Immortal Words from George Carlin

George Carlin in 2004.

Six years ago today George Carlin, one of the great American comedian/social critics, died of heart failure. It’s often assumed that people mellow with age but Carlin’s life and career is proof that the opposite can be true. Throughout much of the 60s, Carlin’s brand of comedy was good but rather mainstream and not outstanding. During the 70s, he reinvented himself, becoming one of the top counterculture comedians of the era. Carlin continued to make occasional appearances in mainstream film and television (eg. “Outrageous Fortune” and the Bill and Ted films), but from around the late 90s to 2008, his counterculture sensibilities came back with a vengeance. At the time, his later material didn’t seem to resonate with audiences as much as his material from the 70s. It was even more edgy, dark, and pessimistic, probably too much for the aging boomer demographic that previously made up the majority of his fanbase. However, for younger audiences discovering Carlin through the internet his words reflected the reality of the world as effects of increasingly corrupt political and economic systems could no longer be kept hidden by corporate media.

The following clip exemplifies what many people around the world love most about George Carlin and will forever remember him for:

Transcript

But there’s a reason… there’s a reason. There’s a reason for this, there’s a reason education SUCKS, and it’s the same reason it will never, ever, EVER be fixed.

It’s never going to get any better, don’t look for it, be happy with what you’ve got.

Because the owners, the owners of this country don’t want that. I’m talking about the real owners now, the BIG owners! The Wealthy… the REAL owners! The big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions.

Forget the politicians. They are irrelevant. The 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 the big 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, 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. Thats against their interests.

Thats right. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table and think about how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 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 shitty jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it, and now they’re coming for your Social Security money. They want your 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 cause 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 to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long beating you over the head with their media telling you what to believe, what to think and what to buy. The table has 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 what 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 you….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. And nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care. Thats what the owners count on. The fact that Americans will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red, white and blue dick thats being jammed up their assholes everyday, because the owners of this country know the truth.

It’s called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.

 

The Unknowable and Ineffable

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By Mark Anthony Rockeymoore

Source: Sacred Space in Time

But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only. ~Matthew 24:36

Many people believe that they know what is going on in the world.

They avidly watch the evening news, read the newspapers, browse the media sites online keeping up with recent events in politics and culture, drawing conclusions based upon their own understanding and the trends of the day. The mainstream media presents memes depicting certain themes they desire the masses to internalize and, subsequently, materialize. Alternative media does the same.

And yet, despite the prognostications of those who believe they know best, their predictions rarely come true, their dire outcomes evaporate back into the wishful nightmares that seem to typify the oft unspoken desires of many. The extraordinary detail to be found in many expositions concerning the confluence of past, present and future upon any topic bearing upon the matter of humanity’s fate often defies description. The varied and fantastic prognoses of those who have taken upon themselves the mantle of prophet seem to lead those who query down a rabbit hole of phantasms, ghosts, demons and even angels hell-bent upon the utter destruction of Terran consciousness from the manifest matter of Creation itself.

The idea of the world existing in some kind of matrix-like relation to the greater reality of the Cosmos, comprised of infinite universes and dimensions, layers and agglomerations of consciousness and potentiality, has migrated from the purely alternative and awakened consciousness paradigm and is currently threatening sleeping and mainstream consciousness with a bombardment of books, television shows and movies that present the structure of alternative belief systems in the guise of fictional narratives.

Of course these memes are structured with very specific outcomes and thought directives in mind. Human supremacy, concentrated violence, cultural, political and racial aggression all underlie the overtly entertaining and colorful multimedia presentations of stories designed to evoke very specific states of mind and emotion. States that lie quiescent, dormant for the most part, until triggered by external events. The timeline is indeed a human one, designed and carried out by larger accretions of consciousness formed over many hundreds of years, intent upon maintaining elite domination of the world through the voluntary acquiescence to an agenda non-life oriented in nature.

All of the institutions of society play their part. From sports to government, from corporations to churches. The same powers and principalities invoke the remorseless and ponderous force of millennia of capital accumulation applied against the natural will and intent of a significant number of the planetary population who are aligned more with the idea of a sustainable world than with the consumptive and death-oriented agenda of the elite. Those inhabitants of the so-called developed countries are immersed within a sea of electromagnetic confusion, vapidly entranced by the dancing mimes of illusory entertainment, bodies malnourished by fast and processed foods, unstructured water and medications designed to diffuse consciousness and debilitate the body.

Those who consider themselves awakened are little better off, isolated and paranoid, confused by the preponderance of information and the apparent inconsistency of diversity,  as fantastic vistas of potentiality compete for relevance and perceptive reality. The extra-terrestrial question, Dark Ops, political gamesmanship, cultural and material genocide, the origins of humanity and our destiny. Themes that swirl and compete in consciousness for domination, the synthesis of a multitude of topical areas utilizing right and left-brained modalities of lateral thinking successfully achieved by some few, yet fatally flawed by the inclusion of deliberately falsified data and information purposefully skewed to favor certain agendas over others.

Considering the fateful importance of clear and concise thinking, immersion within the streams of information competing for ideological and material dominance, the only sane response is continuing and applied concentration upon the modalities of perception themselves.

The instruments of our immersion, the temples, prisons of our consciousnesses.

The body and mind remain the lenses through which our spirits and souls interact with the material world. Clarity of intent, clarity of perception, clarity of speech and action rarefy the experience of the Seeker.  Through the mechanisms of chaos synchronicitous events coalesce around thoughts, words and actions, weaving a tapestry of seamless interaction between the experiencer and the experienced, the Seeker and that which is sought. The deliberately confusing potpourri of information settles into the still, zero-point void of the Absolute from whence it arose, presenting vistas undreamed to those who seek also that return to the form of original consciousness, that point of knowledge and ignorance, of birth and death, of creation and destruction.

Too many speak of helping humanity when helping only themselves. Many are presented upon the worldly stage, interchangeably in energetic signature, in the guises of guru, shaman, priest and preacher, misleading those who are willingly misled. To each who truly seeks comes the answers sought, finite though they may be. The completion of one path leads inexorably to the beginning of another. The wheels within wheels, spirals beyond spirals, cycles infinite and eternal in conception gird our daily sojourns, mired as they may be in minutia and the dramas of our lives.

Attempting the interpretation of the world itself while still encapsulated within the limited consciousness structure of the individuated and divided consciousness is to present bias in the guise of the ineffable, to assume the knowing of that which is unknowable and inherently respondent to and, in many cases, subjected to the very instruments of perception itself. The uncontrolled emotive sheath, the undisciplined mental, the unknown soul constrained, these are the barriers to explode through to achieve the clarity necessary to perceive – even so, in a very limited fashion – the barest outlines of what is really going on.

Knowing is a continuous process. Ignorance is the default state of egoic existence. Pride, hubris threaten ever; only gratitude, openness and pure intention can pierce the locks girding the Portals of True Understanding, revealing the star-swept vistas of eternity beyond. No matter the prognostication of the street-corner prophet, the peaceful ruminations of the Sat sang-bound sage or the rabid denouncements of the internet conspiracy monger, no limited consciousness constrained by their own attachments to materiality holds the keys to the pearly gates, nor the favored ear of the ineffable.

While some do indeed see beyond the veil, are capable of abilities beyond the norm, these powers – called siddhis in the east – often present those possessing them with more problems than solutions. Daily adherence to the tenets of personal transformation remain the key to discernment. These same directives, as laid out by every, single ancient spiritual system known to humanity, provide the answers, while leaving the ultimate questions to that which possesses the ultimate answers. That of which we are ultimately conceived, ultimately returned to and ultimately inseparable from.

Clear, live and learn. Or, as the old folks say, let go, and let God. All is proceeding as per God’s plan, no matter how that term is defined or by whom. Pay attention to your part in it and situate yourself accordingly to find the answers relevant to your life and destiny. No part is too small. Every actor holds the spotlight for their part in the play, a production both infinitely variegated and boundlessly intricate.

Smile, play your role and rejoice in every moment. Paradox rules. Nothing is important or meaningful. And yet, everything is. Let the fear of the unknown die stillborn in your breast, for not even the angels of heaven know more than you do about what is to come.

Ralph Nader: “The Total Support Of The Military-industrial Complex And Empire By Barack Obama And Hillary Clinton Is Staggering”

ralph_nader

Source: Reason.com via Investment Watch

“The total support of the military-industrial complex and empire by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton is staggering,” Ralph Nader tells Reason TV.

Nader’s latest book is Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State.

To watch the full hour-long interview and read a transcript go to http://reason.com/reasontv/2014/06/11/ralph-nader.

Saturday Matinee: Documentary Double Feature

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Today I’m featuring two classic political documentaries, both more than a decade old (from 2003) yet still equally topical and among the best films on their respective subject matters.

The first is Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott’s “The Corporation”, a comprehensive and well-researched film exploring the history of corporations, how they operate and how they’ve come to attain so much political power. Related topics they cover include the 1933 attempted corporate coup exposed by General Smedley Butler, the Fox news coverup of the dangers of Monsanto’s Bovine Growth Hormone, and the mass protests in Bolivia sparked by the attempted privatization of their water supply in 2000.

“Orwell Rolls in His Grave” directed by Robert Kane Pappas is possibly the best dissection of contemporary mass media propaganda yet, with a focus on corporate media consolidation and the role of corporate media in the controversial US presidential election of 2000. The film features interviews with Mark Crispin Miller, Bernie Sanders and Danny Schechter among others.

Podcast Roundup

6/8: Hosts Mickey Huff and Peter Phillips discuss the ongoing situation in the Ukraine with Dr. Michael Parenti, Prof. Michel Chossudovsky, and former Congresswomen and Green Party Presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney on “the Project Censored Show”. All of them are contributors to a new book by Clarity Press edited by Stephen Lendman, “Flashpoint Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks WWIII.”

https://s3.amazonaws.com/Pcradiodos/Project+Censored+060614.mp3

6/9: On “the Progressive Commentary Hour”, host Gary Null interviews Dr. Andrew Wakefield, a gastroenterologist and academician specializing in inflammatory bowel disease and the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine or MMR. They discuss how the US government uses corporations and universities to support policies, silence top scientists, jeopardize public health and protect corporate profits.

http://s36.podbean.com/pb/3f11f4e516587793b6f2d38475623afc/5398ccbc/data1/blogs18/371244/uploads/ProgressiveCommentaryHour_060914.mp3

6/10: On “the Higherside Chats”, Adam Gorightly and Vyzygoth joins host Greg Carlwood for a freewheeling but illuminating conversation about the suppressed history of the United States hidden beneath lies and disinformation most have been led to believe.

http://thehighersidechats.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/112-Vyzygoth.mp3

6/12: KMO talks with Vincent Horn of Buddhist Geeks on the lastest C-Realm podcast. They discuss the use of mindfulness techniques in technological society and its connection to DIY, Quanitifed Self and Maker movements. KMO wraps up with commentary on the nature of individualism and community.

http://www.c-realm.com/wp-content/uploads/418_Adaptive_Comtemplation.mp3

 

 

Individual Wealth in Perspective

billionairehousing

By James Hall

Source: Negotium

A quaint comparison of what money can buy in today’s market has Bill Gates being able to afford every home in Boston. His $76.6 billion reported by the Washington Post or the $78.4 billion by Forbes seems a pittance when put up against John D. Rockefeller’s peak wealth of $318.3 billion (based on 2007 US dollar). According to your resident commissars over at MSNBC, “The median net worth of American households hasn’t changed much over the past decades, it’s about $20,000.” So if Gates decided to purchase all the Beantown houses, whom would he pay for the bricks and mortar? Certainly, most Americans may think of “their home is their castle”, but few actually own a debt free deed to their grand estate. No wonder the banks and financial institutions, are so fond of placing liens on real property.

The proportional context of looking at individual wealth within the relative value of global wealth is examined in the essay; It’s A “0.6%” World: Who Owns What Of The $223 Trillion In Global Wealth, seems trite. Zerohedge concludes, “The bottom line: 29 million, or 0.6% of those with any actual assets under their name, own $87.4 trillion, or 39.3% of all global assets.”

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Here are the stunning facts:

“In 2012, 3.2 billion individuals – more than two-thirds of the global adult population – have wealth below USD 10,000, and a further one billion (23% of the adult population) are placed in the USD 10,000–100,000 range.

The average wealth holding is modest in the base and middle segments of the pyramid, total wealth amounts to USD 39 trillion, underlining the potential for new consumer trends products and for the development of financial services targeted at this often neglected segment.

The remaining 373 million adults (8% of the world) have assets exceeding USD 100,000.

And then the top of the pyramid: 29 million US dollar millionaires, a group which contains less than 1% of the world’s adult population, collectively owns nearly 40% of global household wealth.

Some 84,500 individuals are worth more than USD 50 million, and 29,000 are worth over USD 100 million.”

After absorbing this macro economic analysis, it should ease the pain that the stewardship of world wealth is in such trustworthy hands. No need to burden the masses with the weight of building wealth, when that formula for getting to the top of the financial pyramid, has room for only the few. The expert obelisk creators never meant for wealth sharing and the tools to construct one’s own prosperity are not included in your capital accumulation education. The liability of mortgage and property tax obligations to retain your edifice requires regular payments to maintain the privilege of possession. Ownership is only a conditional wealth asset.

Investopedia says 3 Simple Steps To Building Wealth are:

“You need to make it. This means that before you can begin to save or invest, you need to have a long-term source of income that’s sufficient enough to have some left over after you’ve covered your necessities.

You need to save it. Once you have an income that’s enough to cover your basics, you need to develop a proactive savings plan.

You need to invest it. Once you’ve set aside a monthly savings goal, you need to invest it prudently.”

Ordinary consumers do not build great fortunes. The elementary prescription for “getting ahead” is severely limited in thinking for a world that frequently conducts business as a blood sport. However, many of the enterprises that carve out a market for their products or services have a distinct edge over the unconnected entrepreneur. Namely, government directed and controlled startups or collaborated ventures frequently become the commercial giants of the economy. Here lays the confusion when defining wealth as an accounting device of personal ownership of assets.

In addition, governments are often in the privatization and sale of state assets. The Economists reports that the “IMF estimate that non-financial government assets average 75% of GDP in advanced economies. In most countries, these are worth more than financial assets (stakes in listed firms, sovereign-wealth and securities holdings and the like).”

Liquid cash flow and high worth individuals, especially with inside track contacts, are able to cherry pick sweet heart deals. Such opportunities, usually transfers treasure, but infrequently are engines of new wealth creation. The only guarantee is that money, made or lost depending upon the accounting needs of the vulture predator, is never an option for the normal hard working taxpayer.

Unless people accept the reality that creating and growing wealth is a noble objective that involves the widespread commerce participation of a merchant class, the outrageous disparity of the top down wealth stream will widen even more, as the top tier inclusion narrows to fewer mega-billionaires.

Global business encourages transnational conglomerates with commercially identifiable names and logos. When entire economies prevail under a business plan that eliminates any rival competition, and achieves sole market dominance, the prospects to advance the individual wealth ledger of the average person diminishes.

An opportunistic society can only exist when independent business flourishes. Government bureaucrats and corporate technocrats oppose an unambiguous free market economy. As the map of the über-billionaires illustrates, their checkbook could swallow up entire cities. However, digesting, let alone growing communities into quality environments for future generations, takes an active involvement in the wealth building process that rewards contributing players.

Without a widespread populace practicing mutually beneficial business transactions, the capacity to achieve the skills necessary to compete successfully, will never develop. Instead of making money, saving money and investing money, learn the aptitude of business as a lifelong endeavor.

The poor will always be scraping the bottom, until they learn how to advance their abilities for the betterment of their own families. The alternative to greater concentration of wealth is to initiate a viable substitute to the financial stranglehold that furthers the appetites of egomaniacs like the character, Bretton James in the movie Money Never Sleeps. In the end, the true individual wealth that anyone can attain is the sincerity and moral substance of his or her own character. Money may not snooze from making more cash, but is only a means to elevate living a life worth lived.

In such a quest, the super rich may have a net worth equivalent to one’s property, but they can never afford the essence of your family or measure of your community.

 

The Six-Hour Day

Source: The Hipcrime Vocab

But don’t look for it in Calvinist America anytime soon, where we’re always on the hunt to ferret out “moochers:”

Gothenburg (Sweden) (AFP) – Robert Nilsson, a 25-year-old mechanic in Sweden’s second city Gothenburg, may be the harbinger of a future where people work less and still enjoy a high standard of living. He gets out of bed at the same time as everyone else, but instead of rushing to work, he takes it easy, goes for a jog, enjoys his breakfast, and doesn’t arrive at his Toyota workshop until noon, only to punch out again at 6:00 pm.

“My friends hate me. Most of them think because I work six hours, I shouldn’t be paid for eight,” Nilsson said, talking while fitting part of a rear window onto a Toyota Prius with swift, expert moves.

Sweden often stuns first-time visitors with its laid-back prosperity, making foreigners wonder how it is possible to have both lots of money and lots of leisure.

Part of the answer, according to economists, is a productive and well-educated workforce that adapts to new technologies quicker than most. Exactly how much –- or how little –- Swedes work compared with other nations is a somewhat open question.

“We have a 40-hour work week, but also we have a little more absence than many people and we start work late in life because we study longer,” said Malin Sahlen, an analyst at Timbro, a libertarian Stockholm-based think tank. In 2012, the average Swede worked a total of 1,621 hours, according to the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. This is more than the Netherlands with 1,381 hours, but less than Britain with 1,654 hours or the United States with 1,790 hours – and way below Chile’s 2,029 and Mexico’s 2,226 hours.

“We could work more, that’s a fact,” said Sahlen.

But far from looking to increase time spent at work, some in Sweden are out to prove that less is more and that cutting hours can boost productivity.

In an international productivity ranking by the Conference Board, a non-profit business research organisation, Sweden was already placed close to the top, coming 11th out of 61 countries. The United States was third, the Netherlands number five, and Britain number 13, whereas Chile and Mexico were both in the bottom third.

[…]

Left-wing councillor Pilhem says the concept has already proven its merits — at mechanic Nilsson’s workplace, Toyota. Toyota’s Gothenburg branch introduced the six-hour day in 2002 to make its facilities more efficient by having two shifts, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, instead of a single, longer one. Nilsson confirms that in his experience a six-hour day — paid as much as eight — is more efficient because it requires fewer breaks.

“Every time you have a break, it takes 10 to 15 minutes to get back to work, because you have to see where you were when you left off,” he said.

That efficiency is reflected in the salary, as the Toyota workshop pays technicians like Nilsson 29,700 Swedish kronor (3,300 euro, $4,510) a month, well above the 25,100 kronor (2,790 euro, $3,810) national average for workers in the private sector.

“It was a huge success straight away,” said Toyota service centre manager Elisabeth Jonsson. “We saw the results, and everything was working for the staff, for the company, for the customers, so I don’t think we ever had any discussion about putting an end to it.”

Swedes test a future of less work, more play (Yahoo! News)

Clearly, laziness will turn Sweden into an impoverished, hellish dystopia. Oh, wait, that’s the U.S. I’m describing.

Here’s a Reddit page on the article. From that page:

I used to work salary at 30 hrs a week. They told me I needed to go to 40 and get a corresponding pay increase. I did not want to but they made me.

Getting in at 9am and leaving at 3pm left me so much free time that working 30 hours a week felt like a hobby. I had more time outside of work during the day than at work. Now my butt is stuck in a chair 40 hours a week still doing 30 hours a week worth of work.

Though instead of adding just 2 hours to the work day, it added more like 4.

Extra Rush hour driving time 45 mins each way instead of 15- 1 hour extra.

Necessary Lunch Break- 1 hour extra

2 hours extra at the office- 2 hrs

So, even though I got a corresponding 33% increase in pay (from 6 hrs a day to 8 hrs a day), the time it is costing me increased by 61% (from 6.5 hrs to 10.5 hrs).

So technically, by earning more I got a pay cut.

Despite my top line salary going up 33%, my earnings per hour devoted to work dropped by 17%.

Definitely not worth it.

Comedian Rik Mayall Dead at 56

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I was surprised and saddened to hear the news that counterculture comedian Rik Mayall died in his home in London yesterday. The cause of death hasn’t been released but Scotland Yard reported that it was not believed to be suspicious. Mayall was best known for his memorable roles in cult comedy shows such as “The Young Ones”, “Black Adder”, “The New Statesman” and “Bottom”. In a tribute published by The Guardian yesterday, some of his Young Ones colleagues had this to say about him:

“very, very sad and upset that we’ve lost Rik, who was inspirational, bonkers, and a great life force… a brilliant comedian and someone who made everyone else’s lives more fun. He will be really, really missed”. – Nigel Planer

“Comedy is truly great is when it comes out of nothing, and the greatest of comedians, like Rik, have that rare ability to conjure laugh after laugh, not from endless words, but from a single look or one absurd gesture … It was in his bones. Sweet Rik, much loved – what a loss.” – Alexei Sayle

“There were times when Rik and I were writing together when we almost died laughing. They were some of the most carefree, stupid days I ever had, and I feel privileged to have shared them with him. And now he’s died for real. Without me. Selfish bastard.” – Adrian Edmonson

Not sure exactly when this live performance was recorded, but though it seems to be early in his career it captures the manic energy of some of Mayall’s later roles:

The New Zealand Herald made a commendable attempt to compile some of Rik Mayall’s greatest televised moments (there’s too many to list): http://www.nzherald.co.nz/entertainment/news/article.cfm?c_id=1501119&objectid=11270946

Rik Mayall’s second-to-the-last televised work before his death was as the narrator of the following animation for Channel 4 written and produced by Louis Hudson and Ian Ravenscroft called Don’t Fear Death:

The following is a clip from One By One, an intriguing but difficult to find feature film directed by Diane Jessie Miller and featuring one of Mayall’s final performances: