Showing posts with label 1984. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1984. Show all posts

Saturday, February 22, 2020

FOR DONALD TRUMP...

Donald Trump carries out the purge that eliminates his adversaries and builds his strength as the dictator'''

HEADLINE: ‘A travesty and a disgrace’: Trump quietly issues memo that could abolish union rights for 750,000 federal workers

Sunday, September 1, 2019

Trump to launch Big Brother to stop mass shootings


September 1, 2019" PROGRESSIVE STREET NEWS BYTES...Where Liberals Walk

Donald Trump seeks Orwell's 1984 to solve gun violence  

Trump - Orwell
Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell wouldn't think of initiating the correct approaches to stopping mass shootings, things like universal background checks, closing the gun show loophole, halting straw purchases, and, of course, banning assault weapons. No, the Oval Office lunatic and Moscow Mitch would go with grossly invading the privacy of innocent Americans with Orwellian fictionalized technology. They prefer "new 'solutions' that won’t do anything about guns"...
"These proposals frequently focus on mental health, but a new plan before the White House to monitor “neurobehavioral” predictors of violence isn’t just misguided, it’s terrifyingly dystopian."
Should we all re-read George Orwell's 1984 to understand Donald Trump?...


They are creating a new agency called HARPA, a healthcare counterpart to the Pentagon’s research and development arm DARPA. And here is how HARPA would stick their noses into the lives of us proles...
The proles in 1984 are Orwell's satirical take on the proletariat, the industrial working class in whose interest the Party is ostensibly operating. George Orwell's novel was intended to be a very dark satire on what a totalitarian government would be like if it were ever inflicted upon Britain.
HARPA "would reportedly collect volunteer data from a suite of smart devices, including Apple Watches, Fitbits, Amazon Echos, and Google Homes in order to identify “neurobehavioral signs” of “someone headed toward a violent explosive act.” The project would then use artificial intelligence to create a “sensor suite” to flag mental changes that make violence more likely." And there you have it, George Orwell's Big Brother in 2019.

This maniacal idea has been in the works since 2017, but the mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio gave it momentum. Trump's demented mind calls it, “SAFE HOME,” an acronym for “Stopping Aberrant Fatal Events by Helping Overcome Mental Extremes.” And why does Donald dufus keep returning to mental health as an answer to gun violence? Because Donald Trump, himself is mentally ill and he wants everyone else to be the same.

Friday, June 1, 2012

Washington’s problem is the GOP

It’s official.  Two top political scientists commented in a recent op-ed, "Let's just say it: The Republicans are the problem."  Further, "We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional.  In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.”

This is heavy stuff reported by David Frum on CNN, but once again illustrates what President Barack Obama has been up against during his first term in office.  Frum is quoting from Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, “two of Washington's most veteran watchers of Congress. Both men have hard-earned reputations for nonideological independence of mind despite their institutional affiliations.”  Mann is liberal, Ornstein is conservative. 

Ornstein and Mann continue, "The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition. When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country's challenges."

In their new book, "It's Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism," Frum states that it is clear that the GOP has acted in a “uniquely irresponsible way.”  He cites a number of examples like Republicans almost forcing a default on U.S. obligations in the debt slowdown; a delay on many actions in the senate; and holding up executive-branch nominations.  Just because of Barack Obama.

Karl Rove looking for guidance
It can all be traced back to the master of deceit, lies and fear mongering.  Karl Rove.  His Crossroads group is spending $25 million from donors he will not identify to back Republicans in Congress to denigrate and demonize President Obama.  A media analysis group has indicated that Crossroads GPS is the biggest spender on advertising for the general election up to this point.  So far they have spent $12.6 million in placing 17,000 spots in 47 television markets.

I did a post back in January of this year, “Can Republican HATE politics bring this country down?”  For the piece I Googled “GOP hate” and “Republican hate” and was able to formulate a list of what some pretty influential sites and organizations think Republicans hate.  The results were as follows:

Taxes, the poor and hungry, gays, Hispanics, liberals, gun control, animal rights, the truth, women, even those pregnant, the Occupy Movement, Barack Obama, science (as in stem cell research), public education, environmentalism, veterans, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare, teachers, unions, and, yes, even other Republicans (as in Newt Gingrich)

Example of Karl Rove HATE:

Norman Lear, who abhorred bigotry, and was the creator of the Archie Bunker character on TV, was attacked for his liberal views by ministers Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell.  Robertson responded with a threat of God’s wrath against him.  Jerry Falwell told his followers, “I am about to name the man that some people believe to be the greatest threat to the American family in our generation: Norman Lear!"  Lear founded the organization People for the
American Way
.

I also used George Orwell’s novel, 1984, to draw a comparison in my post to the connection between hate and the GOP.  In 1984, Emmanuel Goldstein is the face of the “Two Minutes Hate” which the citizens of Oceania were subjected to on a regular basis.  They were whipped up into a tremendous frenzy to hate Goldstein and anything else that didn’t agree with the Party.  One might characterize Barack Obama as the modern day Emmanuel Goldstein. 

What Goldstein said made perfect sense in defying this extremely hellish atmosphere and no matter how much hatred was directed against him and his leftist beliefs, his influence never seemed to grow less.  The “hellish atmosphere” cited would be how Republicans hold the White House and the country hostage in attempting to carry out their deranged ideologies.  And we are guaranteed that will not subside until Pres. Obama is re-elected in Nov.  Maybe not even then.

But closing with another Mann and Ornstein point; the solution to all this must be found outside politics.  They feel the problem “will not be solved until America's rich and America's elderly become either less fearful or more generous.”  These are two terms that are at different ends of the spectrum but explain exactly what this country is up against today.

Friday, January 27, 2012

George Orwell lives and so do his “1984” predictions

Geo. Orwell at typewriter
I was prompted to write this post because of another of those privacy naysayers who claims that, although identity theft, which results in the exposure of your most personal data, and which is the number one consumer problem for the Federal Trade Commission, we only have ourselves to blame for its loss.  Pete Cashmore, writing on CNN, says the fact that the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) was dumped proved George Orwell’s 1984 “woefully incorrect.”  He couldn’t be more wrong.

Agreed, there are those individuals out there—probably in the millions—that willingly give up their private information, mostly due to promises of certain conveniences that seem to these folks more important than protecting their personal data.  There is also a culture that has been expended by data gatherers that has convinced this same group that their information is safe.  It is not.  To support this theory, take a look at a recent NJ post that shows that in 2011 there were 419 breaches of private information exposing 22,918,441 personal records.

Watch a good synopsis of 1984 below:



One of the primary reasons I am so cynical over the security of your personal data is that the junk mail industry grosses over $4 billion annually from selling names and personal information with some placing profits over security.  My authority on this comes from being a junk mail data broker for 35 years.  I have seen the cracks in the damn and some of them still remain despite some efforts by this business to clean up its act.  And hackers may be around to haunt us forever.

Over the years I have written numerous articles you can see here on Orwell, 1984, and how Big Brother is ever present in a society that is driven by information.  Corporations picked up this thirst to know everything about you they can several years ago and maintain huge databases capturing every tidbit of data you will provide.  What the public doesn’t seem to understand is that once it is out there, it is there forever.

Take Google and Facebook alone and you have probably the most massive storehouse of private information available in the U.S.  Facebook’s Zuckerberg has been cited repeatedly for not protecting user data and Google just recently announced they would combine all their databases into one for more ease in profiling Internet surfers.  In my experience one of the worst things that affect consumers’ privacy is the combination of data which can virtually lay out a person’s life in its entirety.

What bothers me most is Pete Cashmore’s blasé attitude toward people giving up their data so easily.  He even compares this to the lack of control in 1984 by the citizens of Oceania where the thought police are everywhere.  There is absolutely no difference between that and the uncontrolled collecting of private information today that lingers in databases across the world which almost any first rate hacker can access. 

And the fact that consumers compound that by giving up their personal data so willingly only means that we are on the way to an unavoidable major disaster.

Research shows that Orwell actually predicted the Internet in the second draft of his dystopian novel but decided to cut this before publication.  There is no way to know just how the man envisioned this current feat of genius but it would be clear to me that he would not approve of it in any way challenging the right to privacy of Americans or the citizens of Oceania.

For the best site to explore George Orwell and 1984 go to Orwell Today.

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