What is failure for some is success for others. It depends on where they stand in the struggles over "democratic governance" and related rights - civil, social and economic, and broadly cultural, to adopt the framework of the Universal Declaration that is formally endorsed but constantly undermined.

People who spend their working hours in a lab or research library or a classroom might be intent primarily on keeping or advancing their elite positions, thereby lending tacit support to power structures. Or they might not be.

Far from creating independent thinkers, schools have always, throughout history, played an institutional role in a system of control and coercion. And once you are well educated you have already been socialized in ways that support the power structure, which, in turn, rewards you immensely.

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.

We need not stride resolutely towards catastrophe, merely because those are the marching orders.

The times are too difficult and the crisis too severe to indulge in schadenfreude. Looking at it in perspective, the fact that there would be a financial crisis was perfectly predictable: its general nature, if not its magnitude. Markets are always inefficient.

Bradley Manning should be regarded as a hero. He is doing what an honest, decent citizen should be doing: letting your population know what the government, the people who rule you are doing. They want to keep it secret of course.