I fail to see the connect with mary lin's comment.

She seems to think buying shoes and sunglasses are the answer.

In a way she's right. We need to spend money for the economy to work.

However, this is a site for writing and her spam ads are not welcome here.

Where are the admins when you need them?

I still believe in accidents, the fact that, in many cases, one little blip can effect so much seems to be the way things often go.

But look at those great prices AND Free Shipping!! I'm going to go there right now!

What's a Bildeberg? Is this one of those new world order things?

So you believe in conspiracy theories? I do believe that the world of finance is influenced by a hand full of powerful people. The Bilderberg Group? I'll be watching Spain.

Now that was just a little teaser! You ARE going expound on how you have come to know the Bildeberg Group? Not so secret society and now see the connection between your cities and dates. Lots to ponder but, why not give us some meat to chew on, since you did happen to bring it up! I'm not a vegetarian, so let's have it!

? I read about it on wikipedia.

I don't think humans have decayed morally. They - we - are exactly what we always have been, i.e., extremely aggressive carnivorous primates. We just have cable TV and nuclear bombs now.

It's interesting to try and judge human life as if it were an objective standard and not a relativist hellscape. For instance, is the average person better off than the peasants of the last millennia? The answer is yes, but an intelligent person can see a little deeper, that the population as a whole is stuck into some kind of repetitive, technologically advanced proto-simian-serfdom. We do not think our own thoughts, we do not gather our own food, we do not make our own tools. These vital aspects of life are provided for us, because we can no longer make them. If humans measure the advance of our race in terms of American leisure and sport, then the species is certainly advancing. But if we paint the argument in terms of total quality of life, it should be clear that the world has advanced very little since the beginning of Pax Americana. One could argue that nothing has changed in the last 50 years; Standard Oil became Exxon while the Dutch East India Company became Shell Oil. One could argue society has become more advanced, after all women no longer bring their children to witness public executions. But there is no argument that we still labor under the same systems as our ancestors. The only difference is the level of control, which is much greater than any point in history, and the fact that applications of force are no longer visible or obvious.

You nailed it Bill. Have you read "Democracy, Inc." by Sheldon Wolin? If not I highly recommend it.

Below is part of a review of the book that I found online; it gets at the main thesis quite nicely:

"To reduce a complex argument to its bare bones, since the Depression, the twin forces of managed democracy and Superpower have opened the way for something new under the sun: 'inverted totalitarianism', a form every bit as totalistic as the classical version but one based on internalized co-optation, the appearance of freedom, political disengagement rather than mass mobilization, and relying more on 'private media' than on public agencies to disseminate propaganda that reinforces the official version of events. It is inverted because it does not require the use of coercion, police power and a messianic ideology as in the Nazi, Fascist and Stalinist versions (although note that the United States has the highest percentage of its citizens in prison -- 751 per 100,000 people -- of any nation on Earth). According to Wolin, inverted totalitarianism has 'emerged imperceptibly, unpremeditatedly, and in seeming unbroken continuity with the nation's political traditions.'
The genius of our inverted totalitarian system lies in wielding total power without appearing to, without establishing concentration camps, or enforcing ideological uniformity, or forcibly suppressing dissident elements so long as they remain ineffectual. A demotion in the status and stature of the sovereign people to patient subjects is symptomatic of systemic change, from democracy as a method of 'popularizing' power to democracy as a brand name for a product marketable at home and marketable abroad. The new system, inverted totalitarianism, is one that professes the opposite of what, in fact, it is. The United States has become the showcase of how democracy can be managed without appearing to be suppressed."

I'm not sure just how much control Bilderberg really has. The world is so ridiculously complex that I don't think any one group of people--even a group of the world's most powerful people--can really determine its direction.

As to whether things always slowly get better, I don't believe that at all. Yes, we no longer own slaves (although we still earn slave-wages) and women are no longer as oppressed as they once were in most parts of the world, but I think the pendulum is always swinging back and forth and eventually it may just swing so far that it breaks off completely and we're all wiped out.

Kemstone, as cliche as it sounds, that's what they want you to think. The problems in the world like the Global Depression, the rise of worldwide terrorism, the nuclear stockpiles, these were intentionally manipulated into existence by the Bilderberg elites. You create a worldwide problem that needs a global solution to solve it. In other words they have their hands in a lot of pies, but their goal is to consolidate the chaos under their own control.