Meme Scholar with Madness (PhD)

[EndtheMadnessNow]

February 5, 1971: Apollo 14 lands on the Moon.




Meet Margaret Isabel Dunning, 101 years old that still drives her 1930 Packard 740.


She was an American businesswoman and philanthropist and benefactor of the Plymouth (Michigan) Historical Museum. She died on May 17, 2015, whilst visiting Santa Barbara, California (Jay Leno and his collection of rare cars) from injuries sustained from an accidental fall. She was 104.




Two Rectangular Icebergs Spotted on NASA's Operation IceBridge flight.
Not one but two found in Antarctica. Things that make you go Hmmmmm...


For the debunkers: Operation IceBridge


Another new study shows belief in supernatural evil alongside Christian nationalism has implications for 2024...


Ruled by the Demons?


Happy 76th yesterday to Alice Cooper.  He and Colonel Sanders dealt with chicken in different ways:






Royal announcement about King Charles:


A statement from Buckingham Palace


Senate releases $118 billion bipartisan aid proposal for Israel, Ukraine, border security...


CNBC


Barry Jackson poster art for the 1985 techno-horror film "Joey" (aka "Making Contact") directed by Roland Emmerich.


Most of the film was shot in West Germany, writer-director Roland Emmerich set it in the United States (Virginia Beach) and shot it in English so that the film could be marketed worldwide. Psychic marketing 80s! The US version runs about 20 minutes shorter than the original German version.


Peter Elson 1984 cover art for books 1 & 2 of British author Peter Beere's urban dystopia series, "Trauma 2020: A Brutal Insight Into The Future".




"Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business" is a 1985 book by educator Neil Postman (1931-2003). The book's origins lay in a talk Postman gave to the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1984. He was participating in a panel on George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and the contemporary world.

In the introduction to his book, Postman said that the contemporary world was better reflected by Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, whose public was oppressed by their addiction to amusement, rather than by Orwell's work, where they were oppressed by state violence.

Postman distinguishes the Orwellian vision of the future, in which totalitarian governments seize individual rights, from that offered by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World, where people medicate themselves into bliss, thereby voluntarily sacrificing their rights. Drawing an analogy with the latter scenario, Postman sees television's entertainment value as a present-day "soma", the fictitious pleasure drug in Brave New World, by means of which the citizens' rights are exchanged for consumers' entertainment.

Drawing on the ideas of media scholar Marshall McLuhan – altering McLuhan's aphorism "the medium is the message" to "the medium is the metaphor" – he describes how oral, literate, and televisual cultures radically differ in the processing and prioritization of information; he argues that each medium is appropriate for a different kind of knowledge.

What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us.

Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.

This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.

 
Excerpt from "Amusing Ourselves to Death" by Neil Postman. PDF copy

Ed Lindlof cover art for 'Amusing Ourselves to Death' by Neil Postman, 1985...


Neil Postman Online