PufPuf23
PufPuf23's JournalAlso in the News, The Emperor Wears no Clothes
The propagandists at DU have no shame nor the ethics or values of the Democratic Party of the first 50 years or so of my life.
They are the rainbow have and have mores with "politically correct" GOP-style bloodlust.
Five movements cames together in a Perfect Storm of the 60s:
1 Anti-war
2. Desegregation
3. Free speech
4. Sexual expression
5. Peace and love (flower children).
Plus we had the best music ever; the mixing of cultures and voices was important.
There was much overlap between the movements.
Universities especially were public, were cheap and hotbeds of thought and protest.
There were religious leaders (like MLK, the Berrigans, Bishop Pike, Catholic liberation theology, rebirth of American paganism, rebirth of American Indian religions) allied with the major movements.
I spent the late 66-79s bouncing between Berkeley, San Francisco, and Marin for high school. work, and university and my rural and Indian country Humboldt county home.
My parents did not understand me. I quit hunting age 17. Smoked tobacco a handful of times and never since my teens but learned to like P** age 13.
The arts flourished and the mixing of cultures were syncretic (this happened in religion and life philosophy as well).
Heaven or hell, still proud to be a liberal.
Sadly disappointed in what happened to the USA, World, and our communities, especially post the so-called "Reagan Revolution".
My experience of the present USA is a much meaner and heartless society.
Technology does not always work for good but human understanding of the natural world is always positive.
I did not expect today's world back in the 60s and 70s.
Where have all the flowers gone?
Ubik is/was under most recent option to be filmed by Michel Gondry
who directed Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
Here is a website (that hasn't been updated in 2 years): http://collider.com/michel-gondry-ubik-philip-k-dick/76478/
PKD wrote a screenplay, Ubik - The Screenplay, that was written in 1974 for a French director and published in 1985.
The published screenplay was relatively hard to find until republished in hc and trade sc editions in 2008 and 2012.
Linklater, who did A Scanner Darkly, had an option prior to Gondry but did not make the film so there have been at least 3 stabs at developing the book to film.
I'd like to see a quality production of The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. John Lennon once purchased on option to film 3SPE.
BTW Philip with one "l".
I'll take an early Godwin in this thread - how-ibm-technology-jump-started-the-holocaust
The Nazis' persecution of Jews was brutal, methodical, and horrifyingly efficient. However, their perverse efforts were only realized with the assistance of a Hollerith Machine - IBM's custom-built tabulation system. IBM and the Holocaust by Edwin Black explains.
When Hitler rose to power, German intellect descended into madness. The Nazi movement was not merely a throng of hooligans pelting windows and screaming slogans. Guiding the Brown Shirts and exhorting the masses was an elite coterie of pseudo-scientists, corrupted professionals, and profit-blinded industrialists. Nazi jurists, medical doctors, and a clique of scientists — each with their prestigious academic credentials — found ways to pervert their science and higher calling to advance the cause of Aryan domination and racial persecution.
At the vanguard of Hitler's intellectual shock troops were the statisticians. Naturally, statistical offices and census departments were Dehomag's [IBM's German subsidiary] number one clients. In their journals, Nazi statistical experts boasted of what they expected their evolving science to deliver. All of their high expectations depended on the continuing innovation of IBM punch cards and tabulator technology. Only Dehomag could design and execute systems to identify, sort, and quantify the population to separate Jews from Aryans.
Friedrich Zahn, president of the Bavarian Statistical Office, phrased it best in recalling the role of Nazi statisticians. "The government of our Führer and Reichschancellor Adolf Hitler is statistics-friendly," wrote Zahn in Allgemeines Statistisches Archiv (ASA), the official journal of the German Statistical Society. Zahn emphasized that Hitler's "government not only demands physical fitness and people strong in character and discipline, but useful knowledge as well. It demands not only political and economic soldiers, but also scientific soldiers."
more.......
http://gizmodo.com/5812025/how-ibm-technology-jump-started-the-holocaust
I am not calling POTUS Obama evil nor claiming we are committing genocide. One questionable justification in fact is to reduce deaths by targeting individuals.
Together with the NSA and other data gathering, we have built technology and institutions that would have been a WWII wet dream and that could create a 21st Century nightmare, if taken to an extreme for terror, war, or any sort of "social engineering".
Remember this from the 2008 primary season?
Obama Denies Assuring Canada on NAFTA
First Posted: 03/28/08 03:46 AM ET
SAN ANTONIO — Barack Obama said Monday that his campaign never gave Canada back-channel assurances that his harsh words about the North American Free Trade Agreement were for political show _ despite the disclosure of a Canadian memo indicating otherwise.
According to the memo obtained by The Associated Press, Obama's senior economic adviser told Canadian officials in Chicago that the debate over free trade in the Democratic presidential primary campaign was "political positioning" and that Obama was not really protectionist.
The adviser, Austan Goolsbee, said his comments to those officials were misinterpreted by the author, Joseph DeMora, who works for the Canadian consulate in Chicago and attended the meeting.
In Carrollton, Texas, Obama told reporters: "Nobody reached out to the Canadians to try to assure them of anything."
snip
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/03/03/obama-denies-assuring-can_n_89539.html
Comparing Obama to FDR and the 1930s to now are false equivalencies.
Like NAFTA, the TPP is a pro-corporate and pro-concentrated wealth unlike what was done by FDR to benefit the People and the nation.
From your own quote:
"Of course, it is important to remember that the Roosevelt administration’s efforts to expand world trade were accompanied by such critical pieces of legislation as the National Labor Relations Act and Fair Labor Standards Act, which vastly strengthened the place of unions in American life. The 1930s and ’40s were also years in which the government engaged in an unprecedented level of investment in America’s infrastructure and industry — largely through deficit spending — that helped vastly expand our manufacturing base and render the United States the most powerful industrialized country in the world. Our efforts to expand trade and do away with protection were only part of a broader effort to reform the U.S. economy in such a way as to provide what FDR liked to call “economic security” for every American. "
Scanner Darkly is easily the most true to novel PKD film.
Looks like we might get to see Radio Free Albemuth, another PKD film done with PKD readers in mind.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/elizabethkarr/radio-free-albemuth-theatrical-release
Sort of OT but about Stanton and Lincoln
Philip K Dick wrote a novel, "We Can Build You", published in 1972 about a simulacra of Stanton and Lincoln. The book is back in print published by Vintage.
from wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Can_Build_You
cut
"We Can Build You is set in the then-future year of 1982. It centers on Louis Rosen, a small businessman whose company produces spinets and electronic organs. Rosen's partner wants to begin production of simulacra, or androids, based on famous Civil War figures. The firm completes two prototypes, one of Edwin M. Stanton and one of Abraham Lincoln. Rosen then attempts to sell the robot patents to Sam K. Barrows, an influential businessman who is opening up lunar real estate for purchase and colonization. Unfortunately, while the Stanton simulacrum proves able to adapt to contemporary U.S. society, the Lincoln simulacrum proves unable to do so, possibly due to the fact that the original experienced schizophrenia. At the same time, Louis begins a relationship with Pris Frauenzimmer, the schizophrenic daughter of his business partner, who has designed both simulacra. This becomes an obsession and Louis himself begins to hallucinate about Pris."
cut
My recollections of last read:
The Stanton (first product) and Lincoln androids are so real as to go out in public and have incongruent and independent minds of their own. Lincoln is depressive and unwilling to be on any message for an agenda. Stanton is aggressive and goes off the reservation to work with the "real" competitor.
From Vintage book jacket:
"Louis Rosen and his partners used to sell spinets. Now they are selling people -- or, to be more precise, ingeniously designed, historically authentic simulacra of Edwin M Stanton and Abraham Lincoln ......... And there's the added complication that someone -- or something -- like Abraham Lincoln may not want to be sold."
"Is an electronic Abraham Lincoln any less alive than his creators? Is a machine that cares and suffers inferior to the woman Louis love --a borderline psychopath that does neither?
My note: That the Stanton simulacra who bullies and is a traitor dominates the Lincoln simulacra before getting into the human emotion and Mars-Earth corporate colonization parts of the tale.
Not a shill, just a PKD reader since my teens in the 60s SF area. The book as aged well and is structured as relatively linear and finished story.
Thanks Catherina for the translation(s).
Many posters at DU blow me away.
Jingoism lives at DU.
"Jingoism is extreme patriotism in the form of aggressive foreign policy.[1] In practice, it is a country's advocation of the use of threats or actual force against other countries in order to safeguard what it perceives as its national interests. Colloquially, it refers to excessive bias in judging one's own country as superior to others—an extreme type of nationalism."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jingoism
Important thread.
I feel ill over what has occurred regards to Morales and Snowden and the reaction of the "Good -Democratic- Americans" at DU.
Recall the international support back when POTUS received the Nobel Peace prize, look at now (and we know things would be worse with more war and loss of credibility under the GOP) ?
But look at the loss of international credibility regardless.
My intuition is not anti-Obama. POTUS Obama is a small cog / large icon.
The Golden Rule: Do unto others as you wish they do unto you.
But also those who have the gold, make the rules.
Anti-imperialism and neo-liberalism.
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