The year is 1921 and Margaret Gorman from Washington D.C. is the first Miss America. Compared to today’s beauty standards she isn’t very sexy: she lacks full lips, hips and tits. I guess back then people only cared for inner beauty and a good character?!
I am sure she also wanted World Peace!
Borders are not a human invention, but natures. All kind of animals mark and defend their territory against their own and other species. Just ask your own pets.
But it’s time for the human race to transcend borders and the idea of the Nationstate altogether. The flow of people, ideas and goods should be free. That was one of the basic ideas behind the European Union - and still is.
Crossing borders has become much easier in the last 100 years, but there are still too many walls and fences up. And we still have some nations totally isolated from the global community. But the number of international trade and travel agreements are slowly growing and the openness is expanding.
Let’s hope that in 100 or 200 years most borders only exist on paper.
Gladiators - typical Roman? Nope, Etruscan. Aqueducts - that must be Roman? Nope, Etruscan again. Many things we would consider as typical Roman culture has been ‘invented’ by the Etruscans - a culture that long existed in the north of Italy before the Kings of Sandals arrived/prospered.
Too bad only so little remained of this great culture. I guess it was completely assimilated by the Romans after they had defeated the Etruscans?
More? Wikipedia (not much to read there) and mysteriousetruscans.com (highly recommended)
We credit many advances in our world to inventors - but many of them did not invent anything. They rather developed and improved existing ideas into a new technology. The steam engine didn’t pop up in Mr Watt’s head overnight - it was a long process of trial and error in cooperation with other engineers.
Anyone out there still believes there will be a ‘two state solution’? Instead Israelis and Palestinians should work on becoming one state TOGETHER with equal rights - maybe even adopt a new name for that state to find some common ground.
But this is just a fantasy, because neither side will be willing to give up it’s nationalist and religious claim to the Holy Land.
Instead the Palestinians will dissolve more and more - and simply become minorities in other Arab countries like Jordan, Egypt, Syria and Lebanon. Which has happened since 1946 anyway.
Before the industrial revolution there was plenty of work for everyone - not always pleasant and nice - but there was a huge demand for muscles and brains.
Mechanization took most low level, handcraft, agricultural and production jobs away, so humans had to train to be smarter than machines to keep working. Most of today’s productive work (= producing goods) is done by machines, while we have kept and expanded the so called service industries and administration (and boy, do we love our bureaucracies).
I wonder: when we run out of oil and don’t come up with an adequate supply of alternative fuel if human work might be back in demand? There are six billion of us and not everybody fancies burger flipping and filling out forms & papers.
A new study shows that ancient humans used shoes already 40.000 years ago. Wow! So before the Iron Age we had the Shoe Age. So maybe the woman’s obsession with shoes goes way back …
I am always amused when some of my American friends come to Europe and get lost by our chaotic cities and streets. If you look at schematics above of American and European cities you immediately see how straight and orderly most cities in the new world are. Very different to the of thousand of years old and “organically” grown Euro cities …
Adam Curtis / documentary / ca 44 minutes
From Wikipedia:
An insight into the history of nuclear power. In the 1950s scientists and politicians thought they could create a different world with a limitless source of nuclear energy. But things began to go wrong. Scientists in America and the Soviet Union were duped into building dozens of potentially dangerous plants. Then came the disasters of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl which changed views on the safety of this new technology.
More? Pandora’s Box Series
Adam Curtis / documentary / ca 44 minutes
From Wikipedia:
A look at how former Ghanaian leader Kwame Nkrumah set Africa ablaze with his vision of a new industrial and scientific age. At the heart of his dream was to be the huge Volta dam, generating enough power to transform West Africa into an advanced utopia. But as his grand experiment took shape, it brought with it dangerous forces Nkrumah couldn’t control, and he slowly watched his metropolis of science sink into corruption and debt.
More? Pandora’s Box Series
A lighthearted look at Rome and British TV obsession with it. Very charming and educational. Enjoy!
Most of the (continental) old Europe was either killed in Word War II or demolished to make way for modern car-based cities.
Even big cities like Paris, Warsaw, Hamburg, Amsterdam and Berlin had many almost medieval city centers and places. Only a few survived - most of those old building are recreations.
But maybe it’s a good thing - if you travel to Switzerland (a country so neutral it doesn’t know what war means - apart from ripping off fugitives) - everything there feels like Disney Land, because most of it’s old buildings are still there. Renewal often means destruction - and destruction of means war or a mad emperor burning down your city.
Adam Curtis / documentary / ca 44 minutes
From Wikipedia:
A modern fable about science and society, focusing on our attitude to nature. Should we let scientists be the prime movers of social or political change when, for instance, DDT made post-war heroes of American scientists only to be put on trial by other scientists in 1968? What kind of in-fighting goes on between rival camps before one scientific truth emerges, and when it does emerge, just how true is it?
More? Pandora’s Box Series
Adam Curtis / documentary / ca 44 minutes
From Wikipedia:
Thirty years ago, a group of economists managed to convince British politicians that they had foolproof technical means to make Britain great again. Pandora’s Box tells the saga of how their experiments have led the country deeper into economic decline, and asks - is their game finally up?
More? Pandora’s Box Series
December the 17th 1903 - the first real airplane took off with Orville Wright as the pilot. The rest is history as they say. These two brothers were great engineering pioneers and brave souls to try their own ideas. Their planes crashed several times before that historic few seconds - and they had many crashes after that as well.
Next time you get on your cheap flight to Ibiza or Tichuana remember these brave men (and many others) who made this possible just 100 years ago.
Adam Curtis / documentary / ca 44 minutes
From Wikipedia:
Focusing on the men of the Cold War on whom Dr Strangelove was based. These were people who believed that the world could be controlled by the scientific manipulation of fear - mathematical geniuses employed by the Rand Corporation. In the end, their visions were the stuff of science fiction fantasy.
Curtis most recent documentary ‘The Trap’ also comes back to these think tanks featured in this documentary.
More? Pandora’s Box Series
Adam Curtis / documentary / ca 44 minutes
Once again Maestro Curtis delivers some excellent insights into modern affairs. This time he reports about the inner workings of the Soviet Union and why it’s economy failed. This is once again highly recommended to anyone who wants to understand our present world.
Important note: some minutes of the end are missing. Nothing really essential. Just don’t be surprised if some final statement is abruptly ended. The rest is still brilliant!
More? Pandora’s Box Series
Just until the early 20th century horse & cart were literally the workhorses of transportation. The combustion engines and steam power - and later electricity replaced them slowly until the 1950s in most industrialized countries.
The question is what do we do when petrol becomes so expensive that a car or a flight is no longer affordable for the common man? How do we transport our food and other goods from the producers to our homes and shops?
Will electricity become the main source of energy or will be go back to proven methods of transportation like horse & cart?
BBC 4 / documentary / 3 episodes each ca. 1 hour
This is what I would consider basic knowledge or better say insight what happened in recent history.
I can recommend watching all parts - but number 2 is especially important, because it shows that Racism was one of the driving forces in America that swapped over to Europe (again) in a scientific disguise and supported the old idea of the Masterrace, which suited the Nazis perfectly.
Beginning by assessing the implications of the relationship between Europe, Africa and the Americas in the 15th century, it considers how racist ideas and practices developed in key religious and secular institutions, and how they showed up in writings by European philosophers Aristotle and Immanuel Kant.
Looking at Scientific Racism, invented during the 19th century, an ideology that drew on now discredited practices such as phrenology and provided an ideological justification for racism and slavery. These theories ultimately led to eugenics and Nazi racial policies of the master race. Some upsetting scenes.
The third and final episode of Racism: A History examines the impact of racism in the 20th Century. By 1900, European colonial expansion had reached deep into the heart of Africa. Under the rule of King Leopold II, The Belgian Congo was turned into a vast rubber plantation.
Men, women and children who failed to gather their latex quotas would have their limbs dismembered. The country became the scene of one of the century’s greatest racial genocides, as an estimated 10 million Africans perished under colonial rule.
Adam Curtis / documentary / 50+ minutes / BBC
If you are one of these people who tries to make sense of our mad modern world then this documentary is for you.
Adam Curtis is one of the few and rare geniuses working in television - trying to connect the dots and documenting his findings in an understandable way.
The Century of the Self is about Freud, his nephew Bernays, marketing, the politics of freedom, consumerism, so called free markets, individualism and the modern “self”.
Please take the time (four hours) and watch each episode. It’s worth it - and many things will appear in a different light after that.
More? Century of the Self @ Wikipedia, Adam Curtis and Edward Bernays
The story of the relationship between Sigmund Freud and his American nephew, Edward Bernays. Bernays invented the public relations profession in the 1920s and was the first person to take Freud’s ideas to manipulate the masses. He showed American corporations how they could make people want things they didn’t need by systematically linking mass-produced goods to their unconscious desires.
Bernays was one of the main architects of the modern techniques of mass-consumer persuasion, using every trick in the book, from celebrity endorsement and outrageous PR stunts, to eroticising the motorcar.
His most notorious coup was breaking the taboo on women smoking by persuading them that cigarettes were a symbol of independence and freedom. But Bernays was convinced that this was more than just a way of selling consumer goods. It was a new political idea of how to control the masses. By satisfying the inner irrational desires that his uncle had identified, people could be made happy and thus docile.
It was the start of the all-consuming self which has come to dominate today’s world.
The programme explores how those in power in post-war America used Freud’s ideas about the unconscious mind to try and control the masses.
Politicians and planners came to believe Freud’s underlying premise - that deep within all human beings were dangerous and irrational desires and fears. They were convinced that it was the unleashing of these instincts that had led to the barbarism of Nazi Germany. To stop it ever happening again they set out to find ways to control this hidden enemy within the human mind.
Sigmund Freud’s daughter, Anna, and his nephew, Edward Bernays, provided the centrepiece philosophy. The US government, big business, and the CIA used their ideas to develop techniques to manage and control the minds of the American people. But this was not a cynical exercise in manipulation. Those in power believed that the only way to make democracy work and create a stable society was to repress the savage barbarism that lurked just under the surface of normal American life.
In the 1960s, a radical group of psychotherapists challenged the influence of Freudian ideas in America. They were inspired by the ideas of Wilhelm Reich, a pupil of Freud’s, who had turned against him and was hated by the Freud family. He believed that the inner self did not need to be repressed and controlled. It should be encouraged to express itself.
Out of this came a political movement that sought to create new beings free of the psychological conformity that had been implanted in people’s minds by business and politics.
This programme shows how this rapidly developed in America through self-help movements like Werber Erhard’s Erhard Seminar Training - into the irresistible rise of the expressive self: the Me Generation.
But the American corporations soon realised that this new self was not a threat but their greatest opportunity. It was in their interest to encourage people to feel they were unique individuals and then sell them ways to express that individuality. To do this they turned to techniques developed by Freudian psychoanalysts to read the inner desires of the new self.
This episode explains how politicians on the left, in both Britain and America, turned to the techniques developed by business to read and fulfil the inner desires of the self.
Both New Labour, under Tony Blair, and the Democrats, led by Bill Clinton, used the focus group, which had been invented by psychoanalysts, in order to regain power. They set out to mould their policies to people’s inner desires and feelings, just as capitalism had learnt to do with products.
Out of this grew a new culture of public relations and marketing in politics, business and journalism. One of its stars in Britain was Matthew Freud who followed in the footsteps of his relation, Edward Bernays, the inventor of public relations in the 1920s.
The politicians believed they were creating a new and better form of democracy, one that truly responded to the inner feelings of individual. But what they didn’t realise was that the aim of those who had originally created these techniques had not been to liberate the people but to develop a new way of controlling them.
Documentary / each ca. 50 minutes
Another great historical documentary by Bettany Hughes. I think this should be mandatory in each school in democratic countries to serve as education and a warning to all future generations.
Got some spare time? Like history? You already know everything about Spartan culture? Nope? Then watch this great documentary.
Documentary / three episodes each about 55 minutes
Ms Hughes has done a great job writing and presenting these insights into one of the most influential cultures of European history.
More? Bettany Hughes @ Wikipedia and the Sparta @ Wikipedia
Didn’t know that the Yoyo was such an old toy.
The second part of this great documentary goes back to the great religions and philosophers of India. It shows that the idea of free, spiritual and humanitarian societies is almost as old as humanity itself. We were not all about war, domination and ignorance.
The human spirit was ALSO always about making this a better place for all. Enjoy!
One amazing documentary about India, early human development and culture. Highly insightful! It deals with the first big cities and settlement, as well as the story of the Arians and other early cultures.
More? Some background on the mentioned early cultures
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