Am I Just Getting Old?: Reflections on Rap's Devolution Pt. 1 by E. Rockerz

“You are now witnessing the devolution of rap music. The death of poetry and smoothness, they use this. The absence of a message. This inability to create meaningful change through words and verses, but the worse is, they don’t even know they hurt this artful purpose, it’s tragic.”-- Rakim

I remember listening to my first rap song, "Rapper's Delight" by The Sugarhill Gang back in '79. It was fun, bouncy & lightly humorous with a Nile Rogers-inspired bass-line that will stand the test of time. Aint no shame rapping along to this classic in front of kids, parents, grandparents, whomever!

"Now, what you hear is not a test I'm rappin' to the beat
And me, the groove, and my friends are gonna try to move your feet.."

 Oh hell yeah!

In Conversation: Chauncey DeVega & Richard Painter - " If Donald Trump is Not Impeached For the Ukraine Scandal His Assault on America Will Be Unstoppable"

.
Richard Painter was White House chief ethics counsel under George W. Bush and is a frequent political commentator and analyst on CNN, MSNBC and other news networks. Painter is also a professor of corporate law at the University of Minnesota and the author of several books, including "Getting the Government America Deserves." He is also the host of "The Politics Podcast With Richard Painter."

Painter explains why Donald Trump’s machinations with the President of Ukraine are so dangerous.
He also offers insights on how the Democrats should proceed with impeaching Donald Trump and why Nancy Pelosi waited so long to begin this process.

And Richard Painter warns that if Donald Trump is not impeached for his apparent efforts to extort and bribe the President of Ukraine to help defeat Joe Biden how that would further embolden Trump’s assault on American democracy and the rule of law.

Henry Giroux: “All education is a struggle over what kind of future you want for young people"

Education always plays a central role – whether in a visible or a veiled way – in any ideological project. For anyone backing the transformation of the world into a fairer, more caring and democratic place, education is key, but people who believe that market logics are fundamental for good social functioning also have their own educational project. All this, furthermore, is not only taking place in the classroom but permeating the whole of society.

Chris Hedges: The Problem With Impeachment

Source:Truthdig


Impeaching Donald Trump would do nothing to halt the deep decay that has beset the American republic. It would not magically restore democratic institutions. It would not return us to the rule of law. It would not curb the predatory appetites of the big banks, the war industry and corporations. It would not get corporate money out of politics or end our system of legalized bribery. It would not halt the wholesale surveillance and monitoring of the public by the security services. It would not end the reigns of terror practiced by paramilitary police in impoverished neighborhoods or the mass incarceration of 2.3 million citizens. It would not impede ICE from hunting down the undocumented and ripping children from their arms to pen them in cages. It would not halt the extraction of fossil fuels and the looming ecocide. It would not give us a press freed from the corporate mandate to turn news into burlesque for profit. It would not end our endless and futile wars. It would not ameliorate the hatred between the nation’s warring tribes—indeed would only exacerbate these hatreds.

Permanent Record: Why NSA Whistleblower Edward Snowden Risked His Life to Expose Surveillance State

Six years ago, Edward Snowden leaked a trove of secret documents about how the United States had built a massive surveillance apparatus to spy on Americans and people across the globe. Snowden was then charged in the U.S. for violating the Espionage Act and other laws. As he attempted to flee to Latin America, Snowden became stranded in Russia after the U.S. revoked his passport. He has lived in Moscow ever since. Snowden just published his memoir, “Permanent Record,” in which he writes about what led him to risk his life to expose the U.S. government’s system of mass surveillance.

Chaos, Time, and the Origin of Everything: Stephen Fry on How Ancient Greek Mythology and Modern Science Meet to Illuminate the Cradle of Being by Maria Popova

Source: Brain Pickings

“Time is the substance I am made of,” Borges wrote in his sublime meditation on the most elemental and paradoxical dimension of existence. But what was there before there was time, before there was substance? Before, in the lovely words of the poet Marie Howe, “the singularity we once were” — “when sky was earth, and animal was energy, and rock was liquid and stars were space and space was not at all”?

In Conversation: Christopher Leonard & Chauncey DeVega on the Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America

.
.
Christopher Leonard is a business reporter whose work has appeared in such publications as The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post. He is the author of the bestselling new book Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America.

Leonard explains how Charles Koch and his political network were able amass so much power and influence over American life. He also offers insights into Charles Koch’s “market based management” philosophy and how it enabled him to make so much money and also execute his long-term political strategies.

Christopher Leonard also details the specific public policies that Charles Koch and his political network are advancing to transform the United States fully into a right-wing libertarian dystopia where “survival of the fittest” and unrestrained corporations rule without restriction over every aspect of public and private life.

Musings

What the Felicity Huffman Scandal Says About America by Jessicah Pierre

 Source:OtherWords

Earlier this year, a number of wealthy parents, celebrities, and college prep coaches were accused of offering large bribes to elite universities in order to get their children into schools they didn’t qualify for. 

Federal prosecutors charged at least 50 people in the criminal investigation named “Operation Varsity Blues.” 

About 100 Million Americans Are Effectively Hidden by Official Poverty Statistics by Karen Dolan

New U.S. Census data shows a slight decrease in official poverty in 2018, but it also hides a darker reality.

Pascal on Persuasion

 Source: Quartz

The 17^th century philosopher Blaise Pascal is perhaps best known for Pascal’s Wager which, in the first formal use of decision theory, argued that believing in God is the most pragmatic decision. But it seems the French thinker also had a knack for psychology. As Brain Pickings points out, Pascal set out the most effective way to get someone to change their mind, centuries before experimental psychologists began to formally study persuasion:

When we wish to correct with advantage, and to show another that he errs, we must notice from what side he views the matter, for on that side it is usually true, and admit that truth to him, but reveal to him the side on which it is false. He is satisfied with that, for he sees that he was not mistaken, and that he only failed to see all sides. Now, no one is offended at not seeing everything; but one does not like to be mistaken, and that perhaps arises from the fact that man naturally cannot see everything, and that naturally he cannot err in the side he looks at, since the perceptions of our senses are always true.

Pascal added:

People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come into the mind of others.

Donald Trump, King of Chaos - New research on right-wing psychology points toward big trouble ahead

Donald Trump is the King of Chaos. He has lied at least 12,000 times since becoming president of the United States.

These lies are often obvious and lazy — such as incorrectly claiming that Hurricane Dorian would hit Alabama and then forcing scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to parrot his lies. Trump’s lies are made no less dangerous when they happen to be lazy and obvious.
Trump is unapologetic and unabashed in his contempt for American democracy and the rule of law. Many mental health professionals have concluded he is unwell. He lacks impulse control and evidences sociopathic behavior.

This Is Not the Sixth Extinction. It’s the First Extermination Event by Justin McBrien

SOURCE: TRUTHOUT


From the “insect apocalypse” to the “biological annihilation” of 60 percent of all wild animals in the past 50 years, life is careening across every planetary boundary that might stop it from experiencing a “Great Dying” once more.

But the atrocity unfolding in the Amazon, and across the Earth, has no geological analogue — to call it the “sixth extinction event” is to make what is an active, organized eradication sound like some kind of passive accident. This is no asteroid or volcanic eruption or slow accumulation of oxygen in the atmosphere due to cyanobacteria photosynthesis.

We are in the midst of the First Extermination Event, the process by which capital has pushed the Earth to the brink of the Necrocene, the age of the new necrotic death.

Truth Rises: The 1619 Project

  .

                                               READ:  The 1619 Project.     

Genesis 15:13 Then the LORD told Abram, "You can be certain about this: Your descendants will be foreigners in a land that isn't theirs. They will be slaves there and will be oppressed for 400 years.

Genisis 15:14 But I will execute judgment on the nation that they will serve. Afterward they will come out with many possessions.

The scholarship in this New York Times project is devastatingly impactful! Everyone should take the time to absorb what's presented here. I know many people haven't explored this important project in its entirety, but they really should! You really can't know America without delving into this pivotal historical period. Malcolm X once said, "History is a people's memory, and without a memory, man is demoted to the lower animals".

It's way past the hour for America to look at itself in the mirror, truthfully.

Henry A. Giroux: The Terror of the Unforeseen

  Listen: Terror of the Unforseen

 

            

The Legitimization Machine: Elizabeth Warren by Jeremy Toback

Since the crash of 2008, the neoliberal structures that have dominated our political lives and discourse for the last forty years have been fending off a legitimization crisis . Obama spent eight years using his award-winning brand of progressive neoliberalism to hope and change it away for one portion of the populace. Then, when that left 43% of Americans unable to afford the basics and 78% living paycheck to paycheck, Trump promised to make America great again for the other half… With a nativist, racist take on the same essential neoliberal approach.

Christianity and the Cult of Trump by Miguel A. De La Torre

Source:Burying White Privilege: Resurrecting a Badass Christianity

The authoritarian, patriarchal Trump style is not a stranger to the Eurocentric Christian world. The Christian faith, in its political construction, was founded upon an authoritarian organization modeled on an authoritarian family unit. Just as the husband is the ordained head of the household, called by God to be a modern-day Abrahamic patriarch, so too are priests, called fathers, the ordained heads of churches. And while Protestants shy away from the word father, they nevertheless create similar authoritarian structures where congregants submit to a pastor who serves as the spiritual head.

"We are being written": Notes on the Self and the Networked Society

Writer Richard Seymour examines the online revolution in society, ourselves and the written word - as more of our lives are spent writing and reading online, the invisible algorithms and undemocratic platforms we inhabit create new forms of power and manipulation between ourselves and the machine.

 Richard is author of the new book "The Twittering Machine"

Pythagoras on the Purpose of Life and the Meaning of Wisdom by Maria Popova

The Greek polymath Pythagoras (c. 570–c. 495 BC) ignited the golden age of mathematics with the development of numerical logic and the discovery of his namesake theorem of geometry, which furnished the world’s first foothold toward the notion of scientific proof and has been etched into the mind of every schoolchild in the millennia since. His ideas went on to influence Plato, Copernicus, Descartes, Kepler, Newton, and Einstein, and the school he founded made the then-radical decision to welcome women as members, one of whom was Hypatia of Alexandria — the world’s first known woman astronomer.

Alongside his revolutionary science, Pythagoras coined the word philosopher to describe himself as a “lover of wisdom” — a love the subject of which he encapsulated in a short, insightful meditation on the uses of philosophy in human life. According to the anecdote, recounted by Cicero four centuries later, Pythagoras attended the Olympic Games of 518 BC with Prince Leon, the esteemed ruler of Phlius. The Prince, impressed with his guest’s wide and cross-disciplinary range of knowledge, asked Pythagoras why he lived as a “philosopher” rather than an expert in any one of the classical arts.
Pythagoras, quoted in Simon Singh’s altogether fascinating Fermat’s Enigma: The Epic Quest to Solve the World’s Greatest Mathematical Problem (public library), replies:

Life… may well be compared with these public Games for in the vast crowd assembled here some are attracted by the acquisition of gain, others are led on by the hopes and ambitions of fame and glory. But among them there are a few who have come to observe and to understand all that passes here.

It is the same with life. Some are influenced by the love of wealth while others are blindly led on by the mad fever for power and domination, but the finest type of man gives himself up to discovering the meaning and purpose of life itself. He seeks to uncover the secrets of nature. This is the man I call a philosopher for although no man is completely wise in all respects, he can love wisdom as the key to nature’s secrets.

Complement with Alain de Botton on how philosophy undoes our unwisdom, then revisit other abiding mediations on the meaning and purpose of life from Epictetus, Toni Morrison, Walt Whitman, Richard Feynman, Rosa Parks, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Martha Nussbaum.

James Baldwin on Living and Growing in a 'White World'

James


Baldwin discusses living and growing in a white world in a talk (and Q&A) to students at a predominantly Black high school in Oakland, California.

Recorded by KQED at Castlemont High School, Oakland on June 23rd 1963.

Musings

                            

"The White Rose, Second Leaflet"

Munich, 1942

 

"This is one of my favorite leaflets from 'Die Weiße Rose.' I enjoy their observation that "German intellectuals fled to their cellars, there, like plants struggling in the dark, away from light and sun, gradually to choke to death." One cannot blame them in some ways, since from the very beginning the National Socialists were backing their words with violent street thugs in brown shirts. And so many among the very wealthy and the highly trained professional classes threw themselves into the arms of the powerful like hypocrites and whores. But even if we rightfully condemn the failure of those whose obligation it is to speak, how often are we seeing this in our own time? 

When the economy was very obviously building towards the financial crisis of 2008, how many economists were ignoring the bubble conditions, preferring to keep their noses in their statistics, a willful condition that I call data blindness. How many lawyers look at outrageous miscarriages of justice and say and do nothing? How many of those who have been blessed by circumstances sit back and smugly attribute their good fortune to their natural superiority as a the new ubermensch?

It is not safe to see too much, and even less safe for the career minded to speak out against the actions of powerful insiders who control the benefactions of position, and the perks of the privileged class.  

It is much more judicious to hide one's nose in a selective book of statistics, ignoring the reality, and relying instead on being data blind or ideologically blind to what is really happening. It is easier to say 'I didn't know of this injustice' and afterwards, 'who could see such a thing approaching?' And then to do it all over again."

○

American Inequality Creates the Fascism We Fight Against by Lee Camp

. .

See if you can answer the following if / then statement without the help of a calculator, tape measure or quaaludes:

If inequality, then instability.

If instability, then _____ .

I assume everybody remembers “if / then” statements from middle school? One day your jaded teacher, who had clearly just had some sort of relationship issue, walked into the room and said, “Class, it works like this: IF Tom is a good-looking man, THEN he is a pedophile. …That will be on the exam, so write it down!”

The Last Act of the Human Comedy by Chris Hedges

There is nothing new to our story. The flagrant lies and imbecilities of the inept and corrupt leader.
The inability to halt the costly, endless wars and curb the gargantuan expenditures on the military.
 The looting of a beleaguered populace by the rich. The destruction of the ecosystem. The decay and abandonment of a once-efficient infrastructure. The implosion of the institutions, from education to diplomacy, that sustain a functioning state. The world has seen it before. It is the familiar disease of the end of a civilization. At first it is grimly entertaining, even amid the mounting suffering. But no one will be laughing at the end.

The Chosen One -- From Pat Robertson and The 700 Club to Donald Trump the Christian Fascist

.

Terry Heaton was a television news executive for The Christian Broadcasting Network during the 1980s where he worked primarily on "The 700 Club". Heaton also served as one of Pat Robertson's advisers during his 1988 presidential campaign.

He is the author of several books including his most recent, "The Gospel of Self: How Jesus Joined the GOP".

Heaton explains how right-wing Christian Evangelicals have come to worship and love Donald Trump, a man who is an unapologetic sinner. Heaton also offers insights on how there is a direct connection between the Christian Broadcasting Network and Christian Nationalists such as Pat Robertson (who ran for president in 1988) and Fox News and Donald Trump’s rise to power and their taking over the Republican Party and its voters. Heaton also warns about the power and influence of Pat Robertson and his “shadow government” of right-wing Christian Evangelicals and their decades-long campaign to overthrow secular democracy