A quick thought experiment.
What if there was no such thing as a President? What if Obama is just playing a role, previously played by Bush Jr, Clinton etc?
What if he doesn't actually do anything except make speeches and appearances?
What if the power he wields doesn't come from his office or democratic authority, but from your own belief in a system that isn't really there?
food for thot.
^^^^^This is absolute truth...no what ifs. I have seen behind the curtain and guess what, you can too!
http://sandiego.indymedia.org/media/2006/10/119975.pdf
TRAGEDY AND HOPE is a lively, informed and always readable view
of our not quite One World of today, seen in historical perspective.
Quigley has already shown his command of the kind of historical
perspective seen in the a world like that of Toynbee and Spengler; but
unlike them he does not so much concern himself with projections from
a distant past to a distant future as he does with what must interest
us all much more closely - our own future and that of our immediate
descendants. He uses the insights, but in full awareness of the
limitations of our modern social sciences, and especially those of
economics, sociology, and psychology. Not all readers will agree with
what he sees ahead of us in the near future, nor with what he thinks
we should do about it. But all will find this provocative and
sometimes provoking book a stimulus to profitable reflection.
David Brinton
TRAGEDY AND HOPE shows the years 1895-1950 as a period of
transition from the world dominated by Europe in the nineteenth
century to the world of three blocs in the twentieth century. With
clarity, perspective and cumulative impact, Professor Quigley examines
the nature of that transition through two world wars and a worldwide
economic depression. As an interpretative historian, he tries to show
each event in the full complexity of its historical context. The
result is a unique work, notable in several ways. It gives a picture
of the world in terms of the influence of different cultures and
outlooks upon each other; it shows, more completely than in any
similar work, the influence of science and technology on human life;
and it explains, with unprecedented clarity, how the intricate
financial and commercial patterns of the West prior to 1914 influenced
the development of today's world.
Carroll Quigley, professor of history at the Foreign Service
School of Georgetown University, formerly taught at Princeton and at
Harvard. He has done research in the archives of France, Italy and
England, and is the author of the widely praised "Evolution of
Civilizations." A member of the editorial board of the monthly Current
History, he is a frequent lecturer and consultant for public and semipublic
agencies. He is a member of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science, the American Anthropological Association, and
the American Economic Association, as well as various historical
associations. He has been lecturer on Russian history at the
Industrial College of the Armed Forces since 1951 and on Africa at the
Brookings Institution since 1961, and has lectured at many other other
places including the U.S. Naval Weapons Laboratory, the Foreign
Service Institute of the State Department, and the Naval College at
Norfolk, Virginia. In 1958, he was a consultant to the Congressional
Select Committee which set up the present national space agency. He
was collaborator in history to the Smithsonian Institution after 1957,
in connection with the establishment of its new Museum of History and
Technology. In the summer of 1964 he went to the Navy Post-Graduate
School, Monterey, California, as a consultant to project Seabed, which
tried to visualize what American weapons systems would be like in
twelve years.
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Don't mean to derail your thread Luke, but this shit is important for people to be exposed to.
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