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11/1/2002
Universities Encourage Suicidal Economic Mythologies :.The greatest trick corporations ever pulled was corrupting education. Colleges and universities are now little more than corporate trade schools and training camps. For people who were born and bred corporate, the "Top" schools now serve to put the finishing touches on the managers, analysts and experts who will faithfully serve the private tyrannies of Corporate America. Most of these professionally educated imbeciles are ignorant of the basic philosophical, political and historical truths that would provide the intellectual context necessary to question the world around them. Instead, education is now about learning how to become a corporate hack and obedient foot soldier. Intellectual prowess is now associated with earning potential. In a world where the only rule is win, you don't have time to just learn for the sake of learning. You don't have time to enjoy your life. That nonsense is for losers. I was deeply offended and shocked by the presumptuous tone of this article. Students have four years to experience college and the rest of their lives to work for corporations, or go from one failed startup to another. But since the corporate mentality knows no concept of "enough," they have to go after their future slaves/employees at the very moment these young minds should be learning about the basic knowledge and intellectual skills that would allow them to become conscious and informed individuals. When people grow up having had the freedom to pursue their interests without fear of failure or criticism, they wind up wanting to build, invent and create, just for the sake of it. They want to communicate and help other people, just for the sake of it. That is the natural state of things. But because these tendencies are incompatible with corporate interests, which instead emphasize sacrifice and punishment for the express purpose of benefiting stock holders, corporations needed to take over the educational process from early on in the child's development. Individualism had to be stomped out. Adherence to rules, schedules and "process management" now constitute "learning" in America. While parents were increasingly busy chasing their tails at work, they allowed their children to be raised by filthy pap on TV and schools drunk with government and corporate grant money. It makes sense that corporations would want these young adults to top off their education in a manufactured reality. When these people graduate, they will be delivered, lock, stock and barrel to the plantation. Life on the plantation will conveniently resemble their college experience. They will be ready, willing and able to do the slave master's bidding. Some may find the comparison to actual slavery odious, but I see more similarities than differences. Under the current system, you're FREE to pick your slave master, but, after that, the parallels to the Good Ole' Days are much more evident. After you subtract the costs of food, housing, healthcare, etc. what are you left with? Nah much, Massa. And what is left probably gets spent on buying some other Slave Owner's goods. Ahhh, it's so good being free. For 100 promising undergraduate students intent on creating successful companies, the school customized two floors in one of its ritziest dorms with a grand cherry-wood conference table and leather chairs, wireless connectivity, whiteboards, and a phone system designed to simultaneously ring home and cellular phones so calls are never missed.
The goal is "to try to create within the state of Maryland a culture for entrepreneurship that is comparable to that in Silicon Valley," said William W. Destler, the U-Md. provost who suggested the residential program to College Park alumnus and tech entrepreneur Brian L. Hinman. "I came up with this because these start-up firms are sort of famous for being live-in experiences. They are sort of 24-hour-a-day enterprises while they are getting going, and I thought it would be kind of interesting to see that in a dormitory setting."
The school's Hinman Campus Entrepreneurship Opportunities (CEO) program is designed to mirror the all-consuming environs of a start-up firm.TR Adds: According to the article, students can now learn the first-hand techniques on how to run a successful business, such as: creating snow-job Powerpoint presentations; stealing public grant money for private profit; and commercializing technology developed at public expense. Yes, they'll learn how to create artificial wants, get people dependent upon them, then yank the supply, jack up the prices, and call the police to enforce their newly created markets. They'll learn these strategies in specially created CEO dorms, fitted with leather seats and oak desks to reinforce the culture of an exclusionary class of manipulators and scammers. After being submersed in this PHB boot camp, they'll have developed all the essential traits necessary to succeed in the cut-throat world of business that they will help perpetuate: a narcissistic over confidence in their own abilities to funnel money and power to the top of the grand pyramid scam--all the while knowing that they are intrinsically better than everyone else and basically the world owes them. Thus is created the modern day PHB. Capitalism Uber Alles.
posted by Kevin at 2:44 AM
U.S. Using the Same Scam Invented by the Brits :.Over the past few decades, Britain, one of the world's most powerful states, used roughly 300 armed Irish people (IRA, et al.) as an excuse to turn the entire place into a large penal colony. Now the U.S. is doing the same thing. Because of the actions of a handful of people (many of which have previous U.S. Intelligence connections), all of us are going to be subjected to this biometric nonsense in the future. .Mil and .gov are actively collecting biometric data on people they're calling terrorists. In order for that data to be useful, they're going to have to set up biometric screening equipment that ALL OF US will be required to pass through. I don't know about you, but I feel safer already! HA! The United States is compiling digital dossiers of the irises, fingerprints, faces and voices of terrorism suspects and using the information to track their movements and screen foreigners trying to enter the country.
Since January, military and intelligence operatives have collected the identifying data on prisoners in Afghanistan (news - web sites) and at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. There are also plans to extend the collection process to Iraq in the event of a U.S. invasion.
With this project, the U.S. government has taken biometrics � the measuring of human features � well beyond its most common use to date: verifying people's identities before giving them access to computers or secure areas.
"We're trying to collect every biometric on every bad guy that we can," said Lt. Col. Kathy De Bolt, deputy director of the Army battle lab at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, where the biometric tools being used were developed.
"Any place we go into � Iraq or wherever � we're going to start building a dossier on people of interest to intelligence. Even if they get released, we have face and voice clips. When they come into one of our checkpoints, we can say, `You're this bad guy from here.'"
posted by Kevin at 1:19 AM
French Woman Arrested for Sane Response in U.S. Airport :.Think about what an airport represents! It is an international traveler's first and last impression of a foreign country during a trip. I've traveled around Europe a bit. In all cases, I was treated with respect and dignity in airports. I came away from my experiences in Ireland, France and Spain with good memories and a desire to return. I just can't imagine what international travelers must think of America after being subjected to the types of interrogation now common in U.S. airports. It's just sad because people will think that most Americans are brutish and ignorant. Citizens of the WORLD! Hear me: NOT ALL AMERICANS ARE LIKE THIS! U.S. airports are not fit for use by civilized people. Things are ugly here and getting worse; for reasons that have nothing to do with "terrorism." And to Madame Eliane Yvonne Marcele Aguillaume, I'm sorry. I truly wish my country could have treated you with the same level of courtesy that I received when I visited France. I think we should all take our clothes off at the security gates: A Frenchwoman accused of undressing during an airport security screening could face up to three years in prison if convicted under a law passed after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Eliane Yvonne Marcele Aguillaume, 56, of Paris, burst into tears Tuesday when a judge explained the possible penalties through an interpreter.
Judge Robert J. Tornatta found probable cause for charges of disorderly conduct at an airport, a felony, and resisting law enforcement and public indecency, both misdemeanors. Aguillaume was scheduled to be formally charged Friday.Related: Canada Issues Travel Advisory :.TORONTO �� The Canadian government issued a travel advisory this week with a twist: It suggests citizens born in Iraq, Syria and other countries targeted by U.S. anti-terrorism policies consider avoiding travel to the United States.
The advisory issued Monday focuses on a U.S. regulation adopted a year after the Sept. 11 attacks that permits American authorities to closely monitor travelers born in certain countries suspected of terrorism links.
posted by Kevin at 1:10 AM
Corporate Ads on Cop Cars :.I covered this disgusting story before, but it's back. Turns out, cities all over the country want to prostitute themselves for free cop cars. To cash-strapped cities across the nation, the offer seems too good to pass up. New police cars for $1 each in exchange for allowing NASCAR-style advertisements all over the cruisers.
posted by Kevin at 1:07 AM
10/28/2002
Vidal: "Conspiracy Stuff" Is Now Shorthand For Unspeakable Truth :.Gore Vidal has gone public with a damning assessment of the Bush regime and 9/11. Readers of this site, Copvcia, Infowars, Online Journal and others have been reading these things for months. Now, these perspectives are moving from the lunatic fringe sites into larger media. The trick will be to get prominent U.S. newspapers to wake up! HA! Come on people, email this stuff around. Get others interested. Drum up readership for the sites above. Cryptogon has about 200 regular readers. Most of you don't promote this site and none of you donate. (Thanks to those of you who do promote, you know who you are!) If every one of you turned on just five people to this site, that's 1000 readers. If you donated, I'd use the money for street level propaganda efforts. Get with it! If you take this information in and don't do anything about it, you're part of the problem. I'd actually encourage you to stop reading and forget about all of this stuff. "But what can I do? I'm just one person with no money." Well, I didn't let that stop me. Start slow. Make flyers, or use one of mine. Flyer 1. Flyer 2 (cut in half). Buy a staple gun. I like the Stanley TR45 Light Duty Staple Gun. It's pretty light and powerful. Post stuff on university campuses, bulletin boards, laundromats, health food stores, etc. Do something, anything, to spread the word. Vidal writes: 'We still don't know by whom we were struck that infamous Tuesday, or for what true purpose. But it is fairly plain to many civil libertarians that 9/11 put paid not only to much of our fragile Bill of Rights but also to our once-envied system of government which had taken a mortal blow the previous year when the Supreme Court did a little dance in 5/4 time and replaced a popularly elected President with the oil and gas Bush-Cheney junta.'
Vidal argues that the real motive for the Afghanistan war was to control the gateway to Eurasia and Central Asia's energy riches. He quotes extensively from a 1997 analysis of the region by Zgibniew Brzezinski, formerly national security adviser to President Carter, in support of this theory. But, Vidal argues, US administrations, both Democrat and Republican, were aware that the American public would resist any war in Afghanistan without a truly massive and widely perceived external threat.
'Osama was chosen on aesthetic grounds to be the frightening logo for our long-contemplated invasion and conquest of Afghanistan ... [because] the administration is convinced that Americans are so simple-minded that they can deal with no scenario more complex than the venerable, lone, crazed killer (this time with zombie helpers) who does evil just for the fun of it 'cause he hates us because we're rich 'n free 'n he's not.' Vidal also attacks the American media's failure to discuss 11 September and its consequences: 'Apparently, "conspiracy stuff" is now shorthand for unspeakable truth.'
'It is an article of faith that there are no conspiracies in American life. Yet, a year or so ago, who would have thought that most of corporate America had been conspiring with accountants to cook their books since - well, at least the bright dawn of the era of Reagan and deregulation.'
At the heart of the essay are questions about the events of 9/11 itself and the two hours after the planes were hijacked. Vidal writes that 'astonished military experts cannot fathom why the government's "automatic standard order of procedure in the event of a hijacking" was not followed'.
These procedures, says Vidal, determine that fighter planes should automatically be sent aloft as soon as a plane has deviated from its flight plan. Presidential authority is not required until a plane is to be shot down. But, on 11 September, no decision to start launching planes was taken until 9.40am, eighty minutes after air controllers first knew that Flight 11 had been hijacked and fifty minutes after the first plane had struck the North Tower.
'By law, the fighters should have been up at around 8.15. If they had, all the hijacked planes might have been diverted and shot down.'
posted by Kevin at 1:37 PM
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:. Reading
 Fatal
Harvest: The Tragedy of Industrial Agriculture by Andrew Kimbrell
Readers will come to see
that industrial food production is indeed a "fatal harvest"
- fatal to consumers, as pesticide residues and new disease vectors
such as E. coli and "mad cow disease" find their way
into our food supply; fatal to our landscapes, as chemical runoff
from factory farms poison our rivers and groundwater; fatal to
genetic diversity, as farmers rely increasingly on high-yield
monocultures and genetically engineered crops; and fatal to our
farm communities, which are wiped out by huge corporate
farms.
 Friendly
Fascism: The New Face of Power in America by Bertram Myron Gross
This is a relatively
short but extremely cogent and well-argued treatise on the rise
of a form of fascistic thought and social politics in late 20th
century America. Author Bertram Gross' thesis is quite straightforward;
the power elite that comprises the corporate, governmental and
military superstructure of the country is increasingly inclined
to employ every element in their formidable arsenal of 'friendly
persuasion' to win the hearts and minds of ordinary Americans
through what Gross refers to as friendly fascism.
 The
Good Life
by Scott and Helen Nearing Helen
and Scott Nearing are the great-grandparents of the back-to-the-land
movement, having abandoned the city in 1932 for a rural life based
on self-reliance, good health, and a minimum of cash...Fascinating,
timely, and wholly useful, a mix of the Nearings' challenging
philosophy and expert counsel on practical skills.
 Silent
Theft: The Private Plunder of Our Common Wealth by David Bollierd
In Silent Theft, David Bollier
argues that a great untold story of our time is the staggering
privatization and abuse of our common wealth. Corporations are
engaged in a relentless plunder of dozens of resources that we
collectively own—publicly funded medical breakthroughs,
software innovation, the airwaves, the public domain of creative
works, and even the DNA of plants, animals and humans. Too often,
however, our government turns a blind eye—or sometimes helps
give away our assets. Amazingly,
the silent theft of our shared wealth has gone largely unnoticed
because we have lost our ability to see the commons.
 The
Self-Sufficient Life and How to Live It: The Complete Back-To-Basics
Guide by John Seymour The
Self Sufficient Life and How to Live It is the only book that
teaches all the skills needed to live independently in harmony
with the land harnessing natural forms of energy, raising crops
and keeping livestock, preserving foodstuffs, making beer and
wine, basketry, carpentry, weaving, and much more.
 When
Corporations Rule the World by David C. Korten
When Corporations
Rule the World explains how economic globalization has concentrated
the power to govern in global corporations and financial markets
and detached them from accountability to the human interest. It
documents the devastating human and environmental consequences
of the successful efforts of these corporations to reconstruct
values and institutions everywhere on the planet to serve their
own narrow ends.
 The
New Organic Grower: A Master's Manual of Tools and Techniques
for the Home and Market Gardener
This expansion
of a now-classic guide originally published in 1989 is intended
for the serious gardener or small-scale market farmer. It describes
practical and sustainable ways of growing superb organic vegetables,
with detailed coverage of scale and capital, marketing, livestock,
the winter garden, soil fertility, weeds, and many other
topics.
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