Cluesforum—Exposing Mass Deception

Take care when fighting monsters lest you become one also

reel.deal wrote:nice jumper brian, even tho you just missed the towers with your explosions. =)
i been doin some good coloring-in, kept in the lines & everything! look...

... no one from the U.S. government is stepping forward to squash all these pesky “conspiracy rumors” that Flight 77 never hit the Pentagon. Why? Think about it. The guilty parties responsible for carrying-out the 9-11 terror attacks are loathsome mass murderers of the worst kind. If they were found guilty of committing these crimes, the citizens of this nation would scream for their heads on a silver platter.

But what of knowledge and its commodification? "Knowledge as Property: Who Owns What and Why?" seeks to ferret out the complex relationship between knowledge, communication, ownership, and control. When the Europeans first met Africans they often claimed to have signed contracts that gave them African lands. With the Native Americans it was similar. Europeans using their own cultural barometers and measures often imposed by force their wills on the Native Americans, claiming afterwards that the land was given to them by the Native Americans or was traded for beads and trinkets. Once the land was in the hands of the Europeans, there was a transformation in conception. They began to colonize not just the geography but the information about the land as well. Colonized information became property to them. They owned it and could interpret it, also claiming the right to exclusive interpretation.

A principal model of domination in the Western world is through the accumulation of private property. It rarely matters if the property accumulated is considered a person or a book, the idea is to bring property to the social and political core and to disseminate information about it from the core. Europeans begin with the idea that only information worthwhile to Europe is significant. A number of institutions have been set up in the West to insure the domination of knowledge not just of Europe and America but of other parts of the world as well. This is why there are more significant historical monuments of early Mesopotamia in Europe than there are in Iraq, or why there are more pieces of African art in the French Museum of Man than there are in Abidjan. Thus, the museum, like the library, is a creation of accumulation of knowledge as if it is a commodity.

[...]

Knowledge is a commodity to sell and possess in the construction of the West. I own a certain knowledge and can patented it for l9 years or copyright it for 75. New forms of ownership are being explored right now because of the proliferation of computer software programs. But all of this is rooted in the historical encounter with nature and with other people.

But the real deal is that if it were any different, that is, in a positive sense where all shared in the world's resources like the United States, the world would be a worst place pollution wise, education wise, and morally. There is a bankrupt policy about knowledge that parades as if it is substantive and genuine.