Its true that contemporary technology permits decentralization, it also permits centralization. It depends on how you use the technology.

To construct a scientific theory from the data and to be able to recognize that it is a reasonable theory is possible only if there are some very sharp restrictive principles that lead you to go in one direction and not in another direction. Otherwise, you wouldn't have science at all, merely randomly chosen hypotheses.

South America has virtually broken away in the last decade. That's an event of historic significance. South America just doesn't follow US orders. In fact there isn't a single US military base left there.

The current period of regression is registering some success in "producing people" who are subordinated to external power, diverted to such "superficial things" as "fashionable consumption" and other pursuits more fitting for the "bewildered herd" than participation in determining the course of individual and social life.

I don't feel that there is anything deep in the political culture that prevents "educating the masses." I'm old enough to recall vividly the high level of culture, general and political, among first-generation working people during the Great Depression. Workers' education was lively and effective, union-based - mostly the vigorous rising labor movement, reviving from the ashes of the 1920s. I've often seen independent and impressive initiatives in working-class and poor and deprived communities today.

Most of what is done I think is to kept secret so the public won't know. The same is true of what Wikileaks exposed.

The people who were honored in the Bible were the false prophets. It was the ones we call the prophets who were jailed and driven into the desert.