The Daily Blog Open Mic – 1st May 2025

Time to tear yourself away from devices, device, devic, devi, dev, de, d – deadhead. Read the wonderful people puzzling out our ways and seeing the patterns. Carl Sagan as well as George Orwell, Margaret Atwood, also
Victor Klemperer – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Klemperer
Victor Klemperer (9 October 1881 – 11 February 1960) was a German literary scholar and diarist. His journals, published posthumously in Germany in 1995, detailed his life under the German Empire, the Weimar Republic, the fascist Third Reich, and the communist German Democratic Republic.
Three volumes of his diaries have been published in English translations: I Shall Bear Witness, To the Bitter End, and The Lesser Evil. The first two, which cover the period of the Third Reich, have become standard sources and have been extensively quoted. His book LTI – Notizbuch eines Philologen (Lingua Tertii Imperii: Language of the Third Reich), published in English as The Language of the Third Reich, examined how Nazi propaganda co-opted and corrupted German words and expressions…

[Note the lack of information people had, propaganda, reigned, so they did not know what was going on in the war. Are we on the same path in NZAO?]
In [his] diary, the much-feared Gestapo is seen carrying out daily, humiliating, and brutal house searches, delivering beatings, hurling insults, and robbing inhabitants of coveted foodstuffs and other household items. In addition, the diary relates the profound uncertainty all Germans—Jews and non-Jews—experienced because of the paucity of reliable information about the war’s progress, largely due to the propaganda so central to the Reich’s conduct of the war and of the Final Solution.[citation needed] This diary details the Nazis’ perversion of the German language for propaganda purposes in entries that Klemperer used as the basis for his book ‘[LTI – Lingua Tertii Imperii.

Carl Sagan – did we hear him, read his findings, but it is not too late to learn and apply good practicves,
ie no witch burning, buying up houses and turning people out of what are their homes and leaving them empty so they can appreciate in value. We should Not appreciate the things that we and society are collaborating to do to each other!
https://www.iflscience.com/carl-sagan-made-a-worrying-prediction-of-americas-future-30-years-ago-78377
…In his 1995 book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, Sagan explained how the scientific method helped to illuminate many of the universe’s gloomiest corners. However, he argued that the pursuit of peace and truth was being undermined by humankind’s old friends: superstition and pseudoscience.
Within a passage of the text that frequently goes viral, Sagan set out his pessimistic vision of where the US will go if it loses its admiration for reason, rationality, and open-minded thinking.

It reads: “I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time—when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.”

“And when the dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites now down to 10 seconds or less, lowest-common-denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.”

About the man. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Sagan 1934-1996 …Initially an assistant professor at Harvard, Sagan later moved to Cornell University, where he spent most of his career. He published more than 600 scientific papers and articles and was author, co-author or editor of more than 20 books.[5] He wrote many popular science books, such as The Dragons of Eden, Broca’s Brain, Pale Blue Dot and The Demon-Haunted World. He also co-wrote and narrated the award-winning 1980 television series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, which became the most widely watched series in the history of American public television: Cosmos has been seen by at least 500 million people in 60 countries.[6] A book, also called Cosmos, was published to accompany the series. Sagan also wrote a science-fiction novel, published in 1985, called Contact, which became the basis for the 1997 film Contact. His papers, comprising 595,000 items,[7] are archived in the Library of Congress….

3 COMMENTS

Snow White May 1, 2025 At 8:26 am

What bullying bureaucratic creeps the Hastings District Council is if they’re pinging an enterprising man selling water cress on the street.

It’s not like he’s selling dubious homemade cookies, or methamphetamine near school gates. Shame on Hastings.

I wonder if London’s flower sellers and hot chestnut sellers get harassed in this mean and petty way or whether it’s just another asphyxiating small town greed grab.
Greywarbler May 1, 2025 At 12:01 pm

SW My Fair Lady’s story was about Eliza rising from flower seller to enter the ranks of the rich (nice dresses and hats, have you sen it.) Seems that cycle is likely to continue, with little interaction or empathy between the strata of society, the scramblers, the scammers and the satisfied uppers, though really never satisfied.. And Councils are on the rich side, Kafkaesque as I noted recently. Old but our ways have been going wrong since for ever according to George Monbiot.
Greywarbler May 1, 2025 At 12:32 pm

Time to tear yourself away from devices, device, devic, devi, dev, de, d – deadhead. Read the wonderful people puzzling out our ways and seeing the patterns. Carl Sagan as well as George Orwell, Margaret Atwood, also
Victor Klemperer – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Klemperer
Victor Klemperer (9 October 1881 – 11 February 1960) was a German literary scholar and diarist. His journals, published posthumously in Germany in 1995, detailed his life under the German Empire, the Weimar Republic, the fascist Third Reich, and the communist German Democratic Republic.
Three volumes of his diaries have been published in English translations: I Shall Bear Witness, To the Bitter End, and The Lesser Evil. The first two, which cover the period of the Third Reich, have become standard sources and have been extensively quoted. His book LTI – Notizbuch eines Philologen (Lingua Tertii Imperii: Language of the Third Reich), published in English as The Language of the Third Reich, examined how Nazi propaganda co-opted and corrupted German words and expressions…

[Note the lack of information people had, propaganda, reigned, so they did not know what was going on in the war. Are we on the same path in NZAO?]
In [his] diary, the much-feared Gestapo is seen carrying out daily, humiliating, and brutal house searches, delivering beatings, hurling insults, and robbing inhabitants of coveted foodstuffs and other household items. In addition, the diary relates the profound uncertainty all Germans—Jews and non-Jews—experienced because of the paucity of reliable information about the war’s progress, largely due to the propaganda so central to the Reich’s conduct of the war and of the Final Solution.[citation needed] This diary details the Nazis’ perversion of the German language for propaganda purposes in entries that Klemperer used as the basis for his book ‘[LTI – Lingua Tertii Imperii.

Carl Sagan – did we hear him, read his findings, but it is not too late to learn and apply good practicves,
ie no witch burning, buying up houses and turning people out of what are their homes and leaving them empty so they can appreciate in value. We should Not appreciate the things that we and society are collaborating to do to each other!
https://www.iflscience.com/carl-sagan-made-a-worrying-prediction-of-americas-future-30-years-ago-78377
…In his 1995 book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, Sagan explained how the scientific method helped to illuminate many of the universe’s gloomiest corners. However, he argued that the pursuit of peace and truth was being undermined by humankind’s old friends: superstition and pseudoscience.
Within a passage of the text that frequently goes viral, Sagan set out his pessimistic vision of where the US will go if it loses its admiration for reason, rationality, and open-minded thinking.

It reads: “I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time—when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.”

“And when the dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites now down to 10 seconds or less, lowest-common-denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.”

About the man. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Sagan 1934-1996 …Initially an assistant professor at Harvard, Sagan later moved to Cornell University, where he spent most of his career. He published more than 600 scientific papers and articles and was author, co-author or editor of more than 20 books.[5] He wrote many popular science books, such as The Dragons of Eden, Broca’s Brain, Pale Blue Dot and The Demon-Haunted World. He also co-wrote and narrated the award-winning 1980 television series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, which became the most widely watched series in the history of American public television: Cosmos has been seen by at least 500 million people in 60 countries.[6] A book, also called Cosmos, was published to accompany the series. Sagan also wrote a science-fiction novel, published in 1985, called Contact, which became the basis for the 1997 film Contact. His papers, comprising 595,000 items,[7] are archived in the Library of Congress….

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