Mar 30, 2014

Crime & Politics According to David Simon




From crime beat reporter for the Baltimore Sun to award-winning screenwriter of HBOs critically-acclaimed The Wire, David Simon talks with Bill Moyers about inner-city crime and politics, storytelling and the future of journalism.....A lot of truth-telling in this clip.

OneLove

:::MME:::

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Mar 29, 2014

Musings


"Let me tell you something you already know. The world ain't all sunshine and rainbows. It is a very mean and nasty place and it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it. You, me, or nobody is gonna hit as hard as life. But it ain't how hard you hit; it's about how hard you can get hit, and keep moving forward. How much you can take, and keep moving forward. That's how winning is done. Now, if you know what you're worth, then go out and get what you're worth. But you gotta be willing to take the hit, and not pointing fingers saying you ain't where you are because of him, or her, or anybody. Cowards do that and that ain't you. You're better than that!"
- "Rocky Balboa"
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OneLove
:::::MME::::

Capitalism’s Intellectual Prostitutes (Call Them What They Are) by Gary Engler







There’s nothing worse than ignorant and opinionated.

You know the type: Most mainstream newspapers have at least one; they dominate radio talk shows and certain TV “news” networks.

Loud supporters of the existing economic system who deny inequality is a problem or even claim it doesn’t exist.

Business leaders/columnists/celebrities/media hacks and the “think tanks” they come from who also deny climate change is a problem or even claim it doesn’t exist.

Apostles of greed who claim to be “conservative”, defend chemical-laden, genetics-manipulating industrial food production, ignore all the ways corporations poison our environment, ridicule anyone who points out there must be some limit to the exploitation of the earth’s resources, promote the use of private automobiles, hobble public transportation (and every other public good) by promoting tax cuts, love pipelines and usually claim to speak on behalf of the “middle class” or even the “little guy.”

How should we respond to these defenders of the status quo who frequently pretend to rail against a mythical left-wing media agenda?

Argue with them? Quietly loathe them? Ridicule them? Ignore them?

I’d like to make the case for understanding and pity as the most appropriate reactions.

First, to understand them we must examine the role they play, the first step of which is to recognize whose interests they represent, which is another way of asking: Who would pay them to say/write the things they do?

The answer is, of course, the people who profit most from pipelines, tax cuts, unlimited growth, a private automobile dominated landscape, industrial food production, chemicals poisoning the environment, pipelines, global warming and an acceptance of income inequality.

But why would the billionaires and mere multi-millionaires whose fortunes depend on the continued flow of profits from oil, agribusiness, automobiles, chemical, real estate, media and capitalism in general think it worth their while to handsomely reward thousands of cheerleaders who endlessly repeat a few shallow ideas on the sidelines of capitalism?

Because it is necessary. The wealthy 0.01% minority who rule over the 90% majority understands that the future of their system depends on convincing or paying off 9.99% of the population who become the opinion leaders, the managers, the foremen, the supervisors, the small businessmen and the other shock troops of the system. The rich are like the pathetic men who frequent red-light districts — they must pay for it — and the right wing columnists/celebrities/media hacks/researchers do it for money, often working in the political equivalent of brothels, called think tanks.

The choices offered young writers, journalists and academics who aspire to earn a decent living at their craft are not great today. There are many more opportunities to voice opinions supporting the system than to criticize it. If you do get a job in a shrinking newsroom or social science department the best way to get ahead is always to support the existing power structure, not oppose it. Arguing in favour of the rich and powerful certainly pays better.

And in a time when the Left seldom confronts capitalism, confining its criticisms to tinkering around the edges, rather than offering a vision of an alternative system, should it be a surprise that the easiest route to intellectual success is selling out to the highest bidder?

Media whores are not that much different than the women and a few men who earn a living from selling their bodies. (And I do apologize to every sex-trade worker who is offended by the comparison to Rush Limbaugh.) They too are just trying to survive; they are typically people who don’t have many alternatives; they are often victims of abuse by a system that penalizes intellectual non-conformity (amazing the number of conservative pundits who claim a left-wing background); the ones who do really well at it typically claim they actually enjoy it.

Given the similarities between these two forms prostitution doesn’t it make sense that we respond to both the same way?

We don’t hate streetwalkers or harangue them; we mostly pity them because of our understanding that they are products of sexism and other forms of oppression.

So too should we pity the sycophants of the rich and powerful because we understand they are nothing more than the intellectual prostitutes of an economic system that attempts to buy, sell and profit from everything we do.



                                                                ************************


OneLove

:::MME:::

A Threat to Democracy







In an address to the U.S. Senate this week, Vermont independent Bernie Sanders testified to the basics of wealth and income inequality and described how it distorts the U.S. political process.

The senator’s poignant speech, which is titled “A Threat to American Democracy,” begins with statistics many people have heard but that have not gotten their fair hearing in the corporate press. The Walton family, for example, heirs of the Walmart chain and its fortune, have long been the richest family in America. Today they are worth $148 billion—more than the bottom 40 percent of U.S. citizens combined. (Read about the nation’s 20 richest families here.)

A consequence of the extreme rise in income for the top 1 percent is the Pandora’s box of political power. This power was unleashed particularly with the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision. The ruling continued the court’s 19th century identification of citizen rights with corporations by granting corporations unlimited campaign contributions under the guise that money is speech protected by the Constitution. (The court is currently hearing a case that would ease remaining restrictions on campaign donations.)

Sanders says political power is no longer divided between the Republican and Democratic parties, but instead is held by a billionaire party in which candidates on both sides of the aisle depend on the “financial speech” of a few extremely wealthy donors. Those donors are capable of outspending the entire U.S. middle and lower classes. The exemplars of these superrich working to shape politics are the Koch brothers, currently the second-wealthiest family in this country. The Kochs to date have spent hundreds upon hundreds of millions of dollars on extreme right-wing Republican candidates and causes. Their efforts have paid off. Thanks to tax cuts and other measures passed by their politicians, their wealth in the last year alone increased by $12 billion to some $80 billion altogether.

With 95 percent of all income during the period between 2009 and 2012 going to the top 1 percent of earners, the problem Sanders describes is getting far worse. As it is currently being reported, the “Adelson Primary,” in which Las Vegas billionaire Sheldon Adelson gathers GOP favorites like former Florida governor and brother to former president George W. Bush, Jeb Bush and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie to discuss plans for the 2016 presidential election, is becoming the new standard model for campaign planning.

Sanders concludes his speech by asking, is “this nation ... going to become an oligarchic form of society?”




These greedy, amoral fucks will throw us all off the cliff if we don't fight back.....Get conscious & get active folks! Sen. Bernie Sanders will probably never become President as no wealthy donor will finance his campaign, but it would be great to have someone like him in office. He probably wouldn't last a full term in office if elected as powerful forces will conspire to take him out and make it look like an accident.....ah yes...

OneLove

:::MME:::

Obama Whitewashes World War I by Matthew Rothschild





President Obama just went to Flanders Field in Belgium to pay homage to those who lost their lives in World War I.

But rather than use the occasion to point out the idiotic hideousness of that war, he whitewashed it, praising “the profound sacrifice they made so that we might stand here today.”

He saluted their “willingness to fight, and die, for the freedom that we enjoy as their heirs.”

But this was not a war for freedom. It was a triumph of nationalism, pitting one nation’s vanity against another. It was a war between empires for the spoils.

Historian Allen Ruff, who is studying the causes and effects of World War I, was not impressed with Obama’s speech. “With Both NATO and the European Union headquartered in Brussels,” Ruff says, “it would have been a true homage to the dead buried in Belgium a hundred years ago if Obama spoke out against all major power imperial ambition, the true cause of so much slaughter then and since, rather than mouthing some trite euphemisms about the honor of dying for ‘freedom.’ ”

But Obama insisted on repeating the very propaganda that fed that war. Without irony, he quoted the poem from John McRae that was used to encourage soldiers to sign up and civilians to pay for war bonds. Here’s the verse that Obama cited:

“To you from failing hands we throw

The torch; be yours to hold it high.

If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

In Flanders fields.”

Obama chose not to quote the great World War I poet Wilfred Owen, who was killed just days before the end of that most senseless slaughter. The title of his famous poem, “Dulce et Decorum Est” refers to the line that soldiers said on their way to the war, meaning, “How sweet and right it is to die for your country.”

Here is the second half of that poem, where Owen describes a soldier next to him dying from an attack of poison gas.

“In all my dreams before my helpless sight,

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est.”

Pro patria mori.

Yet there was delivering that “old lie” with “high zest,” and the obscenity of it should not escape us, even 100 years on.

For the soldiers Obama praised did not die for “freedom,” but for something much more base.

They died for the same reason U.S. soldiers died in the Iraq War. As Howard Zinn noted, ten years ago, “They died for the greed of the oil cartels, for the expansion of the American empire, for the political ambitions of the President. They died to cover up the theft of the nation’s wealth to pay for the machines of death.”

I only hope to live long enough to hear a U.S. President speak honestly about war. This one sure won’t.





Matthew Rothschild is senior editor of The Progressive magazine.

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(C'mon Prez-- You're a constitutional scholar. Stop selling out & talking out your ass ....you know better)


OneLove


:::MME:::

America The Beautiful?




Willie Nelson has joined the fight against mountaintop removal in Appalachia with a dark and stirring rendition of "America the Beautiful." More performers and actions from the Natural Resources Defense Council's "Music Saves Mountains" campaign

OneLove

::::MME:::

Mar 28, 2014

The Power of Music











I have always considered myself a music fiend. Folks who have followed this blog long enough know my great love affair with a variety of music.

Music played a crucial role in my formative years and seldom a day goes by without listening to whatever suits my mood. It's like nourishment for the soul. This is understandable as it was our mothers who first hummed lullabies to us, plus as youths we all sang whatever was hot on the charts. As a teen, I gravitated towards the progressive sounds of reggae music (Bob Marley, Steel Pulse &Third World were my faves) & soul music (Earth, Wind & Fire, Bee Gees, Commodores, GQ, Prince). This music helped to shape my generation's consciousness. To this day, music still plays an important role in my life, but in a more subtle way.

Contrast what many of us older folks grew up on to what many of our young ones are vibin' to today. To be fair, a lot of today's music is quite exceptional on many levels, but a good chunk of it - most notably within the Hip Hop & Pop/Rock genres - can be quite harmful to the young &vulnerable, in my opinion. On my way to work in the morning, I hear the most sexually-suggestive and aggressive music that leaves me wondering - what the hell is the FCC for? In the presence of  kids/teenagers in my car, I find myself playing the role of Music Analyst & Channel Switcher when a song comes on describing the joy of witnessing some booty clap. Should kids be exposed to this on our airwaves? Whatever impact music has on human behavior is complex and variant, to be sure. Profane lyrics have been around for a while, but back in the day, it was not played on the radio for all to hear 24/7/365. Grown folks listened to it in the privacy of their own home when the kids weren't around or at concerts.

It is a known fact that music by itself has an effect on people. No matter the genre, chord or beat, music influences behavior/thoughts. With this in mind, how do you think much of today's music with its heavy emphasis on sex, drugs, violence and overall indecency affects the young? From what I can see, it has altered many of them in a negative way. Many parents that I speak to all seem to share the same story with regards to how their teens are behaving. Granted, it is not all the fault of popular music/culture, but it does have a powerful impact which makes parenting doubly hard in this time.  Little 9 year old Johnny gets to see a big booty video vixen twerkin' it or see Miley Cyrus swinging naked on some damn wrecking ball when Mom & Dad fail to lock the parental controls on the cable box & computers. 

Historically, there has been a distrust of youth oriented music. In my day, the music that dominated the airwaves in the Caribbean radicalized the youth which the older generation despised &somewhat feared. Many in my parent's generation overcame many obstacles to achieve their slice of the cake so they didn't want their young having rebellious ideas of burning down Babylon as Bob Marley would often chant. We were wild with the music & ideas of Bob Marley, Marvin Gaye, Peter Tosh & John Lennon (to name a few) & this shook the foundation!

Today we adults in turn distrust youth-oriented music. Only this time we have a legitimate reason unlike past generations. Our revolts back in the day led to global awareness & societal change. Today, much of youth angst arcs toward decadence, ignorance & stagnation and much of the music reflects that. You can't get the artists today to rap or sing about anything worth fighting for - the record labels consider that anathema to the bottomline. Those that do try to impact our collective consciousness are mostly underground & shut out from the corporate-controlled media.  Every now and then a few bubble up to catch the attention of the masses like Lupe Fiasco, Common & Q-Tip.

Abraham Lincoln once said, "He who writes the nation's songs shapes the nation's souls". This is a profound observation.

With the glorification of violence, drug use & the abuse of women, what uplifting values are our children expected to learn? I for one disdain censorship, but I do believe somewhere along the way we lost our moorings and are now adrift culturally & socially.  Music is critically important to this culture and its identity. Music helps define social and sub-cultural boundaries. Today's culture faces far more difficulties and dangers than their counterparts did just a generation ago.

Till recently no studies showed cause and effect relationship between music and lyrical content influencing behavior. Now more than one-thousand scientific studies and reviews conclude that significant exposure to violent music and lyrical content increase the risk of aggressive behavior in certain children and adolescents. The explicit lyrics desensitize the listener to violence& misogyny.This on top of violent games & movies adds to the danger. 

Today's teenagers spend a few hours a day listening to music or watching it on television. One Swedish study found that adolescents who developed an early interest in violent music were more likely to be influenced by their peers and less influenced by their parents. If teens are spending more time tuned into music, they are spending less time with their parents. A few years ago, a Carnegie Foundation Study found that the average teen spends only twenty minutes a day alone in conversation with his or her mom, and less than five minutes alone with dad. Parental involvement & oversight are consequently diminished. I think it is appropriate to assume that prolonged exposure to explicit lyrics during the formative teen years impacts on attitudes and assumptions, and thus decisions and behavior. Understanding the nature and extent of the influence of drug references, sexually-suggestive & violent content in today's music is a critical step towards better addressing the problems plaguing our youth today.

For some teenagers, music is just music, but for others it is a way to enhance their mood that they are already in, which can lead to negative results. Kids should be aware of the negative effects that music can bring (as well as the positive effects). Parents should  know what their kids are listening to and question why they choose to listen to a particular songs.

They say that sex/drugs/violence sells - and it does extremely well. But to put profits over the the mental/social development of our young speaks volumes to how low we have sunk as a culture & as human beings...the future unfolds....

OneLove

:::MME:::

Mar 27, 2014

Dear White People: Tackling Racial Stereotypes on Campus & Being a "Black Face in a White Space"





Dear White People follows the story of four drastically different Black students at an Ivy League college and explores the idea of racial identity in ‘post-racial’ America. This film is scheduled for theatrical release this year and it looks like a must-see for anyone concerned about such a divisive issue This film comes at a critical time in America as things are starting to heat up again along racial (&class) lines. It has always amazed me how non-white people are instantly placed in a one-dimensional box without any complexity whatsoever. Our portrayals in the mainstream media have a lot to do with this. It's about time that a film like this came out to show folks in a humorous yet thought-provoking way that NO, we do not all like gangsta rap, we do not all end our sentences with "know what I'm sayin'", we do not all like fried chicken & watermelon, we all can't sing, dance, play basketball, we all don't look alike & individually, we cannot speak for or represent the millions of black citizens across the land. Being black in America is that weird of an experience for those of you who live abroad reading this. It's like living in your crazy uncle's house who is always seeing or hearing things and blaming you for it. Really.

Look out for this film when it finally gets released nationwide.

OneLove

:::MME:::

MME's Jam of the Day




This is a very soulful & refreshing rendition of Anita Baker's classic "Caught Up In The Rapture". Jojo has been under the radar for a while, making a splash every now and then. This is unfortunate as she really has a great set of pipes. This cut, taken from her latest EP,  is a welcome return to the limelight-Enjoy!

OneLove

:::MME:::

Are We Diminutive Monsters of Death and Destruction? by George Monbiot







You want to know who we are? Really? You think you do, but you will regret it. This article, if you have any love for the world, will inject you with a venom – a soul-scraping sadness – without an obvious antidote.

The Anthropocene, now a popular term among scientists, is the epoch in which we live: one dominated by human impacts on the living world. Most date it from the beginning of the industrial revolution. But it might have begun much earlier, with a killing spree that commenced two million years ago. What rose onto its hind legs on the African savannahs was, from the outset, death: the destroyer of worlds.

Before Homo erectus, perhaps our first recognisably human ancestor, emerged in Africa, the continent abounded with monsters. There were several species of elephants. There were sabretooths and false sabretooths, giant hyenas and creatures like those released in The Hunger Games: amphicyonids, or bear dogs, vast predators with an enormous bite.

Prof Blaire van Valkenburgh has developed a means by which we could roughly determine how many of these animals there were. When there are few predators and plenty of prey, the predators eat only the best parts of the carcass. When competition is intense, they eat everything, including the bones. The more bones a carnivore eats, the more likely its teeth are to be worn or broken. The breakages in carnivores' teeth were massively greater in the pre-human era.

Not only were there more species of predators, including species much larger than any found on Earth today, but they appear to have been much more abundant – and desperate. We evolved in a terrible, wonderful world – that was no match for us.

Homo erectus possessed several traits that appear to have made it invincible: intelligence, co-operation, an ability to switch to almost any food when times were tough, and a throwing arm that allowed it to do something no other species has ever managed – to fight from a distance (the increasing distance from which we fight is both a benchmark and a determinant of human history). It could have driven giant predators off their prey and harried monstrous herbivores to exhaustion and death.

Illustration of a prehistoric mastodon
Artist's rendition of a prehistoric mastodon. Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis
 

 As the paleontologists Lars Werdelin and Margaret Lewis show, the disappearance of much of the African megafauna appears to have coincided with the switch towards meat eating by human ancestors. The great extent and strange pattern of extinction (concentrated among huge, specialist animals at the top of the food chain) is not easy to explain by other means.

At the Oxford megafauna conference last week, I listened as many of the world's leading scientists in this field mapped out a new understanding of the human impact on the planet. Almost everywhere we went, humankind erased a world of wonders, changing the way the biosphere functions. For instance, modern humans arrived in Europe and Australia at about the same time – between 40 and 50,000 years ago – with similar consequences. In Europe, where animals had learned to fear previous versions of the bipedal ape, the extinctions happened slowly. Within some 10 or 15,000 years, the continent had lost its straight-tusked elephants, forest rhinos, hippos, hyenas and monstrous scimitar cats.

In Australia, where no hominim had set foot before modern humans arrived, the collapse was almost instant. The rhinoceros-sized wombat, the ten-foot kangaroo, the marsupial lion, the monitor lizard larger than a Nile crocodile, the giant marsupial tapir, the horned tortoise as big as a car – all went, in ecological terms, overnight.

A few months ago, a well-publicised paper claimed that the great beasts of the Americas – mammoths and mastodons, giant ground sloths, lions and sabretooths, eight-foot beavers, a bird with a 26-foot wingspan – could not have been exterminated by humans, because the fossil evidence for their extinction marginally pre-dates the evidence for human arrival.

A pack of dire wolves and two mammoths
Artist's rendition of a pack of dire wolves and two mammoths. Photograph: Stocktrek Images/Alamy
 

 I have never seen a paper demolished as elegantly and decisively as this was at last week's conference. The archaeologist Todd Surovell demonstrated that the mismatch is just what you would expect if humans were responsible. Mass destruction is easy to detect in the fossil record: in one layer bones are everywhere, in the next they are nowhere. But people living at low densities with basic technologies leave almost no traces. With the human growth rates and kill rates you'd expect in the first pulse of settlement (about 14,000 years ago), the great beasts would have lasted only 1,000 years. His work suggests that the most reliable indicator of human arrival in the fossil record is a wave of large mammal extinctions.

These species were not just ornaments of the natural world. The new work presented at the conference suggests that they shaped the rest of the ecosystem. In Britain during the last interglacial period, elephants, rhinos and other great beasts maintained a mosaic of habitats: a mixture of closed canopy forest, open forest, glade and sward. In Australia, the sudden flush of vegetation that followed the loss of large herbivores caused stacks of leaf litter to build up, which became the rainforests' pyre: fires (natural or manmade) soon transformed these lush places into dry forest and scrub.

In the Amazon and other regions, large herbivores moved nutrients from rich soils to poor ones, radically altering plant growth. One controversial paper suggests that the eradication of the monsters of the Americas caused such a sharp loss of atmospheric methane (generated in their guts) that it could have triggered the short ice age which began about 12,800 years ago, called the Younger Dryas.

And still we have not stopped. Poaching has reduced the population of African forest elephants by 60% since 2000. The range of the Asian elephant – which once lived from Turkey to the coast of China – has contracted by 97%; the ranges of the Asian rhinos by over 99%. Elephants distribute the seeds of hundreds of rainforest tree species; without them these trees are functionally extinct.

Is this all we are? A diminutive monster that can leave no door closed, no hiding place intact, that is now doing to the great beasts of the sea what we did so long ago to the great beasts of the land? Or can we stop? Can we use our ingenuity, which for two million years has turned so inventively to destruction, to defy our evolutionary history?

Twitter: @georgemonbiot. A fully referenced version of this article can be found at Monbiot.com

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OneLove

:::MME:::

Mar 26, 2014

Musings


OneLove 

:::MME:::

Poet's Nook:" Everything is Plundered" by Anna Akhmatova

Everything is plundered, betrayed, sold,
Death's great black wing scrapes the air,
Misery gnaws to the bone.
Why then do we not despair?

By day, from the surrounding woods,
cherries blow summer into town;
at night the deep transparent skies
glitter with new galaxies.

And the miraculous comes so close
to the ruined, dirty houses --
something not known to anyone at all,
but wild in our breast for centuries.


~ Anna Akhmatova from Poems of Akhmatova~
*******
OneLove
::::MME::::

Mar 21, 2014

Musings


OneLove

 :::MME:::

Corporate Engines of Corruption



Anonymous companies protect corrupt individuals -- from notorious drug cartel leaders to nefarious arms dealers -- behind a shroud of mystery that makes it almost impossible to find and hold them responsible.Charmain Gooch does a great job in educating us about how corrupt individuals, groups & institutions are able to do their dirt in broad daylight.


OneLove

 :::MME:::

Mar 20, 2014

Obey: How The World Really Is




This is a film based on the book "Death of the Liberal Class" by journalist and Pulitzer prize winner, Chris Hedges, one of mt favorite non-fictions writers who I feature a lot on this site. The film charts the rise of the Corporate State & examines the future of obedience in a world of unfettered capitalism, globalisation, staggering inequality and environmental change. It predominantly focuses on US corporate capitalism, but one  can recognise the relevance of what is being expressed with regards to domestic political and corporate activity. Let's be the change we want to see and become rebels of truth & courage against the Darkness that engulfs us.

OneLove

:::MME:::

Securiotic: How To Create a Fearful Population




Summary: Citizens of Nation-Z believe that they live in a democracy. Unbeknownst to them, the rulers have established complete control through propaganda called “public service announcements” that indoctrinate the citizens into an extreme fear of terrorism, therefore making them happy to have their freedom completely stripped away. This is what living in 21st century America has come down to. Dare to speak against this malevolent force & may peace be with you....

OneLove

:::MME::::

Mar 17, 2014

Amy Goodman: Corporate Media Isn't Mainstream; it's ‘an Extreme Media Beating the Drums for War’



Is it any wonder why so many people are dazed & confused? We need more journalists like Amy Goodman to wake all these sleeping people up to what is really happening in the world. Pres. Obama will never sit down for an interview with Amy. His charm and eloquence will be rendered dead on arrival after the first question....

Keep your eyes open folks...

OneLove

:::MME:::



If you haven't seen Dr Neil Degrasse Tyson's Cosmos, you're missing out on something fantastic. In the above interview Dr Tyson discusses the importance of scientific literacy. 

 Moyers began this interview by reminding viewers of a recent Gallup poll in which 46 percent of Americans espoused the belief that “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years.” Moreover, a Pew Research poll showed that two-thirds of white evangelical Protestants, “the bedrock of the Republican Party, reject altogether the idea that humans have evolved.” What the fuck are these folks sipping??

 Dr. Tyson attempted to explain this partisan divide in scientific literacy by discussing the role of the democratic process in science education. Because what’s taught in classrooms is handled at the state level, many Americans are “born into” ignorance. 

 He says this is a “self-correcting” phenomenon, because “nobody wants to die. We all care about health. Republicans, especially, don’t want to die poor. So educated Republicans know the value of innovations in science and technology for the thriving of an economy and business industry.” So, he believes, eventually even they won’t want to see something “that is not science in a science classroom,” because that “undermines the entire enterprise that was responsible for creating the wealth that we have come to take for granted in this country.”

 There is only so long, he says, that Republicans will allow the United States to “fad[e] economically.” “[S]ome Republican is going to wake up and say, ‘Look guys, we got to split these two, we have to, otherwise we’ll doom ourselves to poverty.” Check out the clips at the end of this interview of the mind-boggling ignorance of some of these Republicans. Ignorance is truly lethal.

OneLove

:::MME::

Home

We are living in exceptional times. Scientists tell us that we have 10 years to change the way we live, avert the depletion of natural resources and the catastrophic evolution of the Earth's climate. The stakes are high for us and our children. Everyone should take part in the effort, and HOME has been conceived to take a message of mobilization out to every human being.

Let's stop being a cancer to this planet...

OneLove

:::MME:::


Musings



OneLove

:::MME:::

World War 1 All Over Again: The Same Fools Play the Same Game by Paul Craig Roberts





“If you reduce the lie to a scientific system, put it on thick and heavy, and with great effort and sufficient finances scatter it all over the world as the pure truth, you can deceive whole nations for a long time and drive them to slaughter for causes in which they have not the slightest interest.” - Chief French Editor, “Behind the Scenes in French Journalism”, describing the organization of World War 1 propaganda in France.

Did US Secretary of State John Kerry ask you before he delivered an all or nothing ultimatum to Russia? Did he ask Congress? Did he ask the countries of western and eastern Europe–NATO members who Kerry has committed to whatever the consequences will be of Washington’s inflexible, arrogant, aggressive provocation of Russia, a well-armed nuclear power? Did Kerry ask Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, Mexico, South America, Africa, China, Central Asia, all of whom would be adversely affected by a world war provoked by the crazed criminals in Washington?

No. He did not.

The exceptional, indispensable, arrogant, self-righteous United States government does not need to ask anyone. Washington speaks not merely for itself. Washington represents the country chosen by history (and the neoconservatives) to speak not merely for itself, but for the entire world.

Whatever Washington says is truth. Whatever Washington does is legal, in accordance with both domestic and international law. When Washington invades countries and destroys them, sends in drones and missiles, blows up people attending weddings, funerals and children’s soccer games, Washington is practicing human rights and bringing democracy to the people. Whenever a country tries to defend its sovereignty and territorial integrity, the country is engaging in terrorism, al-Qaeda connections, human rights violations, and suppressing democracy.

We are watching this audacity play out now in the confrontation with Russia that Washington’s coup in Ukraine has provoked. Obama and Kerry have been advised by the idiots that comprise the US government that Russia will surrender and accept Washington’s will if Washington is sufficiently insistent. Apparently, no one has asked the advisors what happens if ultimatums are given, and the Russians do not submit.”

                                                          *********************


Ever heard of a suicide in slow-motion? Seems like we are living through one on a global level...surreal...

OneLove

:::MME:::

Mar 10, 2014

Welcome to Satan’s Ball by Chris Hedges


Mikhail Bulgakov’s “The Master and Margarita,” a bitter satire of Soviet life at the height of Stalin’s purges, captured the surrealist experience of living in a brutal totalitarianism. In the novel’s world, lies are considered true and truth is considered seditious. Existence is a dark carnival of opportunism, unchecked state power, hedonism and terrorism. It is peopled with omnipotent secret police, wholesale spying and surveillance, show trials, censorship, mass arrests, summary executions and disappearances, along with famines, gulags and a state system of propaganda utterly unplugged from daily reality. This reality is increasingly becoming our own.

“The Master and Margarita” is built around Woland, or Satan, who is a traveling magician, along with a hog-sized, vodka-swilling, chess-playing black cat named Behemoth, a witch named Hella, a poet named Ivan Homeless, a writer known as The Master who has been placed in an insane asylum following the suppression of his book, his lover Margarita, Pontius Pilate, Yeshua, or Jesus Christ, and Pilate’s dog Banga—the only creature that loves Pilate.

Throughout history, those who spoke the truth in totalitarian states—people such as Edward Snowden, Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning—have been silenced and persecuted and those who parroted back the lies and served the system have been rewarded with lives of luxury and debauchery. Bulgakov reminds us of this. In the midst of his story’s madness, in which moral goodness is banished and only the amoral is celebrated, Satan holds a ball where Margarita, as queen, plays hostess to “kings, dukes, cavaliers, suicides, poisoners, gallows birds and procuresses, jailers, cardsharps, executioners, informers, traitors, madmen, detectives and corrupters of youth” who leap from coffins that fall out of the fireplace. The men wear tailcoats, and the women, who are naked, differ from each other only “by their shoes and the color of the feathers on their heads.” “Scarlet-breasted parrots with green tails perched on lianas and hopping from branch to branch uttered deafening screeches of “Ecstasy! Ecstasy!’ ” As Johann Strauss leads the orchestra, revelers mingle in a cool ballroom set in a tropical forest.

In this bizarre world you flourish, are embraced by its fantasy life, only if the state decides you are worthy to exist—“No papers, no person.”
The arbitrary and capricious power of the state permits it to determine the identity and worth of its people, including the writers and artists it officially anoints. When Behemoth and his companion, Korovyov, an ex-choirmaster, attempt to enter the restaurant at the headquarters of the state-sanctioned literary trade union—filled with careerists, propagandists, profiteers and state bureaucrats, along with their wives and mistresses—they are accosted at the entrance.

A pale bored citizeness in white socks and a white beret with a tassel was sitting on a bentwood chair at the corner entrance to the veranda, where an opening had been created in the greenery of the trellis. In front of her on a plain kitchen table lay a thick, office-style register in which, for reasons unknown, she was writing down the names of those entering the restaurant. It was this citizeness who stopped Korovyov and Behemoth.
“Your ID cards?” she asked. …
“I beg a thousand pardons, but what ID cards?” asked a surprised Korovyov.
“Are you writers?” asked the woman in turn.
“Of course we are,” replied Korovyov with dignity.
“May I see your ID’s?” repeated the woman.
“My charming creature ...” began Korovyov, tenderly.
“I am not a charming creature,” interrupted the woman.
“Oh, what a pity,” said Korovyov with disappointment, and continued, “Well, then, if you do not care to be a charming creature, which would have been quite nice, you don’t have to be. But, here’s my point, in order to ascertain that Dostoevsky is a writer, do you really need to ask him for an ID? Just look at any five pages of any of his novels, and you will surely know, even without an ID, that you’re dealing with a writer. Besides, I don’t suppose that he ever had any ID! What do you think?”
Korovyov turned to Behemoth.
“I’ll bet he didn’t,” replied the latter. …
“You’re not Dostoevsky,” said the citizeness. …
“Well, but how do you know, how do you know?” replied [Korovyov].
“Dostoevsky is dead,” said the citizeness, but not very confidently.
“I protest!” exclaimed Behemoth hotly. “Dostoevsky is immortal!”
“Your ID’s, citizens,” said the citizeness.
Although the book, whose working title was “Satan in Moscow,” was completed in 1940 it did not appear in print in uncensored form until the 1970s.

“The power structure is symbolized by its anonymity and omnipresence, by its mysterious nature, by its total knowledge against which there is no defense, by its ability to penetrate every space, by putting in an appearance at any hour of the day or night,” Karl Schlögel wrote in his book “Moscow, 1937” in speaking of Bulgakov’s portrayal of the organs of state security. “Investigating officials have no names; they are simply ‘they.’ The word ‘arrest’ is replaced by the sentences “We need to sort something out’ or ‘We need your signature here.’ ”

Thomas Mann in “The Magic Mountain,” which takes place in a tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss Alps on the eve of World War I, also chronicles the malaise and sickness of a society in terminal moral decline: There no longer are any goals worth pursuing; death is more dignified than life; illness is more conducive to reflection than health. Joseph Roth in “Hotel Savoy” reaches the same conclusion. In Roth’s novel, Gabriel Dan, an Austrian soldier released from a Serbian prisoner-of-war camp after World War I, finds sanctuary in a hotel that “promises water, soap, English style toilet, a lift, maids in white caps.” In the grand ballrooms the rich and powerful gorge themselves in hedonistic revelry. But on the upper floors Dan discovers desperate, impoverished debtors, bankrupt gamblers, failed revolutionaries, chorus girls, clowns, dancers, the terminally ill and dreamers. Once those in the upper garrets are fleeced of their money and possessions they are tossed into the street.
Roth’s protagonist says:

The hotel no longer appealed to me: neither the stifling laundry, nor the gruesomely benevolent lift-boy nor the three floors of prisoners. This Hotel Savoy was like the world. Brilliant light shone out from it and splendor glittered from its seven storeys, but poverty made its home in its high places, and those who lived on high were in the depths, buried in airy graves, and the graves were in layers above the comfortable rooms of the well nourished guests sitting down below, untroubled by the flimsy coffins overhead.
The moral order, like our own, is upside-down.

Bulgakov, Mann and Roth understood that here is no real political ideology among decayed ruling elites. They knew that political debate and ideological constructs for these elites is absurdist theater, a species of entertainment for the masses. They warned that once societies enter terminal decay, in the end it is the blunt forces of censorship, relentless propaganda, coercion, fear and finally terror that keep a subdued population in check. Those who hold power in such systems are thieves who run a vast kleptocracy.

The rise of criminal elites is global. Vladimir Putin is a megalomaniac and a thug who is filling his personal coffers while he is the leader of Russia, and Barack Obama, who has more polish and sophistication, will fill his own pockets, as did the Clintons, with tens of millions of dollars as soon as he leaves office. The banks and corporations for which Obama works are as criminal and corrupt as the Central Bank of Russia, which calculates that perhaps two-thirds of the $56 billion that left Russia in 2012 might have been from money laundering, drug trafficking, tax fraud or kickbacks. The circular system of patronage and crime that exists worldwide varies from region to region only by degrees and style.

The Western political and financial elites, Putin knows, will not touch him. He and they are in the same decadent oligarchic class. They hold the same values. Europe depends on Russia for 40 percent of its natural gas, most of which passes through Ukraine. European bankers and corporations have no intention of jeopardizing that flow, or any current or potential trade deals. Corporate profit is the driving engine of foreign policy. Our elites do not care about human rights or civil liberties, not to mention the illegality of pre-emptive war, any more than Putin. Ask the people of Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen or Somalia how much moral authority the United States has to denounce the violation of the territorial integrity of a sovereign state. Ask those in our black sites and offshore penal colonies how much moral authority we have to denounce arbitrary detention and torture. Ask the 1.3 million people who lost their extended unemployment benefits in December or those who saw food stamp cutbacks reduce their spending by $90 a month how much moral authority there is left in our corporate state.

Our elites have established the most efficient system of mass surveillance in history. They have abolished most of our civil liberties. They have trashed our economy for their own personal gain. They have looted state treasuries and thrown working men and women aside. Satan is again holding a great ball. You are not invited. I am not invited. Only the gangsters will be there. Putin will be an honored guest. So will Obama.

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OneLove

:::MME:::

Mar 4, 2014

Chomsky: An Ignorant Public Is the Real Kind of Security Our Govt Is After


A leading principle of international relations theory is that the state's highest priority is to ensure security. As Cold War strategist George F. Kennan formulated the standard view, government is created "to assure order and justice internally and to provide for the common defense."
The proposition seems plausible, almost self-evident, until we look more closely and ask: Security for whom? For the general population? For state power itself? For dominant domestic constituencies?
Depending on what we mean, the credibility of the proposition ranges from negligible to very high.
Security for state power is at the high extreme, as illustrated by the efforts that states exert to protect themselves from the scrutiny of their own populations.
In an interview on German TV, Edward J. Snowden said that his "breaking point" was "seeing Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, directly lie under oath to Congress" by denying the existence of a domestic spying program conducted by the National Security Agency.
Snowden elaborated that "The public had a right to know about these programs. The public had a right to know that which the government is doing in its name, and that which the government is doing against the public."
The same could be justly said by Daniel Ellsberg, Chelsea Manning and other courageous figures who acted on the same democratic principle.
The government stance is quite different: The public doesn't have the right to know because security thus is undermined - severely so, as officials assert.
There are several good reasons to be skeptical about such a response. The first is that it's almost completely predictable: When a government's act is exposed, the government reflexively pleads security. The predictable response therefore carries little information.
A second reason for skepticism is the nature of the evidence presented. International relations scholar John Mearsheimer writes that "The Obama administration, not surprisingly, initially claimed that the NSA's spying played a key role in thwarting 54 terrorist plots against the United States, implying it violated the Fourth Amendment for good reason.
"This was a lie, however. Gen. Keith Alexander, the NSA director, eventually admitted to Congress that he could claim only one success, and that involved catching a Somali immigrant and three cohorts living in San Diego who had sent $8,500 to a terrorist group in Somalia."
A similar conclusion was reached by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, established by the government to investigate the NSA programs and therefore granted extensive access to classified materials and to security officials.
There is, of course, a sense in which security is threatened by public awareness - namely, security of state power from exposure.
The basic insight was expressed well by the Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington: "The architects of power in the United States must create a force that can be felt but not seen. Power remains strong when it remains in the dark; exposed to the sunlight it begins to evaporate."
In the United States as elsewhere, the architects of power understand that very well. Those who have worked through the huge mass of declassified documents in, for example, the official State Department history "Foreign Relations of the United States," can hardly fail to notice how frequently it is security of state power from the domestic public that is a prime concern, not national security in any meaningful sense.
Often the attempt to maintain secrecy is motivated by the need to guarantee the security of powerful domestic sectors. One persistent example is the mislabeled "free trade agreements" - mislabeled because they radically violate free trade principles and are substantially not about trade at all, but rather about investor rights.
These instruments are regularly negotiated in secret, like the current Trans-Pacific Partnership - not entirely in secret, of course. They aren't secret from the hundreds of corporate lobbyists and lawyers who are writing the detailed provisions, with an impact revealed by the few parts that have reached the public through WikiLeaks.
As the economist Joseph E. Stiglitz reasonably concludes, with the U.S. Trade Representative's office "representing corporate interests," not those of the public, "The likelihood that what emerges from the coming talks will serve ordinary Americans' interests is low; the outlook for ordinary citizens in other countries is even bleaker."
Corporate-sector security is a regular concern of government policies - which is hardly surprising, given their role in formulating the policies in the first place.
In contrast, there is substantial evidence that the security of the domestic population - "national security" as the term is supposed to be understood - is not a high priority for state policy.
For example, President Obama's drone-driven global assassination program, by far the world's greatest terrorist campaign, is also a terror-generating campaign. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan until he was relieved of duty, spoke of "insurgent math": For every innocent person you kill, you create 10 new enemies.
This concept of "innocent person" tells us how far we've progressed in the last 800 years, since the Magna Carta, which established the principle of presumption of innocence that was once thought to be the foundation of Anglo-American law.
Today, the word "guilty" means "targeted for assassination by Obama," and "innocent" means "not yet accorded that status."
The Brookings Institution just published "The Thistle and the Drone," a highly praised anthropological study of tribal societies by Akbar Ahmed, subtitled "How America's War on Terror Became a Global War on Tribal Islam."
This global war pressures repressive central governments to undertake assaults against Washington's tribal enemies. The war, Ahmed warns, may drive some tribes "to extinction" - with severe costs to the societies themselves, as seen now in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. And ultimately to Americans.
Tribal cultures, Ahmed points out, are based on honor and revenge: "Every act of violence in these tribal societies provokes a counterattack: the harder the attacks on the tribesmen, the more vicious and bloody the counterattacks."
The terror targeting may hit home. In the British journal International Affairs, David Hastings Dunn outlines how increasingly sophisticated drones are a perfect weapon for terrorist groups. Drones are cheap, easily acquired and "possess many qualities which, when combined, make them potentially the ideal means for terrorist attack in the 21st century," Dunn explains.
Sen. Adlai Stevenson III, referring to his many years of service on the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee, writes that "Cyber surveillance and meta data collection are part of the continuing reaction to 9/11, with few if any terrorists to show for it and near universal condemnation. The U.S. is widely perceived as waging war against Islam, against Shiites as well as Sunnis, on the ground, with drones, and by proxy in Palestine, from the Persian Gulf to Central Asia. Germany and Brazil resent our intrusions, and what have they wrought?"
The answer is that they have wrought a growing terror threat as well as international isolation.
The drone assassination campaigns are one device by which state policy knowingly endangers security. The same is true of murderous special-forces operations. And of the invasion of Iraq, which sharply increased terror in the West, confirming the predictions of British and American intelligence.
These acts of aggression were, again, a matter of little concern to planners, who are guided by altogether different concepts of security. Even instant destruction by nuclear weapons has never ranked high for state authorities - a topic for discussion in the next column.
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OneLove

:::MME:::

The New Corporation

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