Musings

 “One can fight evil but against stupidity one is helpless… I have accepted the fact, hard as it may be, that human beings are inclined to behave in ways that would make animals blush. The ironic, the tragic thing is that we often behave in ignoble fashion from what we consider the highest motives. The animal makes no excuse for killing his prey; the human animal, on the other hand, can invoke God’s blessing when massacring his fellow men. He forgets that God is not on his side but at his side.”

~ Henry Miller from On Turning Eighty, which is a wonderfully fascinating read on the perspective that 80 years gives you.

Evangelicals Love Donald Trump for Many Reasons, But One of Them Is Especially Terrifying by Stephanie Mencime

 Source: Mother Jones

The enemies of Israel have unleashed a massive air attack on the Promised Land. Hundreds of fighter jets streak across the sky. But before Israel can be destroyed, fire rains from the heavens and the enemy jets explode in mid-air with no explanation. Hailstones the size of golf balls follow the fire. The ground shakes. Birds pick clean the bodies of the fallen attackers. The enemy is vanquished without a single Israeli casualty, and the country is saved.

These are some of the opening scenes of the bestselling 1995 book Left Behind: A Novel of the Earth’s Last Days, by Jerry B. Jenkins and the late evangelical minister Tim LaHaye. But don’t mistake this scenario for a mere action sequence: It’s based on the war of Gog and Magog, a biblical conflict prophesied in the Book of Ezekiel. In the Bible, Gog is the leader of Magog, a “place in the far north” that many evangelicals believe is Russia. According to Ezekiel’s prophecy, Gog will join with Persia—now Iran—and other Arab nations to attack a peaceful Israel “like a cloud that covers the land.” LaHaye, like many evangelicals, believed this battle would bring on the Rapture, the End Times event when God spirits away the good Christians to heaven before unleashing plagues, sickness, and other horrors on the unbelievers remaining on Earth. Meanwhile, the Antichrist reigns supreme.

Division, Reaction and the Nativist Style in American Politics

Journalist Daniel Denvir explores nativism as an organizing principle of American politics - from the enduring mechanisms of exclusion dating back to the nation's origins as settler colonialist project, to the modern uses of anti-immigrant policies in service of capitalist and imperial profit, and against the interests of the working class on both sides of the border.

Check out his book All-American Nativism: How the Bipartisan War on Immigrants Explains Politics as We Know It

White Right: Meeting the Enemy

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Activist and filmmaker Deeyah Khan attempts to extract a sense of humanity from the dark heart of racism in White Right: Meeting the Enemy, a documentary that places her in the center of the violent extremist movement in America.

Following a similar expose, Khan received a flurry of vitriolic and threatening messages. For this project, she sets out to face down this hate head-on by sitting across from a variety of members from extreme far-right and white nationalist organizations. She wants to understand the origins of their hatred.
A Muslim feminist, her presence alone is enough to make her interview subjects squirm. After all, in their minds, she represents their diminishing superiority in American society.

One of these subjects is Jeff Schoep, who at the time of the filming served as the leader of one of the most popular Neo Nazis groups in the country. The setting of their meeting is Charlottesville, Virginia on the eve of the Unite the Right Rally - the demonstration that turned fatal in August of 2017.

Schoep provides a tour of his crumbling hometown, and expresses his opinions on the detrimental economic impact that more open immigration policies pose to the white race. Later in the film, Khan interviews alt-right leader and noted white supremacist Richard Spencer.

These interviews are not staged as bitter confrontations. Kahn allows each of her subjects the opportunity to freely share their views, but is always ready to point out the inconsistencies and flaws in their belief system. Some of these subjects wither in the face of reasoned opposition, others double down on their sense of entitlement, and one even resigns from his life in the white nationalist movement after witnessing firsthand the threats that are thrown her way in the process of filming.

The threat of aggression is always present - from the frontlines of the Charlottesville protests to the training of National Socialist Movement members in the hills of Tennessee.

White Right: Meeting the Enemy breaks down the impersonal barriers that separate the aggressors from their imagined enemies. The film raises the hope that face-to-face interaction and open communication may hold the key to dissolving the scourge of racism.

Cornel West on Social Justice, Political Discourse and Trump

Steve Adubato sits down with Cornel West, professor, philosopher, author & activist & discusses social justice in education, the importance of civil political discourse, the leadership styles of President Obama and President Trump and the election outlook for 2020. Very thought-provoking!

Martin Luther King - The Three Evils of Society

 


Still RELEVANT...America has learned very little since this prophetic speech!

Musings

The Execution of Martin Luther King

If people only knew the true history of their nation.....

Noam Chomsky: America Has Built a Global Dystopia Pt. 1

Noam Chomsky - prophet, gadfly, polemicist. Listen to this man!

How Democracies Die by Chris Hedges

Source: Truthdig

Leo Tolstoy wrote that happy families are all alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. So too with failed democracies. There is no one route to the dissolution of the open society, but the patterns are familiar, whether in ancient Athens, the Roman Republic or the collapse of the democracies in Italy and the Weimar Republic in Germany that led to fascism. The ills that beset Germany and Italy in the 1930s are sadly familiar to us—an ineffectual political system, a retreat by huge sectors of the population into a world where facts and opinions are interchangeable, the seizure of national economies by international banks, and global finance capital that has forced larger and larger segments of society into a subsistence existence, obliterating hope for the future. We too suffer from an epidemic of nihilistic violence, one that has included mass shootings and domestic terrorism. There is a rapacious and out-of-control militarism. Betrayed citizens, as in the 1930s, harbor an inchoate hatred for a ruling elite that is mired in corruption while it mouths empty platitudes about liberal, democratic values. There is a desperate yearning for a cult leader or demagogue who will exact vengeance on those who have betrayed us and usher in a return to a mythical past and lost glory.

The End of American Empire Won't Be Pretty by Tom Engelhardt

Yes, our infrastructure stinks, our schools are failing, this country’s a nightmare of inequality, and there’s a self-promoting madman in the White House, so isn’t it time to take pride in the rare institutional victories America has had in this century? Arguably, none has been more striking than the triumphal success of the American war system.

Oh, you’re going to bring that up immediately? Okay, you’re right. It’s true enough that the U.S. military can’t win a war anymore. In this century, it’s never come out on top anywhere, not once, not definitively. And yes, just to get a step ahead of you, everywhere it’s set foot across the Greater Middle East and Africa, it seems to have killed startling numbers of people and uprooted so many more, sending lots of them into exile and so unsettling other parts of the world as well. In the process, it’s also had remarkable success spreading failed states and terror groups far and wide.

Musings

 

"....our enemies are not in the poorest countries on the planet but right here in the richest one.."

In the Age of AI

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This riveting documentary explores how artificial intelligence is changing life as we know it — from jobs to privacy to a growing rivalry between the U.S. and China. It impressively investigates the promise and perils of AI and automation, tracing a new industrial revolution that will reshape and disrupt our world, and allow the emergence of a surveillance society -- & a more polarized, fractious world.

A Cautionary Note: When White Supremacists Overthrew a Government

In November 1898, in Wilmington, North Carolina, a mob of 2,000 white men expelled black and white political leaders, destroyed the property of the city’s black residents, and killed dozens--if not hundreds--of people. How did such a turn of events change the course of the city? For decades, the story of this violence was buried, while the perpetrators were cast as heroes. Yet its impacts resonate across the state to this day.

 Know your history!

Farewell to a Warrior: William Greider (8/6/1936 - 12/25/2019)

 


Some gems from one of the finest journalists of the 20th century:


Democracy is held captive, not just by money, but by ideas - the ideas that money buys.

When self-important people and powerful institutions are governed by illusion, history has a way of biting back.

Creating a positive future begins in human conversation. The simplest and most powerful investment any member of a community or an organisation can make is to begin with other people as though the answers mattered.

The economy is not governed with the bottom half in mind.

A profound political question is suddenly on the table: Must the country continue to give precedence to private financial gain and market determinism over human lives and broad public values?

Democracy begins in human conversation. A democratic conversation does not require elaborate rules of procedure or utopian notions of perfect consensus. What it does require is a spirit of mutual respect-people conversing critically with one another in an atmosphere of honesty and shared regard.

Americans cannot teach democracy to the world until they restore their own.

The present struggle seems less about abolishing big government than about who gets to use it.

The rich nations of the world are acting like ancient usurers, lending money to the desperate poor on terms that cannot possibly be met and, thus, steadily acquiring more and more control over the lives and assets of the poor.

People know elections, like television commercials, are not real.

The quest for homeland security is heading ... toward the quasi-militarization of everyday life ... If danger might lurk anywhere, maybe everything must be protected and policed.

A society unwilling to confront its social reality in a timely manner is doomed to experience the consequences in later generations and possibly forever.

The Republican party is not a party of conservative ideology. It is a party of conservative clients. Whenever possible, the ideology will be invoked as justification for taking care of the clients’ needs. When the two are in conflict, the conservative principles are discarded and the clients are served.