We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Friday, September 18, 2020

Posts that I especially recommend today: Friday, Sept. 18, 2020

Notably, the “solutions” offered to many of the health-care institutions that have been hacked have come from government-promoted yet opaque groups that are deeply tied to US and allied intelligence agencies as well as Silicon Valley. These “volunteer groups,” such as “the CTI League” and “the Cyber Alliance to Defend Our Healthcare,” offer their services for free but, notably, gain access to the patient data they are tasked with guarding. Are such groups, given their deep ties to Silicon Valley and intelligence agencies, helping acquire even more data to satisfy the Silicon Valley and national-security state’s endless hunger for more and more data?
  • The Library of Alexandria is on Fire featuring James Corbett of The Corbett Report. (Note: It is obvious that most of human knowledge has been either transferred onto the internet or nowadays accessed only on the internet. But this presents special important problems if the gateways to access this information are "owned" and/or controlled by powerful privately owned entities. Under capitalism these entities are corporations. After his introduction by Richard Gage, founder and president of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, Corbett develops an important argument that under the internet corporations, owners of search engines and social media which provide access to information (like Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) can "burn", or make hard to find, or alter completely (Tower of Babel), information. He uses the burning of the Alexandria Library in 48 BC by Roman troops as a metaphor for the censorship of knowledge that powerful capitalist ruling classes of today do not like (the persecution of Julian Assange is a prime example of a supplier of forbidden information). He cites a number of examples of this growing trend by internet corporations, and offers sound advice to others on how to preserve real information under existing conditions.)
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