Aldous Huxley on the dangers of being ‘caught by surprise by our own advancing technology’ This episode of PBS’s animated series Blank on Blank features an audio excerpt from a 1950 interview with the UK writer Aldous Huxley by the US reporter Mike Wallace. Using his landmark dystopian novel Brave New World (1932) as a starting point, Huxley warns of…

There is a shadowy group of Plutocrats running multinational corporations, controlling the media narrative, manipulating the money supply, influencing governments, generating chaos, and provoking wars in order to further their agendas. These people are very real and extremely dangerous. They operate in the shadows, safely out of the light of public scrutiny. They manage by…

  It’s a strange world of newspeak we live in. What was once a society devoted to logic and progress is now being herded in echo chambers of thought control and anti-critical thinking. Without the ability to examine an issue impartially and completely there is little hope of maintaining liberty and freedom, as history repeatedly demonstrated. Today,…

This meditation by Rupert Spira explores the empty, loving and unconditionally fulfilled aspects of our true nature.

There is almost unanimous agreement among climate scientists and organizations – that is, 97% of over 10,000 climate scientists and the various scientific organizations engaged in climate science research – that human beings have caused a dramatic increase in the amount of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide released into Earth’s atmosphere since the pre-industrial…

Last night a host of nonhuman neighbors paid me a visit. First, two gray foxes sauntered up, including an older female who lost her tail to a leghold trap six or seven years ago. They trotted back into a thicker part of the forest, and a few minutes later a raccoon ambled forward. After he…

Put down your phone and wake up!

Climate scientist Michael Mann says that, under a business-as-usual scenario, the mass displacement of billions could trigger an unprecedented national security crisis. Why isn’t this considered a top news item in the mainstream media? It blows my mind that folks are being distracted & hoodwinked by a clown in the White House & corporate news…

  To grasp what is going on in the world right now, we need to reflect on two things. One is that we are in a phase of trial runs. The other is that what is being trialled is fascism – a word that should be used carefully but not shirked when it is so…

Historian Lilian Calles Barger explores the legacy of liberation theology – as a critique of Christianity under capitalism, a challenge to the conditions of inequality and oppression faced by poor and working class people, and as a resurgent movement with the power to propel social movements today and tomorrow. “People have a very strong sense…

Political power—armed central authority, with states and war— is it part of human nature? Is it necessary for human community? Or is it a tool that ruling elites use to live at the community’s expense? A tool that does violence to human nature and the world? Engines of Domination offers a theory of political power…

Who’s ready for revolution?  

Let his words fill you…..

  Lee Billings @ Scientific American:  “Much has been written about the Anthropocene—a proposed new division of geologic time in which humans are a dominant force for planetary change: When did it begin? How might it unfold? And can we, the supposed masters of Earth, actually use our powers to make our planet a better…

  With thousands of advertisements seen by Americans everyday, and a corporate media that reinforces the needs of Empire, propaganda in the U.S. is more pervasive and effective than ever before. The manipulation of public opinion through suggestion can be traced back to the father of modern propaganda, Edward Bernays, who discovered that preying on…

On Creating Enmity:  Surely that thing which you fight you become. If I am angry and you meet me with anger what is the result? More anger. You have become that which I am. If I am evil and you fight me with evil means then you also become evil, however righteous you may feel….

For the past 25 years acclaimed photographer and filmmaker Lauren Greenfield (The Queen of Versailles, Thin, kids+money, #likeagirl) has traveled the world, documenting with ethnographic precision and an artist’s sensitivity a vast range of cultural movements and moments. Yet, after so much seeking and searching, she realized that much of her work pointed at one…

https://www.democracynow.org/embed/story/2018/8/1/a_threat_to_global_democracy_how “Black Elevation.” “Mindful Being.” “Resisters.” “Aztlan Warriors.” Those are the names of some of the accounts removed from Facebook and Instagram Tuesday (7/31/18) after Facebook uncovered a plot to covertly influence the midterm elections. The tech giant said 32 fake accounts and Facebook pages were involved in “coordinated inauthentic behavior.” This announcement comes just…

The most ominous danger we face does not come from the eradication of free speech through the obliteration of net neutrality or through Google algorithms that steer people away from dissident, left-wing, progressive or anti-war sites. It does not come from a tax bill that abandons all pretense of fiscal responsibility to enrich corporations and…

In addition to padding the bottom lines of America’s largest corporations by cutting their taxes and eliminating scores of longstanding regulations, President Donald Trump is also protecting major companies’ profits by refusing to punish them for ripping off consumers and trampling federal rules that safeguard the planet. That is the central conclusion of a new Public Citizen analysis…

In the past, some prominent psychologists have explained President Donald Trump’s unwavering support by alluding to a well-established psychological phenomenon known as the “Dunning-Kruger effect.” The effect is a type of cognitive bias, where people with little expertise or ability assume they have superior expertise or ability. This overestimation occurs as a result of the fact that they don’t…

Neoliberalism is an economic ideology that exists within the framework of capitalism. Over four decades ago, neoliberalism become the dominant economic paradigm of global society. This video presents the history of neoliberalism, starting with a survey of neoliberal philosophy and research, a historical reconstruction of the movement pushing for neoliberal policy solutions, witnessing the damage…

“You shouldn’t have to convince people to go to paradise,” –Shelton Johnson, Ranger, Yosemite National Park Speaking in front of a group of African American visitors, Yosemite National Park Ranger Shelton Johnson poses as a sergeant of the Ninth Cavalry Regiment of the United States Army, or one of the “Buffalo Soldiers” who protected settlers…

An evil telemarketing company, a corporation making millions off of slave labor, and one Oakland man at the center of it all who discovers a secret that threatens all of humankind. Boots Riley’s “Sorry to Bother You” is the dystopian social satire being hailed as one of the best movies of the summer. The film’s…

  Post industrial mankind’s fascination with material progress has, since the industrial revolution, played the dominant role in the direction taken by Westernised societies. ‘The machine’, along with the material and financial wealth necessary to own and operate it, has steadily subsumed more human centred values that preceded its dominance. Fascination with so-called modern technologies…

Writer Cyrus Farivar explains why yesterday’s privacy laws are no match for today’s surveillance technology – as our devices generate massive quantities of data on our locations and activity, a patchwork of 20th century laws and 21st century workarounds from corporations and the state expose us to the threat of perfect, secret surveillance. Cyrus is…

  “Trump supporters see themselves as a distinct and independent force in the nation — the saviors of America, in their diseased minds — and they now hate the Democratic Party in a far deeper way than before.” So this is what we can look forward to in the long twilight of a shrinking U.S. empire:…

  Journalist Howard Bryant explores the protest politics of Black athletes in America – as a historical committment of the country’s highest profile Black workers towards the communities that raised them, and the subject of intense backlash from an ownership class pushing sports, and culture at large, towards unquestioning authoritarianism. Howard is the author of The…

. While the crash of 2008 unleashed panic on Wall Street and in seats of power worldwide, not much has been done to remedy its causes. In 2010, President Barack Obama signed the Dodd-Frank Act, expanding government oversight of the U.S. financial system, designed to safeguard against future collapse. But in May, President Donald Trump signed…

By the final decade of the 19th century, the American project sanctified as Manifest Destiny was complete. The western boundary of the United States now stretched to the Pacific Ocean, leaving in its wake the genocide of Native Americans, the purchase of Louisiana without the consent of the governed, and a war of aggression against Mexico. What…