Quote Of The Day: What will Ruin Us? Is it What we Love or What we Hate?

Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think. 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, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.

This is from author and media theorist the late Neil Postman in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business 1985

Have we become zombies? (hat tip zero hedge)

Infographics: The Internet of Things and Our Mobile Future, Lessons from the Matrix

The internet of things will likely be one of the major technological advances from the information age that will have significant influence in the shaping of the future. 

The Visual Capitalist writes: 

By the time you finish reading this infographic, there will be 3,810 new devices connected to the Internet of Things.

That’s because there are 328 million devices being connected to the internet each month. It’s also why researchers estimate that there are going to be 50 billion devices connected by 2020.

In fact, the future looks very different as we adopt to these technological trends. Already, 71% of Americans using wearable technology claim that it has improved their overall health and fitness. Imagine what will happen with more immersive analytics, a preventative mindset, more metrics of useful health functions, and integration into the health system.

The connected lifestyle means that there could be 500 devices in each home connected to the web by 2022. Every lightbulb, lock, thermostat, appliance, and item with an electronic circuit could be networked together, finding synergy. As strange as it may seem, by 2020 researchers even expect 100 million lightbulbs and lamps to be connected to this grid.

Entertainment and convenience are driving the “smart home” concept, which is expected to be worth $56 billion in 2018. However, there is also the benefit of creating a more energy efficient world. It’s already expected that street lamps could save energy costs up to 80%, so why can’t that be the case in the home as well? Self-adjusting thermostats, lights, and appliances will increase the efficiency of homes to make a big impact on net efficiency.

Internet of things should be something to look forward to.

But as tools, they can be use for productive or non-productive activities. By non-productive, this can even enhance the government's repression of the public. The internet of things may even pave way for the realization of omnipresent surveillance society ala George Orwell's 1984.

John Whitehead of the Rutherford Institute analogizes the internet of things with the trilogy movie the Matrix:

Make no mistake: the Internet of Things is just Big Brother in a more appealing disguise.

Even so, I’m not suggesting we all become Luddites. However, we need to be aware of how quickly a helpful device that makes our lives easier can become a harmful weapon that enslaves us.

This was the underlying lesson of The Matrix, the Wachowski brothers’ futuristic thriller about human beings enslaved by autonomous technological beings that call the shots. As Morpheus, one of the characters in The Matrix, explains:

The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work… when you go to church… when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.

“What truth?” asks Neo.

Morpheus leans in closer to Neo: “That you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else you were born into bondage. Born into a prison that you cannot smell or taste or touch. A prison for your mind.”

Courtesy of: Visual Capitalist

NSA Spying sends George Orwell’s 1984 Books Sales Soaring; The Age of the Leakers

Whistleblower Edward Snowden’s expose of the NSA’s spying on Americans has sent sales of George Orwell’s 1984 soaring.

From the Bloomberg:

Sales of George Orwell’s novel “1984,” featuring a futuristic totalitarian state, jumped on Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN)’s website following reports of a classified program that lets the U.S. government collect personal data.

One edition of the book, which was originally published in 1949, moved to the No. 5 spot on Amazon’s Movers & Shakers list, which tracks dramatic increases in sales volume over a 24-hour period. That makes it the 125th-best-selling book on the site, an increase from its previous rank of 7,397.

The sales gains come after the revelation of a top-secret electronic-surveillance program that allows the National Security Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to access data from audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents and connection logs from the biggest U.S. Internet companies. The Washington Post and the U.K.-based Guardian reported the program’s existence last week.

Orwell’s novel portrays a dystopian society where individuals are monitored through ubiquitous television screens and overseen by a leader called Big Brother.

(mask of British renegade Guy Fawkes)

I am reminded of the movie  V-for Vendetta  which looks apropos on the theme of neutralizing of the tyranny of Big Brother.

Nonetheless, the Snowden-NSA episode exhibits the shifting of the balance of power of media and whistle blowers which has been undergirded by the information age.

Austrian economist Gary North calls this the age of leakers:

Edward Snowden is now the talk of the town — and the world. His story on the NSA’s PRISM spying system has given exposure to a story that NSA expert James Bamford had exposed in 2008, but which no one in the mainstream media bothered to promote.

Snowden went to the Washington Post first, but when the Post waffled, he dropped them and went to Glenn Greenwald, a pro-civil rights lawyer who lives in Brazil and writes for The Guardian, a British newspaper/website. Greenwald wrote up the story as Snowden gave it to him, thereby scooping the world. He gets 100% credit, as does The Guardian. The Washington Post gets also-ran status.

These days, a leaker with a story can get his story out his way. There is always a journalist somewhere who will run it. If it’s in a major publication, which The Guardian is, the story will get coverage.

A leaker no longer has to do it anyone else’s way. He can do it his way.

This has put governments on the defensive. Because the Web acknowledges no borders, a story gets picked up and sent around irrespective of where it was published. The Guardian does not operate in the USA. It is not in the shadow of the U.S. government. It owes the U.S. government nothing. It is not dependent in any way on the U.S. government. So, the Administration’s spin-meisters have no leverage over The Guardian.

This is the age of the leakers. They can get their stories out to the public by doing an end run around their nation’s fearful mainstream media.

There are no more national gatekeepers. If a newspaper reporter wants a scoop, he will have to do it the leaker’s way — otherwise, he will be an also-ran.

The above only exhibits of the erosion of mainstream media’s centralized control over information and likewise political power.

The age of the leakers include Wikileaks and the Anonymous and myriad forms of social media.

Richard Ebeling: How Karl Marx Brought Ruin to the World

Splendid article from Austrian economist and Northwood University professor Dr. Richard M. Ebeling on the horrific consequences from the bad ideas of Karl Max. (hat tip EPJ)

Karl Marx was born on May 5, 1818 in the German Rhineland town of Trier, and died on March 14, 1883 in London.It is worth recalling, also, that there was a time when Marx was an anti-communist.

It is said that by its fruit you will know the tree. The last one hundred years is a clear testament to the consequences of Marx’s influence on modern history.

Accepting the “classical” labor theory of value, he concluded the workers were “exploited” by the “capitalists.” Marx claimed that “profit” was a portion of the workers’ output extracted by the property owners as the “price” the workers had to pay to have access to the privately owned physical means of production, without which they could not produce and survive.

The Austrian economist, Eugen von Boehm-Bawerk, in Capital and Interest (1884) and Karl Marx and the Close of His System (1896), demonstrated that Marx had confused “”profit” with “interest.” In a competitive market, profit is a temporary discrepancy between selling price and costs-prices, eventually competed away by businesses bidding up wages for workers (and other resource prices) to work for them, and those same businesses then competing for consumers to buy their output by offering their wares at better selling prices than their rivals.

What Marx had failed to fully understand was that production takes time, and that if workers would not or could not wait until the product was finished and sold to consumers to receive their wages, then someone had to “advance” those wages to them over the production period.

That, Boehm-Bawerk showed, is what the employers did, so that what workers received while working was the discounted value of their marginal product. The “gain” received by employers over their costs of production, even in long-run equilibrium, was the implicit interest for having ‘waited” for the product to be finished and sold, when they might have done other things with the “savings” they had advanced to those workers during the period of production.

If it is recognized that “time” has value, and, therefore, an intertemporal price, the notion that workers were or could be “exploited” in open, competitive markets for resources and finished goods was fundamentally wrong.

On this foundation of sand, Marx constructed his theory of the “injustice” of capitalism that has, in various forms, continued to plague the ideas and policies of countries around the world.

In the 20th century, it inspired the communist revolutions that led to the deaths of tens of millions of innocent men, women, and children. For those not aware of the magnitude of this human catastrophe, I recommend, The Black Book of Communism (1997), written by former French socialists and “fellow-travelers, that tells the horrific tale of “socialism-in-practice,” wherever those guided by Marx’s ideas came to power.

Or Paul Hollander’s edited volume, From the Gulag to the Killing Fields (2007), that brings together excerpts from the personal accounts of those who lived through the “building” of the brave new worker’s paradise, with all their tragic details about the fate of those considered “enemies of the people,” or merely expendable cogs in the wheel of socialist central planning.

Pls read the rest here

Here are the ten planks of the communist manifesto (Wikipedia.org)

About four them are prominent features in today’s supposed market economies; particularly progressive taxation, central banking, centralization of communications and transport (this is more indirect for more open economies and direct for authoritarian states) and public school.

One would wonder how the mainstream supposedly loathes communism as to embrace some of its principles, and how communist principles have been adorned as “capitalism”.

George Orwell in 1984 would call such opaqueness and blatant contradiction as Blackwhite newspeak: (bold original)

...this word has two mutually contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts. Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this. But it means also the ability to believe that black is white, and more, to know that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary. This demands a continuous alteration of the past, made possible by the system of thought which really embraces all the rest, and which is known in Newspeak as doublethink.

EU Proposes To Ban the Family

From the Daily Mail

Books which portray ‘traditional’ images of mothers caring for their children or fathers going out to work could be barred from schools under proposals from Brussels.

An EU report claims that ‘gender stereotyping’ in schools influences the perception of the way boys and girls should behave and damages women’s career opportunities in the future.

Critics said the proposals for ‘study materials’ to be amended so that men and women are no longer depicted in their traditional roles would mean the withdrawal of children’s classics, such as Enid Blyton’s The Famous Five series, Paddington Bear or Peter Pan.

The document, prepared by the European Parliament’s Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality, also suggests EU-wide legislation is needed to tackle the way women are depicted in advertising during children’s television programmes.

It further complains about the number of women in EU parliaments, and floats the idea of fixed quotas on a minimum proportion of female MPs.

The report says: ‘Children are confronted with gender stereotypes at a very young age through television series, television advertisements, study materials and educational programmes, influencing their perception of how male and female characters should behave.

‘Special educational programmes and study materials should therefore be introduced in which men and women are no longer used in examples in their ‘traditional roles’, with the male as the breadwinner of the family and the female as the one who takes care of the children.’

The proposal to regulate the ‘traditional’ family values which have been used as justification for gender equality legislation signifies an Orwellian dystopia where the state hopes to subsume family values for state values, impose state control over the citizenry to the individual level via indoctrination or through the control of people’s thought and speech, substitute dependency on the state and the disintegration of the family and the individual, and importantly, the worship of the state. 

[This resonates with the local version of ‘I am the start of change’ being subliminally impressed upon by politically controlled mainstream media to inculcate docility and conformity to the government through the abstract virtues of supposed ‘selflessness’ and through nationalism]

Yet these are signs of desperation from EU’s political elites whom have been groping for the preservation of their privileges and entitlements amidst the rapid deterioration of the incumbent parasitical political economic institutions.

Big Brother now a Reality in the US

The Philippines has a popular reality TV program, called the Pinoy Big Brother (PBB) which is a local version of a foreign reality show.

The basic concept of which is that a select number of participants, who are called “housemates”, live in a camera ubiquitous house and strictly according to the "entertaining" rules of ‘Big Brother’. These housemates competes to survive through elimination rounds, as nominated by Big Brother, where audiences determine the victor, who receives material prizes. Of course, the other implied goal for these participants is to be "discovered" as celebrities.

PBB, according to Wikipedia.org, follows the same premise as its many foreign counterparts around the world: twelve Philippine residents are forced to live with each other inside a house for about 3 months or at least 100 days. (italics mine)

So the sublime message of these shows has been one of generating social acceptability for people to forcibly live under the dictates of a “big brother”, a.k.a despot or a tyrant.

Once people are seduced to the idea of condescension and submission, then the implementation of social policies under a 'compassionate' “big brother” regime becomes easier.

In the US, the city of San Francisco has reportedly started using cameras to supposedly prevent crimes

From the New American,

The United States continues its slow morphing into Big Brotherdom, this time through the use of cameras that predict crimes before they take place based on “suspicious” behavior. The cameras will then summon law enforcement to help pre-empt the crime from taking place.

The Daily Mail (Britain) reports, “Using a range of in-built parameters of what is ‘normal’ the cameras then send a text message to a human guard to issue an alert-or call them.” They can track up to 150 people at a time and will build up a “memory” of suspicious behavior to begin determining what is inappropriate.

BRS Labs, the company behind the camera, indicates that the cameras “have the capability to learn from what they observe.”

BRS Labs President John Frazzini said that the technology involves 11 patents that deal with the camera’s ability to learn.

They are also equipped with the technology to adjust for poor light or shaky imagery, and have a series of “trip wires” that become activated and then alert a human supervisor. The footage is then sent over the Internet to employees with a text message summarizing the details.

“The video surveillance technology we have invented is distinctly and materially different from the simple recognition capabilities found in video analytics solutions currently available from a number of vendors in the physical security market,” Frazzini said in astatement. “Generally speaking, video analytics software receives video data from cameras, and issues alerts based on very specific and narrowly defined human programmed rules that have failed to provide operational value in the video surveillance market. In strong contrast to those limited and deteriorating solutions, the patented technology of BRS Labs does not require any human pre-programmed rules, thereby providing an inherently scalable enterprise class software platform to the video surveillance market.”

The cameras have already been installed in prime tourist attractions, government buildings and military bases, and are now being prepared to be installed throughout the transportation system in San Francisco, including buses, trams, and subways.

According to the company, the cameras will eventually be placed in 12 San Francisco stations, 22 cameras per station, totaling nearly 300 cameras in all.

The San Francisco cameras include a special feature that turns the footage into code before they are analyzed.

The reality is that such measures are designed not really to prevent crimes or terrorism, where policies have always been marketed under the cover of some pretentious public good, but about the slippery slope towards the establishment Big government, if not totalitarianism, for the benefit of the political class and their cronies. Shades of George Orwell's dystopian society of 1984.

Austerity in Spain?

Juan Carlos Hidalgo at the Cato Institute investigates claims that Spain has been suffering from “austerity”

Writes Mr. Hidalgo, (bold emphasis mine)

There is a wide consensus that Spain’s economic troubles are the result of an enormous housing bubble—even bigger than the one that hit the U.S.—that burst in 2008. Just the year before, Spain boasted healthy fiscal indicators: a general government budget surplus of 1.9% of GDP and a gross consolidated debt of just 36.2% of GDP. However, once the bubble burst, government revenues collapsed and stimulus spending was injected into the economy, resulting in a fiscal deficit of 11.2% in 2009 and a gross debt that has increased over 30 percentage points of GDP in just 4 years.

Paul Krugman and The Economist argue that this evidence shows that, unlike Greece, Spain wasn’t fiscally profligate. However, the devil is in the details. Spain did run budget surpluses prior to the crash, but those surpluses weren’t caused by restrained government spending, but by ballooning tax revenues (thanks to a growing housing bubble). If we look at total government spending in the last decade, we can see a steady and significant rise until 2009:

* Using GDP deflator.
Source: European Commission, Economic and Financial Affairs.

Government spending in nominal terms increased at an annual rate of 7.6% from 2000 to 2009. Ryan Avent at The Economist says that “the push for austerity began in 2010,” and thus we have to look at nominal spending after that year, when according to Avent, it fell “substantially” due to austerity measures. In reality, it went down by just 1% in 2010 and a further 3.6% in 2011. If these cuts seem “substantial” to Avent, then a yearly average increase of 7.6% for almost a decade must be staggering.

Moreover, if we look at spending in real terms, using constant euros from 2000, there hasn’t been any decrease in the level of government spending.

If we look at government spending as a share of the economy, Spain appears as fiscally prudent: Spending was 39.2% of GDP in 2000 and exactly the same figure in 2007. However, as has been noted by Juan Ramón Rallo, Ángel Martín Oro and Adrià Pérez Martí of the Juan de Mariana Institute in a recent Cato study, “the data should be interpreted with caution, given that the GDP was growing at an artificially high rate.” The point is proven by the fact that when the economy came to a halt in 2008 (it grew by just 0.9%), government spending as a share of GDP leapt 2.3 percentage points to 41.5% in just one year. Government spending as a share of the economy remained constant during much of the 2000’s not because the government was spending too little but because GDP was growing too fast.

Moreover, once the crisis kicked in, government spending as a share of GDP reached a peak at 46.3% in 2009 (due to a combination of still more stimulus spending and a contracting economy). It later fell to 43% in 2011, still a higher share than in 2008. Government spending in Spain has indeed come down in the last two years, but not in a dramatic fashion as some people would have us to believe.

What about taxes? As has been the case in Britain, France, Italy and Greece, in the last two years the Spanish government increased taxes to tackle the soaring deficit: personal income tax rates went up in 2010 and two new brackets of 44% and 45% were introduced for higher incomes. Tax credits to self-employed workers were revoked. The VAT rate went up from 16% to 18% and excise duties on tobacco and gasoline were also raised. All these tax increases took place before the large tax hike introduced this year by the conservative government of Mariano Rajoy, which turned Spain into one of the highest taxed countries in Europe (and explained at length in this Economic Development Bulletin).

In short, austerity in Spain, described by Paul Krugman as “insane,” consists mostly of significant tax increases and timid spending cuts.

So Spain’s economy has been enduring economic strains hardly from spending cuts but mainly from HEFTY TAX INCREASES, rigid labor regulations and the welfare state.

On asphyxiating labor environment the Economist noted last February,

Spain’s labour laws, which date back to the Franco era, have condemned half the workforce to unemployment or to temporary jobs while the rest enjoy ironclad contracts and huge redundancy pay-offs. The new law blurs this insider/outsider divide and may thus get more people into stable employment. The decree comes on top of a January agreement by unions and employers to limit pay rises over the next three years. Mr de Guindos thinks most Spaniards see the need for labour reform. But its success in terms of growth may depend on unions’ choice between protecting jobs and keeping up their members’ pay.

The same statist FALSEHOODs have been thrown to Greece, where supposed “devaluation” from an “EU exit” would have posed as “elixir” to Greek economic woes.

Yet the ramifications from such absurd mainstream propaganda has been to SPUR a stampede out of the Greek banking system or systemic “bank run” or “capital flight” into safe havens as Germany and the US, as Greeks feared the loss of savings from forcible conversion of their euros to “drachmas”.

And the same tax hike prescriptions from statists has led Greeks to drastically avoid paying taxes.

In short, statist medicines have been blowing up right smack on their faces.

Yes, polls have it that 80% of Greeks want to stay in the Euro!!!

Statist imbeciles engage in deceptive phraseology to promote their political religion. As George Orwell once wrote,

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible... Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness… Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them…The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism.

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics’. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.

False prophets, these statists, are.

Video: Cato Institute on Obama's State of the Union Address

Cato experts straighten out many of the twisted political statements made by US President Obama at last night's State of the Union address.

To quote George Orwell on "BlackWhite" (bold emphasis mine)

this word has two mutually contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts. Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this. But it means also the ability to believe that black is white, and more, to know that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary. This demands a continuous alteration of the past, made possible by the system of thought which really embraces all the rest, and which is known in Newspeak as doublethink.

As exposed above politicians are very good at propagating doublethink.

The Orwellian Approach of Mainstream Media

From Lew Rockwell.com

Today, mainstream media coverage uses programmed distortion, confusion, even outright lying when its Money Power masters order it to support the “official story” on any major political, economic or financial process. When looked at closely, however, the “official story” of things can be seen to be inaccurate, misleading, often hardly believable if not downright stupid.

Examples of this: Iraq’s inexistent WMD’s leading to the invasion and destruction of that country; global mega-banker bail-outs with taxpayer money; irrational US diplomatic, military, financial and ideological alignment to Israeli objectives; “we-killed-Osama-Bin-Laden-and-dumped-his-body-into-the-sea”; and the wide array of “whodunits” surrounding 9/11 in New York and Washington, 7/7 in London, the AMIA/Israeli Embassy attacks in Buenos Aires in 1992/1994, and – of course – that all time favorite: who shot JFK…?…

How they do it…

The Seven Step Mainstream Media Country Destruction Guide

1. First, they start by targeting a country ripe for “Regime Change”, and brand it a “rogue state”; then…

2. They arm, train, finance local terrorist groups through CIA, MI6, Mossad, Al-Qaeda (a CIA operation), drug cartels (often CIA operations) and call them “freedom fighters”; then…

3. As mock UN Security Council Resolutions are staged that rain death and destruction upon millions of civilians, they call it “UN sanctions to protect civilians”; then…

4. They spread flagrant lies through their “newsrooms” and paid journalists, and call it "the international community’s concerns expressed by prestigious spokespeople and analysts…” then…

5. They bomb, invade and begin to control the target country and call it “liberation”; then…

6 As the target country falls fully under their control, they impose “the kind of democracy that we want to see” (as Hillary Clinton before visiting Egypt and Tunisia on March 10, 2011), until finally…

7. They steal appetizing oil, mineral and agricultural reserves handing them over to Global Power Elite corporations, and impose unnecessary private banking debt and call it “foreign investment and reconstruction.”

Their keynotes are: Force and Hypocrisy, which they have used time and again to destroy entire countries, always in the name of “freedom”, “democracy”, “peace” and “human rights”. Utmost force and violence is used to achieve their ends and goals.

Read the rest here

Mainstream media has served as traditional and conventional channels for political interests to broadcast propaganda, even in the Philippines.

Here, the local theme may be different from the above, but the objective has been the same: to justify the use or expansion of political control over the populace--mostly done through abstractions.

As George Orwell wrote,

The inflated style is itself an kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as "keeping out of politics." All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia.