Jun 24, 2014

Being Patient

(the patience of our Mother)








Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.


Have patience. All things are difficult before they become easy.

Patience - the gift of being able to see past the emotion.

Patience is a kind of love. A love that is its own explanation in bewildered circumstance. It is an old, old woman placing a wrinkled-parchment hand against the cheek of a reckless child. Because her heart is too wise to make room for reproach. Too full to find place for offense.

Patience is the companion of wisdom

A moment of patience in a moment of anger can help us avoid a thousand moments of sorrow

Lack of patience in small matters can create havoc in great ones


I think all college students, maybe before college even, but certainly by college, should read 'Letters to a Young Poet.' It cuts through to the heart of what's of value in life. To really be true to your own spirit. To be awake and develop patience so that you truly understand what it is you're trying to do, desire, and who in fact you really are.

Patience: To wait with certainity; the art of allowing life to carry you

The practice of patience toward one another, the overlooking of one another's defects, and the bearing of one another's burdens is the most elementary condition of all human and social activity in the family, in the professions, and in society

Great difficulties may be surmounted by patience and perseverance.

Have patience with all things, but chiefly have patience with yourself. Do not lose courage in considering your own imperfections, but instantly set about remedying them—every day begin the task anew.

Rivers know this: There is no hurry. We shall get there.


Our patience will achieve more than our force.


I have seen many storms in my life. Most storms have caught me by surprise, so I had to learn very quickly to look further and understand that I am not capable of controlling the weather, to exercise the art of patience and to respect the fury of nature.
Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.


The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.


I have just three things to teach: simplicity, patience, compassion. These three are your greatest treasures.


I learned patience, perseverance, and dedication. Now I really know myself, and I know my voice. It's a voice of pain and victory.


OneLove

:::MME:::

The Ghoulish Face of Empire by Chris Hedges




The black-clad fighters of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, sweeping a collapsing army and terrified Iraqis before them as they advance toward Baghdad, reflect back to us the ghoulish face of American empire. They are the specters of the hundreds of thousands of people we murdered in our deluded quest to remake the Middle East. They are ghosts from the innumerable roadsides and villages where U.S. soldiers and Marines, jolted by explosions of improvised explosive devices, responded with indiscriminate fire. They are the risen remains of the dismembered Iraqis left behind by blasts of Hellfire and cruise missiles, howitzers, grenade launchers and drone strikes. They are the avengers of the gruesome torture and the sexual debasement that often came with being detained by American troops. They are the final answer to the collective humiliation of an occupied country, the logical outcome of Shock and Awe, the Frankenstein monster stitched together from the body parts we left scattered on the ground. They are what we get for the $4 trillion we wasted on the Iraq War. 

The language of violence engenders violence. The language of hate engenders hate. “I and the public know what all schoolchildren learn,” W.H. Auden wrote. “Those to whom evil is done do evil in return.” It is as old as the Bible.
There is no fight left in us. The war is over. We destroyed Iraq as a unified country. It will never be put back together. We are reduced—in what must be an act of divine justice decreed by the gods, whom we have discovered to our dismay are Islamic—to pleading with Iran for military assistance to shield the corrupt and despised U.S. protectorate led by Nouri al-Maliki. We are not, as we thought when we entered Iraq, the omnipotent superpower able in a swift and brutal stroke to bend a people to our will. We are something else. Fools and murderers. Blinded by hubris. Faded relics of the Cold War. And now, in the final act of the play, we are crawling away. Our empire is dying.
We should have heeded, while we had a chance, the wails of mothers and fathers. We should have listened to the cries of the wounded. We should have wept over the bodies of Iraqi children lined up in neat rows in the morgues. We should have honored grief so we could honor life. But the dance of death is intoxicating. Once it begins you whirl in an ecstatic frenzy. Death’s embrace, which feels at first like sexual lust, tightens and tightens until you suffocate. Now the music has stopped. All we have left are loss and pain.

And where are the voices of sanity? Why are the cheerleaders of slaughter, who have been wrong about Iraq since before the invasion, still urging us toward ruin? Why are those who destabilized Iraq and the region in the worst strategic blunder in American history still given a hearing? Why do we listen to simpletons and morons?
They bang their fists. They yell. They throw tantrums. They demand that the world conform to their childish vision. It is as if they have learned nothing from the 11 years of useless slaughter. As if they can dominate that which they never had the power to dominate.
I sat in a restaurant Thursday in Boston’s Kenmore Square with military historian Andrew Bacevich. You won’t hear his voice much on the airwaves. He is an apostate. He speaks of the world as it is, not the self-delusional world our empire builders expect it to be. He knows war with a painful intimacy, not only as a Vietnam combat veteran and a retired Army colonel but also as the father of a U.S. Army officer killed in a 2007 suicide bombing in Iraq.
“In the 1990s there was a considerable effort made in the military, but also in the larger community of national security experts scratching their heads and [asking] what are the implications of all this technology,” he said. “They conceived of something called the Revolution in Military Affairs—RMA. If you believed in the Revolution of Military Affairs you knew that nothing could stop the United States military when it engaged in a conflict. Victory was, for all practical purposes, a certainty. People like Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, and I expect Dick Cheney also, bought this hook, line and sinker. You put yourself in their shoes in the wake of 9/11. An attack comes out of Afghanistan, a country frankly nobody cares about, and you conceive of this grand strategy of trying to transform the Islamic world. Where are we going to start? We are going to start by attacking a country [Iraq]—we had it under surveillance and sanctions for the past decade—where there is a bona fide bad guy to make a moral case and where we are confident we can make short work of this adversary, a further demonstration that the American military cannot be stopped. They utterly and totally miscalculated. Iraq is falling apart. And many of these people, either in government or outside of government, who were proponents of the war are now advocating for a resumption of the American war. Not one of them is willing to acknowledge the extent of that military miscalculation. Once you acknowledge it, then the whole project of militarizing U.S. policy towards the Greater Middle East collapses.”
Bacevich blames the concentration of power into the hands of the executive branch for the debacle. He said that since the Kennedy administration “the incoming president and his team, it does not matter which party, see the permanent government as a problem. If we [the new officials] are going to get done what we want to get done we have to find ways to marginalize the permanent government. This has led to the centralization of authority in the White House and means decisions are made by a very small number of people. The consultation becomes increasingly informal, to the point it is not even documented.”
“I do not think we even know when the decision to go to war with Iraq was actually made,” Bacevich said. “There is no documented meeting where [President George W.] Bush sat down with how many people—six, 10, 25—and said, ‘Let’s vote.’ The decision kind of emerged and therefore was implemented. Why would you operate that way? You would operate that way if you viewed the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, the CIA and the State Department as, in a sense, the enemy.”
“The invasion of Iraq was intended to be a catalyst,” he said. “It was supposed to be the catalyst that would enable us ... to change the region. It turned out to be the catalyst that resulted in destabilization. The big question of the moment is not what can we do or is there anything we can do to salvage Iraq. The question is to what degree have our actions resulted in this larger regional mayhem. And to the extent they have, isn’t it time to rethink fundamentally our expectations of what American power, and particularly American military power, can achieve?”
“We need to take a radically different course,” Bacevich said. “There is an analogy to be made with Great Britain in the wake of World War I. It was in World War I that Britain and France collaborated to dismantle the Ottoman Empire to create the new Middle East. While on the one hand there was an awareness that Britain was in decline, at the level where policy was made there was not a willingness to consider the implications of that fact. It took World War II to drive it home—that the [British] empire was doomed. I think that is where we are.”
Out of this decline, Bacevich said, is emerging a multipolar order. The United States will no longer be able to operate as an unchallenged superpower. But, he said, similar to the condition that existed as the British Empire took its last gasps, “there is very little willingness in Washington or in policy circles to take on board the implications multipolarity would call for in terms of adjusting our policy.”
The inability to adjust to our declining power means that the United States will continue to squander its resources, its money and its military.
“By squandering power we forfeit our influence because we look stupid and we bankrupt ourselves,” Bacevich said. “We will spend $4 trillion, not dollars spent in the moment but dollars we will have spent the last time the last Afghanistan veteran gets his last VA check. That money is gone forever. It is concealed because in the Bush administration’s confidence that victory would be easily won the government did not bother to mobilize the country or increase our taxes. We weaken ourselves economically. People complain about our crappy infrastructure. Give me $4 trillion and I probably could have fixed a couple of bridges. And we must never forget the human cost. Lives lost, lives damaged. And in these two wars [Afghanistan and Iraq] there does seem to be this increase in PTSD that we don’t know what to do about. It is a squandering of human capital.”
Bacevich said the “military mind-set” has so infected the discourse of the power elite that when there is a foreign policy problem the usual response is to discuss “three different courses of military action. ... Should it be airstrikes with drones? Should it be airstrikes with manned aircraft? Special operations forces? Or some combination of all three? And that’s what you get.” The press, he said, is an “echo chamber and reinforces the notion that those are the [only] options.”
The disintegration of Iraq is irreversible. At best, the Kurds, the Shiites and the Sunnis will carve out antagonistic enclaves. At worst, there will be a protracted civil war. This is what we have bequeathed to Iraq. The spread of our military through the region has inflamed jihadists across the Arab world. The resulting conflicts will continue until we end our occupation of the Middle East. The callous slaughter we deliver is no different from the callous slaughter we receive. Our jihadists—George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, Thomas Friedman and Tommy Franks—who assured us that swift and overwhelming force in Iraq would transform the Middle East into an American outpost of progress, are no less demented than the jihadists approaching Baghdad. These two groups of killers mirror each other. This is what we have spawned. And this is what we deserve.

                                                         *********

OneLove

:::MME:::

Jun 22, 2014

William Kamkwamba: 'How I Harnessed the Wind'


Inspiring... 

 OneLove

 :::MME:::

Poet's Nook: "Wakeup Calling" by Aaron Hoopes




 


humanity rages
destruction in stages
of everything under the sun

the birds and the bees
the rivers and trees
it seems like the end has begun

a population of people
turned into sheeple
conditioned to crave more and more

life based on greed
want, desire and need
leads to nothing but war

the planet is dying
the animals crying
the forests all being cut down

the climate is hot
except when it’s not 
and some say we’re all going to drown

living in fear
something is near
now we are all scared to death

chaos and change
can often feel strange
please just take a deep breath

we eat poison foods
take meds for our moods
we’re so ill we cannot take action

to keep us asleep
the tendrils run deep
with all manner of lies and distraction

we cut the tops off the hills
down below oil spills
for us to progress, it is said

it’s hard not to believe
if we do not grieve
soon we all will be dead

so what can we do
just me and you
to turn this whole thing around?

one way to recall
our connection to all
is to put our bare feet on the ground

now feel the Earth
remember its worth
let the energy run through your soul

look deep in your heart
that’s where you start
to connect yourself to the whole

this cannot be solved
if you don’t get involved
start now, there’s no time to wait

change how you’re living
stop taking, start giving
please, before it’s too late

and so there you are
if you’ve made it this far
three last things I will say if I may

begin with a bow
stay here in the now
and remember to breathe every day


OneLove

:::MME:::

‘That is total bullsh*t!’: Glenn Greenwald Mops The Floor With Iraq War Vet

 


I admire Glenn Greenwald's courage & convictions. Snowden's leak was much needed medicine for a brainwashed nation. Check out his website The Intercept

OneLove

:::MME:::

Jun 19, 2014

Soul Murder and the Profound Brokenness of Human Culture by Robert C. Koehler





All men are created equal. All chattel are insured.

I saw the movie Belle the other day and a piece of it got stuck in my head. The costume drama, set in England in the 1780s, hinged on a real historical event: the monstrous voyage of the slave ship Zong in 1781, from West Africa to the Caribbean. Its cargo when it set out on its transatlantic voyage included some 470 tightly packed human beings — too tightly packed, it turns out. Disease ran through the cargo hold. Slaves and crewmen began to die. The ship got lost. They began running low on water. Eventually the surviving crew jettisoned . . . 132 live humans, still in chains. This was business as usual.

Marcus Rediker, author of The Slave Ship: A Human History, wrote in the Los Angeles Times in 2008, commemorating the bicentennial of the official end of the slave trade in the British Empire: “Over almost four centuries, from roughly 1500 to 1870, 12 million to 13 million Africans were forced onto slave ships and sailed to New World plantations. . . . We know that during the middle passage, about 1.8 million of these enslaved men, women and children died, their bodies thrown overboard to the sharks that usually trailed the vessels.”

Uh, we don’t talk about this too much, do we? The era in question is the glorious Age of Exploration, when Europe went out and discovered the rest of the world. In the classrooms of my childhood, they taught us about the silk trade and the noble quest for new sea routes and that sort of thing. Go, civilization! I remember no unpleasant disclosures about the rape of Africa or the profit to be made by Europe’s upper classes in human trafficking.

Belle’s plot, though it involves fictionalized characters, addresses the real court case that followed the Zong’s arrival in Jamaica. This case was not about the murder of 132 people but whether or not the ship’s owners could collect insurance on the loss of 132 slaves.

Eventually the case was heard before the highest court in Great Britain. In a historically significant decision, William Murray, Lord Chief Justice of the King’s Bench, ruled in favor of the insurance company: No, the insurers weren’t obliged to pay cash for deliberately discarded slaves. The British abolition movement was ignited by this trial and abolitionists saw the ruling as a great victory.
And so it all sits in history. But the movie, wrapping the historical details in period costumes and a fictional love story, managed to pull off a remarkable feat, in my humble opinion. It brought the Zong and all its implications smack into the 21st century, not abstractly, as history, but with a raw and terrifying contemporary relevance. We’re not done with our past.

As Rediker wrote in his essay: “. . . if European, African and American societies are haunted by the legacies of race, class and slavery, the slave ship is the ghost ship of our modern consciousness.”

The discarded cargo of our past is still with us, no matter how hard we try to ignore it. The slavery out of which we constructed civilization — the cruel certainty of our moral relativism, the enormous profit, the buried psycho-spiritual consequences — awaits, awaits, awaits . . . our collective grief and atonement.

They had single names, like our pets: Jim and Jack, Winney and Zach, Congo and Chloe. They were meant to be worked to death and forgotten. But they remain with us, deeply embedded in the collective consciousness of our global culture, staring at its soul.

In refusing to take up a criminal case against the captain and crew of the Zong, Justice John Lee, British solicitor general, reputedly said: “What is this claim that human people have been thrown overboard? This is a case of chattels or goods. Blacks are goods and property; it is madness to accuse these well-serving honorable men of murder. . . . The case is the same as if wood had been thrown overboard.”

This is our legacy, as much as and perhaps more than whatever else has shaped us. Historian Nell Painter has used the term “soul murder” in describing the impact of slavery. Indeed, she is the author of the book Soul Murder and Slavery. Interviewed some years ago by PBS, she talked about the terrible psychological wreckage on every side of slave life.

Speaking of the children of plantation owners, who at a certain age would be forced to observe slave beatings, she noted that the girls could retain at least partial identification, as females, with the victim. “But the boy must learn to identify with the beater,” she said. “If he doesn’t, then he’s not fully a man. So that makes the ability to inflict violence an integral part of one’s manhood.”

Do we not continue to reap these consequences? This week, at a high school in Troutdale, Ore., a 15-year-old boy “opened fire with an AR-15-style rifle and also was carrying a semi-automatic pistol that he did not use, as well as a knife and nine loaded ammunition magazines capable of holding several hundred rounds,” according to Reuters.

Ho hum. This insanity is on the increase, as everyone knows. It’s an imitation of militarism, but there’s more to it than that. We’ve barely begun to acknowledge, let alone heal, the profound brokenness of human culture. We’re still lost in the Age of Exploration.

                                                                   **************


OneLove

:::MME:::

Jun 18, 2014

The End Of All Of Us: Washington Is Beating The War Drums by Dr. Paul Craig Roberts





I wish I had only good news to bring to readers, or even one item of good news. Alas, goodness has ceased to be a feature of US policy and simply cannot be found in any words or deeds emanating from Washington or the capitals of its European vassal states. The Western World has succumbed to evil.
 
In an article published by Op-Ed News, Eric Zuesse supports my reports of indications that Washington is preparing for a nuclear first strike against Russia. 

US war doctrine has been changed. US nuclear weapons are no longer restricted to a retaliatory force, but have been elevated to the role of preemptive nuclear attack. Washington pulled out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Russia and is developing and deploying an ABM shield. Washington is demonizing Russia and Russia’s President with shameless lies and propaganda, thus preparing the populations of the US and its client states for war with Russia. 

Washington has been convinced by neoconservatives that Russian strategic nuclear forces are in run down and unprepared condition and are sitting ducks for attack. This false belief is based on out-of-date information, a decade old, such as the argument presented in “The Rise of U.S. Nuclear Primacy” by Keir A. Lieber and Daryl G. Press in the April 2006 issue of Foreign Affairs, a publication of the Council on Foreign Relations, an organization of American elites.
Regardless of the condition of Russian nuclear forces, the success of Washington’s first strike and degree of protection provided by Washington’s ABM shield against retaliation, the article I posted by Steven Starr, “The Lethality of Nuclear Weapons,” makes clear that nuclear war has no winners. Everyone dies.

In an article published in the December 2008 issue of Physics Today, three atmospheric scientists point out that even the substantial reduction in nuclear arsenals that the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty hoped to achieve, from 70,000 warheads in 1986 to 1700-2200 warheads by the end of 2012, did not reduce the threat that nuclear war presents to life on earth. The authors conclude that in addition to the direct blast effects of hundreds of millions of human fatalities, “the indirect effects would likely eliminate the majority of the human population.” The stratospheric smoke from firestorms would cause nuclear winter and agricultural collapse. Those who did not perish from blast and radiation would starve to death. Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev understood this. Unfortunately, no successor US government has. As far as Washington is concerned, death is what happens to others, not to “the exceptional people.” (The SORT agreement apparently failed. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the nine nuclear-armed states still possess a total of 16,300 nuclear weapons.) 

It is a fact that Washington has policymakers who think, incorrectly, that nuclear war is winnable and who regard nuclear war as a means of preventing the rise of Russia and China as checks on Washington’s hegemony over the world. The US government, regardless of party in office, is a massive threat to life on earth. European governments, which think of themselves as civilized, are not, because they enable Washington’s pursuit of hegemony. It is this pursuit that threatens life with extinction. The ideology that grants “exceptional, indispensable America” supremacy is an enormous threat to the world.

The destruction of seven countries in whole or in part by the West in the 21st century, with the support of “Western civilization” and the Western media, comprises powerful evidence that the leadership of the Western world is devoid of moral conscience and human compassion. Now that Washington is armed with its false doctrine of “nuclear primacy,” the outlook for humanity is very bleak.

Washington has begun the run up to the Third World War, and Europeans seem to be on board. As recently as November 2012 NATO Secretary General Rasmussen said that NATO does not regard Russia as an enemy. Now that the White House Fool and his European vassals have convinced Russia that the West is an enemy, Rasmussen declared that “we must adapt to the fact that Russia now considers us its adversary” by beefing up Ukraine’s military along with those of Eastern and Central Europe. 

Last month Alexander Vershbow, former US ambassador to Russia, currently NATO Deputy Secretary General, declared Russia to be the enemy and said that the American and European taxpayers need to fork over for the military modernization “not just of Ukraine, but also Moldova, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan.”

It is possible to see these calls for more military spending as just the normal functioning of agents for the US military/security complex. Having lost “the war on terror” in Iraq and Afghanistan, Washington needs a replacement and has set about resurrecting the Cold War.
This is probably how the armaments industry, its shills, and part of Washington sees it. But the neoconservatives are more ambitious. They are not pursuing merely more profits for the military/security complex. Their goal is Washington’s hegemony over the world, which means reckless actions such as the strategic threat that the Obama regime, with the complicity of its European vassals, has brought to Russia in Ukraine.

Since last autumn the US government has been lying through its teeth about Ukraine, blaming Russia for the consequences of Washington’s actions, and demonizing Putin exactly as Washington demonized Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, Assad, the Taliban, and Iran. The presstitute media and the European capitals have seconded the lies and propaganda and repeat them endlessly. Consequently, the US public’s attitude toward Russia moved sharply negative.
How do you think Russia and China see this? Russia has witnessed NATO brought to its borders, a violation of the Reagan-Gorbachev understandings. Russia has witnessed the US pull out of the ABM treaty and develop a “star wars” shield. (Whether or not the shield would work is immaterial. The purpose of the shield is to convince the politicians and the public that Americans are safe.) Russia has witnessed Washington change the role of nuclear weapons in its war doctrine from deterrent to preemptive first strike. And now Russia listens to a daily stream of lies from the West and witnesses the slaughter by Washington’s vassal in Kiev of civilians in Russian Ukraine, branded “terrorists” by Washington, by such weapons as white phosphorus with not a peep of protest from the West. 

Massive attacks by artillery and air strikes on homes and apartments in Russian Ukraine were conducted on the 25th anniversary of Tiananmen Square, while Washington and its puppets condemned China for an event that did not happen. As we now know, there was no massacre in Tiananmen Square. It was just another Washington lie like Tonkin Gulf, Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, Assad’s use of chemical weapons, Iranian nukes, etc. It is an amazing fact that the world lives in a false reality created by Washington’s lies. 

The movie, The Matrix, is a true depiction of life in the West. The population lives in a false reality created for them by their rulers. A handful of humans have escaped the false existence and are committed to bringing humans back to reality. They rescue Neo, “The One,” who they believe correctly to have the power to free humans from the false reality in which they live. Morpheus, the leader of the rebels, explains to Neo:

“The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you’re inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system, and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.”

I experience this every time I write a column. Protests from those determined not to be unplugged arrive in emails and on those websites that expose their writers to slander by government trolls in comment sections. Don’t believe real reality, they insist, believe the false reality. 

The Matrix even encompasses part of the Russian and Chinese population, especially those educated in the West and those susceptible to Western propaganda, but on the whole those populations know the difference between lies and truth. The problem for Washington is that the propaganda that prevails over the Western peoples does not prevail over the Russian and Chinese governments. 

How do you think China reacts when Washington declares the South China Sea to be an area of US national interests, allocates 60 percent of its vast fleet to the Pacific, and constructs new US air and naval bases from the Philippines to Vietnam? 

Suppose all Washington intends is to keep taxpayer funding alive for the military/security complex which launders some of the taxpayers’ money and returns it as political campaign contributions. Can Russia and China take the risk of viewing Washington’s words and deeds in this limited way?

So far the Russians, and only the Russians (and Chinese), have remained sensible. Lavrov, the Foreign Minister said: “At this stage, we want to give our partners a chance to calm down. We’ll see what happens next. If absolutely baseless accusations against Russia continue, it there are attempts to pressure us with economic leverage, then we may reevaluate the situation.”
If the White House Fool, Washington’s media whores and European vassals convince Russia that war is in the cards, war will be in the cards. As there is no prospect whatsoever of NATO being able to mount a conventional offensive threat against Russia anywhere near the size and power of the German invasion force in 1941 that met with destruction, the war will be nuclear, which will mean the end of all of us.

Keep that firmly in mind as Washington and its media whores continue to beat the drums for war. Keep in mind also that a long history proves beyond all doubt that everything Washington and the presstitute media tells you is a lie serving an undeclared agenda. You cannot rectify the situation by voting Democrat instead of Republican or by voting Republican instead of Democrat. 

Thomas Jefferson told us his solution: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. It is it’s natural manure.” 

There are few patriots in Washington but many tyrants.




Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts' latest books are The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West and How America Was Lost

                                          *************

OneLove

:::MME:::

Musings

From laptops to cell phones, cars to airplanes, all kinds of everyday products are made using minerals that come from Africa. It's no exaggeration to say that the world depends on Africa's natural resources and major powers are scrambling to extract its resources..
Those resources are crucial exports for many African countries, and while resource wealth doesn't always benefit ordinary people, there is no doubt that the global commodities boom is helping to power the economies of Africa's resource-rich nations.

OneLove

:::MME:::

MME's Jam of the Day


This crucial cut is from Luke James' upcoming CD "Made To Love" which will be out in a few months. Folks have been waiting for his debut release since 2012 when they heard "Mo Better Blues" & " I Want You" (which received a Grammy nomination), but come 9/23/14, they will wait no more according to his PR folks. 

This cut, "Options", is about two people making a life-altering decision and having options and either way they go, it’s going to change things. We have all had such moments which makes this song/video such a powerful & memorable one. One thing about old school soul is it always told a story..it had movement....there was a connection & it spoke about not only what was going on in the world but what was going on internally within the artist himself/herself. Vulnerability was apparent. Luke James brings us all back to that old school vibe which I hope will usher in another golden age of R&B music.

OneLove

:::MME:::

American Socrates by Chris Hedges


Noam Chomsky, whom I interviewed last Thursday at his office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has influenced intellectuals in the United States and abroad in incalculable ways. His explications of empire, mass propaganda, the hypocrisy and pliability of the liberal class and the failings of academics, as well as the way language is used as a mask by the power elite to prevent us from seeing reality, make him the most important intellectual in the country. The force of his intellect, which is combined with a ferocious independence, terrifies the corporate state—which is why the commercial media and much of the academic establishment treat him as a pariah. He is the Socrates of our time.

We live in a bleak moment in human history. And Chomsky begins from this reality. He quoted the late Ernst Mayr, a leading evolutionary biologist of the 20th century who argued that we probably will never encounter intelligent extraterrestrials because higher life forms render themselves extinct in a relatively short time. 

“Mayr argued that the adaptive value of what is called ‘higher intelligence’ is very low,” Chomsky said. “Beetles and bacteria are much more adaptive than humans. We will find out if it is better to be smart than stupid. We may be a biological error, using the 100,000 years which Mayr gives [as] the life expectancy of a species to destroy ourselves and many other life forms on the planet.”  

Climate change “may doom us all, and not in the distant future,” Chomsky said. “It may overwhelm everything. This is the first time in human history that we have the capacity to destroy the conditions for decent survival. It is already happening. Look at species destruction. It is estimated to be at about the level of 65 million years ago when an asteroid hit the earth, ended the period of the dinosaurs and wiped out a huge number of species. It is the same level today. And we are the asteroid. If anyone could see us from outer space they would be astonished. There are sectors of the global population trying to impede the global catastrophe. There are other sectors trying to accelerate it. Take a look at whom they are. Those who are trying to impede it are the ones we call backward, indigenous populations—the First Nations in Canada, the aboriginals in Australia, the tribal people in India. Who is accelerating it? The most privileged, so-called advanced, educated populations of the world.”  If Mayr was right, we are at the tail end of a binge, accelerated by the Industrial Revolution, that is about to drive us over a cliff environmentally and economically. A looming breakdown, in Chomsky’s eyes, offers us opportunity as well as danger. He has warned repeatedly that if we are to adapt and survive we must overthrow the corporate power elite through mass movements and return power to autonomous collectives that are focused on sustaining communities rather than exploiting them. Appealing to the established institutions and mechanisms of power will not work. 

“We can draw many very good lessons from the early period of the Industrial Revolution,” he said. “The Industrial Revolution took off right around here in eastern Massachusetts in the mid-19th century. This was a period when independent farmers were being driven into the industrial system. Men and women—women left the farms to be ‘factory girls’—bitterly resented it. This was also a period of a very free press, the freest in the history of the country. There were a wide variety of journals. When you read them they are pretty fascinating. The people driven into the industrial system regarded it as an attack on their personal dignity, on their rights as human beings. They were free human beings being forced into what they called ‘wage labor,’ which they regarded as not very different from chattel slavery. In fact this was such a popular mood it was a slogan of the Republican Party—‘The only difference between working for a wage and being a slave is that working for the wage is supposed to be temporary.’ ”

Chomsky said this shift, which forced agrarian workers off the land into the factories in urban centers, was accompanied by a destruction of culture. Laborers, he said, had once been part of the “high culture of the day.” 

“I remember this as late as the 1930s with my own family,” he said. “This was being taken away from us. We were being forced to become something like slaves. They argued that if you were a journeyman, a craftsman, and you sell a product that you produce, then as a wage earner what you are doing is selling yourself. And this was deeply offensive. They condemned what they called ‘the new spirit of the age,’ ‘gaining wealth and forgetting all but self.’ This sounds familiar.”

It is this radical consciousness, which took root in the mid-19th century among farmers and many factory workers, that Chomsky says we must recover if we are to move forward as a society and a civilization. In the late 19th century farmers, especially in the Midwest, freed themselves from the bankers and capital markets by forming their own banks and co-operatives. They understood the danger of falling victim to a vicious debt peonage run by the capitalist class. The radical farmers made alliances with the Knights of Labor, which believed that those who worked in the mills should own them.

“By the 1890s workers were taking over towns and running them in eastern and western Pennsylvania, such as Homestead,” Chomsky said. “But they were crushed by force. It took some time. The final blow was Woodrow Wilson’s Red Scare.”

“The idea should still be that of the Knights of Labor,” he said. “Those who work in the mills should own them. There is plenty of manufacturing going on. There will be more. Energy prices are going down in the United States because of the massive exploitation of fossil fuels, which is going to destroy our grandchildren. But under the capitalist morality the calculus is profits tomorrow outweigh the existence of your grandchildren. We are getting lower energy prices. They [business leaders] are enthusiastic that we can undercut manufacturing in Europe because we have lower energy prices. And we can undermine European efforts at developing sustainable energy.” 

Chomsky hopes that those who work in the service industry and in manufacturing can organize to begin to take control of their workplaces. He notes that in the Rust Belt, including in states such as Ohio, there is a growth of worker-owned enterprises.

The rise of powerful populist movements in the early 20th century meant that the business class could no longer keep workers subjugated purely through violence. Business interests had to build systems of mass propaganda to control opinions and attitudes. The rise of the public relations industry, initiated by President Wilson’s Committee on Public Information to instill a pro-war sentiment in the population, ushered in an era of not only permanent war but also permanent propaganda. 

Consumption was instilled as an inner compulsion. The cult of the self became paramount. And opinions and attitudes, as they are today, were crafted and shaped by the centers of power.
“A pacifist population was driven to become war-mongering fanatics,” Chomsky said. “It was this experience that led the power elite to discover that through effective propaganda they could, as Walter Lippmann wrote, employ "a new art in democracy, manufacturing consent."

Democracy was eviscerated. Citizens became spectators rather than participants in power. The few intellectuals, including Randolph Bourne, who maintained their independence and who refused to serve the power elite were pushed out of the mainstream, as Chomsky has been.
“Most of the intellectuals on all sides were passionately dedicated to the national cause,” Chomsky said of the First World War. “There were only a few fringe dissenters. Bertrand Russell went to jail. Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg were killed. Randolph Bourne was marginalized. Eugene Debs was in jail. They dared to question the magnificence of the war.”

This war hysteria has never ceased, moving seamlessly from a fear of the German Hun to a fear of communists to a fear of Islamic jihadists and terrorists.

“The public is frightened into believing we have to defend ourselves,” Chomsky said. “This is not entirely false. The military system generates forces that will be harmful to us. Take Obama’s terrorist drone campaign, the biggest terrorist campaign in history. This program generates potential terrorists faster than it destroys suspects. You can see it now in Iraq. Go back to the Nuremburg judgments. Aggression was defined as the supreme international crime. It differed from other war crimes in that it encompasses all the evil that follows. The U.S. and British invasion of Iraq is a textbook case of aggression. By the standards of Nuremberg they [the British and U.S. leaders] would all be hanged. And one of the crimes they committed was to ignite the Sunni and Shiite conflict.”

The conflict, which is now enflaming the region, is “a U.S. crime if we believe the validity of the judgments against the Nazis. Robert Jackson, the chief prosecutor at the [Nuremberg] tribunal, addressed the tribunal. He pointed out that we were giving these defendants a poisoned chalice. He said that if we ever sipped from it we had to be treated the same way or else the whole thing is a farce.”  

Today’s elite schools and universities inculcate into their students the worldview endorsed by the power elite. They train students to be deferential to authority. Chomsky calls education at most of these schools, including Harvard, a few blocks away from MIT, “a deep indoctrination system.”
“There is the understanding that there are certain things you do not say and do not think,” Chomsky said. “This is very broad among the educated classes. It is why they overwhelmingly support state power and state violence, with some qualifications. Obama is regarded as a critic of the invasion of Iraq. Why? Because he thought it was a strategic blunder. That puts him on the same moral level as a Nazi general who thought the second front was a strategic blunder. That’s what we call criticism.”
And yet, Chomsky does not discount a resurgent populism.

“In the 1920s the labor movement had been practically destroyed,” he said. “This had been a very militant labor movement. In the 1930s it changed, and it changed because of popular activism. There were circumstances [the Great Depression] that led to the opportunity to do something. We are living with that constantly. Take the last 30 years. For a majority of the population it has been stagnation or worse. It is not the deep Depression, but it is a semi-permanent depression for most of the population. There is plenty of kindling out there that can be lighted.” 

Chomsky believes that the propaganda used to manufacture consent, even in the age of digital media, is losing its effectiveness as our reality bears less and less resemblance to the portrayal of reality by the organs of mass media. While state propaganda can still “drive the population into terror and fear and war hysteria, as we saw before the invasion of Iraq,” it is failing to maintain an unquestioned faith in the systems of power. Chomsky credits the Occupy movement, which he describes as a tactic, with “lighting a spark” and, most important, “breaking through the atomization of society.” 

“There are all sorts of efforts to separate people from one another,” he said. “The ideal social unit [in the world of state propagandists] is you and your television screen. The Occupy actions brought that down for a large part of the population. People recognized that we could get together and do things for ourselves. We can have a common kitchen. We can have a place for public discourse. We can form our ideas. We can do something. This is an important attack on the core of the means by which the public is controlled. You are not just an individual trying to maximize consumption. You find there are other concerns in life. If those attitudes and associations can be sustained and move in new directions, that will be important.”


                                                     ****************

OneLove

:::MME:::

Jun 15, 2014

Musings

There are some oddities in the perspective with which we see the world. The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.



OneLove

:::::MME:::::

Jun 12, 2014

Reflections on Human Stupidity


“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.” 
― Albert Einstein

“Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish.” 
― Euripides

“Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.” 
― George Carlin

“You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. No one is entitled to be ignorant.” 
― Harlan Ellison

“Stupidity isn't punishable by death. If it was, there would be a hell of a population drop.” 
― Laurell K. Hamilton

“Evil isn’t the real threat to the world. Stupid is just as destructive as Evil, maybe more so, and it’s a hell of a lot more common. What we really need is a crusade against Stupid. That might actually make a difference.” 
― Jim Butcher

“Stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results.” 
― Margaret Atwood

“I've learned one thing, and that's to quit worrying about stupid things. You have four years to be irresponsible here, relax. Work is for people with jobs. You'll never remember class time, but you'll remember the time you wasted hanging out with your friends. So stay out late. Go out with your friends on a Tuesday when you have a paper due on Wednesday. Spend money you don't have. Drink 'til sunrise. The work never ends, but college does...”
― Tom Petty

“Sometimes a man wants to be stupid if it lets him do a thing his cleverness forbids.” 
― John Steinbeck

“I have defined the hundred per cent American as ninety-nine per cent an idiot.” 
― George Bernard Shaw

“Stupidity is much the same all the world over. A stupid person's notions and feelings may confidently be inferred from those which prevail in the circle by which the person is surrounded. Not so with those whose opinions and feelings are an emanation from their own nature and faculties.” 
― John Stuart Mill,

“Freedom of speech does not protect you from the consequences of saying stupid shit.
-- Jim C. Hines

“Intelligence minus purpose equals stupidity.” 
― Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity

“Something reduces the speed of the world and that something is stupidity! Stupidity is a boring friction!” 
― Mehmet Murat ildan


“I rather be a stupid person wanting clarification and answers, in order to be wiser, than be a stupid person that blindly believes the lies they are told, without question.” 
― Shannon L. Alder


“Alcohol gives you infinite patience for stupidity.” 
― Sammy Davis Jr.



“Humanity is OK, but 99% of people are boring idiots.” 
― Slavoj Žižek




“Stupidity is doomed,
therefore, to cringe
at every syllable
of wisdom.” 
― HeraclitusFragments

“This life's hard, but it's harder if you're stupid.” 
― George V. Higgins

                                                    ****************

OneLove

:::MME:::

Jun 10, 2014

The Beast Within






I have to admit, over the past few years I have consciously avoided the topic of internalized racism ( loosely defined as the internalization by people of racist attitudes towards members of their own ethnic group). Not that I have anything to hide or be ashamed of, but I find the topic depressingly pitiful and stupefying.  Plus, in my college days, I was quite the firebrand but became exhausted over the years trying to reason with the misguided ones. I have heard the most dumb-ass statements uttered by folks regarding the "dark skin/light skin" conundrum. Needless to say, this problem doesn’t just arise out of nowhere. It’s a direct offshoot of a white supremacist ideology that values whites over people of color and equips Caucasians with what’s known as white skin privilege. This fire-breathing Beast stomps the world and destroys people from the inside out, disfiguring their self-concept & history. From Iraq to India, Brazil to Jamaica, Africa to Japan, people have been/are being traumatized. Some resist the onslaught but a good number allow themselves to get dumbed down as they loathe critical thinking for the most part or lack critical educational resources to know any better.

We credit ourselves with the power of reason / rationalization. Indeed, the human brain is wired to categorize information & make sense of it. And because we're easily influenced, the natural process of categorizing can easily become biased when we allow outside factors to alter our thinking (advertising/movie/music/gaming industries loom large here as powerful external factors ). Being bamboozled all the way into adulthood is big business and keeps things as they are - you know, fucked up.

I noted at a very young age how society had this caste-like system where light-skinned people were favored over dark-skinned people, especially in the field of entertainment/fashion. I did not accept this as the most outstanding people I met at the time had rich, dark-brown skin which all the tourists who visited my island aimed to get by tanning for hours under the sun. I also noted how all the dark-skinned chaps were in demand by a variety of women which made me want to get darker as well when I became a teen! When we first received American programming on my island, things started to change after that. We wanted to be "Superman" and  Charlie's Angels became the desired fruit.

 On the other side, we all know how white slave owners frequently molested the dark African captive  women who they could not resist. They left their white wives in the big house to go out back to terrorize an African beauty. This alone speaks volumes. It reminds me of one of Eduardo Galeano's books, Upside Down, where he brilliantly exposes the truth of Western culture and observes how we have accepted a 'reality' we should reject.

Today, our young ones are surrounded by so much racist garbage passing as fact/truth. The belief that dark skin is not as attractive as light skin or of natural hair not as pretty as relaxed hair is rampant and accepted as fact.. To belabor the point - Blue/Green eyes better than brown/black? White people more intelligent than people of color?  --this shit is insane, but you do see the pattern. That teens/kids run around boasting of their light-complexions or of wanting light-complected girls/boys or wishing that they were light-complected only illustrates how deep and insidious white supremacy is....Its force is devilishly undetected on the conscious level but shreds the dark body to pieces in the labyrinthine corridors of the subconscious. I know people who mention only their light-skinned parent and throw heir dark-skinned parent behind the curtain like he/she has an unsightly deformity. White supremacy is truly the plague of our times robbing countless numbers of their human dignity.

In India, the darker Indians are at the bottom of the socio-economic pole--they call them "untouchables". Many Indians feel their country’s disturbing obsession with fairness has been compounded in recent years with the invasion of European and American retail outlets and widespread access to information via the Internet. As a result of colonial rule and its brutal racism, Indian society suffers from  a very rigid & deep-seated caste system/color bias whereby certain professions such as aviation, films and many other white-collar jobs, are filled by people with fair skin. Skin bleaching products sell like hot cakes.

In Iraq, the darker Iraqis are at the bottom. They are prohibited from interracial marriage and denied even menial jobs.

 In Japan and many other places in east Asia, dark skinned Asians are looked down upon. Everyone strives to be white skinned-- every skin product has whitening in it and everyone stays out of the sun. A fucked up mess.

I listen to music a lot and its power over people's consciousness is not to be taken lightly. I remember a line by Lil Wayne back in 2011 on the song “Right Above”. Folks got heated over the line “beautiful black woman, I bet that bitch look better red.”  Lil Wayne is a first-class idiot and a danger to impressionable minds who only see his wealth & fame. What is even more sad is having folks repeat his stupid lyrics and believing it. The record labels are also to blame as they green-light this crap which repeats throughout the day on urban radio. It is no wonder then that our darker brothers and sisters feel so devalued & maligned. Many resort to drug and alcohol abuse to dull this existential pain. Some commit suicide.

Of course, many white/light-complected people buy into this mess because it is profitable & makes them feel superior so why would they criticize it?  It is really up to us people of color (and progressive white folk) to detox ourselves and our loved ones from this fuckery, and it starts with awareness & education. As the great Caribbean scholar Frantz Fanon once wrote, "...There are too many idiots in this world. And having said it, I have the burden of proving it.”

OneLove

:::MME:::

The New Corporation

  The New Corporation ​is a 2020 documentary directed by Jennifer Abbott and Joel Bakan, law professor at the University of British Columb...