The True Size of Africa

George Carlin on who "owns" American society

"There's a reason education sucks, and it's the same reason that it reason why it will never, ever, ever, ever be fixed. It's never going to get any better; don't look for it; be happy with what you got. Because the owners of the country don't want that. I'm talking about the real owners now, the big--the wealthy--the real owners, the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians, they're an irrelevant--politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice. You have owners; they own you. They own everything; they own all the important land; they own and control the corporations; they've long since bought and paid for the senate, the congress, the state houses, the city halls; they got the judges in their back pockets; and they own all of the big media companies, and they control about all of the media companies, so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want, they want more for themselves and less for everybody else.

"But I'll tell you what they don't want; they don't want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don't want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They're not interested in that; that doesn't help them; that's against their interests. That's right. You know something? They don't want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they're getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard thirty fucking years ago. They don't want that. You know what they want? They want obedient workers, obedient workers: people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime, and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it. And now they're coming for your social security money. They want your fucking retirement money; they want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street.

"And you know something? They'll get it. They'll get it all from you sooner or later, because they own this fucking place. It's a big club, and you ain't in it. You and I are not in the big club. By the way, it's the same big club they use all day to beat you over the head with when they tell you what to believe--all day long, beating you over the head and their media telling you what to believe, what to think, and what to buy. The table is tilted, folks. The game is rigged, and nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care. Good, honest, hard-working people--white collar, blue collar, it doesn't matter which color shirt you have on--good, honest, hard-working people continue--these are people of modest means--continue to elect these rich cock-suckers who don't give a fuck about them. They don't give a fuck about you. They don't give a fuck about you; they don't care about you at all, at all, at all."

Area 51 Uncensored

Here are some interview excerpts from the book Area 51 Uncensored by Annie Jacobsen. (Source: NPR's Fresh Air.)

On flying discs and conspiracy theories

"The UFO craze began in the summer of 1947. Several months later, the G2 intelligence, which was the Army intelligence corps at the time, spent an enormous amount of time and treasure seeking out two former Third Reich aerospace designers named Walter and Reimar Horten who had allegedly created [a] flying disc. ... American intelligence agents fanned out across Europe seeking the Horton brothers to find out if, in fact, they had made this flying disc.

"The idea behind it remains, why? Why were they looking for a flying disc? And conspiracy theorists have had their hands on this declassified file for over a decade now, and they say it proves that this flying disc came from outer space. If you read the documents, the takeaway that I found fascinating was that at the end of it, the Army admits finding the Horten brothers, and that the Horten brothers admitted their contact with the Russians and that's where the file ends. Everything after that is classified."

On why Area 51 is actually classified, according to a source

"The Horten brothers were involved in the flying disc crash in New Mexico. And that is from a single source. ... There was an unusual moment where that source became very upset and told me things that were stunning that's almost impossible to believe at first read. And that is that a flying disc really did crash in New Mexico and it was transported to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, and then in 1951 it was transferred to Area 51, which is why the base is called Area 51. And the stunning part of the reveal is that my source, who I absolutely believe and worked with for 18 months on this, was one of the engineers who received the equipment and he also received the people who were in the craft.

"The people were, according to the source, were child-sized pilots, and there's a lot of debate about how old they were. He believes they were 13, although other people believe they may have been older. But this is a firsthand witness to this, and I made a decision to write about this in the very end of the book, after I take the traditional journalist form of telling you everything in the third person, I switch and I kind of lean into the reader and I say, 'Look, this is not why Area 51 is classified to the point where no one in the government will admit it exists. The reason is because what one man told me.' And then using the first person, I tell you what I was told. And there's no doubt that people are going to be upset, alarmed and skeptical of this information, but I absolutely believe the veracity of my source, and I believe it was important that I put this information out there because it is the tip of a very big iceberg."

On the Soviet human experiments her source told her about

"The child-sized aviators in this craft [that crashed in New Mexico] were the result of a Soviet human experimentation program, and they had been made to look like aliens a la Orson Welles' War of the Worlds, and it was a warning shot over President Truman's bow, so to speak. In 1947, when this would have originally happened, the Soviets did not yet have the nuclear bomb, and Stalin and Truman were locked in horns with one another, and Stalin couldn't compete in nuclear weaponry yet, but he certainly could compete in the world of black propaganda — and that was his aim, according to my source. ...

"What is firsthand information is that he worked with these bodies [of the pilots] and he was an eyewitness to the horror of seeing them and working with them. Where they actually came from is obviously the subject of debate. But if you look at the timeline with Josef Mengele, he left Auschwitz in January of 1945 and disappeared for a while, and the suggestion by the source is that Mengele had already cut his losses with the Third Reich at that point and was working with Stalin."

On why the Soviets would have undertaken such a hoax

"The plan, according to my source, was to create panic in the United States with this belief that a UFO had landed with aliens inside of it. And one of the most interesting documents is the second CIA director, Walter Bedell Smith, memos back and forth to the National Security Council talking about how the fear is that the Soviets could make a hoax against America involving a UFO and overload our early air-defense warning system, making America vulnerable to an attack."

Eli Pariser: Beware online "filter bubbles"

A short lecture on the problems with personalized web content:



Also, a related book:

One review, from Amazon:

One of Eli Pariser's central points is that personalized internet services--Google, Facebook, advertising--can put you into a "you loop", in which they show you what you think you want, and then you wind up wanting those things more because you see them more often. Invisibly, your momentary impulses (click on this, ignore that) shape your reality, and your reality shapes what you respond to.

Since reading the book, I've found myself compulsively testing one of its main case studies: Google's automatically personalized search results. Try searching for "guns": I don't see the NRA on the first page, but friends do. Huge differences on "abortion" too: some people see Planned Parenthood, other people see Catholic.com. Even searching for "bias" shows different results to me vs my wife!

Drawing on history, academic research, exclusive interviews, and a huge range of other sources, the author takes a hard look at the algorithms that increasingly shape how all of us think. He contends that unchecked profit-centric personalization threatens democracy. When you read the book, you'll come away convinced. And you'll appreciate how the book itself makes our democracy stronger.

A People's History of the United States

Full text online: http://www.historyisaweapon.com/zinnapeopleshistory.html

Audiobook version of Zinn's lecture at Reed College: Here or here

The Internet in Society: Empowering or Censoring Citizens?

"A National Strategic Narrative"

Two high-ranking members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (Captain Wayne Porter of the U.S. Navy and Colonel Mark Mykleby of the Marine Corps) recently authored an alternative strategic narrative for U.S. foreign policy. It argues that the U.S. should abandon outdated, imperialistic policies left over from the Cold War and proposes a number of priority shifts:

1. From control in a closed system to credible influence in an open system.
2. From containment to "sustainment."
3. From deterrence and defense to civilian engagement and competition.
4. From zero sum to positive sum global politics/economics.
5. From national security to national prosperity and security.

Here's a look at the narrative from CNN's Fareed Zakaria: