The Internet is simply a delivery system, like UPS or FEDEX. No one can blame UPS or FEDEX
for delivering packages someone might not like, and the Internet is no
different but immensely more valuable.
The Internet is
more valuable than textbooks because the identical information written
in the book can be published online, in a fraction of the time, and
can be constantly and immediately updated. In addition, footnotes and
links to additional information can be delivered in real time, and with
web annotation, the entire text outline can be discussed in real time
with professors, teachers, industry leaders, and so on. A book cannot even come close to that kind of capability, although eyestrain certainly has to be considered.
The people posting on the
internet provide a barometer of thoughts and feelings for the huge
number of people
that take the time to post and comment. Doing so offers a
snapshot of thinking which you would never get without their
conversations. Regarding the idea of fake news, more recently some of
it may be blatant lies, and some of it may be thought shaping
propaganda designed to keep your eye off the ball, masking real issues and
creating a secondary narrative.
You may notice that the news cycle changes so
quickly that important information is put up and then lost when it is
shifted into archives or behind a pay wall. Yet much of the information the news conveys needs
to be saved and organized so that it becomes instructive, which p2p is
in the process of doing. For example, very few people have
studied the history of intelligence agencies. These guys operate like
thugs. They lie, cheat, steal, murder, manipulate, torture, and support
all of these actions in compliant regimes everywhere, or in the words of US foreign service personnel the U.S. "REAMS" them over economically and militarily "as best we can".
In studying manipulation of the public consciousness and understanding
foreign policy, this information is important to know. Some pundit
writing a textbook, or whose livelihood depends on providing opinions
supporting what his audience wants to hear, will not convey the dynamics
of the real world environment to persons seriously studying the
subject. The textbooks written in isolation from real time world events and
reactions are more like propaganda and hearsay than valuable guides to
what is going on and more importantly, how to change it. The
short window and move to archived pay walls effectively erases history
and its lessons may be lost. Time to fix that.
Many
of us are fortunate to live in relatively free countries, but it is
amazing how many people are not being equipped to use that
freedom to their advantage. I spent my early years selling
programs designed to help people educate and help themselves do better
at their chosen profession. It was frustrating to see that not
everyone benefited the way I thought they should, so I set out to find
out why. One of the most successful behavior change operations in
the world is the military. They have been training ordinary folks to
become people willing to kill in a very short time, which is a more
successful behavior change program than Weight Watchers or Alcoholics Anonymous
ever thought to be.
A relative who was friends with J. Edgar
Hoover, told me Hoover got him to buy Bowie race track just outside DC. So
I asked my relative to speak to Hoover and get
information and materials on how the military was doing it, which he
did. Anybody that has gone through boot camp will have an idea of
how
it works, so I won't detail that here. But suffice it to say it
is possible to mobilize anyone to do pretty much anything if you know
how. Over time my relative talked me
out of continuing to deploy what I had learned simply because he said I
could
not protect the information and would eventually lose it, and so greed
infected my brain and I stopped.
Watching my children and grandchildren grow up it became obvious the information needs to be disseminated so that anyone can use it. I have continued researching what I leaned over the years, with particular interest in behavior change as well as the manipulation and control of citizens. The quest initially was for my own interests, and then out of concern for my children and grandchildren. There does not seem to be an effective way to help people help themselves and it would be of great benefit to encourage the development of things that might work.
You would think the school system would be the logical place to start, but I am no longer confident it is. My grandchildren go to public schools that today seem to be a living retirement fund for teachers. Teachers are protected by unions whose sole job appears to be making sure their member teachers are never confronted by the reality of poor performance. The thought that a teacher should be provably and measurably responsible for educating students and getting results is lost on unions and their membership because that would violate the idea that members can't be fired for doing a lousy job. Seniority over service and performance.
It does not matter who you are, if you ask anyone to help you fix something or perform some task you should only pay them if they do. That’s easy to understand and it applies around your home, the workplace whether you own it or not, the schools your children attend, and any place where you pay for services. That expectation should govern our relationship with politicians and bureaucrats as well. But the first thing you need to know in all of these circumstances is, are they doing the job expected of them or not? If there is no measurement of their performance you have no idea at all.
“People don't do what you expect but what you inspect.” - Louis V. Gerstner, Jr.
In the absence of any performance measurement system, if you want the very best for your children, you need to help them start thinking and educating themselves on how the world works and what they want to do in it. Improving their knowledge of how things work is fundamental for them to develop ideas and strategies on trying to improve the systems we live in. The ride sharing service Uber is an example of a broken taxi cab system being improved by sidestepping the monopoly the taxicab industry operates. Uber gave people an alternative to cab riding monopolies and taxi riders took it because Uber was better, faster and cheaper.
Every single day of the year, people all over the
world are talking about what is happening to them and the world around
them. There are a huge number of people
looking at these challenges and trying to think out ways to fix things.
And there are a large number of good
reporters providing up to date and detailed information about history and
events in progress. Much of that
information is available right now if you look.
In addition, anyone on the inside of organizations rigging things and who are genuinely concerned about our future will break rank at some point and tell the truth. Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, and many others have and will continue to come forward. And although not all will have access to the huge amounts of information others do, anyone who is resourceful can find ample information on how things work written by genuinely concerned individuals. In a free country the truth is simply too hard to hide.
We live in a rules based world. Think curbs on the side of the road. Drive and hit one and you can get a flat. Great way to learn to drive properly. The curbs for life are called laws and norms, and in business they are called processes and procedures, adding and subtracting and every fancy variation on that all the way up to theoretical physics and biology.
And every single one of these curbs, laws and norms, processes and procedures are being shaped, bent, altered, and manipulated by people. There are even organizations that specialize in twisting the rules for a buck. One is called American Legislative Exchange Council or ALEC which is simply a businessmen’s MS-13 gang that hides their tattoos. People like you made the rules and people like you can change them.
There is only one thing that controls the twisting and perverting of the game, and that is accountability. Unfortunately we live in a world where faith is supposed to be the everyday practice while the reality is no one accounts to anyone. If there were Gods and we lived among them, that might be OK, but everyone else should be demanding proof continuously.
There are quite a few groups of people that
have become tremendously successful through the use of their minds,
Israel, Taiwan, Hong Kong to name a few, so it its clearly possible to
change anything with absolutely no resources and the simple will to do
so. p2p.media hopes to help that along.
You can change everything if you pull your brain out of the smog a small minority of people deliberately want you to live in. Don’t expect much help from those that are too far gone to pull out a flashlight to see through it. But if you do change there is blue sky beyond. And there is a hell of a lot of fun on the way out just stirring things up. Religions have an idea called being reborn by the renewing of your mind and the concept is the same.
The internet is a forum for thousands of people that will help you find the facts out there. And they are easy to identify. Think of it the Internet as a societal Petri dish. Read continuously and your knowledge will grow.
As for operating on pure faith, do your kids seem smarter and are they learning how to read, write and do math well? Is someone teaching them how to create their own jobs instead of working for some company that will pay the least amount possible, hide their profits offshore, go to third world countries where they will pay the lowest wages possible, except to themselves, and eventually replace you with a robot when they can? No? Then in a capitalist society the entire education system we have is not working. If you go to a trade school for plumbing you better learn plumbing. So what are we doing in a capitalist system teaching people to get jobs working for capitalists rather than learning how to BE CAPITALISTS?
And in looking for more reasons not to operate on faith alone, what explains why the US has 900 military bases around the world in countries you do not own or have citizenship rights to? What explains why the few hundred con men that represent you are pissing way trillions of your tax dollars unaccountably, and you don’t even own the countries they are busting up? If they send the military over there killing and murdering for a profit where is your share? Even the Romans were smart enough to pay off their soldiers. That is unless the military is really a mercenary force for corporate America and you are being sucked in to lending your name to it. Find out who profits from the con mens' death and destruction if you want an eye opener.
And in looking for even more reasons not to operate on faith alone, is some moron telling you that soon you are going to be replaced by a robot, have no job and that some bureaucrat is going to hand you some money for sitting on your butt? WTF. That is the great American dream? Sitting in front of TV watching other people earning a living telling fairy tales while all you get is bad eyesight and an empty head with a couch gut. Seriously?
And in looking for even more reasons not to operate on faith alone, is most of the wealth in the world controlled by a handful of people while the rest of the world is broke and experts suggest that is a reasonable approach to life. ???? What are you going to help your children do about it?
And in looking for even more reasons not to operate on faith alone, are you a woman who could get pregnant because some guy with a penis and no brain says he loves you until your panties are down, but you get to keep the child and bear the responsibility for the rest of your life if you get pregnant? ???? Where is the sign from the so called god that says Daddy, get her pregnant and we take your DNA, find you so you have responsibility for the child for the rest of its life while Mother goes fishing and has a latte with the girls whenever she feels like it. You change the dirty diapers and get up in the middle of the night for 12 years and perhaps you will get some cash for looking after the child and visit on weekends, if she has some cash left over.
And in looking for even more reasons not to operate on faith alone without thinking and questioning, are you
are a woman and some man in a cloak or
robes says you are
inferior to men and
you are made from their rib and they are the boss, and suggests you
come obediently
to their worship joints and pay up, while they tell you that you can’t
have
abortions and can’t use birth control. ???? Here is a tip. Tell them to get a bowling ball shoved up their rear
and carry it for nine months, and then raise the bowling ball for eighteen
years,
before they start with that nonsense. Tell
them to name the ball Hail or Mary or Rashid.
And in looking for even more reasons not to operate on faith alone when your Momma tells you should not have sex, then ask her how you got there without it. ???? The gods say you can't handle abortions, which I get, only because the unborn at some point sure look like little people. Barring that then birth control makes a lot more sense, which you also cannot do? So if you’re going to buy some guy in robes or a cloak telling you God or Allah or whoever else says you can’t practice birth control, then I suggest you tell them to send God over in a chariot of fire to explain it to you, because it make no sense to me for women to be the ones who will ultimately bear responsibility when the rubbers don't meet the road.
Or you can tell them p2p.media directed you to do so and it promises to speak to God on your behalf. Which should be OK since millions of you were willing to listen to George Bush when he lied and said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, or here, or here using jazzed up lies, and conned you into authorizing the murder of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis based on a complete lie. Oh wait, you did not authorize it? Hmm.
And if you are of the opinion only white boys will always tell you lies, then here is Colin Powell wading in. And for a little icing on the cake, just like Bill Clinton ran around with his penis hanging out and Trump grabs pussy, here is Powell’s email trail of his running around in Europe with his extremities out. Boys will be boys and liars too, does not matter what color they are. See CNN’s “Of course Presidents Lie” and Obama's criminal legacy on war, torture and Guantánamo. Next
Think
of the constant stream of information on the Internet as a live
streaming textbook. You don’t have to wait years for some historian to
write a text book, or some researcher to do so. Researchers write
papers all the time, its called being published so that their peers can
comment. Think of these papers as a window on invention,
ingenuity and potential discovery.
You can also reverse engineer the entire
process by reading extensively, taking books out of the library and
talking to others. There is a lot of information. The only thing
missing is the textbook and someone explaining it to you, but there are
lots of people who can. You have to convert the internet into a living,
dynamic text book. How you do that is to bookmark and save links, and
use something like Nimbus to capture information and save it as pdfs
just in case it gets taken down or hidden behind a pay wall. If it is
offered for you to read it is offered for you to save to read at a
later date for your own personal use. Exactly like recording shows to
watch at your convenience on a PVR. They may own the rights to the show
but they cannot tell you when to watch it. Join a library and use their
online services to get access to whatever they have available. Take a
course at a university, live or online and get access to their library.
Find a student who has access and get them to give you access to the
library online. Perhaps they can assist you.
Get new books in print from Amazon or on an e-reader of some kind. There are reader apps for PCs, notebooks, laptops, pad devices and smartphones.
Use this stuff to build your own degree. Look over this page on the internet. There are a few links there on people teaching themselves how to do things that interest them.
We live in an age in which there are thousands of really smart people who can help you learn on the fly. They are in books, on the internet in stories, blogs and chats, and these offer a huge number of insights that you will never get from a five year old textbook. The world is constantly changing and quickly. So what you do need to do is start reading and thinking every day. You can do that by checking books out of a library and by researching online constantly. Find out what interests you and start pursuing it.
And, one last and critically important
point. You live in a free society so far. You can vote and
you can control your wallet. If 10 million people get together
and refuse to buy another car from Ford or GM or somebody else
exploiting you, it could be over for them. Changing your mind and
controlling your money are powerful weapons.