2459 - Everybody Pays

2013-07-11

America is at war with the world and its citizens. Not with everybody, but with most of them, even most of its own. America spies on everyone and trusts nobody. Everybody could be a terrorist, everybody could copy their so-called “intellectual property”. Poor America 🙂

Dissent on economic systems makes them send out their agents and their drones, revelation of their betrayal of their own people’s rights and freedom makes them antagonize all of what they like to treat as their colonial backyard. Poor America 🙂

But worst of all, the deadliest of dangers, encryption and freedom of speech for everyone, makes them mobilize their most feared weapons of mass destruction, the rating agencies and the credit card companies.

Want a Virtual Private Network (VPN) to protect your privacy? Well, you can, but you can’t pay for it with US-controlled plastic money.

You can pay for porn and you can pay for your own automatic guns, interestingly enough, at this time you can even donate to the defense of Bradley Manning, but giving people access to comfortable encryption and self-controlled privacy, that’s obviously too much.

If you ask them, then it’s always the same story. Terrorists and child pornographers eat your children and your puppies, but as always and ever, it’s a lie, just a shameless lie, trumpeted into the world over and over and over again.

In reality it’s all about the money, it’s all about being in control, it’s all about being able to perpetuate the status quo. America does not produce anything any more (well, almost), but it wants to own everything, your genes, your thoughts, your memories and your ideas, and most of all it wants to own and control all the channels of communication that you use. It wants to own you. For the best, but not for the best of you.

The Song of the Day is “Everybody Pays” from Mark Knopfler’s 2004 album “Shangri-La”. Hear it on YouTube.

There are 6 comments

Markus   (2013-07-12)

Ha, so quiet here? Were you provoking too harshly? None of the U.S. readers to contradict (or confirm) here? Strange, but not unsimilar to the debate in Germany. Nobody really wants to name the fact what it is: a billionfold breach of all reasonable assumptions of privacy, a non-material agression, the de-masking of a once proud nation of the free. Sad.

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andreas   (2013-07-12)

Well, Paul may have given up on me 🙂 In reality the problem is not with America, it is with "The Empire of the Rich", and of course currently the USA are The Empire. Once it was Rome, later Byzantium, much, much later it was Great Britain, and when the US fall as they inevitably will, who knows, it may be China, and given enough time it may be something else. The problem isn't Capitalism either. The problem is the concentration of power and corruption in the ruling classes. Ideology is much less persistent than power and corruption 😄

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Ted Byrne   (2013-07-14)

I never can figger out how you choose your featured image. This time I definitely would have chosen the fashion shot. It's ambiguity demands that my imagination explode. It's a powerful... perhaps dramatic, perhaps humorous short story. Or poem. And it brings such a human dimension to what is often a powerful abstract statement inherent in your work. I understand that here in the US we have considerable more freedom to include candid and revealing images of human faces in our work, so European street photographers must find proxies for emotions. Still, of our choices for today... I find that the second image wraps a tractor beam around my attention, and the scarce time I have for a haunting emotional contemplation. But hell, whudooIknow, eh? 🙂

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Ted Byrne   (2013-07-14)

OH... as to your AmeriKa the assholes rant. Well... guess you're right. Interesting that the darling of the European Left... Nobel-Lauriate Obama, is little better than our dismal George Bush (both of 'em) in protecting anyone from the We-Can-Do-It-So-Why-Not? psychosis of Big Government hubris. All of these characters seem to believe that as long as they are in the saddle that they can control the rampaging beast to ride the path of goodness as they imagine it. Of course they can't, won't, and don't. And when we discover that our George Bush or Barack Obama's are either fools or knaves... we become just a hair more cynical. Pity... Because cynics are the easiest for the beast to corral and herd. What we must become are skeptics. Cynics ignore facts, skeptics navigate by them. Which is why emotional arguments rule cynics, while the skeptics are fueled by the rational. We need more Spocks and fewer James T. Kirks. Not just here in America BTW... Just as you appear to feel pity for America, I gotta' admit that there's a lot to go around for the populations of most of the EU as well. Sigh...

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andreas   (2013-07-14)

Ted, excellent points indeed. My answers, so far as I have any, are in "2461 – No Connection".

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2461 – No Connection » Andreas Manessinger   (2013-07-14)

[...] friend Ted Byrne commented twice on “2459 – Everybody Pays“. In the first comment he rightly questioned my choice of images. Yes Ted, the image of the [...]

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