The ruling elites, who grasp that the reigning ideology of global corporate capitalism and imperial expansion no longer has moral or intellectual credibility, have mounted a campaign to shut down the platforms given to their critics. The attacks within this campaign include blacklisting, censorship and slandering dissidents as foreign agents for Russia and purveyors of “fake news.”

Continue reading “The Silencing of Dissent by Chris Hedges”

March 2017 marks the 46th anniversary of a dramatic moment in U.S. history. On March 8, 1971—while Muhammad Ali was fighting Joe Frazier at Madison Square Garden, and as millions sat glued to their TVs watching the bout unfold—a group of peace activists broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, and stole every document they could find.

Keith Forsyth, one of the people who broke in, explained on Democracy Now!:

I was spending as much time as I could with organizing against the war, but I had become very frustrated with legal protest. The war was escalating and not de-escalating. And I think what really pushed me over the edge was, shortly after the invasion of Cambodia, there were four students killed at Kent State and two more killed at Jackson State. And that really pushed me over the edge, that it was time to do more than just protest.

Continue reading “Why We Should Teach About the FBI’s War on the Civil Rights Movement by Ursula Wolfe-Rocca”

Carl Sagan reading from his book “The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark“

Equifax, the oldest credit reporting company in the United States, was hacked in July, compromising the personal information of 143 million people. Earlier this month, the multibillion-dollar organization announced the massive data breach to the public. The slow response to the stolen information has drawn criticism  from members of Congress, state attorneys general and everyday people. This is just pathetic. This country is becoming toast in more ways than you can imagine.

Donald Trump tweets a hell of a lot! Many judge him to be unfit for office partially based on the the inaccuracies & child-like quality of his tweets. Behind this weird spectacle are things that fly under the radar. This dark soul is orchestrating the slow destruction of a nation. Here are a few things many people are not aware of:

Continue reading “The Destruction So Far”

On any given day we’re lied to from 10 to 200 times, and the clues to detect those lies can be subtle and counter-intuitive. Pamela Meyer, author of Liespotting, shows the manners and “hotspots” used by those trained to recognize deception — and she argues honesty is a value worth preserving.

Try telling that to the insane clown posse in the White House!

How many times will we rebuild Florida’s cities, Houston, coastal New Jersey, New Orleans and other population centers ravaged by storms lethally intensified by global warming? At what point, surveying the devastation and knowing more is inevitable, will we walk away, leaving behind vast coastal dead zones? Will we retreat even further into magical thinking to cope with the fury we have unleashed from the natural world? Or will we respond rationally and radically alter our relationship to this earth that gives us life?

Continue reading “The Great Flood by Chris Hedges”

Houston didn’t need to be warned. The city had already been sunk by four major hurricanes, each less powerful than Harvey, in the last 80 years. Generational storms. But boomtowns have short memories. After each epochal deluge, Houston rebuilt on the ruins. Rebuilt in a Texas way: Bigger. Brasher. Gaudier. Rebuilt on the very same vulnerable grounds. In the same pathway of destruction.

Continue reading “Chronicle of a Flood Foretold by Jeffrey St. Clair”

There is an ancient and well-kept secret to happiness which the Great Ones have known for centuries. They rarely talk about it, but they use it all the time, and it is fundamental to good mental health. This secret is called The Fine Art of Not Being Offended.

Continue reading “How to Not Be Offended by Shemsi Prinzivalli”

Internet-enabled devices are so common, and so vulnerable, that hackers recently broke into a casino through its fish tank. The tank had internet-connected sensors measuring its temperature and cleanliness. The hackers got into the fish tank’s sensors and then to the computer used to control them, and from there to other parts of the casino’s network. The intruders were able to copy 10 gigabytes of data to somewhere in Finland.

Continue reading “The ‘Internet of Things’ is Sending Us Back to the Middle Ages by Joshua A.T. Fairfield”

As the Obama presidency drew to a close, it became clear that the post-racial democracy it was supposed to inaugurate did not materialize. But during the last eight years something very important emerged in the way race is discussed in America: the foregrounding of whiteness. From discussions of diversity on campus and white appropriation of black culture to #OscarsSoWhite, “whiteness” as a cultural and social category has become a subject for scrutiny and criticism in ways that “blackness” was in years past.

Continue reading “White Rage: Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide by Jesse McCarthy”

One day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an iPhone since she was 11—sounding as if she’d just woken up. We chatted about her favorite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do with her friends. “We go to the mall,” she said. “Do your parents drop you off?,” I asked, recalling my own middle-school days, in the 1980s, when I’d enjoy a few parent-free hours shopping with my friends. “No—I go with my family,” she replied. “We’ll go with my mom and brothers and walk a little behind them. I just have to tell my mom where we’re going. I have to check in every hour or every 30 minutes.”

Continue reading “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation? by Jean M. Twenge”

The opioid crisis, the frequent mass shootings, the rising rates of suicide, especially among middle-aged white males, the morbid obesity, the obsession with gambling, the investment of our emotional and intellectual life in tawdry spectacles and the allure of magical thinking, from the absurd promises of the Christian right to the belief that reality is never an impediment to our desires, are the pathologies of a diseased culture. They have risen from a decayed world where opportunity, which confers status, self-esteem and dignity, has dried up for most Americans. They are expressions of acute desperation and morbidity.

Continue reading “Diseases of Despair by Chris Hedges”

IT IS INSUFFICIENT TO STATE the obvious of Donald Trump: that he is a white man who would not be president were it not for this fact. With one immediate exception, Trump’s predecessors made their way to high office through the passive power of whiteness—that bloody heirloom which cannot ensure mastery of all events but can conjure a tailwind for most of them. Land theft and human plunder cleared the grounds for Trump’s forefathers and barred others from it. Once upon the field, these men became soldiers, statesmen, and scholars; held court in Paris; presided at Princeton; advanced into the Wilderness and then into the White House. Their individual triumphs made this exclusive party seem above America’s founding sins, and it was forgotten that the former was in fact bound to the latter, that all their victories had transpired on cleared grounds. No such elegant detachment can be attributed to Donald Trump—a president who, more than any other, has made the awful inheritance explicit.

Continue reading “The First White President by Ta-Nehisi Coates”

In this essay bell hooks (narrated by a male voice) offers a quick introduction to patriarchy and particularly the way it affects men. She draws on examples from her own life and from other writers. This essay comes from an older feminist perspective that has not taken into account the experiences or existence of trans, intersex, or gender-queer people; however we believe it still offers a useful understanding of patriarchy.
“Patriarchy is a political-social system that insists that males are inherently dominating, superior to everything and everyone deemed weak, especially females, and endowed with the right to dominate and rule over the weak and to maintain that dominance through various forms of psychological terrorism and violence. When my older brother and I were born with a year separating us in age, patriarchy determined how we would each be regarded by our parents. Both our parents believed in patriarchy; they had been taught patriarchal thinking through religion.
At church they had learned that God created man to rule the world and everything in it and that it was the work of women to help men perform these tasks, to obey, and to always assume a subordinate role in relation to a powerful man. They were taught that God was male. These teachings were reinforced in every institution they encountered– schools, courthouses, clubs, sports arenas, as well as churches. Embracing patriarchal thinking, like everyone else around them, they taught it to their children because it seemed like a “natural” way to organize life.”

Listen closely & teach another…

There has been a military coup in the United States and nobody noticed, least of all our president. Just when we were following the MSM down the Russian rabbit hole convinced that the deep state would eventually pull us out of this nose dive and perhaps even collude in the impeachment of the apricot-hued one, along come the Generals – Kelly, Mattis and McMaster – to join the other adult in the room, Rexxon Tillerson, to right the ship of state and navigate it back on track towards the end of the world.

Continue reading “Coup de Planète by John Davis”