Douglas Rushkoff: Life Inc.

Douglas Rushkoff: Life Inc.

How the world became a corporation and how to take it back.

From the site: In Life Inc, Douglas Rushkoff presents the unnerving, unbelievable, but ultimately undeniable proof that our world has been overtaken by an absolutely artificial economy.

He shows how our most fundamental assumptions about money and commerce are actually false ones - artifacts of a 400-year-old plan by a waning aristocracy to maintain control of Western Europe. Although the architects of this corporatism have long since passed on, we still live in a landscape defined by their plans and have internalized their values as our own.

Taking on some of the biggest assumptions of our age, this is a book filled with dangerous ideas and rather unspeakable heresies:

• Money is not a part of nature, to be studied by a science like economics, but an invention with a specific purpose.
• Centralized currency is just one kind of money - one not intended to promote transactions but to promote the accumulation of capital by the wealthy.
• Banking is our society’s biggest industry, and debt is our biggest product.
• Corporations were never intended to promote commerce, but to prevent it.
• The development of chartered corporations and centralized currency caused the plague; the economic devastation ended Europe’s most prosperous centuries, and led to the deaths of half of its population.
• The more money we make, the more debt we have actually created.

Most importantly, Rushkoff shows how this moment of financial crisis is actually an opportunity to reinstate commerce and communities based in creating value for one another, rather than continuing to extract it for the benefit of institutions that no longer exist.

Yellow Submarine part 2

Streaming Movie is here and first part is here.

I look at all the lonely people

all the lonely people, where do they all belong?

Father McKenzie writing the words of a sermon that no one will hear

no one comes near
look at him working...
Father McKenzie wiping the dirt from his hand as he walks from the grave
no one was saved
all the lonely people, where do they all belong?
Ringo Starr on Hope Street

Yellow Submarine All Seeing Eye Periscope follows Ringo

The police bowing for the cat elite

Infinte Hallway of Dimensional Doors

Run lizzy!

Skull & Bones

All together now! In the Ocean of Consciousness.

Nik Kershaw - The Riddle

More music, something entirely different. From the wiki: The "riddling" lyrics caused much puzzlement and speculation among listeners as to their meaning, which was further fuelled by record company MCA's decision to run a competition to work out the meaning - without either telling Nik or even bothering to ask him what the meaning was. Had they done so, they would have discovered that there is in fact no meaning at all - the lyrics were nothing but gibberish thrown together to fit the music, or in Nik's own words: "nonsense, rubbish, bollocks, the confused ramblings of an 80s popstar".

Hmmm, well here are some highlights from the rather esoteric video: Infinite stairways, spirals, breaking through walls, looking glass, 1.22: scullery skull (& bones society), pyramid metronome, sun box. Door knobs on wall. rodents eating 'eyes' in box? Rodents on the mind. waterdoor stargate, dartboard stargate, burning history books (after touching the waterdoor with gloved hand, hmm!). Fried egg mind, riddler shot (remember from Batman Forever movie Jim Carrey's Riddler: "Does anybody else feel like a fried egg?!") 2.01: Painted stairway with sun. Eye mirror, Tweedledum and Tweedledee with puzzle piece, checkered floor pattern and painted on the wall to seem continuing, twin chandeliers, arched windows, distorted mirror, painted doors, etc!

I got two strong arms,
blessings of Babylon
time, to carry on and try
for sins and false alarms
so to American the brave
wise man save.

Near a tree by a river there's a hole in the ground. (stargate?:p)
Where an old man of Aran goes around and around.
And his mind is a beacon in the veil of the night.
For a strange kind of fashion there's a wrong and a right

But he'll never never fight over you.

I got plans for us
nights in the scullery
(1.22: skull (& bones society), pyramid metronome, sun box)
and days, instead of me I only
know what to discuss
Oh, for anything but light
Wise men fighting over you

It's not me you see,
pieces of valentine
and just, a song of mine to keep
from burning history
seasons of gasoline and gold
Wise men fold.

Near a tree by a river there's a hole in the ground
Where an old man of Aran goes around and around.
And his mind is a beacon in the veil of the night.
For a strange kind of fashion there's a wrong and a right

But he'll never never fight over you.

I got time to kill, sly looks in corridors without
a plan of yours a blackbird sings on bluebird hill.
Thanks to the calling of the wild
wise mens child.

Near a tree by a river there's a hole in the ground
Where an old man of Aran goes around and around.
And his mind is a beacon in the veil of the night.
For a strange kind of fashion there's a wrong and a right

But he'll never never fight.

Hallucinogen - LSD