The Simulation Hypothesis

Are we living in a virtual reality? Is the universe emerging from an information processing system? And if so, could we ever tell? Is it possible to 'hack' the system and change reality? Take a look at the evidence and decide for yourself!

24 Hours without Technology and Food by Richard Arthur

When was the last time you turned off your phone, computer, and TV for an entire day? And when was the last time you went 24 hours without eating?  If the answer is “I don’t know” or “never,” you need to consider a day of discipline like this…

Recently, I went on a 24-hour fast – abstaining from all technology, and food.

It amazing to unplug, reflect on the past, and plan for the future.

Being disconnected from the distractions and stimulants of the world brought me clarity…

It made me feel connected to my essence and to my authentic thought process…

And with that clarity and connection, came a few big thoughts…

But before I share those, I’d like to drop a quick note about the benefit of fasting – abstaining from all or some food or drink.

The Benefits of Fasting

While we’re fasting, our bodies are in an autophagic state – which means the body is healing and cleaning our cells.

According to the American Journal of Cardiology, Autophagy caused by fasting protects our cells from the oxidative stress that is the usual cause of cancer, diabetes, and heart disease.

To back this up, another study coming out of the University of Utah found that out of 500 people who fasted just one day per month, 40% were less likely to suffer from clogged arteries.

And living longer is only the beginning of the many benefits that come with fasting…

Cardiologists at the Intermountain Heart Institute concluded that adding fasting to your lifestyle can cause a 2,000% increase in Growth Hormone, or GH for short.

GH is the hormone that controls how much fat our bodies burn, how much muscle we build, how we age, and much, much more.

And recently, Neil and Gabby Reece did a Truth Barrel podcast episode with an expert on fasting, Ori Hofmekler. Together, they discuss…

• How to prepare for intermittent fasting.
• The benefits of exercising on an empty stomach.
• How to stop a stress-eating binge in 60 seconds.

And no need for a peer-reviewed paper on the benefits of abstaining from technology. If you need proof of the benefits, just think about how many combined hours you and your friends spent on doing nothing on social media today.

Epiphanies from my 24-Hour Fast

1).  You are powerful beyond belief.

You do what you like, when you want. You can also design your lifestyle and say “fuck the norm.”

2).  To succeed, you must do two things:  be really good at your one thing and let the whole world know about it.

3).  A rich life isn’t based around money.

It’s based in experiences, relationships, self care, love, freedom, passion, and creation.

4).  This is YOUR life, but be receptive to everyone’s thoughts, recommendations, criticism, and feedback. Remember, only you know what is best for you.

5).  Every decision you make changes the course of your life.

After this 24 hour fast, I felt brand new.  I felt energized. I felt connected to my essence.

And I still feel that way.

6).  Consistent little victories lead to bigger victories.

When my 24-hour food and technology fast ended, I didn’t pig out. And when I re-connected to technology, the same old noise was much easier to turn off again. This small step made it much easier for me to reject stagnant temptations from stalling my productivity and clarity.

So if you’re interested, getting started is quite easy:  pick a day, and unplug. I started on a Friday evening and “broke” the food and technology fast on Saturday night.

Do it, you’ll amaze yourself.

How Can We Live Beautifully in an Age of Vitriol? by Omid Safi

These are days of snark and bluster. How do we live better and communicate more beautifully?

I spend a lot of my time wondering how to live a beautiful life in an age when the quickest way to get thousands of tweets and retweets is to post something filled with anger and vitriol, something that elicits a response from both avid fans of one side and rabid fans of the other side. How do we live beautifully when so much of dialogue is “marketized” based on how many people we can arouse to one side, immediately capitalizing on division and bifurcations? When conversation seems based less on listening and nuance and more on scoring points and eviscerating the perceived virtual opposition?

Where is not just the common ground but the higher ground?

How do we live beautifully when the president of the country is the provocateur-in-chief? How do we live beautifully when 140 character tweets take the place of careful policy, with worldwide consequences for all of us?

In times like this, I always turn to our faith traditions. Yes, there is profound racism, tribalism, and sexism in our traditions. That is the filth that covers up the jewels. But there are also luminous teachings that we can explore and draw from. This week I want to sit with one of these jewels and figure out how to invite it into my heart.

One of these gems is the African Muslim knight, Omar Mukhtar. The story of this brave warrior was preserved in the movie Lion of the Desert. Omar Mukhtar was a Libyan warrior and leader who led the resistance against the Italian Fascists between 1911 and 1931. The Italian colonial powers inflicted a terrible violence on the Libyans. They imprisoned some 125,000 people in concentration camps. Under the command of the dictatorial Mussolini and the general Graziani, the Italian forces slaughtered thousands of Libyan civilians whose crime was resisting a foreign occupying colonial army.

The Libyan resistance was led by several religious leaders, including a poor and humble teacher of the Qur’an. Omar Mukhtar, a brave Jedi-like Muslim knight who was initiated in a mystical Senussi Order, skillfully fought against the Italians until the eventual moment of his capture and his public execution.

I want to focus on one point in their resistance. After thousands of their countrymen were imprisoned by the Italians, the Libyans were able to capture two Italian soldiers. Many of the Libyans wanted to execute the Italian prisoners in retaliation. Omar Mukhtar refused, stating that this was not the way of Muslims.

The folks who had argued for killing the prisoners objected: “But the Italians killed our prisoners.”

Omar Mukhtar softly responded: “They are not our teachers.”

They are not our teachers. That response has lingered with me for days now.

We have our teachers. We follow our teachers. We imitate the best of our examples. We are not bound to return an eye for an eye, a tweet for a tweet. We can do better. We can rise above. We are not bound to stoop down to the gutter.

This temptation is a huge challenge. I myself know that I fall into this trap time and time again. We live in a culture that prizes a “quick wit,” defined as being able to return an insult with an insult. We have confused wisdom with a sharp wit that can identify the weakness in someone (or their argument) and attack them.

Can we be better? Can we step away from a fight in which no one wins? Can we, as the Qur’an says, “repel evil with something that is lovelier?”

No, as we have seen in the case of Charleston and so many other places, it should not be the moral burden of people of color and persecuted communities to always turn the other cheek and set the higher moral example when their systematic and structural suffering goes on. How do we insist on addressing structural violence, state sponsored terror, while also living up to the most luminous example of our own traditions?

These are not our teachers. We have teachers. We have exemplars. We have luminous souls we emulate.

May we be like Omar Mukhtar with the Italians.
May we be like Prophet Muhammad with the Arabs.
May we be like Desmond Tutu with the white South Africans.
May we be like Martin Luther King, Jr. with America.
May we be like the Dalai Lama with the Chinese.

May we follow in their path. May we live up to this beauty. May we become such that someday, others, in a moment of moral conflict, will look to us as their teachers.

May we be our own best selves for those around us and for ourselves. We are all in need of redemption and transformation.

May we be our own lamp, the light that shines within us, around us, above us, beneath our feet.

We have such teachers.
We have such teachings.

Hip-Hop, Job, and the Black Struggle for Being by Julian Deshazier

The opening of De La Soul’s “Intro” (from the Stakes Is High album) is an expertly mixed chorus of four voices saying these six words…

When I first heard “Criminal Minded…”

…which refer to Boogie Down Productions’ 1987 album of that name, one of the most acclaimed albums in hip-hop history. De La Soul’s sentiment is clear and can easily be translated to “When I first heard that album that changed my life,” be it from BDP or Black Thought or Bob Dylan: the moment the listener hears an album that is both talking to and for them, bearing witness to a reality and helping to create a better reality. BDP and its lead rapper KRS-One became entertainers, journalists, and prophets to a South Bronx, N.Y., context full of poverty, drugs, and pop music — whether disco or rock — that was served to them but not made by them. As invisible as the politics of the day made them, hip-hop represented the soundtrack of resistance.

The notion of creating music as a way of creating or articulating reality has its roots in other genres. James Cone reminds us that blues music was created in the midst of the black struggle for being in another era, King David of Israel becomes a brilliant psalmist (that is “songwriter”) in the midst of deep pain, and Samuel Livingston traces humankind’s first songs to the African concept of neferu (cultural manifestations of functional beauty). In other words, music has always had a purpose before it had an industry, and its economy was purely social, made up of those who would listen, identify, and be identified by those artists.

When I first heard “Criminal Minded”
When I first heard 2Pac’s “All Eyez on Me” 
When I first heard Common’s “One Day It’ll All Make Sense”
…It changed my world
…Because I heard myself, for the first time

Rap is scary to some because it is loud, which is entirely the point. It is a response with deep intention toward the systemic silencing by privileged whites, the wealthy, and the ignorant men who hold the center at this particular moment in time. It is the first bell that rings after the death around us young black Chicagoans has silenced us.

It is the cathartic response of Job after being stunned over and over, pathologically pummeled to the brink of nonbeing, and his first words — “Let the day perish on which I was born… let that day be darkness!” — which begin to reaffirm and reconstruct his being. His words are harsh and explicit and feel grossly emotional; in our context they would seem anti-intellectual when in fact they are super-rational, transcending intellect.

In 1988 and today, N.W.A.’s “Fuck Tha Police” is shocking and controversial — “uncalled for” by most tastes — until you hear the songwriters recall their inspiration, being pulled over in Los Angeles, handcuffed and forced to lie on the ground for being one thing: black. Was N.W.A. having a Job moment, or was Job having one of the first hip-hop moments? Either way, both texts comprise wisdom, both utterances remain necessary.

If you want to understand the violence epidemic in Chicago, listen to the “drill” music of the shooters. You will hear the struggle for being that too often describes and destroys. If you want to understand the beautiful complexity of our youth, listen to Chance the Rapper’s “No Problem,” where he talks about “scoopin’ all the blessings out my lap” and by the end of the same verse brusquely reminds us that his “shooters come for free.” His message is clear: He’s keeping his, by any means necessary.

What he’s really saying — perhaps in every verse Chance has ever written — is that his being matters. His album Coloring Book, along with BDP’s Criminal Minded, expresses the “courage to be” without probably ever hearing (and certainly never caring about) the name Paul Tillich. These are theological projects as much as they are musical ones, and hip-hop has a way of reminding us that the separation of the head and heart is mostly an academic and superficial one. Job should have written an album; maybe Notorious B.I.G. was reading the famous text when he settled on a name for his first album, Ready to Die.

Growing up on the Southside of Chicago in rap’s “Golden Era,” I had no need for church; I had already found an adequate object of worship in the music that blared through my cassette player — music from Christians and Muslims and Five-Percenters and Black Hebrew Israelites — music that was loud and confident and confrontational, explicit in every sense of the word. For all I had seen and endured, it needed to be.

We — that is, most young, black boys — take our cues from rappers, perhaps to a fault, but at least they show better journalistic integrity in accurately describing reality than most news outlets. This trust in entertainer as journalist evolves rappers into a greater role: the poets who shape culture, the poetry whose purpose is to create a new reality. You hear rappers who don’t understand this and use their microphone to spread a dangerous gospel of misogynist and capitalist urges — no different from some pulpits. But you also hear the proclamation and affirmation of the #BlackLivesMatter movement, its anger and its spirit engorged as a people fight to be made visible. In the rhythm and lineage you see Africa. It is neferu. It is the catharsis of Job. And for those hearing it for the first time…

When I first heard “Criminal Minded”
When I first read Job
When I saw myself

…it is like coming alive again. It is that Resurrection that many classically trained theologians spend too many words describing. It is a hip-hop moment.

The Simulacra Democracy by John Steppling

… a nation in which 87 percent of eighteen- to twenty-four year olds (according to a 2002 National Geographic Society/Roper Poll survey) cannot locate Iran or Iraq on a world map and 11 percent cannot locate the United States (!) is not merely “intellectually sluggish.” It would be more accurate to call it moronic, capable of being fooled into believing anything …”

— Morris Berman

I cannot remember U.S. culture ever being quite so compromised by ruling class control. Hollywood turns out one jingoistic and militaristic and racist film and TV show after another. Corporate news is completely controlled by the same forces that run Hollywood. It is the complete capitulation of the liberal class to the interests of the increasingly fascistic U.S. elite. And this didn’t start with Donald Trump. Certainly in its current incarnation it goes back at least to Bill Clinton, and really it goes back to the end of World War Two. The ideological trajectory was formed under the Dulles brothers and military industrial complex — representing U.S. business interests and exhibiting a demand for global hegemony. But once the Soviet Union collapsed, the project was accelerated and intensified.

Another starting point might well be the 1960 Bay of Pigs fiasco, or the 1961 CIA (and MI6) assassination of Patrice Lumumba. Or Kennedy’s 1962 speech at American University calling for the end of Pax Americana. We know what happened to Kennedy soon after that. Pick any of these incidents. But it was the fall of the U.S.S.R. that signaled to the governing class, the proprietor class, that the last real obstacle to global domination had been removed. In the interim, one finds the Iran/Contra affair, and the invasion of Iraq. The real and the symbolic meaning of the Soviet Union is forgotten today, I think. Its meaning for the developing world, especially.

The next conscious trial balloon was Clinton’s attack on the former Yugoslavia. A test run for expanding NATO. And it worked. The propaganda machine has never been as successful as it was when it demonized the Serbs and Milosevic. Then came 9/11. And the well honed PR machine spewed an endless barrage of hyper-patriotic rhetoric and disinformation. American exceptionalism was given full credibility. And remember Colin Powell and his cartoon visual teaching aids at the UN? Nobody was going to argue. Certainly not the white liberal class. And Hollywood upped its game in churning out military fantasies. And in just churning out fantasies. A genre that lent itself to obvious neo-colonial messages. By 2007, when Barack Obama announces he will run for President, the master narrative for America was firmly entrenched. The biggest hit from Hollywood in this period is Avatar (2009), a neo-colonial fable that fit seamlessly with Obama’s reconquest of Africa.

Dan Glazebrook recently wrote:

The year 2009, two years before Gaddafi’s murder, was a pivotal one for US-African relations. First, because China surpassed the US as the continent’s largest trading partner; and second, because Gaddafi was elected President of the African Union. The significance of both for the decline of US influence on the continent could not be clearer. Whilst Gaddafi was spearheading attempts to unite Africa politically, committing serious amounts of Libyan oil wealth to make this dream a reality, China was quietly smashing the West’s monopoly over export markets and investment finance. Africa no longer had to go cap-in-hand to the IMF for loans, agreeing to whatever self-defeating terms were on offer, but could turn to China – or indeed Libya – for investment. And if the US threatened to cut them off from their markets, China would happily buy up whatever was on offer. Western economic domination of Africa was under threat as never before.

The US response was to increase base building, upgrade AFRICOM, and then murder Gadaffi. Hollywood hits from this period include The Hurt Locker and The Dark Knight. Meanwhile domestically Obama was giving the OK for militarizing of police departments across the country. On another front….Danny Haiphong wrote…

What isn’t discussed often enough is how Obama has worked tirelessly to protect and fulfill the interests of the corporate healthcare system. In 2009, he collaborated with the monopoly health insurance industry and its pharmaceutical counterparts to repress the demand for single payer healthcare. The conditions at the time appeared ripe for a single payer system. Popular discontent with Republican Party rule was at its highest point. A relatively organized movement for single payer care was represented by organizations such as Healthcare Now. The Democratic Party possessed a majority in both the House and Senate.

Obama came to power as Wall Street went into meltdown, 2008. But instead of hope and change we got almost 5 trillion dollars moving to the top 1% of the financial elite. Poverty increased every year under Obama, as did inequality. Social Network came out in 2010 and Wolf of Wall Street in 2013. Both were big hits. The message from Hollywood never changed. And part of that message is that wealth is its own justification and a symbol of virtue. Hollywood, and U.S. liberals just naturally gravitate toward the rich.

Obama attacked Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Sudan, Somalia, and Yemen. And it is perhaps that last venture that will prove to be his most significant. Arming, training, and coordinating the Saudi aggression (and now that has escalated to boots on the ground) against the helpless Yemen has resulted in the largest humanitarian catastrophe in five decades.

The U.S. now has all but formally criminalized dissent, especially if that dissent is aimed at Israel.

None of this is to create exact corollaries between political action and studio product. But rather that the overriding message of Hollywood in both film and TV is to validate U.S. exceptionalism. And to hedge criticism with faint token protest. But its not just Hollywood, its theatre and fiction and all the rest of the arts. The erasure of the working class is the most pronounced truth in American culture today. There are no Clifford Odets (a high school drop out) anymore; they have been replaced by a steady stream of well groomed compliant MFA grads. Mostly from elite and expensive schools. Hemingway and James Baldwin were not college grads, nor was Tennessee Williams, the son of a traveling shoe salesman. Even more recent authors such as Thomas Pynchon were college drop outs (to join the Navy), but the point is that today mass culture is carefully controlled. Dreiser was a college drop out, and Twain was a typesetters apprentice. Others like Faulkner, went to University, but also worked. In Faulkner’s case as a postman. Same profession as Henry Miller and Charles Bukowski. Stephen Crane and Hemingway worked as journalists, when that was an honorable profession.

The decision makers in mass culture are mostly firmly entrenched in the Democratic Party ethos (witness stuff like House of Cards, Madame Secretary, or Veep). If one only gets one’s news from MSNBC or FOX or CNN then one will take away mostly pure propaganda. Rachel Maddow has a career based on craven parroting of DNC approved talking points and conclusions. Bill Maher, whose show is on HBO, is of late pimping for war. Sunday news talk shows do not invite radical voices, not ever. Michael Parenti isn’t on those shows, nor  are Ajamu Baraka or Glen Ford, Mike Whitney or Ed Curtin or Dan Glazebrook or Stephen Gowans. No, but there are plenty of retired generals and politicians. This is a media that exerts absolute control of message.

The loss of the working class, of class diversity, has been a far bigger blow to the health of the culture than anything else. One might argue that culture has always been, in the modern era, a province of the bourgeoisie, and that’s true. But there is still a rather pronounced change that has taken place. But Americans are discouraged from thinking in terms of class. They see individualism and identity. Get me more women directors they cry….which would give us more versions of Zero Dark Thirty, I guess. Gender equality matters, something every single socialist country in history has emphasized. Something Chavez saw fit to write into the Bolivarian constitution on day one. Chavez, who liberal avatar Bernie Sanders dismissed as a “dead communist dictator”. Chavez, who feminist avatar Hillary Clinton worked overtime to oust from power.

People are shocked…shocked I say…that US soldiers are killed in Niger. Darn that Donald Trump. When it is pointed out that it was Obama who sent troops there in his pivot to Africa, one is met with blank stares. The concern over U.S. soldiers dying is simply mind numbing in its hypocrisy and blinkered exceptionalism. I mean just count the numbers of dead civilians due to U.S. drone strikes from just one year. Pick any year you like.

Under Obama, the US African Command (AFRICOM) has penetrated every African country but Zimbabwe and Eritrea. AFRICOM has locked African nations into military subservience. In 2014, the US conducted 674 military operations in Africa . According to a recent Freedom of Information Act request by Intercept, the US currently has Special Forces deployed in more than twenty African nations.

Danny Haiphong

People are terrified today lest they be called conspiracy theorists. No single pejorative term has exercised such disproportionate power. There is a subterranean subject position associated with this, too. A masculine identity that connects with the presentation of those accepting of the official version of things. It is ‘no nonsense, mature, and sort of tough guy’ pose. Only weak and muddled (feminine you see!) would bother to question official narratives of…well, anything. It is staggering, really, why so few ask why is it OK to assassinate people without due process? Why is it whistleblowers, truth tellers, are being locked away and shunned? Why are there 900 plus US military bases around the world. Why, given the growing poverty in the U.S. do we need an updated nuclear arsenal that will cost trillions? In fact why is the defense budget over 4 billion a day? The liberal educated class seem not to ask such questions. Let alone ask is the U.S. arming takfiri jihadists in Syria? Most of what people call conspiracy is just perfectly reasonable skepticism. Given a history that includes COINTELPRO, Operation Northwoods, Gladio, MKUltra, and Operation AJAX. This is also relevant in terms of the coming war on *fake news*. An idea put forward by Obama and now in enthusiastic Orwellian operation by Facebook, YouTube, and Google. In the U.K. Theresa May proudly announces the government SHOULD control what one can see on the internet. Censorship is pitched as protection.

And then we come to NATO and Europe. Why does NATO even exist one might ask? I mean the USSR doesn’t exist anymore. Well, the answer has been under construction for a few years now, and that answer is the extraordinary anti Putin propaganda of the U.S. The “Russian Threat” is now an accepted trope in public discourse. Or the anti Iranian disinformation. In fact Iran is far more democratic and less a global threat (actually its NO global threat) than U.S. boon allies Israel and Saudi Arabia. Which brings us back to Yemen. The utter destruction of Yemen, poorest Arab country in the world, and now one with the largest Cholera outbreak in history, posed no threat to ANYONE. Certainly not to the United States. Are we to believe the House of Saud is worth supporting? They behead homosexuals and witches in Saudi Arabia. The leader of KSA is a 32 year old psychopath named Mohammed Bin Salman. Someone please explain the U.S. support for this country?

Or Venezuela. The U.S. has waged various campaigns against this sovereign nation for over a decade now. A democracy. But a disobedient one. Where is the outcry? When people are going on about Harvey Weinstein, a troglodyte movie producer that literally everyone knew was a serial abuser, I wonder that the women of Venezuela seem not to count. Or of Libya, or Haiti, or Puerto Rico, or hell, the women of Houston right now. Poor women. Ah, but that is class again. Now perhaps the Weinstein affair will yield good results and some form of collective protection and maybe even unionizing will take place to limit the power of rich white men. I doubt it, but maybe. Still, given that the liberal class today applaud the idea of making it OK for women to bomb defenseless villages in Afghanistan or Iraq or Yemen, just like men, and given that most of these horrified by Weinstein were and are solidly behind Hillary Clinton and the DNC, and laud adulation on figures like Maddie Albright, it seems hard to imagine.

David Rosen:

Sexual abuse and violence in the U.S. is as old as the country. America’s patriarchal culture long legitimized sexual abuse and violence toward women — and children — whether conducted at the workplace, at home, a nightclub or on a deserted street. During the nation’s earliest days, the custom of sexual abuse and violence was legitimized through the notion of “chastisement.” This was a feature of Anglo-American common law that recognized the husband as master of “his” household and, thus, permitted him to subject “his” wife to corporal punishment, including rape, so long as he did not inflict permanent injury upon her. Sexual abuse was institutionalized in the rape of African and later African-American female slaves. As the legal scholar Adrienne Davis notes, “U.S. slavery compelled enslaved black women to labor in three markets – productive, reproductive, and slavery – crucial to the political economy.”

One need only note the sexual violence that takes place in the U.S. military (See Kirby Dick’s The Invisible War). But that is not the military you see in this season’s TV shows such as SEAL Team or Valor or The Brave. The current Tom Cruise film American Made is a sort of comedy about Barry Seal who worked as a pilot for the CIA, and with various cartels in South America. Yeah, nothing funnier than squashing a socialist government like in Nicaragua. There is not a single Spanish speaking character who is not either a drunk, a sadist, or just incompetent. This stunningly racist revisionism was called “jaunty and bouncy” by the Hollywood Reporter.

The liberal class will always side with the status quo. Always. They do not care if the status quo is fascist. And its suits them much more to lay out bromides about male abuse of women, as long as this doesn’t mean having to untangle the complexity of women in unfamiliar non tourist visited nations like Yemen or Libya or Honduras. Just like the fact that U.S. domestic police departments murdered over a thousand black men in 2015. And continue to do so, along with increasing numbers of black women. That’s just not a jaunty bouncy story, I guess. Obama has never been comfortable talking about or to black people. He did manage to scold Colin Kaepernick recently though, about the pain he, Kaepernick, might be causing. The pain of white billionaire sports team owners I guess. The Uncle Tomism of what Glen Ford called black misleadership has never been greater. And that’s another crime we can lay, largely, at the feet of Barack Obama.

The U.S. House voted unanimously to sanction Iran and North Korea, an absurdity and a crime, and yet one that barely registered on the media Richter scale. What has Iran or North Korea ever done to hurt anyone in the United States? It is Saudi Arabia and Israel that fear a democratic nation like Iran and the influence they wield in the region. Iran is accused of fomenting instability but evidence is never given. Russia is said to control U.S. public opinion, but evidence is never given. The U.S. doesn’t even bother to really try and make claims about Venzeuela, because its just part of inherited wisdom that they are *bad*. Like Castro was bad, like Gadaffi, like Aristide, like anyone exhibiting independence. The world according to media entertainment is made up of bad guys and good guys. Mike Pompeo, head of the CIA, recently stated that his agency would become a “much more vicious agency” in fighting its enemies. Its actually hard to imagine what that might look like given CIA history. More vicious than rendition, drone killing and black site torture? Remember it was the U.S. and its School of the Americas that trained those death squads in Central America. Hollywood makes comedies about this.

In any event nobody in Hollywood complains. Just as none of the actresses assaulted by Weinstein (and countless others) said anything lest they lose career opportunities. Just as nobody complains about the racism and demonizing of Muslims or Serbs or North Koreans or Russians lest they not get the job. Coercion is silent and a given. It is also absolute. Most actors and directors simply don’t think about it, and most know little beyond what they hear on corporate news or read in the NYTimes. But I understand. People have to eat, have to feed their families. The real problem is that power is ever more consolidated. Distribution of films is monopolized. And for most Americans, foreign policy remains a giant black hole about which they know very little. Tell someone Milosovic was actually a good guy and they will laugh at you (this still happens on the left, too, rather depressingly). Tell them Russia is not threatening the U.S. or Europe, and they will laugh at you. Try to explain what Imperialism is and means, and you get that bored look of irritation. A good rule of thumb is if the U.S. targets a country or leader, then its worth questioning the western generated propagated propaganda in mainstream media about said country or leader (think Syria, Gadaffi, Aristide, Milosovic, Iran, North Korea). The U.S. does not go after countries who welcome western capital.

One of the things I’ve noticed about Hollywood film is the extraordinary amount of self pity from most characters. Self pity, entitlement, and sarcasm. The people who produce and make film and TV today, by and large, tacitly censor themselves. Some don’t have to, of course. But there is a general group think at work. And it extends to the way characters are written. The problems of affluent white people is the template here. Few examine the wider world, and mostly when they do it is seen as a world of threat and menace. An uncivilized place in need of guidance from the civilized white West (The Lost City of Z comes to mind, which made all the approved anti colonial notes while still creating a colonial narrative anyway.). But it is even more narrow than that. Everything resembles a studio; political discussions, even if they take place in outer space, resemble studio executives discussing opening weekend profits, or Neilson ratings. And since Hollywood itself ever more resembles Wall Street, or some corporate headquarters, that is increasingly what the world looks like. It is a profound loss of imagination. Westerns look and sound the same as melodramas set in Santa Monica or New York. Fantasy worlds resemble corporate headquarters or corporate motivational weekends. It is a world created by writers under thirty, largely, and certainly under forty. These are worlds created by people who themselves know very little of the world. They know even less about having to work for a living. The entire universe of film is absent any class awareness. History is simplified the better to appeal to a wider audience. Everything feels and sounds the same. And it is stultifying. There are films and TV from Europe, even from the U.K. that have merit, have heterogeneous sensibilities, but not from Hollywood. Like White House press conferences, the idea is to stay on message. Black characters sound white (or are given caricature *black* dialect and dialogue), brown characters sound white (or are given caricature barrio dialects), and Muslims sound dangerous and devious. Asians seem lifted from Fu Manchu serials or Charlie Chan. Strange when I hear people make fun of ethnic cliches from the 1940s, because it is really no different today (and check the recent TV incarnation of the venerable Star Trek franchise where the Klingon villains are very dark, live in dark spaceships and utter a guttural invented language all of which suggests something oddly racist and like nothing so much as colonial portraits of savages from darkest Africa).

Fixation on Trump’s crimes distracts from a system in which crime is a built-in factor. Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Trump. They are only the figureheads that carry water for the system. And the system is the property of the ruling class. People vote as if it crucially matters, and they vote for who they like. Not for policy because mostly they have no idea of policy. Trump is an obvious target, but that’s the problem in a sense. America didn’t become racist and violent overnight. The forces of social unrest have been building for decades. Trump was inevitable. His lack of basic literacy mirrors the nation he nominally heads, and his vulgarity mirrors the vulgarity of America, as does his misogyny and racism. The same advisors are in place and if Hillary had won, those openly fascist thugs applauding Trump would still be committing hate crimes. Has Trump empowered them? To a degree, yes. But an HRC win would likely have provided motivation of a different sort and the same violence would be taking place. You cannot sustain, as a country, this level of inequality. And as more super hurricanes descend on us, as the bio-sphere collapses, none of this may end up mattering. There is something disturbing, actually, about the relentless attacks on Trump. Its like beating up a special needs kid. Where was this hatred and outrage before? I mean Trump’s America, a term I hear a lot, is just America. We have over 2 million people in prison in the U.S. Far and away leaders in the world. Infant mortality however puts the U.S. between 26th and 51st, depending on who is counting. There is no Universal Heath Care, no union protection for workers, no maternity leave, no free education. What is there to feel so special about, exactly? Trump was very popular on his moronic reality TV show. I’m guessing more than few now outraged by this buffoonish reactionary watched that show. I mean it did last fifteen years I believe. Who did they think he was? There is nothing wrong with identifying the crimes of Trump’s administration. But there is something deeply wrong in not recognizing it as a continuation of prevailing policy. Yes, it is worse in many areas. The environment for one. But then again, 47% of the world’s pollution is caused by the military. And the U.S. has a military bigger than the next ten largest militaries in the world. And every president since the first  Bush has increased the military budget. The nightmare did not begin with the swearing in of Donald Trump. But nobody likes him. They liked Obama. And that is why he was able to do so much harm. Trump is dangerous not because of what he thinks (he mostly doesn’t) but because of his ignorance and weakness (and fear). And that weakness generated his welcoming hand to the Pentagon. Foreign policy is really in the hands of a man nicknamed ‘Mad Dog’. One cannot blame this catastrophic situation on one man. This is the creation of American history.

Neuroscientist Dr. Carl Hart: People Are Dying in Opioid Crisis Because of Politicians’ Ignorance

God, Science & The Universe

Utterly fascinating discussion! The panelists are:

Sadhguru - Yogi, Mystic, founder of Isha Foundation

Dr. Pushp M Bhargava - Molecular Biologist

Father Dominic Emmanuel - Spokesperson of the Delhi Catholic Archdiocese

Prof. R. Rajaraman - Emeritus Professor of Theoretical Physics at Jawaharlal Nehru University

Sw. Aatma Priyananda - Vice Chancellor of Ramakrishnan Mission, Vivekananda University (Ex Theoretical Physicist)

Shiv Visvanathan - Sociologist

It should be noted that non-Western ways of knowing has always been looked down on by Western minds which of course was/is fueled by race & culture, primarily. Other ways of knowing are equally powerful. For example, Indian spirituality understood infinity centuries before any westerner could even think of. Einstein himself dropped all pretensions of so-called Western superiority when he stated,

"“The world we have made as a result of the level of thinking we have done thus far,

creates problems that we cannot solve at the same level of consciousness at which we created them… We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if humankind is to survive.”

Only seeking in a more honest & open-minded way will we get out of this hell hole we have created,,,,

Manufactured Consent, Power, Media and Thinktanks

Corporations don’t just shape our politics or economics, they also seek to change public opinion to serve their interests. Which corporations play the biggest role in shaping knowledge and news? What do they fund? Who do they represent? What role have they played in the rise of authoritarian populists? This infographic for State of Power 2017 exposes those “manufacturing consent”.

Infographic: Manufactured Consent via TNI’s State of Power 2017 report.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Donald de Groen and Amy O’Donoghue for their research support

Sources for infographics

• Source of media companies: Business Insider; Board interlocks indicates the official affiliations of the company’s executive board members and were sourced from crunchbase.com and the relevant media company websites.
• Media concentration in the US: New York Times and Future of Music Coalition (FMC). The data on radio is from a FMC report in 2002 but two of the 10 listed (Cumulus and Citadel) merged in 2011.
• Digital empires: Leading social networks from Smartinsights.com. Traffic to news website from Parsely.com
• Post-truth: Survey of trust by Quinnipiac University; see also Washington Post; how informed media consumers from Business Insider
• Google’s political web: Check out http://googletransparencyproject.org
• Breitbart.com donations from Public Integrity and Washington Post
• List compiled using data from Penn University Thinktank Index. Thinktanks revenue, assets and board members from their websites.  Board interlocks include not only present affiliations of board members but also past affiliations and career.
• Graphic and information on Trump and thinktanks from muckety.cominfluence of Heritage Foundation from National Review

The Logic of Financialization is a Poison in Our Hearts and Our Minds

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We need to ask much more fundamental questions about what a society is for, and how we can care for each other. That's what is going to allow us to overcome the twin evils of - on the one hand, a financialized system which is transforming us all into hyper-paranoid individualist risk takers, and on the other a system that leaves whole racialized populations essentially to die at the hands of the police, of poverty, or any number of ills unleashed by incredible inequality.

Writer Max Haiven finds financialization at the heart of capitalism's reactionary authoritarianism - as a force that has dominated the ways we view land, ourselves and each other, and as an existential challenge that can only be overcome by new modes of understanding care, and organizing for collective action.

Max's article Financialization, precarity and reactionary authoritarianism at ROAR Magazine is an excerpt from his book Cultures of Financialization: Fictitious Capital in Popular Culture and Everyday Life from Palgrave Macmillan.

Black Wall Street: America's Dirty Little Secret

Karma is a bitch...O'Reilly stated recently that he was mad at God for not having his back with regards to his sexual misdeeds. A whole lot of O'Reillys--millions---will soon feel the same way when the truth of all their evils is revealed...political misdeeds, economic misdeeds, legal misdeeds, personal misdeeds, organized religious misdeeds, etc....oh, their days are numbered, believe me.

Everything arises, everything falls away....

Dr. James Hansen on How to Solve the Urgent Climate Crisis

Chris Hedges discusses climate change with an acclaimed expert on the subject: Dr. James Hansen, a climatologist, activist and professor at Columbia University. The two discuss the dire effects of climate change and Hansen explains why we need to radically change our relationship with the planet and implement solutions as quickly as possible.

Hedges notes that while Hansen and most other climatologists have been "sounding the alarm for decades," the "establishment systems of power continue to pursue policies that are suicidal...why?"

"It's pretty clear why," Hansen responds. "Because the fossil fuel industry is making a lot of money...and they are able to influence both the legislative branch of government and the executive branch. That's why we're trying to use the third branch of government, the judicial branch, to secure the rights of young people."

"I find that both parties are at fault here," Hansen continues, adding that there economic solutions to climate change, like creating financial incentives for people to switch to green energy.

"Make the fossil fuels pay their cost to society," he argues. "We could get a compromise between conservatives and liberals if they would come to their senses."

Musings

Toni Morrison’s Radical Vision of Otherness by Nell Irvin Painter

A generation ago, as the culture wars raged, Toni Morrison often stood at the front lines, demanding the desegregation of the American literary canon. In her Tanner Lectures in 1988, and later in her book Playing in the Dark, she argued against a monochromatic literary canon that had seemed forever to be naturally and inevitably all-white but was, in fact, “studiously” so. She accused scholars of “lobotomizing” literary history and criticism in order to free them of black presence. Broadening our conception of American literature beyond the cast of lily-white men would not simply benefit nonwhite readers. Opening up would serve the interests of American mental as well as intellectual health, since the white racial ideology that purged literature of blackness was, Morrison said, “savage.” She called the very concept of whiteness “an inhuman idea.”

What is a Black Identity Extremist? by Julianne Malveaux

While White men are beating Black men on the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia, while a lone White wolf is shooting people from the Mandalay Bay Hotel, while the word “terrorist” is hardly used to describe these men, the FBI, under the leadership of the racist Attorney General Jeff Beauregard Sessions, is thinking up a new way to oppress Black people.  Despite the fact that there is no evidence of a “movement”, the FBI has described a group of black people as “black identity extremists” who pose a domestic terrorist threat to police officers. (https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/4067711/BIE-Redacted.pdf)

Hold up!  We have seen domestic terror threats, though there are those of limited intelligence who cannot fathom them.  The man who shot up an Orlando, Florida nightclub was a domestic terrorist.  Dylan Roof, who worshipped with the parishioners at Mother Emanuel AME church was a domestic terrorist so highly regarded by law enforcement that they bought him a meal before taking him to jail.  The man I will not mention in Las Vegas was a domestic terrorist.  But the FBI is manufacturing evidence to focus on us African Americans who embrace our Black identity.

Foreign Policy, the magazine and website that broke the story of this new classification of “woke” black people, leaked the FBI document that links black identity with extremism and threats to police officers.  The document mentions Black Lives Matter, although the connection between Black Lives Matter and anti-police violence has not been established.  For the FBI to identify “Black Identity Extremists” as domestic terrorists is to declare war on black people.  After all, what does it mean to be a “Black Identity Extremist”?  Does it mean we love our Blackness and refuse to back down when we are attacked?  Does it mean that we revel in our identity and use every available platform (thank you, Colin Kaepernick) to lift our voices up against injustice?  Why is this embrace of Blackness so frightening to melanin-deficient people?  They prefer us silent, docile, grateful, acquiescent.  They demand no such acquiescence from their melanin-impaired friends who gleefully walk through civilized streets of places like Charlottesville and parry racist chants like “you will not replace us, Jews will not replace us”.  That’s domestic terrorism, Beauregard!  Call it like it is instead of inventing a Black movement that does not exist.

Andrew Cohen (https://www.brennancenter.org/blog/fbi-new-fantasy-black-identity-extremists) wrote about the FBI report for the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University and reports that “there is no “BIE movement,” but in the fertile mind of those within the Trump administration that want you to believe there is some sinister Black force out there bent on attacking police officers. No journalists or academics have discovered and chronicled such a movement or its leaders. No such leaders have come forward to say they are part of such a movement. No one has killed a cop in the name of such a movement. The only citations to the movement, the Foreign Policy piece tells us, come from “internal law enforcement writings made over the past two months.”

Journalist Sam Fulwood III, writing for the Center for American Progress blog, Think Progress, (https://thinkprogress.org/fbi-targets-black-activists-83628a5eb611/) describes the FBI report as an “ominous siren call coinciding with President Donald Trump’s penchant for stoking racial divisions in the country.”  He says that “the administration views

The FBI report says the Black Identity Extremist movement began after a Ferguson; Missouri police officer unnecessarily killed Michael Brown.  Andrew Cohen notes that the FBI report lists six cases where so-called BIE perpetrators killed police officers.  These cases are so isolated that if these men were white they would have been classified, as Dylan Roof was, as mentally ill or troubled.  They would have gone to McDonalds with those who arrested them!  Instead the FBI has figure out another way to demonize Black people.

Meanwhile, 173 Black people were killed by police officers so far this year.  Six instances of BIE folks allegedly (do we know they are BIE, or just crazy) killing police officers is a pattern, but 173 Black folks being shot by police officers is what?  Business as usual?

This so-called BIE nonsense is diabolically racist and pathologically creative.  It suggests that any Black person who has issues with so-called law enforcement is suspect.  I stand with my people who choose to protest ignorance, ugliness and nonsense.  Those who embrace their Black identity are not terrorists, we are healthily self-confident.  We are at risk, as we have always been, when injustice prevails.

Julianne Marie Malveaux  is an economist, author, social/political commentator and businesswoman.