Mohamad Mahathir
Mohamad Mahathir, former prime minister of Malayasia, sounds like a rare example of an enlightened politician.
Michael Jackson
Michael Jackson produced some nice ‘theme songs’ for protest/resistance:
Occupy Music
The Occupy movement has some nice songs. This one ‘I’ll Occupy’ to the tune of ‘I will Survive’ is very sweet.
Cryptome
Governments and corporations conspire to maintain control over those who might challenge them. The instruments of control are largely hidden from citizens even in democratic societies. Conspiracy theorists are right generally even though particular conspiracy theories may be wrong.
Cryptome is an interesting site featuring lots of documents that governments, corporations and media would prefer to keep secret. Why is it not as well know as Wikileaks? It is more accessible.
Harold Pinter on America
I’m just posting this for reference. Pinter’s robust view of America. Coherent. Persuasive. Proven. But what do we do with this? Ignore it?
Tram Experience Video
When I saw this I wrote on Facebook that “I feel sad for her, she’s obviously in pain; but good the way the other people on the tram reacted – supporting each other and keeping cool.”
Andy Roberts commented “There’s something not quite right about this viral video phenomenon and the moral outrage surrounding it. Firstly, I agree it looks like an unfortunate “looney on the bus” scenario, but 2nd, what exactly was the role and relationship of the person shooting the video?”
The woman was wrong (her behaviour incited distress and could have incited violence) and she has been arrested but what about the ethics/legality of filming a public incident and publishing without the permission of those filmed? The authorities have used the video as evidence to arrest the woman and on YouTube there are responses from all angles, multiculturalist and racist. What’s said on the street doesn’t stay on the street any more and the men and women on the Clapham Omnibus and the Croydon Tram are going home to upload their vlogs. Are we becoming a more open society and a more ‘conversational society’ or are we becoming a ‘Big Brother’ society in both famous references of the term?
Malware
Spent the last two hours getting rid of malware on my NYPO and Netstorms sites. Anyway I found a site that is helpful in identifying problems: sucuri.net. It offers a free scanning service but no info on how to prevent these attacks. I’ll add it to my links list.
Gurdjieff – Hypnotic Sleep of Man
The following is from www.messagefrommasters.com:
Gurdjieff – Hypnotic Sleep of Man
“There are a thousand things which prevent a man from awakening, which keep him in the power of his dreams. In order to act consciously with the intention of awakening, it is necessary to know the nature of the forces which keep man in a state of sleep.
“First of all it must be realized that the sleep in which man exists is not normal but hypnotic sleep. Man is hypnotized and this hypnotic state is continually maintained and strengthened in him. One would think that there are forces for whom it is useful and profitable to keep man in a hypnotic state and prevent him from seeing the truth and understanding his position.
“There is an Eastern tale which speaks about a very rich magician who had a great many sheep. But at the same time this magician was very mean. He did not want to hire shepherds, nor did he want to erect a fence about the pasture where his sheep were grazing. The sheep consequently often wandered into the forest, fell into ravines, and so on, and above all they ran away, for they knew that the magician wanted their flesh and skins and this they did not like.
“At last the magician found a remedy. He hypnotized his sheep and suggested to them first of all that they were immortal and that no harm was being done to them when they were skinned, that, on the contrary, it would be very good for them and even pleasant; secondly he suggested that the magician was a good master who loved his flock so much that he was ready to do anything in the world for them; and in the third place he suggested to them that if anything at all were going to happen to them it was not going to happen just then, at any rate not that day, and therefore they had no need to think about it.
Further the magician suggested to his sheep that they were not sheep at all; to some of them he suggested that they were lions, to others that they were eagles, to others that they were men, and to others that they were magicians.
“And after this all his cares and worries about the sheep came to an end. They never ran away again but quietly awaited the time when the magician would require their flesh and skins. “This tale is a very good illustration of man’s position.
Source – from Ouspensky Book “In search of Miraculous”
Torture as Entertainment
Robert Fisk in the Guardian asks why torturers film their handiwork.
When prisoners were brought to Saddam Hussein’s intelligence service for interrogation, their torturers often videotaped the torment …. The videos were originally shot to shame the prisoners, but also, I suspect, for the sense of domination it gave the torturers.
The Abu Ghraib pictures – US torturers taking over the role of the Iraqi thugs in the very same prison in which many of the earlier Saddam videos were shot – had perhaps the same purpose. Lynndie England saw nothing particularly wrong with them. That was what Iraq was like, wasn’t it? And we must forget, of course, that other American pictures from Abu Ghraib, which Obama the Good has decided we must not see, show the rape of Iraqi women and boys.
Janina Struk’s new book on soldiers’ private pictures of war, which I wrote about last week, contains some paragraphs about the new military art of filming, editing and producing war by video, the soldiers’ very own version of Hollywood, in which real soldiers play themselves in real life and real Iraqis are cut down and killed in front of the camera. If the Vietnam-era US army could take photos of its own atrocities, American soldiers in Iraq have gone a step further.
Fisk suggests that filming torture and killing may serve to desensitise soldiers .. presumably to make them indifferent to the suffering of others; but maybe what it does is increase sensitivity to the suffering of others as pleasure. American Gen. Mattis is famous for his remark that ‘shooting some people is fun’ and his justification of that.
If shooting people is fun and torture is justified then why not treat it as fun to be filmed? Torture is a counter productive tool in a fight against terrorism.
Torture and the filming of it as a kind of sadistic pornography brings to mind the vampire meme in popular culture where vampires are sustained and entertained by the blood and fear of their victims. This meme possibly mythologises the kind of inherent savagery that Camille Paglia talks about in her essay ‘It’s a Jungle Out There‘:
Aggression and eroticism are deeply intertwined. Hunt, pursuit, and capture are biologically programmed into male sexuality. Generation after generation, men must be educated, refined, and ethically persuaded away from their tendency toward anarchy and brutishness. Society is not the enemy, as feminism ignorantly claims. Society is woman’s protection against rape. Feminism, with its solemn Carry Nation repressiveness, does not see what is for men the eroticism or fun element in rape, especially the wild, infectious delirium of gang rape. Women who do not understand rape cannot defend themselves against it.
The savagery behind torture and rape and killing for fun is pretty obvious. I don’t know that I would go all the way with Paglia in seeing this as genetically inherent with society/culture being a ‘protector’. I think society can and does modify instinct but sometimes society gives its members the moral sanction or ‘green light’ to be cruel. Gen. Mattis gives and is given moral sanction for his attitude.
This is from Wired:
How did you react when Graner told you how the detainees were being treated?
Of course it was wrong. I know that now. But when you show the people from the CIA, the FBI and the MI the pictures and they say, “Hey, this is a great job. Keep it up”, you think it must be right. They were all there and they didn’t say a word. They didn’t wear uniforms, and if they did they had their nametags covered.
Which photos did Graner present to them?
All of them. He showed them on his laptop. He’d say, “Hey, let me show you this, this is what we’re supposed to be doing.” And they said, “Yeah, we got great results, keep it up, you’re doing a good job.” He actually got a letter of commendation for the stuff he did.
Grunts like Lynndie England might come to enjoy the torture because it’s fun but their enjoyment, the release of instinct, whatever, is sanctioned by those higher up like Gen Mattis and, at some level, by society.
The American Awakening
We keep being told that Occupy has no coherent agenda but the reaction of the Establishment suggests differently.
Naomi Wolf writes:
US citizens of all political persuasions are still reeling from images of unparallelled police brutality in a coordinated crackdown against peaceful OWS protesters in cities across the nation this past week….
This was clearly not simply a case of a freaked-out mayors’, city-by-city municipal overreaction against mess in the parks and cranky campers. As the puzzle pieces fit together, they began to show coordination against OWS at the highest national levels.
The 99 Percent Declaration that comes out of OWS looks like a very coherent agenda, in fact it looks like a revolutionary manifesto.
I recommend going to the 99 Percent Declaration site to read the declaration with all its links and background. It is essential reading and suggests that there really is an American Awakening happening.