. Kabir Helminski is a Shaikh of the Mevlevi Order of Sufis, which traces its inspiration to Jelaluddin Rumi. He now focuses on Sufi music, writing, teaching, and developing a program of spiritual education with an international team of scholars. You can tell the quality of someone’s heart by voice & presence sometimes. You can definitely…

We should be very grateful to Francesco Duina for his new book, Broke and Patriotic: Why Poor Americans Love Their Country. He begins with the following dilemma. The poor in the United States are in many ways worse off than in other wealthy countries, but they are more patriotic than are the poor in those other…

It’s the greatest con game of modern history, it’s happening right under your nose, and you’re the mark. It goes like this.

Neuroscientist Sarah-Jayne Blakemore explores the new scientific understanding of the teenage brain – as complex biological changes affecting how we perceive risk-taking, socialization and our own identities unfold, we lay the foundations for who we are and who we’ll become later in life. Sarah-Jayne is author of Inventing Ourselves: The Secret Life of the Teenage…

This speech is as relevant today as it was when Malcolm X delivered it on November 10, 1963, at the Northern Negro Grass Roots Leadership Conference. 55 years since Malcolm gave this speech, America is now headed by an unabashed white nationalist & settler revanchist. It’s not looking good, yet sadly, Malcolm’s description that the…

In an environment that is saturated with mass media propaganda, it can be hard to figure out which way’s up, let alone get an accurate read on what’s going on in the world. Here are a few tips I’ve learned which have given me a lot of clarity in seeing through the haze of spin…

    When the forces of destruction, hate, bigotry, greed, and violence rise into power, there are three things they steal before they plunder the treasury. Stopping them is where the struggle for life begins.

  Chauncey DeVega & Michael Eric Dyson     There is a lack of moral leadership in America. The country is like a wheel: racism, consumerism, celebrity-worship, violence at home and abroad, sexism, misogyny, anti-intellectualism, and extreme wealth and income inequality are like the spokes radiating outward from the moral vacuum at its center.

Donald Trump, the arch racist usurper of the Republican Party, is tearing the ruling class consensus to shreds, inflicting bigger shocks to the imperial system by accident, impulse and ignorance than any conceivable “progressive” elected U.S. president could achieve on purpose. In the space of a few weeks, Trump has 1) threatened to disrupt corporate global supply…

  This is an uncompromising and multi-faceted look at an epidemic that continues to claim tens of thousands of lives on a yearly basis.   

It’s no wonder that most Americans are clueless about why “their” country is feared and hated the world over. It remains unthinkable to this day, for example, that any respectable “mainstream” U.S. media outlet would tell the truth about why the United States atom-bombed the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As Gar Alperovitz and other historians have shown,…

  George Carlin (May 12, 1937 – June 22, 2008) was an American stand-up comedian, actor, author, and social critic. This quote is taken from his last stand up routine, “Life Is Worth Losing” (2005). To get the After Skool Graphic Novel visit their site- https://www.afterskool.net/  

  This very interestng video essay highlights our misconceptions about creativity. These misconceptions have led to many absurdities to include the notion that whites are creatively superior to other human populations.

    In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It is…

  “Enough is enough of this capitalist fraud..”

Based on Donald Trump’s public behavior, some of America and the world’s leading psychologists, psychiatrists and other clinicians have concluded that the president of the United States is mentally unwell. Trump appears, in their opinion, to suffer from malignant narcissism. He is also a compulsive liar who lacks empathy for his fellow human beings and shows…

  America is a police state. 2.3 million people are held in prison. People go to jail 11 million times a year. People go to jail most often without conviction of a crime. Many cannot afford to post bail and are caught in jail until their trial. 1 in 5 incarcerated people are in jail for a…

/     In this searing critique of the Trump presidency and the rise of authoritarianism in the U.S., Henry Giroux asks, How have we arrived here, and what can be done? In a discussion of events that ranges from the Administration’s ongoing attempts to repeal Obamacare and its anti-immigration policies and travel bans, to…

The marshmallow test is one of the most famous pieces of social-science research: Put a marshmallow in front of a child, tell her that she can have a second one if she can go 15 minutes without eating the first one, and then leave the room. Whether she’s patient enough to double her payout is…

America does what it wants. This is obvious, except it’s also monstrously unnerving. Let’s at least add some quote marks: “America” does what it wants — this secretly defined, self-obsessed, unelected entity that purports to be the United States of America, all 325 million of us, but is, in fact, a narrowly focused amalgam of…

W.E.B. Du Bois, more than any intellectual this nation produced in the first half of the 20th century, explained America to itself. He did this not only through what he called the “color line” but by exposing the intertwining of empire, capitalism and white supremacy. He deftly fused academic disciplines. He possessed unwavering integrity, a…

Institutions—governmental, religious, financial, even revolution itself—have a way of turning stale and sour. “Thank God for the history of the heretics and the blasphemers. That’s my crowd,” says Dr. Cornell West. Quoting from some of history and literature’s greatest thinkers and doers, West presents a poetic lecture on the role of hope in America’s past…

“I must learn to keep silent,” young André Gide resolved in his journal. But what kind of silence did he mean, exactly? In the 1972 masterwork Speaking and Language (public library), which became his last published work, the great twentieth-century novelist, poet, playwright, and psychotherapist Paul Goodman(September 9, 1911–August 2, 1972) — dubbed “the most influential man you’ve never heard of” —…

I’m a man chained by time Why am I judged all the time My world is bizarre My mind is gone mad Tired and dying I beg forgiveness I tear my heart to you I tell you what I feel I can feel but I can’t express So I m seen as ‘cold n feelingless’…

In Christopher Nolan’s captivating and visually dazzling film Inception, a practitioner of psychic corporate espionage must plant and idea inside a CEO’s head. The process is called inception, and it represents the frontier of corporate influence, in which mind spies no longer just “extract” ideas from the dreams of others, but seed useful ideas in…

Donald Trump is deliberately forcing millions of Americans into financial ruin, cruelly depriving them of food and other basic protections while lavishing vast riches on the super-wealthy, the United Nations monitor on poverty has warned. Philip Alston, the UN special rapporteur who acts as a watchdog on extreme poverty around the world, has issued a withering critique of the…

  “I am what I am because of who we all are.” – A definition offered by Liberian peace activist Leymah Gbowee.

Words always matter, but they often matter more when the odds are already against you. The freedom to express oneself is supposed to be protectively enshrined in the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. However, for some people this ideal has always been slippery. The freedom to speak our minds can easily transform into…

  The United States is “incapable of producing any results other than destruction and further fragmentation across staggeringly large parts of the planet,” argues Tom Engelhardt, author of A Nation Unmade by War. Since 1991, the US has been engaged in a misguided and destructive exercise of triumphalism. In this interview, Engelhardt discusses why the US…

  This knowledge seems rudimentary, and yet it’s not: The same ships that transported the “American dream” from 15th century Europe likewise delivered a nightmare to indigenous lands now known as America—a nightmare that would persist for centuries for millions of indigenous people, African slaves and their many descendants. But it was far beyond a…

  Tom Chi  is an inventor (he most recently served as head of product experience at Google X developing technology such as Google Glass and Google’s self-driving cars). coach & speaker and  .has worked in a wide range of roles from astrophysical researcher to Fortune 500 consultant to corporate executive developing new hardware/software products and…