Ron Paul’s reputation in social media networks is bent to a different purpose today. His house went up for sale on the Internet. See it for yourself.
It is interesting to note that USA today’s headline reads, Ron Paul sells his Texas house through Facebook, which is not entirely true. The link was shared on his Facebook page, but the ad has it’s own domain name. Dr. Paul is using Facebook like anyone else would… well, not quite like anyone else. Have you ever put your house up for sale on the Internet?
Have a laugh at modern contemporary comparisons while reading about the history of copyright:
Under its auspices, and purporting to control the production of religious materials, the British government granted the exclusive right to publish printed works to the Stationer’s Company in 1534. The Stationer’s Company, in exchange for its monopoly, was obliged to seek permission from the Crown before it printed anything. The Stationer’s Company was the sixteenth century version of Fox News. As a result, the Crown conveniently only had to keep on eye on one media outlet to dampen dissent and attenuate propaganda. (emphasis added)
That piece of legislation was eventually allowed to expire (150-odd years later!) in 1694, and in 1710, the Statute of Anne passed Parliament, giving birth to the modern concept of “authorship.”
“Standing at the shore of this overwhelming sea, instead of trying to swallow it all in, the new masters of information skim across it, picking out things from all over, and diving in deep only when necessary. Maybe more importantly, the true masters aren’t the ones who simply accumulate knowledge; they’re those that reconfigure it into something new”.
Documentary Heaven is a gold mine for all you doc junkies out there. The site provides links to quality streams, funded by donations and the kind of ads that don’t make you want to smash your laptop in a modern-day Clash reenactment.
This is a clip of comedian Louis C.K. on Conan, back when he still had a talk show on NBC. Louis talks about how amazing life is today, and how little people appreciate it. It never gets old. On the miracle of human flight, he relates the following story.
“Flying is the worst one because people come back from flights and they tell you their story. And it’s like a horror story. They act like their flight was like a cattle car in the ’40s in Germany. Theyre like, ‘It was the worst day of my life. First of all, we didn’t board… for 20 minutes. And then we get on the plane and they made us sit there, on the runway, for 40 minutes! We had to sit there!’
Oh really, what happened next? Did you FLY through the AIR, incredibly, like a BIRD? Did you partake in the MIRACLE of human flight, you non-contributing ZERO? … YOU’RE FLYING! It’s amazing. Everybody on every plane should just constantly be going, OHMYGOD! WOW! … You’re flying. You’re sitting in a chair, in the SKY.”
These days it is hard, with a reality so insanely captivating, to imagine a stranger fiction.
Suppose a particularly sensitive and perceptive man emerges today from a three-month sabbatical in seclusion. Suppose also that someone has taken the time to gather together all reports of important events, stories, decisions, and disasters since the first of this year, and then delivers them to him. Our man was away studying, perhaps, or living in a Tibetan monastery, searching for enlightenment. In any case, he has not seen the news or heard anything about the outside world since his departure.
Would our man, freshly emerged from his peaceful life in seclusion, not be completely overwhelmed by what he learns in this compilation report? The revolution in Egypt alone is enough to inspire intense disbelief, learning that so much of significance happened while he wasn’t looking. Add in Charlie Sheen, war in Libya, and every strange thing that happened in between, and it would be perfectly reasonable to suppose that a clever someone is pulling an elaborate prank on a man that has simply taken a little break from the world.
“Ha, ha! Joke’s on me!” our man would say. And the person delivering the report would frown and respond, “No, sir. I’m afraid this is real.” —read on »
