Language & Grammar discussion

Cynda Reads Mighty Slow these days wrote: "We can read The Divine Comedy also in 2025.

I want to read all three parts."

That would be great. If you find the best English translation let me know!! We should create a shelf so we can collect our books (as they go on sale on Kindle).

Or if we find a link we can exchange it. There are a lot of people on here that have been resources than I do.

Cynda Reads Mighty Slow these days wrote: "Hitler used newspapers for his Nazi propaganda. Goebbles used radio.

The next great communications advance, radio, proved even easier to dominate: because the transmitters were so expensive, it w..."

This is such a loaded question! Your article speaks about the press creating a public persona. Well unless we know the person personally ( and even then we know their persona) we are getting this persona from all of our leaders.

My son thinks that Trump is a patriot because the "liberal" media is against him. Why he is the biggest media personality there is!! The media creating a persona is a fraud. It is intentional.

Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes

The Technological Society

Does an excellent job peeling the onion on this.

There two translations that are good for experienced but not scholarly readers like is--the Oxford I linked and a Norton editions not linked. The most recent Norton edition--last time I checked--contained 17 of the stories.

Norton editions are often available on Kindle

Reading Chapter 7.
I was born in the early 1960s, a time when people still listened to the radio. Until the mid- to late 1960s, the men of the neighborhood took turns taking a radio out into a garage or outside workroom to hang out, listen to a game, drink beer, and ask wives for sandwiches. It was only in the late 1970s when second televisions became a thing in our neighborhood that small black and white televisions were traded out for the radios.

Other Books

Have Read:
Hello World: A Life in Ham Radio by Danny Gregory


Want to Read:
Listening in: Radio and the American Imagination by Susan J. Douglas

Rural electrification helped more people hear FDR speak in their own homes, in their friends' homes, in the coffeeshops, lunchroooms, schoolrooms, and other gathering places. But not everyone, not for decades. Some Americans choose to live off the grid. Some may not have neighbors close enough or wealthy enough to share the cost of joining up with the grid.

https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2016/...

Many more people than now owned and used hand tools in their daily lives. Some built their own radios from scraps on their property, stuff found at the junk shop. Sometimes they even had to buikd hand cranks to power up their radios. . . .Before starting this book, I saw on You Tube someone's old crank radio that was kept in repair since someone's grandpa had made it. The you tuber showed us how it still worked :-)

You have 7 links in message 100. I will be editing my comments here as I go through the seven vids.

Vid 1. Gutenberg's press still required careful attention to detail, practiced skills, and strong arms and back--which means a healthy heart.

Vid 2. If I remember correctly, John Boy Walton of the 1970s television show operated a manual version of this printer.

Some radio shows became television shows. The morning news segments on radio shortened until the 1980s they had shortened locally to weather and some headlines. Our neighbor Mrs Judy watched the local 12 noon news as she kneaded her bread. My father switched on the CBS Evening News when came he home from work.

Some afternoon shows had started out on radio. With my mother--and I sometimes-- watched As the the World Turns and Perry Mason.

With our father, we watched shows he first listened to on radio: Dragnet, a police show, and The Lone Ranger which we watched during Saturday brunches our father made when my mother needed a bit of rest.

Cynda Reads Mighty Slow these days wrote: "Some radio shows became television shows. The morning news segments on radio shortened until the 1980s they had shortened locally to weather and some headlines. Our neighbor Mrs Judy watched the lo..."

I remember thinking that everyone's Dad came home from church and read the Sunday Paper. During the 70's we always watched the nightly news. I thought everyone's dad did this. When I got married I found out that was a generation thing.

Cynda Reads Mighty Slow these days wrote: "Rural electrification helped more people hear FDR speak in their own homes, in their friends' homes, in the coffeeshops, lunchroooms, schoolrooms, and other gathering places. But not everyone, not ..."

Your right. One of my husband's hobbies was collecting and resorting old radios. We have one radio called The Radiola 20 https://www.radiomuseum.org/r/rca_20..... We have a horn speaker too. It was fun to listen to.

I have a couple Trans-Oceanic radios.
Zenith Trans-Oceanic Vacuum Tube Radio, Model G-500, circa 1949.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-O...

Cynda Reads Mighty Slow these days wrote: "Other Books

Have Read:
Hello World: A Life in Ham Radio by Danny Gregory


Want to Read:"


I haven't read that but I do have my ham radio license. Just Technician. I did it to motivate my boys to get theirs. It worked. Oldest now has his extra class and middle child has his Technician.

Cynda Reads Mighty Slow these days wrote: "Other Books

Have Read:
Hello World: A Life in Ham Radio by Danny Gregory


Want to Read:


My husband started his career in Radio at 18. He was a ham radio operator, Extra Class since he was 14. He was a television engineer for over 40 years.

Both sons were tv chief engineers. They don't work in TV now and are sick of the propaganda. I don't think they will ever go back.

The sons worked for a group and sometimes would have to take a helicopter to the transmitter. It was a pretty cool start to a career. But they are doing really well with what they are doing now.

I have been reading and then rereading and taking notes on chapter 6. I thought it was interesting to read:

"The differing treatments afforded Columbus’s and Vespucci’s exploits highlight the central problem of the news business. To the extent that newspapers wield power, it resides primarily in the prerogative of choosing what to print."

Things haven't changed much.

Further, for four centuries after Gutenberg, printed material remained an expensive luxury. ..

"Newspapers, by their very nature, consume vast amounts of capital, and this constraint limits their number. For the first few hundred years following their birth in medieval Europe, their production remained easily under the thumb of the ruling elites, and even the purchase of individual broadsheets remained the prerogative of the wealthy."

Looks like today. There are no independent TV stations. They are all bought up by conglomerates. We might even suggest that they need to be on the stock exchange.


And this is why they all say the same thing and how the media is "controlled" and not a free press.
Scripted Journalists (Media) All Saying the Same Thing - Compilation
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yshJn7l...

I was reading about William Randolph Heart 1863 last night.

I was reading about his Grand European Tour with his mother at 10. Best education money can buy!! And among the people he saw on that trip he had a personal visit with the pope.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William...
After moving to New York City, Hearst acquired the New York Journal and fought a bitter circulation war with Joseph Pulitzer's New York World. Hearst sold papers by printing giant headlines over lurid stories featuring crime, corruption, sex, and innuendos.

" He sensationalized Spanish atrocities in Cuba while calling for war in 1898 against Spain. Historians, however, reject his subsequent claims to have started the war with Spain as overly extravagant."

Which makes me believe that all wars have been manufactured. In fact this is what I figured out in reading The Catcher in the Rye.

What is propaganda?
Propaganda is anything that moves people to take action.

He was twice elected as a Democrat to the U.S. House of Representatives. He ran unsuccessfully for President of the United States in 1904, Mayor of New York City in 1905 and 1909, and for Governor of New York in 1906. During his political career, he espoused views generally associated with the left wing of the Progressive Movement, claiming to speak on behalf of the working class.

After 1918 and the end of World War I, Hearst gradually began adopting more conservative views and started promoting an isolationist foreign policy to avoid any more entanglement in what he regarded as corrupt European affairs. He was at once a militant nationalist, a staunch anti-communist after the Russian Revolution, and deeply suspicious of the League of Nations and of the British, French, Japanese, and Russians.[2] Following Hitler's rise to power, Hearst became a supporter of the Nazi party, ordering his journalists to publish favourable coverage of Nazi Germany, and allowing leading Nazis to publish articles in his newspapers.[3] He was a leading supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932–1934, but then broke with FDR and became his most prominent enemy on the right.

This is basically what J.D. Salinger said that the people in New York were supporting Hitler. They make bank off of wars. Just time to cash in. Look no further than

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prescot...

In July 2007, Harper's Magazine published an article by Scott Horton, an American attorney known for his work in human rights law and the law of armed conflict, claiming that Prescott Bush was involved in the 1934 Business Plot, a failed plan by some of America's wealthy to trick Retired Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler into helping them overthrow President Franklin D. Roosevelt.[8][9]

Bush was a founder and one of seven directors (including W. Averell Harriman) of the Union Banking Corporation (holding a single share out of 4,000 as a director), an investment bank that operated as a clearing house for many assets and enterprises held by German steel magnate Fritz Thyssen, an early supporter and financier of the Nazi Party.[10][11] In July 1942, the bank was suspected of holding gold on behalf of Nazi leaders.[12] A subsequent government investigation disproved those allegations but confirmed the Thyssens' control, and in October 1942 the United States seized the bank under the Trading with the Enemy Act and held the assets for the duration of World War II.[10]

Journalist Duncan Campbell pointed out documents showing that Prescott Bush was a director and shareholder of a number of companies involved with Thyssen. Bush was the director of the Union Banking Corporation that "represented Thyssen's US interests", continuing to work for the bank after America's entry into World War II.

How did Hitler rise to power??? With a lot of financing!!

Right. Someone makes bank off of modern wars. The bank being made by big business during WWI disillusioned many of the Lkst Generation.

I hope tonight to comment on Chapter 8: The Comrades Who Couldn't Broadcast Straight. If I don't, it will be Sunday or Monday that I will comment as I have a 24-hour readathon this weekend I am committed to.

I am impressed, Cosmic, with you and your family's being radio operators and engineers! Ham operators were so important-+and still are--that meeting a operator is like meeting a information link, something better appreciated in pre-internet days.

I really liked this story!! My husband did not enjoy it (knowing just how duplicitous the media is.)

"Orson Welles, the enfant terrible of the American stage, inadvertently demonstrated the awesome power of the new medium not just to distort reality, but to invent its own."

"H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, a late-nineteenth-century short novel about an alien invasion, seemed like a good story for his Mercury Theater Radio to read on its regularly scheduled Sunday evening broadcast just before Halloween."

"Welles’ technique of dressing up old scripts in contemporary clothes amplified the credibility of his productions. When he staged Macbeth, he decked out his actors in 1930s fascist garb. In the War of the Worlds broadcast, the ill-fated New Jersey militia commander sounded suspiciously like General Douglas MacArthur; the smooth-talking secretary of the interior’s delivery was nearly identical to FDR’s; and the announcer’s general tenor was modeled on the radio reportage of the earlier, all too real Hindenburg disaster and of the Munich crisis. All these factors contributed to the broadcast’s terrifying impact."

"A few years later, Professor Cantril produced an authoritative analysis of the event. He found that those audience members who mistook the broadcast for reality tended to have missed most of it, particularly the beginning, and to have lower socioeconomic status and educational levels; southerners were more easily fooled than northerners. Curiously, those who listened with friends were far more likely not to check the veracity of the story by tuning in other stations to discover that nothing was actually going on; Cantril interpreted this as the result of social reticence."

"The radio audience consists essentially of thousands of small, congregant groups united in time and experiencing a common stimulus—altogether making possible the largest grouping of people ever known."

Today we call events like this False Flags. The only difference is that the producers never admit their sly of hand.

They mentioned this. Wonder how well received this would be today?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voodo...

Yes I liked the Orson Welles story. I shared it with a nonfiction group when someone mentioned in whole other context The War of Worlds. We got a kick out of Orson Welles saying that he had a radio program to present and an audience to encourage to listen. These things happened, so job well done! Love it :-)

I have finished the book. I have notes to write here tonight.

From Chapter 8: The Comrades Who Couldn't Broadcast Straight.

Thomas Jefferson was interested in the newest technology. Since he was his own secretary, we needed a way to copy the correspondence he sent out. A polygraph helped him.

https://youtu.be/_1JAZV5KNsc

New technology often/always makes documents and records made or recorded on older technology difficult to access. Much of the past has been lost due to new technology. When the we were switching from DOS 3 into newer DOSes on early personal computers, I remember many people realizing that their documents were no longer available, that documents were stuck on a floppy disk that could no longer be accessed.

And it is not just a personal problem. It is also a historical problem.

1. Documents how we store them and retrieve them matters. Paper documents on acidic paper means that archivists have to find ways to keep documents in conditions that scholarly historians would like them to be. Archivists are constantly seeking new and better ways to keep paper from disintegrating. I have seen documents in such poor condition that soon scholars will nit be abke.view the orginal document.

2. I was was writing a biographical paper on a singing Texas folklorist who was most active in the 1950s. I wanted to his singing. I had access to one LP record that I was allowed to borrow to play on my parents' old stereo--big trust and honor. If J wanted ti.listen ti the okd drum recordings, I would have setup the machinery in the room others researchers might be using at the same time. I just listened to the LP. The archivist was also worried about what if something happened to the old machinery and the old drums as they wore out. As I was not a scholar, just a researcher wanting to poresent a paper, I let the machinery and music stay put.

This is long ways to show a couple of ways old technology beckmes less and less acessible.

I remember the old mimeograph machines and their blue-purple copies. When I taught at a private Catholic high school into the 1990s, we teachers were directed to use the photocopier onky if we wanted to make 10 or fewer copies. If we wanted more, we would have to use the mimeograph machine. It was a difficult irkslme machine to work with. I never made friends with it.

Perhaps you remember too Cosmic. . . .When women went out to work into the 1980s, they often started out as office clerks, typing. And typing in an office often meant messing with duplicate pages of white paper, carbon sheets layered between onion sheets. If you made a mistake, you had to erase the mistake on all the pages, brush away eraser crumbs, and then do your best to match the new type line and space with the text you have been working on. You could not erase harshly on the onion paper or it would just shred. Then the carbon paoer was saved for other typing jobs until the copies were not so legible. Sometimes you did not realize the carbon could not adequately work only ince you were dine with a whole page of text.

Oh thank you for word processor and personal computers and desktops too. whew.

I have read and reread & thought and rethought about
Chapter 8: The Comrades Who Couldn't Broadcast Straight. They cannot broadcast straight/clearly because information is not used or understood because of social policies, because of technology limitations, because of illiteracy, political issues.

That took me long enough.

When political expression is suppressed, literature becomes the main political outlet.

Remember how in the Early Modern Period that bibles were written in secret, moved in secret, and translators were killed. . . . Here in Russia the consequences.of writing illict works came more swiftly. Information could.mire easily bought and sold. Information could move more quickly with ail service, telegraphs and telephones.

Cynda Reads Again wrote: "Yes I liked the Orson Welles story. I shared it with a nonfiction group when someone mentioned in whole other context The War of Worlds. We got a kick out of Orson Welles saying that he had a radio..."

I think it was a social experiment to see what they could do with the new technology. It was very close to screaming "fire" in a building when there was no fire. I did not find it funny at all, but cruel and egocentric.

"To hell with people and on with the show."

Rwanda in chapter 7

"Before the 1950s, the Hutus and Tutsis had gotten along reasonably well, and because of frequent intermarriage it was often difficult to discern to which group an individual belonged."

"The approach to independence in 1962 saw spasms of slaughter. Between 1959 and 1967, Hutus killed twenty thousand Tutsi, and hundreds of thousands of the latter fled. Hard economic times typically breed political and racial conflict, as occurred in Germany in the 1930s."

"After 1967, life in Rwanda quieted down for a while, but in the late 1980s, prices for the nation’s coffee and tea exports fell; the resultant economic dislocation heated up its simmering ethnic cauldron."

"On April 6, 1994, Rwanda’s President Habyarimana, Burundi’s new leader, Cyprian Ntayamina, and several of the latter’s cabinet were returning home from a regional trip on a Falcon 50 business jet. When the plane was on its final approach to the Kigali airport, witnesses saw two missile launches; both missiles struck the aircraft, which crashed into the presidential palace and killed all aboard."

"In Rwanda, two media outlets drove the genocide."

They were bias or prejudice against the Tutsis.

"After 1960, multiple factors mitigated radio’s totalitarian potential: the decreasing costs and increasing accessibility of telephone, fax, and personal printing and copying devices; the miniaturization of cheap long-range radio receivers capable of pulling in foreign broadcasts; and the growing importance of television. In one part of the world, however, these factors remained largely absent: Africa.

Africa contained all the minerals for the modern age. So although they didn't have the technology they possessed what would contribute to our technological development.

Rwanda is one of the world’s largest producers of tin, tantalum, and tungsten (3Ts) and also exports gold and gemstones. Rwanda also possesses a variety of minerals such as silica sands, kaolin, vermiculite, diatomite, clays, limestone, talcum, gypsum, and pozzolan. Small-scale mining accounts for around 80 percent of the country’s mineral output.

https://www.trade.gov/country-commerc....

tantalum was used for vacuum tubes ...like in Radio and TV stations.
Now it is used in capacitors and any electronics that gets heated really high.

I find it interesting that our media suppressed what was going on in favor of a court trial....where one person was killed. Definitely a media "bomb".

So as they say follow the money. I don't think this was a local induced event.

"Its primary product, though, was a murderous hatred of Tutsis nearly identical to Kangura’s (news paper ten commandments: “Hutus must stop having mercy on the Tutsis.”) The spew could be diffuse and general: the demonization of Tutsis as thieving, sexually and financially predatory “cockroaches,” usually coupled with exhortations for their murder, both individually and en masse, such as the chilling, oft-repeated rhetorical question, “The graves are only half filled. Who will help us fill them?”

I see the media doing these things as well today. Divide and conquer.

University of Chicago Plans Winter Class “The Problem of Whiteness”

Now this could have been stopped! If it wasn't part of the plan.

"In the words of Major General Roméo Dallaire, the Canadian commander of the United Nations peacekeeping force, “The haunting image of killers with a machete in one hand and a radio in the other never leaves you.”

Fortunately we didn't have the complete mahem that Rwanda had but you can see that something is going on here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=se_Zs...

This is our country, America. What technology might have triggered all these youth coming down to the city to riot? Phones in one hand...


One Westerner who understood was General Dallaire; he repeatedly and unsuccessfully asked for permission to jam it. Writing years later, he pointed out that if such tragedies are to be prevented in the future, international monitoring of radio broadcasts in civil war zones will prove key. One of his major regrets is that he did not destroy RTLM’s transmitters.

After April 6, 1994, the withdrawal of almost all Westerners from Rwanda compounded the tragedy.

a Rwandan government informant revealed to Dallaire the outline of the Hutu strategy: they would provoke the murder of some Belgian troops, the backbone of the UN mission, and thus would trigger the withdrawal of the peacekeepers. Directed by the informant, the peacekeepers discovered several Hutu weapons caches.


In a famous “genocide fax” to his superiors in New York on January 11, 1994, three months before the fateful crash of the presidential plane, Dallaire outlined the plot and asked for permission to destroy the weapons caches; Kofi Annan, who at the time supervised UN peacekeeping activity, not only refused Dallaire’s request but actually ordered Dallaire to betray the name of his informant to the then Hutu-led government. (Annan compounded his shame three years later, when, as secretary-general, he ordered Dallaire not to testify before the Belgian senate investigation into the UN’s role in the catastrophe.)

Events ran precisely according to the Hutu plan. After the shoot-down, the Hutus fabricated the story that the Belgians had ordered it, and on this pretext hacked to death ten Belgian soldiers. The rest of the Belgians and, along with them, most of Dallaire’s peacekeepers and almost the entirety of Rwanda’s foreign population, then left. The UN ordered Dallaire’s rump force not to protect Tutsis, but rather to guarantee the safe evacuation of foreigners.

The virtual absence of Western observers sealed the Tutsis’ fate.


Rwanda is one of the world’s largest producers of tin, tantalum, and tungsten (3Ts) and also exports gold and gemstones. Rwanda also possesses a variety of minerals such as silica sands, kaolin, vermiculite, diatomite, clays, limestone, talcum, gypsum, and pozzolan. Small-scale mining accounts for around 80 percent of the country’s mineral output.

https://www.trade.gov/country-commerc....

These minerals created the technological society we enjoy.

Just starting 8 THE COMRADES WHO COULDN’T BROADCAST STRAIGHT

Yes, and I just came to a new understanding of Chapter 8, so I will be sharing some of that. I am remembering that I am not being graded, so I will post shorter, easier to write comments and move on as I have to get to our next buddy read at our nonfiction group where we will read The Rhetoric of Mao Zedong: Transforming China and Its People. There I will leave far fewer notes, I hope. Otherwise I just slow myself down. Books to read. . . . Books to read.

Cynda Reads Again wrote: "Yes, and I just came to a new understanding of Chapter 8, so I will be sharing some of that. I am remembering that I am not being graded, so I will post shorter, easier to write comments and move o..."

When you get a chance send me the link to the buddy read for The Rhetoric of Mao Zedong: Transforming China and Its People.

Khrushchev's Secret Speech, 'On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences,' Delivered at the Twentieth Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.o...

JFK Cold War Speech:
https://www.files.ethz.ch/isn/125399/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ich_bin...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKjIt...

This isn't the one

This is the one referenced in the book
https://www.jfklibrary.org/archives/o...

Just a piece of it here:
"Third: Let us reexamine our attitude toward the cold war, remembering that we are not engaged in a debate, seeking to pile up debating points. We are not here distributing blame or pointing the finger of judgment. We must deal with the world as it is, and not as it might have been had the history of the last 18 years been different."

"We must, therefore, persevere in the search for peace in the hope that constructive changes within the Communist bloc might bring within reach solutions which now seem beyond us. We must conduct our affairs in such a way that it becomes in the Communists' interest to agree on a genuine peace. Above all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war. To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy--or of a collective death-wish for the world."

"To secure these ends, America's weapons are nonprovocative, carefully controlled, designed to deter, and capable of selective use. Our military forces are committed to peace and disciplined in self- restraint. Our diplomats are instructed to avoid unnecessary irritants and purely rhetorical hostility."

"For we can seek a relaxation of tension without relaxing our guard. And, for our part, we do not need to use threats to prove that we are resolute. We do not need to jam foreign broadcasts out of fear our faith will be eroded. We are unwilling to impose our system on any unwilling people--but we are willing and able to engage in peaceful competition with any people on earth."

In early 1964—months before Khrushchev’s fall from power—the Soviet hard-liners fired the “opening shot” in their campaign against dissident literature with the trial of poet Joseph Brodsky. His work was both lyrical and entirely nonpolitical, and his trial was a Kafkaesque witch hunt famous for this exchange between the judge and the defendant:

Judge: And what is your real trade?
Brodsky: I’m a poet and a translator of poetry.
Judge: Who has recognized you as a poet? Who has given you a place among the poets?
Brodsky: No one. And who gave me a place among the human race? Judge: Did you learn that?
Brodsky: What? Judge: To be poet. You didn’t attempt to go to a university, where people are trained, where they’re taught?
Brodsky: I didn’t think that could be done by training.
Judge: By what, then?
Brodsky: I thought that by God.

textsThis is Moscow speaking, and other stories
by Daniėlʹ, I͡Uliĭ, 1925-1988

https://archive.org/details/thisismos...

This is Moscow Speaking and Other Stories
Pdf
https://www.unz.com/PDF/PERIODICAL/Re...

The Atlantic
Is Google Making Us Stupid?
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/...

"As recently as sixty years ago, high school students spent long hours memorizing vast tracts of literature, from Virgil to Shakespeare to Byron to Longfellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride.” Similarly, in today’s traditional Muslim societies, primary education focuses—sometimes exclusively—on commitment of the Koran to memory. Yes, something was surely lost when the educational process left such memorization behind for calculus, linguistics, evolutionary psychology, and computer science. Yet this shift liberated our neurons from rote learning, and much more was gained in terms of intellectual ability, individual well-being, and societal good. And, as always, both the old and the new styles of education rewired brains in their own ways."

I wonder what you think about this? I used to memorize Bible verses as a child. I don't do any memory work now.

I know when I listen to pop music it interferes with my absorption of deep reading.

On the flip side of this I didn't think that rote equals education. I think school is a little to heavily based on this! I think experiences create better educational learning skills.

Cosmic wrote: "The Atlantic
Is Google Making Us Stupid?
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/..."

Google makes me stupid while making me sound more knowledgeable than I am. . . . .And it makes the undereducated way more knowledgeable about topics of their choice because they can bypass the whole liberal arts education--listen to this--used to be our university system. Not long ago we received basic college educations the first two years at college or university. Not anymore. . . .I was watching TED recently where a university administrator had to admit to herself that liberal arts education disappears in US.
. . . . . .
Until the shutdown due to pandemic, I could read pages and pages of text, every or just about every word with no effort for a couple of hours at a time. Now my brain hops and skips over text. I listen to videos and audiobooks at fast speed.

I am changed.

"Because the WVS database now extends back three decades, researchers can examine in detail the sequence of changes that have led to democracy. The key factors seem to be economic growth and the modernization of both the workplace and education that attend it. Inglehart and Welzel have conclusively shown that prior increases in per capita GDP, improvements in education, and the growth of knowledge professions predict future increases in the S/SE score, which in turn predict a transition to democracy. This is no surprise; after all, the wealthier a person becomes, and the more that independent thought becomes an educational goal and a job requirement, and the higher he or she moves up Maslow’s pyramid, the less he or she is willing to tolerate a despotic government."

There is another government that is not mentioned in this book. This form of government threw off a monarchy (acting as dictator). This form of government is called a Republic! That is the form of government that is in our pledge of allegiance.

During the Revolutionary War I would imagine that the people were all over the place on Maslow's pyrimid. I don't think this is a very accurate study. I think they wanted to prove something.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dicta...
Dictatorship
"A dictatorship is a form of government which is characterized by a leader, or a group of leaders, who hold governmental powers with few to no limitations on them. The leader of a dictatorship is called a dictator. Politics in a dictatorship are controlled by the dictator and they are facilitated through an inner circle of elites that includes advisers, generals, and other high-ranking officials. The dictator maintains control by influencing and appeasing the inner circle and repressing any opposition, which may include rival political parties, armed resistance, or disloyal members of the dictator's inner circle. Dictatorships can be formed by a military coup that overthrows the previous government through force or they can be formed by a self-coup in which elected leaders make their rule permanent. Dictatorships are authoritarian or totalitarian and they can be classified as military dictatorships, one-party dictatorships, personalist dictatorships, or absolute monarchies."


From Masters of the Word: How Media Shaped History
"The Web filters and sifts information to a degree not possible with the old array of newspapers and TV networks, which, because of the small number of boots these media place on the ground, simply cannot give all stories the attention and analysis they need. Yes, the Web regularly disseminates spurious and incorrect information, but increasingly used and respected sites such as FactCheck.org gradually eliminate it as well, or at least convert its true believers into targets of general ridicule, such as those who believe that the moon landings were staged or that the CIA engineered the 9/11 attacks. Mainstream journalists know that bloggers will instantaneously fact-check their pieces,"

"massive centrally planned economies by their very nature tend to make massively irrational decisions;"

Now what makes something meaningful in a country under dictatorship? How do you think these people would view a FactCheck.org ? Have we become more conditioned to become like the Soviet Union...now that we perceive there is no threat (cold war...i am not thinking about the on going war today. But the Cold War which was contemplated differently.)

Masters of the Word: How Media Shaped History :

"a medium of communication which looks poor and miserable beside the fantastic rotary press and color television, but which is an unusually powerful and indestructible force. . . . It is written by someone who has something to say. . . . When I take it in my hand, I know that it cost someone a good deal to write it, without an honorarium and at no little risk.49 The tattered paper; crude, uneven print; and typographical and grammatical mistakes, amplified by repeated copying, actually increased the appeal and legitimacy of samizdat. At the very least, it was forbidden fruit. The sway of this bohemian shabbiness was so great that it served to delegitimize the slicker official press: the more attractive a book, the less believable it was. A popular Russian anecdote from the 1970s tells of a woman unable to interest her granddaughter in War and Peace because it looked “too official”; the grandmother finally gets the girl to read it by laboriously retyping it on cheap paper."

https://ourworldindata.org/global-eco...

"This is intuitively appealing: citizens who lead a grim, subsistence life focus on meeting their basic physical needs. Higher goals, such as individual freedom and democratic development, will take a back seat until people become wealthier and physically more secure. at that point will people begin to challenge corrupt institutions and despotic rulers. This process can take decades, even generations, and can be further delayed by brutal and determined despots, as occurred in the Soviet empire for nearly half a century after World War II."

This whole section is pure propaganda. How many of those countries have armed their citizens so that they can form militias?


Second Amendment to the United States Constitution

"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

So I would say that people should not have to resort to dipping themselves in lighterfluid to burn down their neighborhood to make a point. But in places where there is no self defense they may have to resort to this.

Masters of the Word: How Media Shaped History

"Yes, the Internet has also given despots the power to spy on and suppress their citizens, but on balance, the ground has shifted in favor of the latter. Before 1995, the foes of dictators brought a communications knife to a gunfight. Now, both sides have guns."

I wonder if he would write this now since Covid-19?

What didn't fit the narrative was canceled. And if you didn't know your place your account demonetize or deleted. If you want to be an alternative voice you are discredited with algorithms.

October 18, 2019, in New York, NY
Before you ever heard the word Covid!
https://centerforhealthsecurity.org/o...

Governments and the private sector should assign a greater priority to developing methods to combat mis- and disinformation prior to the next pandemic response. ...For their part, media companies should commit to ensuring that authoritative messages are prioritized and that false messages are suppressed including though the use of technology.

The Plan: 8:30 min/sec
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AoLw-Q8...


This is on the Level of H. G. Wells being played out....only a virus is the alien.

Segment 1 of 4) Clade X is a day-long pandemic tabletop exercise hosted by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security on May 15, 2018, in Washington, DC. The exercise simulates a series of National Security Council-convened meetings of 10 US government leaders, played by individuals prominent in the fields of national security or epidemic response.

Drawing from actual events, Clade X identifies important policy issues and preparedness challenges that could be solved with sufficient political will and attention. These issues were designed in a narrative to engage and educate the participants and the audience. Lessons learned from Clade X will be distilled by the Center and shared broadly.

More information is available at http://www.centerforhealthsecurity

CLADE X IS A FICTIONAL EXERCISE AND DISEASE
This training tabletop exercise is based on a fictional scenario. The inputs experts used for modeling the potential impact were fictional. It is a teaching and training resource for public health and government officials.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sJ1x8Sl...

I will say that psychologically all these actors played on the script of Maslow. They completely absorbed people's focus. If you go back and read about H.G. Well's radio event War of the Worlds...it doesn't look like much has changed!


CladX, is really funny!! Everyone is reading from a script. This could easily have been a radio show production.

I guess the show must go on!! The best way to watch these videos is on 2x. So you can see it as a cartoon!

World Health Forum:
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/0...
Second diagram, at the top..."the 5 stages of vaccine development":

Vaccine takes more than 10 years and cost $500,000,000.00. Boy bringing one to market without all that testing is efficient and profitable!

They take more than 10 years! Why should anyone be hesitant to have something injected into them (like a rat) that has less vetting? . The same reason they thought aliens had come down and making war on the world. The media! If you had gone out and looked around people would have seen that no one was sick ...if people looked up and see how small a virus is (rather than believed in the fake picture ...they would know that it was the size of a light particle. So a hole in a mask would look like a pea going through a tunnel 20 feet in diameter. It wouldn't stop a virus. The best thing for me to do is to build up my immune system...just like my mother told me to do with chicken broth...and vitamin C and zinc and green tea...but for heaven sakes don't "fact-check" this...because you need to go trust the science! (Even Fauci said he didn't think mask would help much).

Cosmic wrote: "Second Amendment to the United States Constitution

"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."...

"This is intuitively appealing: citizens who lead a grim, subsistence life focus on meeting their basic physical needs. Higher goals, such as Just as samizdat and shortwave radios were not solely responsible for the fall of communism, tweets and blogs alone cannot bring down despotic regimes. People must test their resolve in the streets; police and soldiers must stop firing; ruling elites must become demoralized and, in some cases, decide to switch sides."

In Rwanda, why didn't that work for them?

Masters of the Word: How Media Shaped History

Given post 2013, when this book was written this is a very fortuitous statement:

"For the first time, a significant fraction of the world’s citizens can be in instant communication with one another and send words, pictures, and videos across the planet. The coming decades will see, in China and elsewhere, the political, social, and cultural fallout from this explosion in human communication. Most of these changes should be as positive as they will be unpredictable. One thing, though, is certain: The medium is not merely the message, but the very page on which human history is written."

The page matters. When people carved in stone, the words were important enough to chisel and shape on a stone that had to be perhaps hacked out of a quarry and definitely shaped. The words were meant to be recorded in the strongest meaning of the word.

Now everyone has a page with them most hours of the day and many want to record and share. Many many many.

My new understanding of Chapter 8

Information needed to be moved quickly and efficiently so that political and military people could get the information they need as fast as possible. Yet the technology had not caught up on quickly and maybe more importantly, efficiently.

The copiers--pantagraphs to carbon paper to mimeographs were not particularly useful. However serviceable is a chain of ham operators to provide emergency information, a operator can be put of commission by weather and climate disasters.

Rapid and clear information has been the strength and flexibility of political actions and military maneuvers. Without fast and efficient information in times of change, a Cessna airplane can enter an area that shold have protect on land and air. Kinda to me. Not to Russian government.

About Chapter 9: The Argus

Within the last month, I watched the movie The Post. Maybe I will rewatch and then reread this section about Vietnam War political and military secrets. The movke js based on facr. Thks book has mkre factual informtion. I want to match them up.

I was in the academic world when first information was available in a program for the computer system or a closed circuit or and then available through the early internet of the early 1990s. The connections were not like what they are now. If I were at the university library in South Texas and wanted to see the catalog of let's say another library with an online catalog. When that other library was closed, their online services closed. I had to connect with an awake computer there or a person connecting me through to their online catalog. Things were not 24/7 on the new internet.

Thank you for reading g with me Cosmic. I got far more put the book reading with you. . . . .Give me a dovish minutes maybe to get a link over to you for the The Rhetoric of Mao Zedong book.

Masters of the Word: How Media Shaped History

Welles also soon became aware of the sensation he was creating, but refused to break the story’s flow with an extra announcement, telling one executive, “What do you mean interrupt? They’re scared? Good, they’re supposed to be scared. Now let me finish!”38 Later, he unashamedly defended this refusal as a warning about the gullibility of the public to radio broadcasts.

A few years later, Professor Cantril produced an authoritative analysis of the event. He found that those audience members who mistook the broadcast for reality tended to have missed most of it, particularly the beginning, and to have lower socioeconomic status and educational levels; (Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling) southerners were more easily fooled than northerners. Curiously, those who listened with friends were far more likely not to check the veracity of the story by tuning in other stations to discover that nothing was actually going on; Cantril interpreted this as the result of social reticence.

How many of these boxes could be clicked off for 2020. ( Hind sight is always 20/20).