The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
Obedience Training: The Truth about the Pledge of Allegiance
A look into the origins of the pledge of allegiance – mandatory regurgitation for school children – reveals that it was actually created by a magazine in 1892 in order to sell flags to schools, and the pledge was created by Francis Bellamy to create a reason for schools to buy the flags. In turn, this social ritual creates cohesion and unity in the mind of the public with the federal government.
TechnoCalyps Part I TransHuman
99 cents — the lowest price Amazon will allow for 9 page eye-opener.
The endorsement of John Kasich by the New York Times — and the varied reasons for disqualifying Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio — open the way for the only candidate that has been a Governor and created a balanced budget to first win the Republican nomination and then win over all others, most of whom are not Democratic party loyalists.
The looming indictment of Hillary Clinton for ordering, in writing, the by-passing of security protocols for thousands of classified messages, at least 22 of which are in the sensitive compartmented / special access domain, opens the way for a serious national conversation leading toward a sanity nomination on the right and a justice accommodation on the left — it's time we restore integrity to our electoral process and give true inclusive democracy a chance.
Kasich's early validation in the primaries would also dissuade Michael Bloomberg from running — and Kasich is probably the only candidate capable of easing Bloomberg's legitimate concerns about the field that Tom Friedman described in his article, “None of the Above.”
Hope For Imagining a World Beyond Corporate Control
Finding ways to democratically control our common wealth, from Quebec to India
An excerpt from the recent book SOS: Alternatives to Capitalism (New Internationalist Publications).
The commons is not just a battlefield between corporate predators and those who resist them – it is also a source of hope for those willing to imagine a world beyond capitalism. It represents a space between the private market and the political state in which humanity can control and democratically root our common wealth. Both the market and the state have proved inadequate for this purpose. In different ways, they have both led to a centralization of power and decision-making. Both private monopolies and state bureaucracies have proved incapable of maintaining the ecological health of the commons or managing the fair and equitable distribution of its benefits.
Plutocracy, a five-part documentary by Scott Noble. The first part, Divide et Impera (Divide and Rule), is currently available online at Films for Action.
See Also:
Why your nation’s IQ matters more than your own
We know that intelligence matters at the level of the individual, impacting performance in school, work, and life. Decades of research supports that point. But what if your personal intelligence level doesn’t matter as much as the average level of intelligence of the country in which you live? This is what economist Garett Jones of George Mason University calls the “paradox of IQ” in his new book Hive Mind: How Your Nation’s IQ Matters So Much More Than Your Own.
Phi Beta Iota: A great deal goes into creating a “Smart Nation.” We have not done anything in this direction since the first article appeared in 1996.
See Also:
Steele, Robert. “SPECIAL FEATURE: Creating a Smart Nation–Strategy, Policy, Intelligence, and Information,” Government Information Quarterly, pp. 159-173
This is a fascinating article about differences in language, and shows how things can truly be “lost in translation.” My husband, a native Spanish speaker and I will have heated debates about English because he's translating in his head, and some expressions he'll claim he's never heard (despite living in this country for almost 35 years), or he'll say they don't make sense.
How language can affect the way we think
There’s a wide field of research on the link between language and both psychology and behavior. Here, a few fascinating examples:
