Jesus, was so special that she didn't die but was lifted
bodily in to Heaven. Other Christian traditions disagree, saying that Mary
did die like anybody else. These other religions don't talk about much and,
unlike Roman Catholics, they don't call her the "Queen of Heaven." The
tradition that Mary's body was lifted into Heaven is not an old one. The
bible says nothing on how she died; in fact, the poor woman is scarcely
mentioned in the Bible at all. The belief that her body was lifted into
Heaven wasn't invented until about six centuries after Jesus' time. At
first, it was just made up, in the same way as any story like "Snow White"
was made up. But, over the centuries, it grew into a tradition and people
started to take it seriously simply because the story had been handed down
over so many generations. The older the tradition became, the more people
took it seriously. It finally was written down as and official Roman
Catholic belief only very recently, in 1950, when I was the age you are now.
But the story was no more true in 1950 than it was when it was first
invented six hundred years after Mary's death.I'll come back to tradition at the end of my letter, and look at it in
another way. But first, I must deal with the two other bad reasons for
believing in anything: authority and revelation.Authority, as a reason for believing something, means believing in it
because you are told to believe it by somebody important. In the Roman
Catholic Church, the pope is the most important person, and people believe
he must be right just because he is the pope. In one branch of the Muslim
religion, the important people are the old men with beards called
ayatollahs. Lots of Muslims in this country are prepared to commit murder,
purely because the ayatollahs in a faraway country tell them to.When I say that it was only in 1950 that Roman Catholics were finally told
that they had to believe that Mary's body shot off to Heaven, what I mean is
that in 1950, the pope told people that they had to believe it. That was it.
The pope said it was true, so it had to be true! Now, probably some of the
things that that pope said in his life were true and some were not true.
There is no good reason why, just because he was the pope, you should
believe everything he said any more than you believe everything that other
people say. The present pope ( 1995 ) has ordered his followers not to limit
the number of babies they have. If people follow this authority as slavishly
as he would wish, the results could be terrible famines, diseases, and wars,
caused by overcrowding.Of course, even in science, sometimes we haven't seen the evidence ourselves
and we have to take somebody else's word for it. I haven't, with my own
eyes, seen the evidence that light travels at a speed of 186,000 miles per
second. Instead, I believe books that tell me the speed of light. This looks
like "authority." But actually, it is much better than authority, because
the people who wrote the books have seen the evidence and anyone is free to
look carefully at the evidence whenever they want. That is very comforting.
But not even the priests claim that there is any evidence for their story
about Mary's body zooming off to Heaven.The third kind of bad reason for believing anything is called "revelation."
If you had asked the pope in 1950 how he knew that Mary's body disappeared
into Heaven, he would probably have said that it had been "revealed" to him.
He shut himself in his room and prayed for guidance. He thought and thought,
all by himself, and he became more and more sure inside himself. When
religious people just have a feeling inside themselves that something must
be true, even though there is no evidence that it is true, they call their
feeling "revelation." It isn't only popes who claim to have revelations.
Lots of religious people do. It is one of their main reasons for believing
the things that they do believe. But is it a good reason?Suppose I told you that your dog was dead. You'd be very upset, and you'd
probably say, "Are you sure? How do you know? How did it happen?" Now
suppose I answered: "I don't actually know that Pepe is dead. I have no
evidence. I just have a funny feeling deep inside me that he is dead." You'd
be pretty cross with me for scaring you, because you'd know that an inside
"feeling" on its own is not a good reason for believing that a whippet is
dead. You need evidence. We all have inside feelings from time to time,
sometimes they turn out to be right and sometimes they don't. Anyway,
different people have opposite feelings, so how are we to decide whose
feeling is right? The only way to be sure that a dog is dead is to see him
dead, or hear that his heart has stopped; or be told by somebody who has
seen or heard some real evidence that he is dead.People sometimes say that you must believe in feelings deep inside,
otherwise, you' d never be confident of things like "My wife loves me
<http://www.fortunecity.com/emachines/e11/86/secret.html#Love> ." But this
is a bad argument. There can be plenty of evidence that somebody loves you.
All through the day when you are with somebody who loves you, you see and
hear lots of little titbits of evidence, and they all add up. It isn't a
purely inside feeling, like the feeling that priests call revelation. There
are outside things to back up the inside feeling: looks in the eye, tender
notes in the voice, little favors and kindnesses; this is all real evidence.
Sometimes people have a strong inside feeling that somebody loves them
when it is not based upon any evidence, and then they are likely to be completely
wrong. There are people with a strong inside feeling that a famous film star
loves them, when really the film star hasn't even met them. People like that
are ill in their minds. Inside feelings must be backed up by evidence,
otherwise you just can't trust them.Inside feelings are valuable in science, too, but only for giving you ideas
that you later test by looking for evidence. A scientist can have a "hunch"
about an idea that just "feels" right. In itself, this is not a good reason
for believing something. But it can be a good reason for spending some time
doing a particular experiment, or looking in a particular way for evidence.
Scientists use inside feelings all the time to get ideas. But they are not
worth anything until they are supported by evidence.I promised that I'd come back to tradition, and look at it in another way. I
want to try to explain why tradition is so important to us. All animals are
built (by the process called evolution) to survive in the normal place in
which their kind live. Lions are built to be good at surviving on the plains
of Africa. Crayfish to be good at surviving in fresh, water, while lobsters
are built to be good at surviving in the salt sea. People are animals, too,
and we are built to be good at surviving in a world full of ..... other
people. Most of us don't hunt for our own food like lions or lobsters; we
buy it from other people who have bought it from yet other people. We
''swim'' through a "sea of people." Just as a fish needs gills to survive in
water, people need brains that make them able to deal with other people.
Just as the sea is full of salt water, the sea of people is full of
difficult things to learn. Like language.You speak English, but your friend Ann-Kathrin speaks German. You each speak
the language that fits you to '`swim about" in your own separate "people
sea." Language is passed down by tradition. There is no other way . In
England, Pepe is a dog. In Germany he is ein Hund. Neither of these words is
more correct, or more true than the other. Both are simply handed down. In
order to be good at "swimming about in their people sea," children have to
learn the language of their own country, and lots of other things about
their own people; and this means that they have to absorb, like blotting
paper, an enormous amount of traditional information. (Remember that
traditional information just means things that are handed down from
grandparents to parents to children.) The child's brain has to be a sucker
for traditional information. And the child can't be expected to sort out
good and useful traditional information, like the words of a language, from
bad or silly traditional information, like believing in witches and devils
and ever-living virgins.It's a pity, but it can't help being the case, that because children have to
be suckers for traditional information, they are likely to believe anything
the grown-ups tell them, whether true or false, right or wrong. Lots of what
the grown-ups tell them is true and based on evidence, or at least sensible.
But if some of it is false, silly, or even wicked, there is nothing to stop
the children believing that, too. Now, when the children grow up, what do
they do? Well, of course, they tell it to the next generation of children.
So, once something gets itself strongly believed - even if it is completely
untrue and there never was any reason to believe it in the first place - it
can go on forever.Could this be what has happened with religions ? Belief that there is a god
or gods, belief in Heaven, belief that Mary never died, belief that Jesus
never had a human father, belief that prayers are answered, belief that wine
turns into blood - not one of these beliefs is backed up by any good
evidence. Yet millions of people believe them. Perhaps this because they
were told to believe them when they were told to believe them when they were
young enough to believe anything.Millions of other people believe quite different things, because they were
told different things when they were children. Muslim children are told
different things from Christian children, and both grow up utterly convinced
that they are right and the others are wrong. Even within Christians, Roman
Catholics believe different things from Church of England people or
Episcopalians, Shakers or Quakers , Mormons or Holy Rollers, and are all
utterly covinced that they are right and the others are wrong. They believe
different things for exactly the same kind of reason as you speak English
and Ann-Kathrin speaks German. Both languages are, in their own country, the
right language to speak. But it can't be true that different religions are
right in their own countries, because different religions claim that
opposite things are true. Mary can't be alive in Catholic Southern Ireland
but dead in Protestant Northern Ireland.What can we do about all this ? It is not easy for you to do anything,
because you are only ten. But you could try this. Next time somebody tells
you something that sounds important, think to yourself: "Is this the kind of
thing that people probably know because of evidence? Or is it the kind of
thing that people only believe because of tradition, authority, or
revelation?" And, next time somebody tells you that something is true, why
not say to them: "What kind of evidence is there for that?" And if they
can't give you a good answer, I hope you'll think very carefully before you
believe a word they say.Your loving
Daddy
RICHARD DAWKINS is an evolutionary biologist; reader in the Department of Zoology at Oxford University; fellow of New College.
Looking for a Sign
Nov 10th 2005
(From
The Economist via Simona Fina )
People can communicate without agreeing on the meaning of the terms
THE birth of a new language is such a rare event that scientists who want to
watch it happen generally have to make do with computer simulations. Bruno
Galantucci, a cognitive scientist at Yale University in America, has
developed a human alternative, based on the principle that necessity is the
mother of invention. He asks pairs of strangers to play a computer game in
which they have to find one another in a virtual bungalow. This requires
them to communicate, but the only way they can do so is by inventing a
language. The game is revealing some of the secrets of successful
communication.The two players cannot see or hear each other, but they are seated at
interconnected computers. In the simplest version of the game, each player
is located in one of four rooms and must find each other in one move each.
These rooms are arranged in a square, and each pair of adjacent rooms is
connected by a doorway. On the floor of each room is an icon-a circle, a
hexagon, a flower-and, prior to the game starting, the players have a short
time to explore their surroundings. (Sometimes, a player with good spatial
awareness can move quickly through all four rooms and understand the layout but others do not grasp it at this stage.)The players know there is another player in another of the rooms, and that
they must both end up in the same room, but they can only ever see the room they are in. To help them guide each other to a rendezvous, they have a
device on which they can scrawl symbols that appear on the other's screen.
But the device works like a roll of paper that constantly scrolls downwards,
preventing them from writing letters, numbers or any other commonly
recognisable symbol.The first thing Dr Galantucci discovered was how quickly reliable symbolic
systems emerged. Nine out of ten pairs solved the game in three hours,
having agreed on a set of three or four symbols. In a more advanced version
of the game, one pair developed 16 symbols in six hours.The languages were also very different. Dr Galantucci had expected that the
pairs would build their language on elements of the icons that appear on the
floors of the rooms. A few did so, but they extracted different features of
the icons-the number of vertices, say, or some linear abstraction of its
shape. Others adopted a numbering system for the rooms-such as one slanting line for the first room and two for the second, moving clockwise or
anticlockwise through the four rooms. Another technique involved labelling
the rooms by their relative position in space, by placing marks on different
parts of the screen.Some pairs solved the game in minutes, others struggled for hours and there
were a few pairs who never found each other. In those cases, Dr Galantucci
often saw the ideographic equivalent of a person shouting loudly in a
foreign country where he does not speak the local language. Since his
volunteers included Yale University post-doctoral students, he infers that
building a language is no trivial task. But then what are the ingredients of
successful communication?Having observed winning pairs at play, Dr Galantucci says that communication
is established as soon as one player decides to copy the symbols proposed by
his co-player, rather than impose his own. At that point the pair's chances
of finding each other jump. As soon as there is imitation, he says, there is
a common currency. After that, it is relatively easy to attach useful
information to those symbols.Dr Galantucci is now developing the game to make it increasingly complicated
by adding on extra rooms. He is also working with trios, and hopes
eventually to build up to small groups-more closely mimicking the conditions
in which human language evolved.Giacomo Rizzolatti, a neuroscientist at the University of Parma in Italy who
studies the origins of language, says the game is interesting because it
shows the importance of imitation in language development. But he points out
that the symbolic systems adopted-numerical ones, for instance-are
sophisticated abstractions that would have been beyond the minds that
produced the first proto-language.One strength of Dr Galantucci's experiment that does not exist in the real
world, however, is that he is able to interview his subjects afterwards.
What is striking, he says, is that a pair can be successful even if a symbol
represents something quite different in the virtual world to each player-as
long as they agree on what they should do when confronted by it. In other
words, people only need to convey a small amount of information to
communicate effectively, and they can do so while holding fundamentally
different ideas about how their language describes the world.
____________________
_______
Ghoul's
Paradise -
A Blood Banquet
By Sean Cracraft
12-1-5
"power is the capacity to transform a living person into a corpse,
that is to say, into a thing"
--Simone Weil (1)
The continuum of corruption Bush fronts for has devoured much of the
substance of freedom. A nearly barren shell of bones has been left
behind to perpetuate the mass delusion called the United States of
America. The corpse still stalks the globe, but the indwelling spirit
is long since departed. Can it be recovered? The historical record
proves that it can. Our time isn't the only to have witnessed
unprincipled, ambitious, megalomaniacal criminals hijack the gears and
levers of power. Experience has shown the way to defeat criminal
elites. We must first recognize the pathology of power run amok. In
order to expose the men behind the curtain, it is necessary to gaze
into the abyss without being sucked in.
There is a place so far removed from love that those possessed by such
evil become enchanted with its dark majesty. Most of us have made
brief excursions into the outer perimeter of this nether world of the
human psyche and were repulsed by what we found. Nightmares we called
them, or perhaps spates of feverish fits. The elite of the world--
royalty, corporate thugs, the hierarchy of tax exempt foundations, and
politicians--have made a permanent residence out of this benighted
realm. Walled off from remorse and compassion, they sit in the
citadels of power plotting the doom of us all. Causing suffering on a
massive scale is their sacrament and their most cherished currency is
that of power. It is this ideology, that of power pragmatism, that
drives them and fuels their lust. Their mission is total control,
which requires a universal regime, a global prison state. A system of
global Sadism is the ultimate consequence if they succeed. The wars in
Afghanistan, Iraq and future wars on "Gap" countries are indicators of
this demented teleology (2). Perpetual warfare is a means, not an end.
The domestic ramifications of the Iraq occupation go far beyond the
cost of keeping the fiat currency presses printing. Power might be
attained with iron, but it is only preserved with grey matter,
therefore the real war that the Iraq chaos serves to obscure is the
psychological war being waged on the people of the United States. The
war is not against terror, that is a mist of lies; the true war is the
perpetual war for the domination of all reality.
Being completely unfamiliar with the philosophy of the Marquis de
Sade, most people simply project their own worldview onto everyone
else, especially those clean-cut smiling men on TV wearing $8,000
tailored suits (3). The results of this stunted workaday culture of
naïve malaise have been devastating. The scientific management of mass
psychology is at the heart of globalization--the goal of all Power
fanatics to unify the globe under a single, seamless, networked system
of control. It is the merger of 1984 and Brave New World, and this
dystopic convergence seeks nothing less than the material, ethical,
moral, spiritual, and physical exsanguination of humanity. The cult of
Power and its high priests have no room for truth or beauty, for they
are walking abscesses who can never be satisfied. To this elite
predator class there is nothing more sublime than power and its
corollaries. These Sadists delight in mutilating beauty and obscuring
the truth. They revel in destroying and debasing humanity.
Sadistic power pragmatism divides the world into the dialectic of the
strong few who have the right to torture and feed off, by dint of
their willingness to be ruthless, what they perceive to be their weak
prey, the majority. Giving in to the thrill of domination, they
celebrate every moment of the debauched orgy of desecration. It is
this combination of social Darwinism, psychopathic blood lust, and
greed which has painted the surrealist landscape we find ourselves in
today. Despite all their trappings of material success, these elitists
are no better than the mental patient who found it amusing to swing
cats by their tails into brick walls. What they view as their greatest
strength, the suppressed conscience, is actually the weakness that
contains the seeds of their downfall. The neighbor dog of David
Berkowitz had no real power and neither do the Owl Shrine and bone
fetishes of the predator elite. It is all symptomatic of the mindset
of jaded, death-obsessed, retrogressive perverts who refuse to find
peace of mind. The flaw in social Darwinism is clear: the tumor, the
parasite and the plague are not more fit and therefore superior to the
lives they snuff out.
An indication of this infantile and ravenous need to control
everything and everyone that festers within members of the Iron Rule
of Oligarchy is the remark made to reporter Ron Suskind by what is
widely believed to be power tactician Karl Rove:
"The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-
based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that
solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' I
nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and
empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the way the world really works
anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we
create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality --
judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new
realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort
out We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to
just study what we do." (4.)
Echoing O'Brien's torturous remarks to Winston Smith in George
Orwell's 1984, people such as this White House lackey, be it Rove or
not, only prove how imbedded this idea of total control is even in the
upper management levels of power (5)
The black hole of psychological, economical, ecological, and
territorial warfare and the whirlwind of depression are cutting off
the sustenance of sanity and kindness by strangling civilization with
the pollution of deceit, the slough of un-free trade slavery, and the
stupefaction of plastic pop culture programming. A pall of deception
has cast its shadow across the globe and the predators are on the
march. But so too are the remnants of sanity who remember that
legitimate authority is that which serves with benign restraint, not
that which catapults into the Coliseum all those who oppose it and
then cheers at the ensuing bloody tableaux. The ancient Aztec elite,
amongst other Sadistic practices, would disport in the ritualistic
rolling of people tightly bound into balls down tall flights of
stairs. If they survived the ordeal their heads were hacked off,
unfortunately little has changed in the substance of tyranny,
regardless of form (6). Today the ritualistic blood-letting in the
meat grinder of Iraq endures despite over 2,000 admitted U.S. soldiers
dead for a massive bundle of lies, and the countless heaps of Iraqi
corpses which have amassed since the Gulf War of George H.W. Bush.
Words have been redefined, corruption institutionalized, and humanity
betrayed with malignity which knows no boundaries. Their sickening
miasmic refuse is the factory of death, otherwise known as the
Military-Industrial-Complex. Fear is the tool they use, absolute
subjugation the goal, and war the mechanism for global transformation.
When the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace found that the
surest way to mold a society was warfare, they were presaging what
Hitler had written in Mein Kampf: the fear of sudden death is the
perfect Pavlovian conditioning method (7). In the weltanschauung of
neo-Machiavellian pragmatists, humanity is simply a malleable animal
that is the product of a random universe, in the end nothing but
automata to be used for sustaining the total tyranny of Strongmen.
Thus there is only stimulus and response, action and reaction, nothing
but atomistic materialism and the forces that hold it all together.
Since energy is neither created nor destroyed, and the building blocks
of matter, atoms, are held together via energy subject to entropy,
there is no epistemological basis for morality. In the dim world of
the elite, there is only the ever-gnawing grind and throb of Power. A
mechanistic worldview leaves the inferiority-complex ridden and inbred
parasitical power elite with one option--either be the programmer or
be programmed. A lion devours gazelles, a leach sucks blood, and the
domineering dissolute mutant class grows fat off the hoi polloi.
The redefining of words has now surpassed Edward Bernays spin-cycle
and is on a full-tilt boogie to oblivion. Case in point: torture.
Brown victims of the war on terrorism can fill a football stadium (8).
Deaths abound from CIA torture, now merely redefined as "Enhanced
Interrogation Techniques" (9). America could do no worse if Charles
Manson were President, Vlad the Impaler Vice President, and Mao Tse-
tong Secretary of Defense. What will the human hordes in hovels do
once they collectively perceive the steely bite of the war against
them, the "useless eaters" (10)? As it was in the past, by the time
such realization dawns it may be too late for many. In any case it
will be a long and trying recovery. This Sadistic siege of control
freaks must be broken quickly if freedom and progress are ever to
flourish again
1. George Orwell. 1984. New York: The New American Library, 1961.
Afterword by Erich Fromm, first footnote p. 263.
2. Barnett, Thomas "The Pentagon's New Map." Esquire, March 2003 issue.
At: <http://www.thomaspmbarnett.com/published/pentagonsnewmap.htm>
3. The 120 Days of Sodom and Other Writings by the Marquis de Sade.
For sale at: <http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0802130127/102-2348426-
19841 33?v==glance&n=(3155&n=P7846&s==books&v==glance>
Also available for free at various websites.
4. Suskind, Ron. "Without a Doubt." The New York Times online 17 Oct. 2004
At: <http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/17BUSH.html?ex=55665600H
&en=0a96189e162076&ei=P90&partner==rssuserland>
5. "We, the Party, control all records, and we control all memories.
Then we control the past, do we not?.You are here because you have
failed in humility, in self-discipline. You would not make the act of
submission which is the price of sanity. You preferred to be a
lunatic, a minority of one. Only the disciplined mind can see reality,
Winston. You believe that reality is self-evident. When you delude
yourself into thinking that you see something, you assume that
everyone else sees the same thing as you. But I tell you, Winston,
that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and
nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and
in any case soon perishes; only in the mind of the Party, which is
collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be truth is
truth."--p. 205 George Orwell. 1984. New York: The New American
Library, 1961.
At: <http://whitewolf.newcastle.edu.au/words/authors/O/OrwellGeorge/
prose/NineteenEightyFour/>
"Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing
human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of
your own choosing. Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we
are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic
Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery
and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world
which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself
Progress in our world will be progress toward more pain. The old
civilizations claimed that they were founded on love and justice. Ours
is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except
fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. Everything else we shall
destroy--everythingThere will be no loyalty, except loyalty toward the
Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There
will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated
enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science. When we are
omnipotent we shall have no more need of science. There will be no
distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity,
no employment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be
destroyed. But always--do not forget this, Winston--always there will
be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly
growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of
victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless If you
want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face-
-forever."-- op. cit.. p. 220.
6. Feats and Wisdom of the Ancients. "A Deadly Ball Game," pp. 105-6.
1990 Time Life Books.
7. "Transcript of Norman Dodd Interview". By G. Edward Griffin. 1982.
At: <http://www.supremelaw.org/authors/dodd/interview.htm>
8. "DETAINEES FILL FOOTBALL STADIUM" 18 Nov. 2005.
At: <http://www.freemarketnews.com/WorldNews.asp?nid=#13#2313>
9. "CIA's Harsh Interrogation Techniques Described" by Richard
Esposito, and Ross, Brian. ABC News online, 18 Nov. 2005.
At: <http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/Investigation/story?id=22866>
10. "Useless Eaters: Disability as Genocidal Marker in Nazi Germany"
by Regent University.
At: <http://www.regent.edu/acad/schedu/uselesseaters/>