"The disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 led to a multinational search effort in Southeast Asia and the southern Indian Ocean that became the most expensive search in aviation history."
528Hz Positive Energy, Self Healing with 417Hz Solfeggio frequency. Peaceful, empowering and soothing music and nature to nurture your mind, body, and soul. Supporting and empowering you on your life journey."
I can't praise this visually beautiful, and very effective, video enough. In these incredibly highly stressful times, please be kind to yourself and take the time to savor this exquisite work in full screen mode. Headphones suggested but not necessary. It works, as simple as that...
“This wide, sharp telescopic view reveals galaxies scattered beyond the stars and faint dust nebulae of the Milky Way at the northern boundary of the high-flying constellation Pegasus. Prominent at the upper right is NGC 7331.
Click image for larger size.
A mere 50 million light-years away, the large spiral is one of the brighter galaxies not included in Charles Messier's famous 18th century catalog. The disturbed looking group of galaxies at the lower left is well-known as Stephan's Quintet. About 300 million light-years distant, the quintet dramatically illustrates a multiple galaxy collision, its powerful, ongoing interactions posed for a brief cosmic snapshot. On the sky, the quintet and NGC 7331 are separated by about half a degree.”
"From: Coordinator of Volunteer Services: We have a young man, thirty-six, on hospice who has a very young child. They want someone to help him do a life review and perhaps put some pictures together for he and his wife so the child will know him. Call me if you are willing to do this."
"The next time, friend, your life seems too hard, check your Inbox." - Jose Orez
"Let It Roll Off Our Back: Dodging and Deflecting" by Madisyn Taylor, The DailyOM
"When we are criticized or attacked it is important to not take it into our heart space. One of the most difficult challenges in life is learning not to take things to heart and hold on to it. Especially when we’re younger, or if we’re very sensitive, we take so much of what comes our way to heart. This can be overwhelming and unproductive if it throws us off balance on a regular basis. When we are feeling criticized or attacked from all directions, it becomes very difficult for us to recover ourselves so that we can continue to speak and act our truth. This is when we would do well to remember the old saying about letting certain things roll off us, like water off a duck’s back.
Most of the time, the attacks and criticisms of others have much more to do with them and how they are feeling than with us. If we get caught up in trying to adjust ourselves to other people’s negative energy, we lose touch with our core. In fact, in a positive light, these slings and arrows offer us the opportunity to strengthen our core sense of self, and to learn to dodge and deflect other people’s misdirected negativity. The more we do this, the more we are able to discern what belongs to us and what belongs to other people. With practice, we become masters of our energetic integrity, refusing to serve as targets for the disowned anger and frustration of the people around us.
Eventually, we will be able to hear the feedback that others have to offer, taking in anything that might actually be constructive, and releasing that which has nothing to do with us. First, though, we tend ourselves compassionately by recognizing when we can’t take something in from the outside without hurting ourselves. This is when we make like a duck, shaking it off and letting it roll off our back as we continue our way in the world."
"The Green Frog Skin – that’s what I call the dollar bill. In our attitude towards it lies the biggest difference between the Indians and the whites. My grandparents grew up in an Indian world without money. Just before the Custer battle the white soldiers had received their pay. Their pockets were full of green paper and they had no place to spend it. What were their last thoughts as an Indian bullet or arrow hit them? I guess they were thinking of all that money going to waste, of not having had a chance to enjoy it, of a bunch of dumb savages getting their paws on that hard-earned pay. That must have hurt them more than the arrow between their ribs.
The close hand-to-hand fighting, with a thousand horses gally-hooting all over the place, had covered the battlefield with an enormous cloud of dust, and in it the green frog skins of the soldiers were whirling around like snowflakes in a blizzard. Now, what did the Indians do with all that money? They gave it to their children to play with, to fold those strange bits of coloured paper into all kinds of shapes, making into toy buffalo and horses. Somebody was enjoying that money after all.
The books tell of one soldier who survived. He got away, but he went crazy and some women watched him from a distance as he killed himself. The writers always say that he must have been afraid of being captured and tortured, but that’s all wrong. Can’t you see it? There he is, bellied down in a gully, watching what is going on. He sees the kids playing with the money, tearing it up, the women using it to fire up some dried buffalo chips to cook on, the men lighting their pipes with green frog skins, but mostly all those beautiful dollar bills floating away with the dust and the wind. It’s this sight that drove the poor soldier crazy. He’s clutching his head, hollering, ‘Goddam, Jesus Christ Almighty, look at them dumb, stupid, red sons of bitches wasting all that dough!’ He watches till he can’t stand it any longer, and then he blows his brains out with a six-shooter. It would make a great scene in a movie, but it would take an Indian mind to get the point."
- John (Fire) Lame Deer, "Seeker of Visions" Brule, "Stomp Dance"
"First of all, although men have a common destiny, each individual also has to work out his own personal salvation for himself in fear and trembling. We can help one another to find the meaning of life no doubt. But in the last analysis, the individual person is responsible for living his own life and for "finding himself." If he persists in shifting his responsibility to somebody else, he fails to find out the meaning of his own existence. You cannot tell me who I am and I cannot tell you who you are. If you do not know your own identity, who is going to identify you?"
"The country seems bigger, for you can see through the bare trees. There are times when the woods is absolutely still and quiet. The house holds warmth. A wet snow comes in the night and covers the ground and clings to the trees, making the whole world white. For a while in the morning the world is perfect and beautiful. You think you will never forget.
You think you will never forget any of this, you will remember it always just the way it was. But you can't remember it the way it was. To know it, you have to be living in the presence of it right as it is happening. It can return only by surprise. Speaking of these things tells you that there are no words for them that are equal to them or that can restore them to your mind. And so you have a life that you are living only now, now and now and now, gone before you can speak of it, and you must be thankful for living day by day, moment by moment, in this presence.
But you have a life too that you remember. It stays with you. You have lived a life in the breath and pulse and living light of the present, and your memories of it, remember now, are of a different life in a different world and time. When you remember the past, you are not remembering it as it was. You are remembering it as it is. It is a vision or a dream, present with you in the present, alive with you in the only time you are alive."
"Do as little harm to others as you can; make any sacrifice for your true friends; be responsible for yourself and ask nothing of others; and grab all the fun you can. Don't give much thought to yesterday, don't worry about tomorrow, live in the moment, and trust that your existence has meaning even when the world seems to be all blind chance and chaos. When life lands a hammer blow in your face, do your best to respond to the hammer as if it had been a cream pie."
"We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace - business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob. Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me - and I welcome their hatred."
"If only"... you don't stop because you can't stop.
If you do it's all over. It's all over anyway, you're just buying time.
Tell me I'm wrong...
"56 million Americans have been in credit card debt for at least a year. ‘We are seeing pockets of trouble,’ expert says. More Americans are trapped in a credit card debt spiral and fewer are able to pay their bills in full at the end of the month."
"One of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century, Jiddu Krishnamurti, once said: “It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” I agree with Jiddu. Society is seriously sick. Yet most of us aren’t aware of it. That’s because we’re so conditioned to our society that the idea of something being terribly wrong with it usually doesn’t cross our minds.
Well, it did cross mine – in fact, it does and has every single day for the last 15+ years. And I write about it so that it might cross yours too (if it hasn’t already). Not because I want to disappoint you, but because I want you to know what’s truly going on so that you can perhaps help make some change.
There are some crystal clear signs that reveal the sickness of our society, and certainly one of them is consumerism – that is, the compulsive buying of stuff. Look around you attentively and you’ll see almost everywhere people chasing products they think will bring them happiness, only to feel sadder a few moments after acquiring them. Yet they keep on getting more and more of them, without ever realizing their addictive behavior.
But why exactly do we fall victims to consumerism? And how could we free ourselves from it? Well, that’s exactly what my newest article is all about. So if you’re interested in knowing the answers to those questions, then be sure to check it out. It's a bit lengthy compared to most articles you come across online, but I'd highly suggest you to dedicate some of your time to it, as I consider it to be one of the best pieces of writing I've published so far."
So, you look around in horrified astonishment at how totally insane it all really is, how the never ending bad news is everywhere you look, how truly hopeless it really is, and know there's nothing at all you can do about any of it, can't save anyone, can't even save yourself. So you remember what they said and how you need to be, and carry on...
“The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority,
but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.”
- Marcus Aurelius, "Meditations"
“That millions of people share the same forms of
mental pathology does not make these people sane.”
- Erich Fromm, "The Sane Society"
“Laugh whenever you can. Keeps you from killing
yourself when things are bad. That and vodka.”
- Jim Butcher, "Changes"
And yet, sometimes, at the end of another long day,
your defenses are just worn out and it feels like you're losing your mind,
"The Demolition of the World Trade Center (The Devil’s Trick)"
by Mark Gaffney
"When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever
remains, however improbable, must be the truth"
- Sherlock Holmes
Excerpt: "On the twenty-third anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks, more than enough evidence exists to draw reasonable conclusions about what happened that day and who was responsible. Most of the basic facts have been known for years, though unfortunately have not been readily available to the general public.
Way back in 2007, a physics professor at Brigham Young University, Dr Steven E. Jones, turned up critical evidence while investigating samples of World Trade Center (WTC) dust. The samples had been collected immediately after September 11, 2001 from the thick deposit of dust that blanketed the WTC site and much of lower Manhattan. Jones found tiny bits of an exotic incendiary known as thermate that can cut through steel like a hot knife through butter. Thermate burns at ~5,000°F. The main product of the reaction is molten iron.
Thermate differs from its better known cousin thermite in that it contains sulfur which lowers the melting point of iron, speeding up the reaction. The presence of both sulfur and aluminum was diagnostic for thermate. Jones called this “the last nail in the coffin.” (Dr. Steven E. Jones, Revisiting 9/11/2001. Applying the Scientific Method, 2007)
Jones also found an abundance of tiny iron microspheres in the dust (up to .05% by volume), proof that large amounts of WTC steel had melted. The diameter of the spheres ranged from one micron to 1.5 mm. When Jones obtained some thermate, which is commercially available, and used it to cut through a steel plate, the reaction produced an intense spray of molten droplets which cooled into iron microspheres identical to the spheres in the dust.
And there were other revelations. It is indeed shocking how far the development of thermate had “progressed” by the late 1990s. Jones & Co, learned that a liquid sol-gel form of nano-thermate can be applied to steel simply by spraying or painting it on. This means insiders could have prepped the twin towers for demolition undetected during an elevator retrofit, a fireproofing upgrade, or even during routine maintenance. Nor was it necessary to wire the entire building. Ignition can be accomplished remotely using a specially designed thermitic match triggered by a radio signal. Once thermate is ignited, the reaction is self perpetuating. (Kevin R. Ryan, The Top Ten Connections between NIST and Nano-thermites, July 2, 2008)
All of this is consistent with the many eyewitness accounts of explosions on 9/11. And it is consistent with the testimony of New York City firemen, first responders and clean-up crews who reported seeing copious amounts of molten steel on site. As one fireman put it: “molten steel was flowing down the channel rails like in a foundry…”
Office and building fires do not reach temperatures anywhere near hot enough to melt steel which has a melting point of 2,500°F. Nor were there any combustible materials in the WTC, nor any combination thereof, capable of approaching this temperature. Although burning jet fuel has been frequently (and incorrectly) cited as the reason for the WTC collapse, the reality is otherwise. Jet fuel is essentially kerosene and will not burn in air in excess of 1,832°F, far below the melting point of steel.
Not long after the towers collapsed, a hard rain storm drenched Manhattan. Firemen also sprayed millions of gallons of water onto the smoking ruin of the WTC in an attempt to extinguish the fires, all to no effect. This is consistent with burning thermate, which includes its own chemically bound oxygen. This is why a thermate fire cannot be smothered by dowsing and will even burn underwater.
The WTC site was so hot it melted the workmen’s rubber boots. Search-and-rescue dogs brought in to help locate survivors suffered severe burns, and three of the dogs died. Just how hot was the pile? We got an idea on September 16, 2001 when NASA conducted a flyover using an infrared spectrometer (AVIRIS) and detected surface temperatures as high as 1,376° F. Temperatures beneath the pile were undoubtedly much higher.
The site remained intensely hot for five months. Molten steel was reported as late as February 2002 when clean-up crews finally reached the bottom of the WTC bathtub. (Jennifer Lin, “Recovery Worker Reflects on Months Spent at Ground Zero”, Knight-Ridder Newspapers, May 29, 2002)
The discovery of thermate in the WTC dust should have been front-page headline news across America, and indeed, around the world. Yet, as we know, the US media went deaf and dumb on the issue. Why? If Muslim jihadists were behind the 9/11 attacks, why would the media censor this breaking story? The only plausible reason for suppressing it was to prevent the truth from emerging about what actually happened. Blanket censorship has been the rule, ever since."
"9/11 False Flag Terror OP: Overwhelming Hard Proof Of An Inside
Job Pulled Off By US Intel Community and Armed Forces, MOSSAD & MI6"
by Laurent Guyenot
Excerpt: "SOTN Editor’s Note: In light of the coming anniversary of the 9/11 false flag terrorist attacks perpetrated by the U.S. Intelligence Community & U.S Armed Forces, C.I.A & MOSSAD, among other major organs within the US government as well as foreign state actors, the following exposé is being posted - AGAIN.
This highly authoritative breakdown of what was actually a complex international conspiratorial criminal plot of the highest order proves, unequivocally, that 9/11 was an “inside job”. Should any investigator doubt this obvious conclusion, the following links provide even more indisputable evidence of the quite amateur “inside job”. In other words, the perps really didn’t care if anyone found out who pulled it off or how they really did it. They just didn’t care, so controlled would the massive cover-up be, so they thought. N.B. What follows is the gold standard regarding irrefutable proof confirming that 9/11 was a patently inside job.
Technical impossibilities: Thanks to courageous investigators, many anomalies in the official explanation of the events of 9/11 were posted on the Internet in the following months, providing evidence that this was a false flag operation, and that Osama bin Laden was innocent, as he repeatedly declared in the Afghan and Pakistani press and on Al Jazeera. The proofs of this appalling fraud have been accumulating ever since, and are now accessible to anyone willing to spend a few hours of research on the Web. (Although, while preparing this article, I noticed that Google is now making access to that research more difficult than it was five years ago, artificially prioritizing anti-conspiracy sites.)
For example, members of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth have demonstrated that it was impossible for plane crashes and jet fuel fires to trigger the collapse of the Twin Towers. Even Donald Trump understood this. In fact, speaking of “collapse” is perhaps misleading: the towers literally exploded, pulverizing concrete and projecting pieces of steel beams weighing several hundred tons hundreds of meters laterally at high speeds. The pyroclastic dust that immediately flooded through the streets, not unlike the dust from a volcano, indicates a high temperature mixture of hot gasses and relatively dense solid particles, an impossible phenomenon in a simple collapse. It is also impossible that WTC7, another skyscraper (47 stories), which had not been hit by a plane, collapsed into its own footprint at near free-fall speed, unless by “controlled demolition.”
Testimonies of firefighters recorded shortly after the events describe sequences of explosions just before the “collapse”, well below the plane impact. The presence of molten metal in the wreckage up to three weeks after the attack is inexplicable except by the presence of incompletely burned explosives. Firefighter Philip Ruvolo testified before Étienne Sauret’s camera for his film Collateral Damages (2011): “You’d get down below and you’d see molten steel - molten steel running down the channelways, like you were in a foundry - like lava.”
Aviation professionals have also reported impossibilities in the behavior of the planes. The charted speeds of the two aircraft hitting the Twin Towers, 443 mph and 542 mph, exclude these aircraft being Boeing 767s, because these speeds are virtually impossible near ground level. In the unlikely event such speeds could be attained without the aircraft falling apart, flying them accurately into the towers was mission impossible, especially by the amateur pilots blamed for the hijacking. Hosni Mubarak, a former pilot, said he could never do it. (He is not the only head of state to have voiced his doubts: Chavez and Ahmadinejad are among them.) Recall that neither of the black boxes of the jetliners was ever found, an incomprehensible situation.
And of course, there are the obvious anomalies of Shanksville and Pentagon crash sites: no plane or credible plane debris can be seen on any of the numerous photos easily available.
Among the growing number of Americans who disbelieve the official version of the 9/11 attacks, two basic theories are in competition: I called them “inside job” and “Mossad job”. The first one is the dominant thesis within the so-called 9/11 Truth movement, and blames the American government, or a faction within the American Deep State. The second one claims that the masterminds were members of a powerful Israeli network deeply infiltrated in all spheres of power within the US, including media, government, military and secret services.
This “Mossad job” thesis has been gaining ground since Alan Sabrosky, a professor at the U.S. Army War College and the U.S. Military Academy, published in July 2012 an article entitled “Demystifying 9/11: Israel and the Tactics of Mistake”, where he voiced his conviction that September 11th was “a classic Mossad-orchestrated operation.”
We can notice from the outset that incriminating Israelis or Arabs are both “outside job” theories (in fact, they are mirror images of each other, which is understandable in light of what Gilad Atzmon explains about Jewish “projected guilt”). Before even looking at the evidence, “outside job” sounds more credible that “inside job”. There is something monstrous in the idea that a government can deceive and terrorize its own citizens by killing thousands of them, just for starting a series of wars that are not even in the nation’s interest. By comparison, a foreign power attacking the U.S. under the false flag of a third power almost seems like fair play. Indeed suspicion of Israel’s role should be natural to anyone aware of the reputation of the Mossad as: “Wildcard. Ruthless and cunning. Has capability to target U.S. forces and make it look like a Palestinian/Arab act,” in the words of a report of the U.S. Army School for Advanced Military Studies quoted by the Washington Times, September 10th, 2001 - the day before the attacks.
This is an important point, because it raises the question of how and why the 9/11 Truth movement has been led to endorse massively the outrageous “inside job” thesis without even considering the more likely thesis of an attack by a foreign power acting under an Islamic false flag - and what foreign power but Israel would do that?
Of course, the two dissenting theses do not necessarily exclude each other; at least, no one incriminating Israel denies that corrupted elements from the American administration or deep state were involved. The “passionate attachment” between Israel and the U.S. has been going on for decades, and 9/11 is one of its monstrous offsprings."
View,objectively and without preconceptions, complete article here:
"Bank Fraud Gone Wild: Infinite Money Hack Fiasco- an outrageous tale you won’t believe! Join me as I dive into the jaw-dropping saga of the infamous infinite money hack and the chaos that followed. What started as a viral sensation quickly turned into a criminal fiasco with thousands facing the grim reality of felony charges. From depositing fake checks to withdrawing massive sums at ATMs, this so-called "hack" was a one-way ticket to jail. Tune in as I unravel the madness and share some wild stories about people’s desperate attempts to game the system."
"Humanity is the spirit of the Supreme Being on earth, and that humanity is standing amidst ruins, hiding its nakedness behind tattered rags, shedding tears upon hollow cheeks, and calling for its children with pitiful voice. But the children are busy singing their clan's anthem; they are busy sharpening the swords and cannot hear the cry of their mothers."
- Kahlil Gibran
U.S. Navy Hospital Corpsman HM1 Richard Barnett, assigned to the 1st Marine Division, holds an Iraqi child in central Iraq in this March 29, 2003 file photo. Confused front line crossfire ripped apart an Iraqi family after local soldiers appeared to force civilians towards positions held by U.S. Marines.
“My heart broke on its shame and sorrow. I suddenly knew how much crying there was in me, and how little love. I knew, at last, how lonely I was. But I couldn’t respond. My culture had taught me all the wrong things well. So I lay completely still, and gave no reaction at all. But the soul has no culture. The soul has no nations. The soul has no color or accent or way of life. The soul is forever. The soul is one. And when the heart has its moment of truth and sorrow, the soul can’t be stilled. I clenched my teeth against the stars. I closed my eyes. I surrendered to sleep. One of the reasons why we crave love, and seek it so desperately, is that love is the only cure for loneliness, and shame, and sorrow. But some feelings sink so deep into the heart that only loneliness can help you find them again. Some truths about yourself are so painful that only shame can help you live with them. And some things are just so sad that only your soul can do the crying for you.”
"The 59-year-old chimpanzee Mama was very ill and stopped taking food and drink at the Royal Burgers Zoo in Arnhem, Netherlands. Professor of Behavioral Biology, Jan van Hoof has known Mama since 1972. In the video he visits to say goodbye to her. Mama is asleep, but is slowly awakened by Jan. When she sees who is visiting, she lights up. She takes the food she has previously refused to eat. In the video, the old friends are enjoying and kidding each other before Jan finally takes one last goodbye. Mama died one week after the visit."
“Far beyond the local group of galaxies lies NGC 3621, some 22 million light-years away. Found in the multi-headed southern constellation Hydra, the winding spiral arms of this gorgeous island universe are loaded with luminous young star clusters and dark dust lanes. Still, for earthbound astronomers NGC 3621 is not just another pretty face-on spiral galaxy. Some of its brighter stars have been used as standard candles to establish important estimates of extragalactic distances and the scale of the Universe.
This beautiful image of NGC 3621 traces the loose spiral arms far from the galaxy's brighter central regions that span some 100,000 light-years. Spiky foreground stars in our own Milky Way Galaxy and even more distant background galaxies are scattered across the colorful skyscape.”
Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometimes voices,
That, if I then had wak'd after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again.”
"Caliban is talking to Stephano and Trinculo in Shakespeare's “Tempest”, telling them not to be "afeard" of the mysterious place they find themselves, an island seemingly beset with magic, strangeness, ineffable presences. And you and I, and, yes, all of us, find ourselves inexplicably thrown up on this island that is the world, and we too, if we are attentive, hear the strange music, the sounds and sweet airs, that seems to come from nowhere and everywhere
No, I'm not talking about the usual ubiquitous clamor, the roar of internal combustion, the blare of the television, the beeping of mobile phones. I'm not talking about the Limbaughs and the Becks, the televangelists, the blathering politicians, the twitterers and bloggers (including this one). I'm not even talking about the exquisite music of Mozart, the poetry of Wordsworth, the theories of Einstein.
I'm talking about the sounds we hear in utter silence, in moments of repose, in the heart of darkness, when we are a little bit afraid, disoriented, off kilter. A strange music that comes from beyond our knowing, a felt meaning. You've heard it. I've heard it. You'd have to be deaf not to have heard it.
Where we differ is how we describe it. Mostly, we give its source a name. Angels. Fairies. Gods or demons. Yahweh. Allah. Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Nixies, E.T.s, shades and shadows. Naiads, dryads, Ariel and Puck. A host of invisible creatures who are, in one way or another, images of ourselves. And, in naming, we are a little less afraid.
And some of us are just content to listen, to take delight. Having woken to the inexplicable mystery of the world- the sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not- we let the music lull us back into a sweet slumber, a kind of dreamless dream, a reverie. Does reverie share a deep root with reverence? I don't know.”
“And when they found our shadows (grouped ‘round the TV sets), they ran down every lead; they repeated every test; they checked out all the data in their lists. And then the alien anthropologists admitted they were still perplexed, but on eliminating every other reason for our sad demise they logged the only explanation left: This species has amused itself to death.” - Roger Waters
“Apathy and indifference are nurtured in the modern age as most peoples’ free time is frittered away with worthless trivia like ball games, computer games, movies and soaps, and fiddling with their mobile phones. These distractions might be fun, but after most of them you’ve learnt nothing of any value, and remain ignorant, malleable and suggestible, which is just how the elites want you.” – Clive Maund
“A truth’s initial commotion is directly proportional to how deeply the lie was believed… When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker, a raving lunatic.” – Dresden James
“A lie gets halfway around the world before
the truth has a chance to get its pants on.”
– Winston Churchill
"30 years ago (1985) Neil Postman (a professor of communications arts and sciences at New York University – until his death in 2003) wrote the best-selling book “Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business”. (Free download below.) The book exposed, among other things, the subtle but profound dangers to the developing mind from the mesmerizing (and addictive) commercial television industry.
The lessons from that book have essentially been ignored by the amoral and corrupted sociopathic capitalist system that says “damn the torpedoes/full steam ahead” and blindly and greedily promotes unlimited growth no matter what the costs and who or what gets hurt long–term in the resource-extractive, exploitive and permanently polluting processes.
But Postman’s thesis applies even more strongly today to the current internet/computer/ age-inappropriate, pornographic sex and pornographic violence-saturated televangelist/political-contaminated media reality with which the prophetic Postman was properly alarmed.
SOMA, the Drug That Predicted Prozac by 50 Years: In the classic “Brave New World” (1932) Aldous Huxley wrote about the new form of totalitarianism that has now come to pass in the developed world, thanks to the privatized profit-driven, drug, medical and psychiatric corporations whose practitioners were once (naively or altruistically?) mainly concerned with relieving human suffering and trying to holistically and permanently cure their distressed patients’ ailments (rather than lucratively “managing” said “clients” as permanently paying consumers of unaffordable prescription drugs). Nearly 30 years after he wrote the book, Huxley said,
“And it seems to me perfectly in the cards that there will be within the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda, brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods.” Neil Postman’s very last sentence of his book concerned the prescription drug-infested victims of the new form of totalitarianism that Huxley had described in “Brave New World”.
Of course, Huxley’s book was all about his imaginary psychotropic drug SOMA that Prozac’s makers and promoters in the late 1980s to falsely claim to make its swallowers “feel better than well”. One of the characters in Brave New World said: “And if ever, by some unlucky chance, anything unpleasant should somehow happen, why, there’s always Soma to give you a holiday from the facts. And there’s always Soma to calm your anger, to reconcile you to your enemies, to make you patient and long-suffering. In the past you could only accomplish these things by making a great effort and after years of hard moral training. Now, you swallow two or three half-gramme tablets, and there you are. Anybody can be virtuous now. You can carry at least half your morality about in a bottle. Christianity without tears; that’s what Soma is.”
Postman ended his book by writing: “What afflicted the people in Brave New World was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking.” A couple of years after the publication of Postman’s book, Roger Waters (of “Pink Floyd’s The Wall” fame) released a “concept” album that was inspired by the book. He titled the album “Amused to Death”. The lyrics of the title track are as follows:
