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I first alluded to the paradigm shift all of us need to make including the media in my Archimedes Manifesto.  On this page, I have links to the Ashland Newspaper with unbiased coverage and information on health care.  I will be expanding this site, but currently I am including comments by Marshall McLuhan and Bill Moyers on the media.  
Marshall McLuhan's book, "Understanding the Media" in 1964 was prophetic and profound.  Bill Moyers is one of my heroes who tells the truth.  

 
The Media An excellent four part series on the Health Care Crisis from the Ashland Daily Tidings.  A newspaper and journalist who understand their mandate and covenant.

Part 1 The Basics

Part 2 Impact on Businesses

Part 3 The Marketing of Drugs

Part 4 Patients and Providers

 


From Marshall McLuhan...."Understanding the Media
 
 
 

ARCHIMEDES 

Archimedes once said, "Give me a place to stand and I will move the world."  Today he would have pointed to our electric media and said, "I will stand on your eyes, your ears, your nerves, and your brain, and the world will move in any tempo or pattern I choose."  We have leased these "places to stand" to private corporations.

                                                                        Marshall McLuhan   1964  
 
 
 
                Literate Man

Literate man, once having accepted an analytic technology of fragmentation, is not nearly so accessible to cosmic patterns as tribal man. He prefers separateness and compartmented spaces, rather than the open cosmos. He becomes less inclined to accept his body as a model of the universe, or to see his house-or any other of the media of communication, for that matter-as a ritual extension of his body .Once men have adopted the visual dynamic of the phonetic alphabet, they begin to lose the tribal man's obsession with cosmic order and ritual as recurrent in the physical organs and their social extension. Indifference to the cosmic, however, fosters intense concentration on minute segments and specialist tasks, which is the unique strength of Western man. For the specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving toward the grand fallacy.

                                                                Marshall McLuhan,

 

 

Tzu-Gung

As Tzu-Gung was traveling through the regions north of the river Han, he saw an old man working in his vegetable garden.  He had dug an irrigation ditch. The man would descend into a well, fetch up a vessel of water in his arms and pour it out into the ditch. While his efforts were tremendous the results appeared to be very meager. 

 

Tzu-Gung said. "There is a way whereby you can irrigate a hundred ditches in one day, and whereby you can do much with little effort. Would you not like to hear of it?" 

 

Then the gardener stood up, looked at him and said, "And what would that be?" 

 

Tzu-Gung replied, "You take a wooden lever, weighted at the back and light in front. In this way you can bring up water so quickly that it just gushes out. This is called a draw- well."

 

Then anger rose up in the old man's face and he said, "1 have heard my teacher say that whoever uses machines does all his work like a machine. He who does his work like a machine grows a heart like a machine, and he who carries the heart of a machine in his breast loses his simplicity. He who has lost his simplicity becomes unsure in the strivings of his soul. Uncertainty in the strivings of the soul is something which does not agree with honest sense. It is not that I do not know of such things; I am ashamed to use them."

 

 

Bill Moyers

 

He is a man who speaks the truth, and whom I admire tremendously.  I have some brief quotations of his speech in January, 2007 to National Conference for Media Reform

Text of Bill Moyers speech in January, 2007

Video, part I, of this speech

Video, part II

 

 

 

QUOTATIONS:

 

His speech was a metaphor of the Big Media controlling the people on the plantation (which is all of us who are the subjects of the Media, as Afro Americans were the subjects of the Plantation owners!!!)

 

“So if we need to know what is happening, and Big Media won’t tell us; if we need to know why it matters, and Big Media won’t tell us; if we need to know what to do about it, and Big Media won’t tell us, it’s clear what we have to do. We have to tell the story ourselves.

And this is what the plantation owners feared most of all. Over all those decades here in the South, when they used human beings as chattel, and quoted scripture to justify it, property rights over human rights was God’s way, they secretly lived in fear that one day — instead of saying, “Yes, Massa” — those gaunt, weary, sweat-soaked field hands, bending low over the cotton under the burning sun, would suddenly stand up straight, look around, see their sweltering and stooping kin and say, “This ain’t the product of intelligent design. The boss man in the big house has been lying to me. Something is wrong with this system.”

This is the moment freedom begins, the moment you realize someone else has been writing your story, and it’s time you took the pen from his hand and started writing it yourself.”

 

 

In this speech, he later quoted a poem of Marge Piercy:

 

What can they do
to you? Whatever they want.
They can set you up, they can
bust you, they can break
your fingers, they can
burn your brain with electricity,
blur you with drugs till you
can t walk, can’t remember, they can
take your child, wall up
your lover. They can do anything
you can’t blame them
from doing. How can you stop
them? Alone, you can fight,
you can refuse, you can
take what revenge you can
but they roll over you.

But two people fighting
back to back can cut through
a mob, a snake-dancing file
can break a cordon, an army
can meet an army.

Two people can keep each other
sane, can give support, conviction,
love, massage, hope, sex.
Three people are a delegation,
a committee, a wedge. With four
you can play bridge and start
an organization. With six
you can rent a whole house,
eat pie for dinner with no
seconds, and hold a fundraising party.
A dozen make a demonstration.
A hundred fill a hall.
A thousand have solidarity and your own newsletter;
ten thousand, power and your own paper;
a hundred thousand, your own media;
ten million, your own country.

It goes on one at a time,
it starts when you care
to act, it starts when you do
it again after they said no,
it starts when you say We
and know who you mean, and each
day you mean one more.

 

 

 

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