INFOWARS: WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THEM

Source: Alex Jones´INFOWARS.com

Ten Things You Need to Know About the Infowar

By Carolyn Sortor 
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	The first serious infowar is now engaged. The field of battle is WikiLeaks. You are the troops.
	– John Perry Barlow, co-founder, Electronic Frontier Foundation, in a tweet re-posted by Wikileaks to its 300,000-odd followers

(This essay further explores some thoughts I first broached in a series of posts on c-Blog beginning Dec. 13, 2010.)

PROLOGUE

"Knowledge is power" (Sir Francis Bacon, Religious Meditations, Of Heresies, 1597).

"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely" (Lord Acton, Letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton, 1887).

So, whether or not Barack Obama or the kids running Google have good intentions is not the only issue. It's not enough to just elect or appoint a "good guy" as your leader; you have to also not crown him. Or as Chris Hedges put it, "we forgot that the question is NOT, how do we get good people into power. The question is, how do we limit the damage the powerful can do to us?" ("The Failure of the Liberal Class in the United States," address to the Poverty Scholars Program, April 10, 2010). If we don't want the kids to steal the cookies, we have to stop leaving them alone with the cookie jar. We have to change the rules that make good people either leave the field or turn bad; we have to fix the system.

 

There are two main ways of restraining corruption. One is through regulation, some measure of which is usually necessary; this is part of what John Adams meant when he wrote of "a government of laws and not of men." But laws alone are not enough; law makers and enforcers can be co-opted. 

Another, sometimes more efficient way is structural: by carefully defining various constituencies, granting them measured powers, and prescribing procedures for the exercise of their powers, all in such a way as to create a structure in which each of the constituencies is, by virtue of its own nature and self-interest, inherently qualified and motivated to restrain the others in the exercise of their respective powers. This approach is called a balance of powers; and it, together with regulation, constitute "checks and balances." James Madison studied other nations' systems of government before authoring the US Constitution; that's why he engineered checks and balances into the US's DNA (and it held up pretty well, for pretty long . . . but that's another story). 

Ok, so, hopefully you already knew all that (although a lot of people don't seem to). So here are the Ten Things:

READ MORE: CLICK HERE (Page 1). HERE (Page 2).

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