White Fright

In 2015, the community of Islamberg discovered that a Tennessee minister was plotting the deadliest attack on US soil since 9/11 against their village. Why have Americans heard nothing about him, and why has the safety of their community been ignored? On 10 April 2015, the FBI quietly arrested Robert Doggart, a white, 63-year-old Christian minister after they discovered he was plotting an attack against Islamberg, a small African American Muslim community in upstate New York. Inspired by Fox News claims that the community was a terrorist training camp, Doggart discussed firebombing a mosque and a school in the village, and using assault rifles and a machete to murder the residents.
No terrorism charges were brought against Doggart. No national news outlets covered his arrest, and one month after he was taken into custody, a judge released him on bail. As Doggart's case went before an all-white jury, White Fright cross-examined the US’s inconsistent system of national security, the media’s role in exacerbating terrorist threats, and the failure to protect vulnerable communities from racist attacks.

You Are Being Lied To About Julian Assange!

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"Today we are all Julian Assange because if they can crucify Julian Assange they can crucify any one of us. Like Julian, we are not simply guilty of being journalists. We are guilty of being members of the Fifth and final Estate. We are guilty of being truth tellers, untethered to the multinational life-support-system of big business and bigger government. We are guilty of colluding with one another across their manufactured borders dividing us into left and right. We are guilty of spitting out the poison of the propaganda that once passed for journalism in this country. We are guilty of betraying their shallow patriotism in the name of truth. We are guilty as charged and we are aggressively unapologetic for our crimes.

We are all Julian Assange. We are all Chelsea Manning. We are all Reality Winner. We are all Edward Snowden, Glen Greenwald, Ross Ulbricht, Cody Wilson, Jeremy Scahill, Peter Van Buren and Laura Poitras. We are the charred, writhing, screaming corpses of the earth. We are the children you left home alone while you went out starting fires in the Middle East and we found the loaded .45 you keep under the bed. We are the Fifth fucking Estate. We are pissed off and we are not going away. When you crucify one of us, you crucify all of us. I hope you brought a lot of nails. We will make things ugly for you and that’s a promise I aim to keep. You want a war? You got one. Bring your guns, hell, bring your goddamn atom bombs. I will outfox them all with my blog. My keyboard is one weapon of mass destruction you don’t have to fabricate. This isn’t over. Not by a long shot."

~~Nicky Reid

How Do We Want to Die?: On Climate Collapse, Omnicide and Deep Adaptation

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Sustainability scholar Jem Bendell looks to deep adaptation in the face of inevitable climate-induced social collapse - as the global system of carbon capitalism pushes life on this planet towards disaster, only a profound shift in the way we relate to the natural world, each other, and our own mortality can prepare us for the world that lies closer than we'd ever imagined.

Jem is author of the paper Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy: 

In Conversation: Chauncey DeVega & Jonathan Metzl

Chauncey DeVega & Johnathan Metzl 


 In yet another riveting conversation on the Chauncey DeVega Show, cultural/political critic and contributing writer to Salon and Alternet , Chauncey Devega sits down with  Dr. Jonathan Metzl,  Professor of Sociology and Psychiatry, and the director of the Center for Medicine, Health, and Society, at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. 

 Metzl is the author of several books, including Prozac on the Couch and The Protest Psychosis. In this episode, Chauncey discusses Metzl's  new book, Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America's Heartland. 

 Metzl explains how Trump's voters in Red State America are literally dying of whiteness and their devotion to the Republican Party and its harmful policies, why guns and god are such an important part of personal identity and meaning for white "working class" Trump voters, and how racism and a need to punish nonwhites and other "outsiders" motivates "working class" white conservatives in their political decision-making. 

 Dr. Metzl also shares stories about white Trump voters who are on their death beds but are proud that they never took "Obamacare" because they wanted to make sure that "welfare queens" and "Mexicans" did not have access to "their" health care. Dr. Metzl also recounts tragic stories about white Trump and Republican "ammosexuals" who love their guns more than their children, relatives, and friends.

TNCs Stride the World

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Abby Martin sits down with Peter Phillips, former director of Project Censored and professor of Political Sociology at Sonoma State University. His new book “Giants: The Global Power Elite” details the 17 transnational investment firms which control over $50 trillion in wealth—and how they are kept in power by their activists, facilitators and protectors.

Musings

"How many times do you have to get hit over the head until you figure out who's hitting you?" - 

~Harry S. Truman

Jim Crow of the North

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The roots of racial disparities are seen through a new lens in this film that explores the origins of housing segregation in the Minneapolis area. But the story also illustrates how African-American families and leaders resisted this insidious practice, and how Black people built community — within and despite — the red lines that these restrictive covenants created.

For generations, the North has given itself credit for being less racially biased than the South, and for being the better place for African Americans to live. I heard this myth repeated many times & believed it for a long time. The logic was straightforward – at least to Northerners. After Reconstruction ended in 1876, the South imposed Jim Crow, which it enforced with lynchings and state-sanctioned brutality. As a result, millions of blacks fled to the North.

After World War II, northern states began passing civil rights laws that prohibited discrimination – in theory, at least – and protected voting rights, long before Congress passed similar laws in the 1960s.
Northerners have forgotten, however, how hard it was for blacks living above the Mason-Dixon Line to struggle to achieve rudimentary freedoms.

This film illustrates this painful reminder.

Welcome to the Fourth Reich: Donald Trump's Assault on the Rule of Law Will Not End Well by Chauncey DeVega

Donald Trump is not an ideologue or a person who possesses a coherent or sophisticated understanding of political theory, history or philosophy. He is all impulse and id, a man gifted in manipulating the fears of ignorant and insecure white people in the service of expanding his power and his fortune. Trump's enforcers, including Attorney General William Barr, White House senior adviser Stephen Miller and the right-wing media machine, are then tasked with transforming the president's most base impulses into public policy.

Press Freedom Under Siege

 The arrest of Julian Assange eviscerates all pretense of the rule of law and the rights of a free press.In this clip, intellectual grenade thrower, Chris Hedges, discusses the arrest and pending extradition of Julian Assange with one of the sharpest critics of our precarious times, historian Vijay Prashad.

WE ARE THE PEOPLE OF THE APOCALYPSE BY JOHN F. SCHUMAKER

For a culture to avoid self-destruction as it progresses, writes Henry George in his classic 1883 work Social Problems, it must develop ‘a higher conscience, a keener sense of justice, a warmer brotherhood, a wider, loftier, truer public spirit’, while ensuring responsible and visionary leaders who embrace ‘the mental and moral universe’. By stark contrast, modern consumer culture barrels in the opposite direction, breeding an increasingly trivialized and disengaged strain of personhood, devoid of the ‘loftier’ qualities needed to sustain a viable society and healthy life supports.

Musings

The Only Way White Supremacy Is Defeated

Very interesting interview of Melina Abdullah, Chair of Pan-African Studies at California State University, Los Angeles. She is an original member of Black Lives Matter and serves as a Los Angeles chapter lead and contributes to the global leadership. She co-hosts KPFK Radio’s Beautiful Struggle. 

Beyond the Propaganda: North Korea's Economy of Self-Reliance

 

This is the first in a series of videos to focus on North Korea. This particular video is based on the writings of Soobok Kim, from ZoominKorea

The 8 Stages of Genocide

In its primer "The 8 Stages of Genocide," the human rights group Genocide Watch offers the following warnings and guidance. "Genocide is a process that develops in eight stages that are predictable but not inexorable. At each stage, preventive measures can stop it. The process is not linear. Logically, later stages must be preceded by earlier stages. But all stages continue to operate throughout the process."

These stages are:

1. CLASSIFICATION: All cultures have categories to distinguish people into “us and them” by ethnicity, race, religion, or nationality: German and Jew, Hutu and Tutsi. ...
2. SYMBOLIZATION: We give names or other symbols to the classifications. We name people “Jews” or “Gypsies,” or distinguish them by colors or dress; and apply the symbols to members of groups. Classification and symbolization are universally human and do not necessarily result in genocide unless they lead to the next stage, dehumanization. ...
3. DEHUMANIZATION: One group denies the humanity of the other group. Members of it are equated with animals, vermin, insects or diseases. Dehumanization overcomes the normal human revulsion against murder. At this stage, hate propaganda in print and on hate radios is used to vilify the victim group. In combating this dehumanization, incitement to genocide should not be confused with protected speech. Genocidal societies lack constitutional protection for countervailing speech, and should be treated differently than democracies. Local and international leaders should condemn the use of hate speech and make it culturally unacceptable. Leaders who incite genocide should be banned from international travel and have their foreign finances frozen. Hate radio stations should be shut down, and hate propaganda banned. Hate crimes and atrocities should be promptly punished.
4. ORGANIZATION: Genocide is always organized, usually by the state, often using militias to provide deniability of state responsibility. ...
5. POLARIZATION: Extremists drive the groups apart. Hate groups broadcast polarizing propaganda. Laws may forbid intermarriage or social interaction. Extremist terrorism targets moderates, intimidating and silencing the center. Moderates from the perpetrators’ own group are most able to stop genocide, so are the first to be arrested and killed. ...
6. PREPARATION: Victims are identified and separated out because of their ethnic or religious identity. Death lists are drawn up. Members of victim groups are forced to wear identifying symbols. Their property is expropriated. They are often segregated into ghettoes, deported into concentration camps, or confined to a famine-struck region and starved. ...
7. EXTERMINATION begins, and quickly becomes the mass killing legally called “genocide.” It is “extermination” to the killers because they do not believe their victims to be fully human. ...
8. DENIAL is the eighth stage that always follows a genocide. It is among the surest indicators of further genocidal massacres. ...

This bitch-ass President and his administration's physical and psychological warfare against nonwhite immigrants, migrants, and refugees is a combination of philosopher Hannah Arendt's "banality of evil" mixed with craven greed and raw, unadulterated right-wing ideology.

Many Americans have succumbed to outrage fatigue. Others, including white Christian conservatives, enthusiastically support Trump's campaign of cruelty against brown and black people.  Some Americans are actively resisting Trumpism and the threat it represents to our democracy, but most Americans are too exhausted, overwhelmed or distracted, and have surrendered to learned helplessness.

Are we going to continue to be silent? 

Truth Decay: An Initial Exploration of the Diminishing Role of Facts and Analysis in American Public Life

American Idiocracy: 50 Years Later, We’re Still Stranded in the Twilight Zone by John W. Whitehead

“We’re developing a new citizenry. One that will be very selective about cereals and automobiles, but won’t be able to think.”
~~Rod Serling

Have you noticed how much life increasingly feels like an episode of The Twilight Zone?
Only instead of Rod Serling’s imaginary “land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas,” we’re trapped in a topsy-turvy, all-too-real land of corruption, brutality and lies, where freedom, justice and integrity play second fiddle to political ambition, corporate greed, and bureaucratic tyranny.

Musings

Nachiketa asked:

When a person dies, there arises this doubt: “He still exists,” say some; “he does not,” say others. I want to know from you, what is the truth?

Yama, The God of Death, replied:

The all-knowing Self was never born, nor will it die. Beyond cause and effect, this Self is eternal and immutable. When the body dies, the Self does not die.

If the slayer believes that he can slay or the slain believes that he can be slain, neither knows the truth. The eternal Self slays not, nor is ever slain.

Hidden in the heart of every creature exists the Self, subtler than the subtlest, greater than the greatest. They go beyond sorrow who extinguish their self-will And behold the glory of the Self.

Those who know they are neither body nor mind but the immortal Self, the divine principle of existence, find the source of all joy and live in joy abiding.

That through which one enjoys form, taste, smell, sound, touch, and sexual union is the Self. Can there be anything not known to That who is the One in all? Know One, know all.

That through which one enjoys the waking and sleeping states is the Self. To know That as Consciousness is to go beyond sorrow.

Changeless amidst the things that pass away, Pure Consciousnessin all who are conscious, The One answers the prayers of many. Eternal peace is theirs who see the Self In their own hearts. To none else does it come!

The supreme Self is beyond name and form, beyond the senses, inexhaustible, without beginning, without end, beyond time, space, and causality, eternal, immutable. Those who realize the Self are forever free from the jaws of death.

The self-existent lord pierced the senses to turn outward. Thus we look to the world outside and see not the Self within us. A sage withdrew his senses from the world of change and, seeking immortality, looked within and beheld the deathless Self.

The wise, realizing through meditation the timeless Self, beyond all perception, hidden in the cave of the heart, leave pain and pleasure far behind.

When the wise realize the Self, formless in the midst of forms, changeless In the midst of change, omnipresent and supreme, they go beyond sorrow

The Self cannot be known through study of the scriptures, nor through the intellect, nor through hearing learned discourses. The Self can be attained only by those whom the Self chooses. Verily unto them does the Self reveal itself.

The Self cannot be known by anyone who desists not from unrighteous ways, controls not his senses, stills not his mind, and practices not meditation.

None else can know the omnipresent Self, whose glory sweeps away the rituals of the priest and the prowess of the warrior and puts death itself to death.

The immature run after sense pleasures and fall into the widespread net of death. But the wise, knowing the Self as deathless, seek not the changeless in the world of change.

It is but few who hear about the Self. Fewer still dedicate their lives to its realization. Wonderful is the one who speaks about the Self; rare are they who make it the supreme goal of their lives. Blessed are they who, through an illumined teacher, attain to Self-realization.

Get up! Wake up! Seek the guidance of an illumined teacher and realize the Self. Sharp like a razor’s edge, the sages say, is the path, difficult to traverse.

Know thyself to be pure and immortal!

Know thyself to be pure and immortal!

—Selected verses from the Katha Upanishad.

Yolande Duran : The Power of Silence

In this highly illuminating interview with Proyecto Libremente. Yolande Duran shares her experience and her vision of reality, answering questions simply and sincerely.

A Thousand Suns

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A Thousand Suns tells the story of the Gamo Highlands of the African Rift Valley and the unique worldview held by the people of the region. This isolated area has remained remarkably intact both biologically and culturally. It is one of the most densely populated rural regions of Africa yet its people have been farming sustainably for 10,000 years. Shot in Ethiopia, New York, and Kenya, the film explores the modern world's untenable sense of separation from and superiority over nature and how the interconnected worldview of the Gamo people is fundamental in achieving long-term sustainability, both in the region and beyond.

The Fight for Life v. Monsanto/Bayer AG

 

Recently Monsanto/Bayer AG was ordered by a California federal court to pay $80 million to Edwin Hardeman after a jury found its weed killer, Roundup, caused his cancer. The case is just one of thousands of lawsuits filed against the company over plaintiff’s use of the glyphosate-based herbicide. In 2015, the World Health Organization classified glyphosate as probably carcinogenic to humans. The Food and Drug Administration has concluded the herbicide is not likely carcinogenic to humans. In August 2018, a jury in California state court awarded a school’s groundskeeper, Dewayne Johnson, nearly $289 million in damages. The verdict was later reduced to $78 million and is on appeal. In this conversation with Chris Hedges, environmental activist and author & one of my favorite public intellectuals, Vandana Shiva, talks about Monsanto/Bayer AG and other big AG players interests in India and her fight to protect life forms, seed varieties and farmers.