Monday, October 10, 2011

What Would Steve Jobs Say about OWS -- Occupy Wall Street?



Edison? Ford. The innovator of today's cool computerized world of music downlads, the iPod and iPad.

Dead at 56, Steve Jobs, and the witty obituaries -- Read Jobs backing of using LSD, and how Bill Gates should have dropped a few tabs!
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One of the most meaningful to us at The Fix was what he said in a commencement address at Stanford University in 2005, a year after his cancer diagnosis:

"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma—which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.…Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle."

But equally suggestive, at least to us, is a quote from Steve Jobs to New York Times reporter John Markoff, who interviewed him for his 2005 book What the Doormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer. Speaking about his youthful experiments with psychedelics, Jobs said, "Doing LSD was one of the two or three most important things I have done in my life." He was hardly alone among computer scientists in his appreciation of hallucinogenics and their capacity to liberate human thought from the prison of the mind. Jobs even let drop that Microsoft's Bill Gates would "be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once." Apple's mantra was"Think different." Jobs did. And he credited his use of LSD as a major reason for his success.

Read more:

What Do Steve Jobs' Obituaries Leave Out? His Appreciation for LSD

Apple's legendary co-founder Steve Jobs said acid was one of the most important things he did in his life.
October 7, 2011 |
 
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Occupy Wall Street Hitting Critical Mass on Columbus Day... And Can Only Get Bigger

It's Columbus Day, which means many Americans, including students, have the day off—which means Occupy Wall Street is expecting a swell of numbers today. And after Paul Krugman's awesome column in the Times yesterday, a must read,

Plutocrats React to OWS: Krugman Calls it Panic

The Pundit-Elite Class is besides themselves, trying to figure out how to put this Citizen's Action genie back in its bottle ... and so they just keep doing what they do best -- lie, censor, obscure, mis-construe. And above all, shift the debate ... redirect those Citizen advocate spotlights ... to anywhere, but on them.

Panic of the Plutocrats
by Paul Krugman, NYTimes -- October 9, 2011
[...]
Nonetheless, Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, has denounced “mobs” and “the pitting of Americans against Americans.” The G.O.P. presidential candidates have weighed in, with Mitt Romney accusing the protesters of waging “class warfare,” while Herman Cain calls them “anti-American.” My favorite, however, is Senator Rand Paul, who for some reason worries that the protesters will start seizing iPads, because they believe rich people don’t deserve to have them.
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The way to understand all of this is to realize that it’s part of a broader syndrome, in which wealthy Americans who benefit hugely from a system rigged in their favorreact with hysteria to anyone who points out just how rigged the system is.
[...]
They’re people who got rich by peddling complex financial schemes that, far from delivering clear benefits to the American people, helped push us into a crisis whoseaftereffects continue to blight the lives of tens of millions of their fellow citizens.

Yet they have paid no price. Their institutions were bailed out by taxpayers, with few strings attached. They continue to benefit from explicit and implicit federal guarantees -- basically, they’re still in a game of heads they win, tails taxpayers lose. And they benefit from tax loopholes that in many cases have people with multimillion-dollar incomes paying lower rates than middle-class families.

And what they are Panicking about most of all -- is that bright light will finally uncover, the "rigged game" they've been scamming us with, all along ...
They're panicked that we may discover their hypocrisy for calling us "Mobs" while previously issuing Congressional "Resolutions of Thanks" for similar Tea Party demonstrations:


....[cont.] ...it's not inconceivable that the crowds will contain a reader or two who wasn't planning on heading to the protest before reading it.

Many noted over the weekend that the tide was turning for OWS, at least in the mainstream media... that publications which refused to acknowledge the movement at its start were now publishing several stories a day about it, and positive ones at that. Here's a good example: CBS, that bastion of middle-of-the-roadness, has published an article on its website entitled "Occupy Wall Street's Drumbeat Grows Louder":

On "The Early Show" Monday, Former Senator Russell Feingold, D-Wis., said of the protests spreading across the country, "I'm not just pleased about it, I'm excited about it."

He reflected on the pro-labor demonstrations in Wisconsin earlier this year that were sparked by the governor's fight to take away collective bargaining rights from public sector workers in his state. "We did it here, and I think this is going to happen all over the country," Feingold said, "because people have been kicked when they are down, over and over again. You can only kick people so long before they react.

"This is time now for accountability, and this is a good way to show people how strongly we feel. The working people of this country have been treated very brutally and it has to change."
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