And bama alludes to big brother in a speech this past Friday {scroll down}-doublespeaking he says he thinks the unwarranted surveillance has hit the right balance. Big Brother is the Party leader surrounded by a cult of personality dedicated to rooting out politically incorrect thought crimes.
http://www.dailyfinance.com/on/nsa-scandal-1984-george-orwell-sales-soar/?ncid=txtlnkusaolp00000058
As of this writing, both the Signet Classics paperback edition and a hardcover volume, "Animal Farm and 1984," appear on Amazon's list of "Movers & Shakers: The biggest gainers in Books sales rank over the past 24 hours," as numbers 16 (up 139 percent) and 11 (up 274 percent), respectively. "1984" has of course gotten a lot of free advertising over the last week, as NSA opponents have compared the government's methods to the nightmarish excesses of the totalitarian regime Orwell imagined.
A complementary commercial winner-and-loser pair has emerged from the disclosure of the NSA's domestic data dragnet, one that would surely bring a thin-lipped smile to the face of Eric Arthur Blair, the English Democratic Socialist who wrote as George Orwell: While Booz Allen Hamilton (BAH), the defense contractor that employed leaker Edward Snowden, has seen its stock plummet since the revelation of its connection to the scandal, Amazon's (AMZN) sales of "1984," Orwell's classic dystopian novel of surveillance and control, have skyrocketed.
The LA Times reports that sales of the book, which concerns a discontented propagandist working for the Ministry of Truth in a time of endless war, are up 5,771 percent as of Tuesday morning. From a sales rank of 12,507 in the days before The Guardian published top-secret government documents provided by Snowden, "1984" has risen to crack Amazon's top 200.
The LA Times notes that President Obama alluded to "1984" on Friday when speaking in defense of his policies: "In the abstract, you can complain about Big Brother and how this is a potential program run amok, but when you actually look at the details, then I think we've struck the right balance." Big Brother is the novel's Party leader, surrounded by a cult of personality and committed to rooting out so-called thoughtcrime, or inward deviations from political orthodoxy.
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Keep exposing the facts, Pet Rock... And maybe Obarmy is happy about the "set right balance," but people all over the world are truly disgusted.....
Incidentally I answered your question about China on my Prism blog.. ;-)