Reply #9: Facts ARE stupid things (Take "History." Please.) ...

[Octafish]

... especially dumb when on the wrong side of them. For example, what Buckminster Fuller said in these excerpts from

Critical Path

by Buckminster Fuller:

George Washington took command of the U.S. Continental Army under an elm tree in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The flag used for that occasion was the East India Company's flag, which by pure coincidence had the thirteen red and white stripes.... While the British government lost the 1776 war, the East India Company's owners who constituted the invisible power structure behind the British government not only did not lose but moved right into the new U.S.A. economy along with the latter's most powerful landowners. (p. 78)

GEODESIC SNIP...

We have also noted how the power structures successively dominant over human affairs had for aeons successfully imposed a "specialization" upon the intellectually bright and physically talented members of society as a reliable means of keeping them academically and professionally divided--ergo, "conquered," powerless. The separate individuals' special, expert glimpses of the separate, invisible reality increments became so infinitesimally fractionated and narrow that they gave no hint of the significant part their work played in the omni-integrating evolutionary front of total knowledge and its power-structure exploitability in contradistinction to its omni-humanity-advantaging potentials. Thus the few became uselessly overadvantaged instead of the many becoming regeneratively ever more universally advantaged.

Hyperspecialization also prevented popular comprehension of what the ongoing world power structure was doing--ergo, hyperspecialization kept society preoccupied in ways nondetrimental to the power structure's interests and practically dependent upon the power structure's media for information. (p. 162)

SOURCE:

http://www.zverina.com/2001/1030.htm