On the Far Side of Silence

It’s always a troubling experience to realize that your life sucks, but it’s also a helpful one, because that realization makes it possible to change. If the things that make your life suck are a matter of personal choices, once you grasp this, you can make different choices.  If the things that make your life suck are a matter of social, cultural, or political factors—for example, the dismal quality of US public schooling or the problematic nature of the mandatory two-income family—you have two ways of taking action: you can change your own relationship to those factors (by considering the possibility of homeschooling your kids, for example, and assessing whether your family will benefit if one of its adult members leaves paid employment for the household economy) and you can also help bring about change on the larger scale (by lobbying your state legislators to support homeschooling as an option, for example, and being encouraging to other people who choose to move into the household economy and defending them against bullies who think they ought to tell everyone else what to do).

via On the Far Side of Silence – Ecosophia

John Whitehead Exposes America’s Heart Of Darkness: Sexual Predators Within The Power-Elite

Abuse of power—and the ambition-fueled hypocrisy and deliberate disregard for misconduct that make those abuses possible—works the same whether you’re talking about sex crimes, government corruption, or the rule of law.

It’s the same old story all over again: man rises to power, man abuses power abominably, man intimidates and threatens anyone who challenges him with retaliation or worse, and man gets away with it because of a culture of compliance in which no one speaks up because they don’t want to lose their job or their money or their place among the elite.

It’s not just sexual predators that we have to worry about.

For every Jeffrey Epstein (or Bill Clinton or Harvey Weinstein or Roger Ailes or Bill Cosby or Donald Trump) who eventually gets called out for his sexual misbehavior, there are hundreds—thousands—of others in the American police state who are getting away with murder—in many cases, literally—simply because they can.

The cop who shoots the unarmed citizen first and asks questions later might get put on paid leave for a while or take a job with another police department, but that’s just a slap on the wrist. The shootings and SWAT team raids and excessive use of force will continue, because the police unions and the politicians and the courts won’t do a thing to stop it.

The war hawks who are making a profit by waging endless wars abroad, killing innocent civilians in hospitals and schools, and turning the American homeland into a domestic battlefield will continue to do so because neither the president nor the politicians will dare to challenge the military industrial complex.

The National Security Agency that carries out warrantless surveillance on Americans’ internet and phone communications will continue to do so, because the government doesn’t want to relinquish any of its ill-gotten powers and its total control of the populace.

Unless something changes in the way we deal with these ongoing, egregious abuses of power, the predators of the police state will continue to wreak havoc on our freedoms, our communities, and our lives.

via John Whitehead Exposes America’s Heart Of Darkness: Sexual Predators Within The Power-Elite | Zero Hedge

Scientists Warn the UN of Capitalism’s Imminent Demise

via Scientists Warn the UN of Capitalism’s Imminent Demise

Assange and the Unforgivable Sin of Disemboweling Official Narratives

via oftwominds-Charles Hugh Smith: Assange and the Unforgivable Sin of Disemboweling Official Narratives

Umberto Eco’s Antilibrary: Why Unread Books Are More Valuable to Our Lives than Read Ones

“It is our knowledge — the things we are sure of — that makes the world go wrong and keeps us from seeing and learning,” Lincoln Steffens wrote

via Umberto Eco’s Antilibrary: Why Unread Books Are More Valuable to Our Lives than Read Ones – Brain Pickings

Environmental racism: Black Americans are three times more likely to die from pollution

via Environmental racism: Black Americans are three times more likely to die from pollution — Quartz

There’s a word for it…

Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with important matters.— Albert Einstein

Source: There’s a word for it… – Medium

Dangerous Spirituality

Thurman’s spirituality was grounded not only in the beauties of the black experience, but grounded as well in the terrors of the black experience, as only someone living in Florida and Georgia could know them in 1915 and 1920 and 1930. At the same time, it was a spirituality that says: “And knowing all that, I also know that all human beings are one.”

This kind of strange combination of spiritual truth with hard political social truth led one young man in the 1930s to say this about Howard Thurman: “I’m disappointed in him. We thought we had found our Moses. And he turns out to be a mystic.” That’s the spirituality that gets people all riled up.

Source: Dangerous Spirituality | On Being

Seeing Through The Debris

Imagine being Joe Schmo on main street in 1964… Sitting outside a drug store (not a Starbucks) but the fake wooden streetscape of our earlier mental conjuration still remains the same. It’s a time before ‘real’ commercial airline travel — the first flight of a 747 is still 5 years away. The closest thing Joe has to the idea of air travel is a 1st generation airliner like a De Havilland Comet and only then because he heard about it on the radio (My Grandpa worked by the way on the De Havilland Comet decompression investigation), and Black and White TVs are still sold more than colour.

Meanwhile, you tell him this: there exists a separate world of classified technology and just one of those things is a Mach 3 Stealth Plane that can fly to the edge of space.

Do you think you could tell Ol’ Joe this without his hackles being raised? Do you think he’d believe you? There would be much shaking of heads and remonstration. I’m not sure Mr Schmo would accept it at all. It would just bounce off the carefully constructed bubble of Red Reality that he’s unknowingly internalised. At the time it would be indistinguishable to him from UFO reports.

Source: Seeing Through The Debris – Anomalous Engineering – Medium

Writing Thoughtfully In Unthinking Times

The truth of the claim that writing can help thinking has long been impugned. Consider Plato’s Phaedrus. Socrates is down on writing–he thinks it is the last thing we need. For him, it is a medium through which only superficial understanding may be attained. Learning from, or through, writing generates a mere appearance of wisdom. There are three main ways in which writing tricks us. Socrates says written words can’t speak for themselves to teach the truth to others. We also err in supposing that writing will guarantee intelligibility or certainty of meaning. Worse still, writing can only provide reminders of thought, not originate it. The learning that ensues is thus shallow, temporary, and stale. People never really know things from writing, having not actually thought about them.

That is quite an indictment. What should we make of it? A hasty dismissal as mere “phonocentrism” will not do, not in times like these. It is said that all too often we don’t think enough, or even at all. In the modern world, so the story goes, we are akin to Descartes’s brutes. Does writing really kill deep and original thinking?  This assertion merits scrutiny. In all this we should not spare ourselves. Philosophers, just by virtue of their vocation or trade, are not immune to the epoch in which they live. So the criticisms of writing matter, to all of us. What then to do? In my view, as is often the case, Plato provokes rather than vitiates. We might then pursue a moderate response wherein we address Plato’s concerns. This is to seek a philosophical way of writing able to accommodate the three objections put forth by Plato. These I shall call the argument, clarity, and originality objections.

Source: Writing Thoughtfully In Unthinking Times | Blog of the APA