This is what it looks like when two people who can think clearly talk to two people who cannot think clearly but are good at emoting. https://t.co/p6NDgWd1CB
— Peter Boghossian (@peterboghossian) January 7, 2024
leefang | As the Israel-Hamas war began to heat up in late October, Courtney Carey, a Dublin-based employee of the Israeli website building company Wix, posted the Irish words “SAOIRSE DON PHALAISTIN” -- “Freedom for Palestine” -- on her LinkedIn page.
Within 24 hours of Carey’s LinkedIn post appearing, Alon Ozer, a Miami-based investor, took a screenshot of the post and shared it with a WhatsApp group of more than 300 like-minded investors, tech executives, activists, and at least one senior Israeli government official. Ozer took care to note that Carey worked for Wix.
Oded Hermoni, a tech journalist-turned-venture capitalist, piped up to assure everyone that Batsheva Moshe, Wix’s general manager for Israel and a member of the group chat, had been “on it since Sat[urday] night.”
Moshe then chimed in to assure her peers that the issue with Carey had been “taken care of since it was published.”
“I believe there will be an announcement soon re our reaction,” she added.
Wix terminated Carey the following day.
Moshe was apparently aware of Carey’s LinkedIn comments, which also included a denunciation of the “Zionist ideology which promotes an exclusivist state,” before Ozer flagged them in the WhatsApp group.
The interaction nonetheless reflects the heightened coordination among pro-Israel forces in Silicon Valley and the global tech sector.
Following Hamas’s terror attack on Oct. 7, a loose network of pro-Israel investors, tech executives, activists, and Israeli government officials have stepped up their efforts to combat the slightest deviations from the pro-Israel script.
The WhatsApp group where Carey’s case came up serves as a kind of switchboard where the various independent players in Silicon Valley’s pro-Israel community swap ideas, identify enemies, and collaborate on ways to defend Israel in the media, academia, and the business world.
We have obtained access to thousands of the group’s WhatsApp messages dating back to mid-October, and an intricate spreadsheet where group participants request and claim tasks ranging from social media responses to IDF support shipments. Separately, we have viewed a number of video meetings charting best practices for “hasbara” – an Israeli term of art for “public diplomacy” whose detractors see it as a euphemism for propaganda -- that offer a window into Israel’s public-relations war that is not limited to the tech sector.
In addition to Moshe, the WhatsApp group includes prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalist Jeff Epstein – a former CFO of Oracle – and Andy David, a diplomat-cum-venture capitalist who also serves as the Israeli foreign ministry’s head of innovation, entrepreneurship, and tech.
The WhatsApp group, officially
named the “J-Ventures Global Kibbutz Group,” is a project of J-Ventures,
a U.S.-Israeli investment fund that calls itself a “capitalist kibbutz”
-- a reference to Israel’s historically collectivist
farming communities. Hermoni, the WhatsApp group’s founder, is a
managing director of J-Ventures, and David, the foreign ministry
official, is internally listed by J-Ventures as a member of the
"PR/Political Team" that makes decisions on messaging and lobbying.
scottritterextra | I arrived late to the Palestinian cause. I was too wrapped up in the Israeli saga, too invested in the Israeli fantasy, to see the forest for the trees. I was too busy hating Hamas to realize that I should instead be hating that which enabled Hamas to carry out the crimes it has committed for the past four decades.
Simply put, I was blind to the tragedy of the Palestinian people.
Today I know that the only true victims in the Israeli saga (outside the children from every walk of life who are caught up in the tragic events foisted upon them by adults who claim to be working for a bright and shiny tomorrow, but only deliver death and destruction) are the Palestinian people.
At least Israel’s founding fathers were honest enough to acknowledge this.
The Zionists of today lack the moral character to admit that Israel can only be built and sustained at the cost of a viable, free, and independent Palestine, that Israel will never allow such a Palestine to exist, and that if there is a Zionist Israel, there will never be an independent Palestine.
The sins of the fathers are real, especially when it comes to Israel’s founding fathers and the crimes they committed against the Palestinian people. Moshe Dyan admitted this much. So, too, did David Ben Gurion. These were men—fundamentally flawed in their ideologies and motivations, but honestly so.
Benjamin Netanyahu and his fellow modern-day Israeli politicians, regardless of political affiliation, have no such integrity. They are inveterate liars, men and women who will promise one thing, then do another, when it comes to the future of Palestine, all the while leading Israel down the path of permanent war.
I arrived late to the Palestinian cause, but now that I am here, I can say this—the best way to defeat both Hamas and Zionist Israel is to support a free and independent Palestinian state.
I have never stood with Hamas, and I never will.
I once stood with Israel, but I will never do so again.
For four decades now, the Israeli-Hamas collusion has run its tragic course, each side proclaiming its desire to destroy the other, and yet each side knowing the awful truth—that one cannot exist without the other.
The Israeli-Palestine problem has become a never-ending cycle of violence which feeds off the pain and suffering of the Palestinian people. It is time to bring this cycle to an end.
From this moment forward, I will always stand with the people of Palestine, convinced that the only path for peace in the Middle East is one that leads through a viable Palestinian homeland, its capital firmly and forever ensconced in East Jerusalem.
In this way, Hamas will be disenfranchised as a terrorist organization—a legitimate Palestinian state takes away the perpetual state of conflict Hamas contributes to, a status which is justified by the pursuit of a legitimate Palestinian state Zionist Israel will never allow to exist.
A legitimate Palestinian state delegitimizes the notion of a Zionist Israeli entity which, by definition, can only exist by the perpetual exploitation of the Palestinian people. Benjamin Netanyahu was able to sustain the modern-day version of the Zionist Israeli state by generating fear through the endless cycle of Hamas-driven violence.
Remove the threat posed by Hamas, and Zionist Israel no longer will be able to blind the citizens of Israel and the world to the apartheid-like reality of the present-day Israeli existence. Basic humanity will compel Zionist Israel to shed its Zionist ideology, just as apartheid South Africa shed its ugly legacy of White supremacy. Post-Zionist Israel will be compelled by necessity to learn to coexist with its non-Jewish neighbors peacefully and prosperously, not as a colonial apartheid state, but as equal partners in the experiment of life that will have collectively seized the people who call the Holy Land home.
.@RobertKennedyJr talks to Russell Brand about how the NSA was in charge of Operation Warp Speed, the history of the United States bioweapons program, and why Anthony Fauci is the highest-paid government official in history:
— KanekoaTheGreat (@KanekoaTheGreat) September 18, 2023
"The weird thing about the pandemic was this constant… pic.twitter.com/qunw3Bn6pP
nydailynews | YouTube has demonetized Russell Brand’s channel, and the BBC pulled some of his shows from its online streaming service, after several women accused the comedian-turned-wellness guru of rape and sexual assault in an investigative report published over the weekend.
In a statement on Tuesday, YouTube said they took action against Brand’s account — which has 6.6 million subscribers — to “protect” users in light of “serious allegations against the creator.” It means 48-year-old Brand will no longer be able to profit from the ads that run within and alongside his videos, which have titles like “What REALLY Started the Hawaii Fires?” and “Covid Tsar Admits Lockdowns Were NEVER About Science.”
Other channels associated with the funnyman’s main YouTube page also include Awakening With Russell, which has 426,000 subscribers, Football Is Nice, which has some 20,000 subscribers, and Stay Free With Russell Brand, which has 22,200 subscribers.
“This decision applies to all channels that may be owned or operated by Russell Brand,” the Google-owned video service said.
While Brand has not been charged with any crimes, YouTube said he violated its “creator responsibility policy.”
“If a creator’s off-platform behavior harms our users, employees or ecosystem, we take action to protect the community,” the statement read.
BBC echoed the sentiment, saying Brand’s content “now falls below public expectations” of iPlayer and BBC Sounds.
Over the weekend, the Times of London, The Sunday Times and Channel 4 Dispatches published a joint investigation in which several women accused Brand of sexual assault and rape between 2006 and 2013 — a period during which Brand also became married to and subsequently divorced from pop star Katy Perry.
thehill | In today’s world — as RFK Jr. himself has said — media outlets such as CNN and MSNBC refuse to have him on, while allies of President Biden continually assail his character and motivations. Why would they do so?
Some supporters of Kennedy would say it’s because he has been continually challenging narratives pushed by the entrenched elites — be they related to COVID-19, U.S. policy in Ukraine or the American people being voiceless in their own nation.
Another reason why a DNC with its thumb on the scale for Biden, powerful Democratic powerbrokers behind the scenes and certain media outlets advocating for Biden might be dialing up their attacks on Kennedy was outlined by a story in Axios headlined “Biden could lose first two ’24 contests to RFK Jr.”
Talk about embarrassing for the president.
Those contests are the traditional first-to-vote states of Iowa and New Hampshire. Or, as Kennedy campaign manager Dennis J. Kucinich described them, “States at risk of such disenfranchisement include New Hampshire, where Biden came in last in 2020, receiving zero delegates; Iowa, where Biden came in 4th in 2020.”
It is clear that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a Democrat and wants to run as one in the Democratic primaries. He has stressed time and again that the Democratic Party he once knew was all about helping the disenfranchised and those with the least among us.
But if the system is “rigged” and he is shut out of the Democratic primaries, does his quest become a lost cause?
Jefferson Smith in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” closed the film by speaking of the importance of lost causes. Said the character, “I guess this is just another lost cause, Mr. Paine. All you people don’t know about lost causes. Mr. Paine does. He said once they were the only causes worth fighting for and he fought for them once. For the only reason any man ever fights for them. Because of just one plain simple rule. Love thy neighbor. And in this world today of great hatred a man who knows that rule has a great trust.”
As the DNC, in conjunction with the Biden White House, continues to try to silence and ostracize Kennedy while punishing states such as Iowa, New Hampshire and Georgia — along with millions of potential primary voters — it certainly seems as if they don’t trust the people to speak for themselves.
The DNC and the Biden White House may quickly learn that it’s one thing to try to silence RFK Jr. It’s quite another to try and disenfranchise the votes of millions of Americans.
Lines are being drawn in the sand. Can the DNC and Biden see them?
unz | The Jews won’t tolerate you disagreeing with them.
They are now going after Roger Waters – a pointed critic of Israel – for being against Nazism, saying that satirizing Nazism is the same thing as being a Nazi.
They’ve been trying to get at this guy for years. This is what they’ve come up with.
These people will not tolerate dissent. They will crush you, whoever you are.
RT:
German police have launched a criminal investigation into English rock legend and Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters on suspicion of glorifying Nazism during two concerts in Berlin. The musician has insisted the performance was in opposition to fascism.
On Friday, in a statement quoted by several media outlets, the Berlin police said that Waters was suspected of inciting hatred, and that the probe was centered on his performances on May 17 and 18 in the German capital.
In footage posted on social media, the musician can be seen wearing a leather trench coat resembling a Nazi uniform with two crossed hammers and a red armband. He then proceeds to take a mock gun and shoot into the crowd.
“The context of the clothing worn is deemed capable of approving, glorifying or justifying the violent and arbitrary rule of the Nazi regime in a manner that violates the dignity of the victims and thereby disrupts public peace,” the police said.
…
The Israeli UN Ambassador Danny Danon suggested that Waters wanted to compare Israel to the Nazis, describing the musician as “one of the biggest Jew haters of our time.”
On Friday, the musician addressed the controversy, writing on Twitter that he had become a target of “bad faith attacks” from those who disagreed with his political views.
“The elements of my performance that have been questioned are quite clearly a statement in opposition to fascism, injustice and bigotry in all its forms”, he said, adding that he had spent his entire life speaking out “against authoritarianism and oppression.”
What he should have explained, frankly, is the fact that he’s been doing this bit for literally decades. Roger Waters has been performing this show, in this costume, in Germany, for 42 years.
Now, inexplicably, it’s a problem.
Of course, the reason it is a problem is that since 1981, and particularly over the last decade or so, Waters has gotten aggressively political. He is extremely anti-Israel, and he is against this Jewish war in the Ukraine. If you want more information on that, you can really just check the Roger Waters archive on the Daily Stormer.
Probably, the fact that I’ve been so supportive of him is one of the reasons the Jews are so obsessed with him.
thebulwark | Scott Adams, the cartoonist behind the comic strip Dilbert, has been canceled for racism. In a video livestream last Wednesday, he declared:
Adams wasn’t done. The next day, he continued:
Most Americans would consider these statements vile. But Adams swears he’s preaching practicality, not hate. “It wasn’t because I hated anybody,” he pleaded in his daily livestream on Monday. “I was concerned that somebody hated me.” That somebody, he argued, was black people. “The whole point was to get away from racists,” he insisted.
A week after his original rant, Adams still claims that nobody has disagreed with his main point: that to steer clear of people who dislike you, it’s sensible for white people to avoid black people, and vice versa.
Adams is wrong. Not just morally, but practically. His advice is empirically unfounded and would make everything worse.
Every time one of these racially incendiary arguments comes along, the cycle repeats itself. The offender gets canceled. His opinion is dismissed as unthinkably repellent. He and his allies seize on that dismissal as evidence that the establishment is suppressing dissent. Nothing should be unthinkable, the dissenters argue. There’s some secret truth, some taboo insight, that the cancel culture is hiding from you.
Sorry, but there’s no great insight here. You can watch hour after hour of Adams’s livestreams, as I have, and you won’t find that nugget of forbidden truth. His reasoning is as sloppy as his research. In every way, he’s just wrong.
detroitnews | Dilbert comic strip creator Scott Adams experienced possibly the biggest repercussion of his recent comments about race when distributor Andrews McMeel Universal announced Sunday it would no longer work with the cartoonist.
Andrews McMeel Chairman Hugh Andrews and CEO and President Andy Sareyan said in a joint statement that the syndication company was “severing our relationship" with Adams.
In the Feb. 22 episode of his YouTube show, Adams described people who are Black as members of “a hate group” from which white people should “get away.” Various media publishers across the U.S. denounced the comments as racist, hateful and discriminatory while saying they would no longer provide a platform for his work.
Andrews and Sareyan said Andrews McMeel supports free speech, but the comments by the cartoonist were not compatible with the core values of the company based in Kansas City, Missouri.
“We are proud to promote and share many different voices and perspectives. But we will never support any commentary rooted in discrimination or hate,” they said in the statement posted on the company website and Twitter.
The creator of the long-running comic that pokes fun at office-place culture defended himself on social media against those whom he said "hate me and are canceling me.”
The backlash against Adams arose following comments on “Real Coffee with Scott Adams.” Among other topics, Adams used the YouTube show to reference a Rasmussen Reports survey that had asked whether people agreed with the statement “It's OK to be white."
Most agreed, but Adams noted that 26% of Black respondents disagreed and others weren't sure.
The Anti-Defamation League says the phrase was popularized in 2017 as a trolling campaign by members of the discussion forum 4chan but then began being used by some white supremacists.
Adams, who is white, repeatedly referred to people who are Black as members of a “hate group” or a “racist hate group” and said he would no longer “help Black Americans."
“Based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from Black people,” Adams said on his Wednesday show.
In another episode of his online show Saturday, Adams said he had been making a point that “everyone should be treated as an individual” without discrimination.
To hear Eric Weinstein's entire "shut it down, the goyim know" drunken rant, - in which he repudiates everything he's professed about the DISC as well as placing himself squarely in the Epstein psy-op camp - go to the 3 hour 30 minute mark on the spotify podcast with Rogan.
yahoo | Whoopi Goldberg is talking again about whether the Holocaust, which involved the murder of 6 million Jewish people, was racially motivated.
In a new interview with The Sunday Times of London, shared during Hanukkah, Goldberg suggested Jews are divided about whether they are a race, religion or both.
"My best friend said, ‘Not for nothing is there no box on the census for the Jewish race. So that leads me to believe that we’re probably not a race,’ " she recalled.
When The Times journalist Janice Turner mentioned racially divisive laws set by Nazis aimed at Jews, "The View" cohost insisted that the Holocaust "wasn't originally" about "racial" or "physical" attributes.
"They were killing people they considered to be mentally defective. And then they made this decision," she said.
Goldberg's new comments echo remarks she made about the Holocaust on "The View," which led to a suspension in February.
ABC News president Kim Godwin said that Goldberg would be suspended from "The View" for two weeks effective immediately for "her wrong and hurtful comments," in a statement shared with USA TODAY on Feb. 2.
“While Whoopi has apologized, I’ve asked her to take time to reflect and learn about the impact of her comments," Godwin added. "The entire ABC News organization stands in solidarity with our Jewish colleagues, friends, family and communities."
Previous: Whoopi Goldberg returns to 'The View' after suspension
Goldberg posted a now-deleted statement expressing her "sincerest apologies" on Twitter on Jan. 31, after the episode aired, also echoing a statement from Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt who wrote that the Holocaust "was about the Nazi’s systematic annihilation of the Jewish people – who they deemed to be an inferior race."
"On today's show, I said the Holocaust 'is not about race, but about man's inhumanity to man.' I should have said it is about both," she wrote. "I stand corrected. The Jewish people around the world have always had my support and that will never waiver. I'm sorry for the hurt I have caused."
On the show the following day, she addressed the controversy again, saying she "misspoke."
grahamhancock | What is Western civilization all about? What are its greatest achievements and highest aspirations?
It’s my guess that most people’s replies to these questions would touch—before all the other splendid achievements of science, literature, technology, and the economy—on the nurture and growth of freedom.
Individual freedom.
Including, but not limited to freedom from the unruly power of monarchs, freedom from the unwarranted intrusions of the state and its agents into our personal lives, freedom from the tyranny of the Church and its Inquisition, freedom from hunger and want, freedom from slavery and servitude, freedom of conscience, freedom of religion, freedom of thought and speech, freedom of assembly, freedom to elect our own leaders, freedom to be homosexual—and so on and so forth.
The list of freedoms we enjoy today that were not enjoyed by our ancestors is indeed a long and impressive one. It is therefore exceedingly strange that Western civilization in the twenty- first century enjoys no real freedom of consciousness.
There can be no more intimate and elemental part of the individual than his or her own consciousness. At the deepest level, our consciousness is what we are—to the extent that if we are not sovereign over our own consciousness then we cannot in any meaningful sense be sovereign over anything else either. So it has to be highly significant that, far from encouraging freedom of consciousness, our societies in fact violently deny our right to sovereignty in this intensely personal area, and have effectively outlawed all states of consciousness other than those on a very narrowly defined and officially approved list. The “War on Drugs” has thus unexpectedly succeeded in engineering a stark reversal of the true direction of Western history by empowering faceless bureaucratic authorities to send armed agents to break into our homes, arrest us, throw us into prison, and deprive us of our income and reputation simply because we wish to explore the sometimes radical, though always temporary, alterations in our own consciousness that drugs facilitate.
Other than being against arbitrary rules that the state has imposed on us, personal drug use by adults is not a “crime” in any true moral or ethical sense and usually takes place in the privacy of our own homes, where it cannot possibly do any harm to others. For some it is a simple lifestyle choice. For others, particularly where the hallucinogens such as LSD, psilocybin, and DMT are concerned, it is a means to make contact with alternate realms and parallel dimensions, and perhaps even with the divine. For some, drugs are an aid to creativity and focussed mental effort. For others they are a means to tune out for a while from everyday cares and worries. But in all cases it seems probable that the drive to alter consciousness, from which all drug use stems, has deep genetic roots.
Other adult lifestyle choices with deep genetic roots also used to be violently persecuted by our societies.
A notable example is homosexuality, once punishable by death or long periods of imprisonment, which is now entirely legal between consenting adults—and fully recognized as being none of the state’s business—in all Western cultures. (Although approximately thirteen US states have “anti-sodomy” laws outlawing homosexuality, these statutes have rarely been enforced in recent years, and in 2003 the US Supreme Court invalidated those laws.) The legalization of homosexuality lifted a huge burden of human misery, secretiveness, paranoia, and genuine fear from our societies, and at the same time not a single one of the homophobic lobby’s fire-and-brimstone predictions about the end of Western civilization came true.
Likewise, it was not so long ago that natural seers, mediums, and healers who felt the calling to become “witches” were burned at the stake for “crimes” that we now look back on as harmless eccentricities at worst.
Perhaps it will be the same with drugs? Perhaps in a century or two, if we have not destroyed human civilization by then, our descendants will look back with disgust on the barbaric laws of our time that punished a minority so harshly (with imprisonment, financial ruin, and worse) for responsibly, quietly, and in the privacy of their own homes seeking alterations in their own consciousness through the use of drugs. Perhaps we will even end up looking back on the persecution of drug users with the same sense of shame and horror that we now view the persecution of gays and lesbians, the burning of “witches,” and the imposition of slavery on others.
Meanwhile it’s no accident that the “War on Drugs” has been accompanied by an unprecedented expansion of governmental power into the previously inviolable inner sanctum of individual consciousness. On the contrary, it seems to me that the state’s urge to power has all along been the real reason for this “war”—not an honest desire on the part of the authorities to rescue society and the individual from the harms caused by drugs, but the thin of a wedge intended to legitimize increasing bureaucratic control and intervention in almost every other area of our lives as well.
This is the way freedom is hijacked—not all at once, out in the open, but stealthily, little by little, behind closed doors, and with our own agreement. How will we be able to resist when so many of us have already willingly handed over the keys to our own consciousness to the state and accepted without protest that it is OK to be told what we may and may not do, what we may and may not explore, even what we may and may not experience, with this most precious, sapient, unique, and individual part of ourselves?
If we are willing to accept that then we can be persuaded to accept anything.
slate | Netflix’s new hit Ancient Apocalypse is an odd duck: a docuseries filmed in many gorgeous and historic locations (Turkey, Mexico, Indonesia, … uh, Ohio) that advances a provocative thesis aimed furiously at a single academic discipline. The argument is essentially this: The authorities who study human prehistory are ignoring—or covering up—the true foundations of the world as we know it today. And the consequences could be catastrophic.
Graham Hancock, the journalist who hosts the series, returns again and again to his anger at this state of affairs and his status as an outsider to “mainstream archaeology,” his assessment of how terrible “mainstream archaeology” is about accepting new theories, and his insistence that there’s all this evidence out there but “mainstream archaeologists” just won’t look for it. His bitter disposition, I’m sure, accounts for some of the interest in this show. Hancock, a fascinating figure with an interesting past as a left-leaning foreign correspondent, has for decades been elaborating variations on this thinking: Humans, as he says in the docuseries, have “amnesia” about our past. An “advanced” society that existed around 12,000 years ago was extinguished when the climate changed drastically in a period scientists call the Younger Dryas. Before dying out completely, this civilization sent out emissaries to the corners of the world, spreading knowledge, including building techniques that can be found in use at many ancient sites, and sparking the creation of mythologies that are oddly similar the world over. It’s important for us to think about this history, Hancock adds, because we also face impending cataclysm. It is a warning.
Scientists, Hancock says, don’t want to believe any of this because they don’t like to think about mythology or astronomy, both of which he often uses to prove his points. Coming to terms with this paradigm shift would also rock the foundations of their discipline. Hancock, scientists say, doesn’t understand how eagerly they’d leap at this evidence if it really existed, in an empirical and reproducible form. (As archaeologist Carl Feagans writes in a review of Ancient Apocalypse, “Every single archaeologist I know would be elated to discover any previously unknown civilization of the Ice Age. Or any age for that matter.”)
One of the oddest aspects of Ancient Apocalypse is how largely absent these nasty mainstream archaeologists are from its run time. Joe Rogan, who has had Hancock on his podcast multiple times, makes a few appearances, lauding Hancock’s free-thinking ways. The other talking heads are either pro-Hancock or edited to look that way. Michael Shermer, of Skeptic magazine, who debated Hancock on Rogan’s show in 2017, merits a 20-second appearance in which he manages to get across one single argument against Hancock’s theory: “If this civilization existed, where are their trash heaps, where are their homes, where are their stone tools or metal tools, where is the writing?” That’s it—then back to Hancock, the “just asking questions,” the rancor.
John Hoopes, an archaeologist at the University of Kansas, is one of the mainstream archaeologist naysayers of the kind Hancock targets without naming. Hoopes has often written about the history of alternative and pseudoarchaeology, and about Hancock himself; his Twitter feed has been full, over the past week, with conversation between academic archaeologists about the specific claims in Ancient Apocalypse.
I called him to ask what people who aren’t up to speed with Hancock’s work should know if they watch this show. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Rebecca Onion: What can you say about the difference between the way academic archaeology approaches evidence and how Graham Hancock does?
John Hoopes: Graham Hancock is not and does not want to be seen as a scientist or a historian. He is coming from a metaphysical place. He’s inspired by Western esoterica. For him, the significance of a lot of this information is sort of intuitive and is confirmed to him through his personal revelatory experiences.
There’s a TEDx presentation he did back in 2013, called “The War on Consciousness,” in which he explained that he had been smoking cannabis daily for 25 years and finally stopped using it because he had an ayahuasca experience and found that it was a more meaningful and revelatory experience than his daily use of cannabis. [This TEDx talk sparked controversy within the TED organization after it went up on YouTube, described here.] So, if it seems like, in watching the show, his perspective has been influenced by drugs, it’s because it has.
Guardian | For a story that was first told 2,300 years ago, the myth of Atlantis has demonstrated a remarkable persistence over the millennia. Originally outlined by Plato, the tale of the rise of a great, ancient civilisation followed by its cataclysmic destruction has since generated myriad interpretations.
Many versions have been intriguing and entertaining – but none have been as controversial as its most recent outing in the Netflix series Ancient Apocalypse.
Presented by the author Graham Hancock, the programme argues that a once sophisticated culture was destroyed by floods triggered by a giant comet which crashed on Earth, a disaster that inspired the legend of Atlantis, it is claimed.
According to Hancock, survivors of the calamity spread round the world – which was then populated by simple hunter-gatherers – bringing them science, technology, agriculture and monumental architecture. We owe everything to these near godlike individuals, it is claimed.
For good measure, Hancock – who has been promoting these ideas in his books for decades – argues that archaeologists have deliberately covered up this catastrophic vision of civilisation’s spread and accuses mainstream academia of its “extremely defensive, arrogant and patronising” attitudes.
These stark claims have helped the series reach the top of viewing lists on both sides of the Atlantic, to the chagrin of archaeologists who, for their part, have denounced Ancient Apocalypse on the grounds that it provides little evidence to support its grandiose claims and for promoting conspiracy theories dressed up as science.
Nor is Hancock the first to suggest the destruction of a once great civilisation led to the flowering of culture elsewhere. In 1882, the maverick US congressman and popular writer Ignatius Donnelly published Atlantis: The Antediluvian World which argued that a highly complex, sophisticated culture had been wiped out by a flood 10,000 years ago and claimed that its survivors had spread round the world teaching the rest of humanity the secrets of farming and architecture. Sounds familiar.
Then there were the Nazis. Many swore by the idea that a white Nordic superior race – people of “the purest blood” – had come from Atlantis. As a result, Himmler set up an SS unit, the Ahnenerbe – or Bureau of Ancestral Heritage – in 1935 to find out where people from Atlantis had ended up after the deluge had destroyed their homeland.
And that, in part, explains why the myth of an ancient, lost civilisation is so useful. It is a basic tale of a rise and fall that can be corralled and exploited for all sorts of causes. Plato meant his tale to be an allegory. Atlantis was destroyed by the gods who had grown angry with the hubris displayed by its inhabitants and so destroyed it. Don’t get too big for your boots, in other words.
theconversation | Netflix’s enormously popular new show, Ancient Apocalypse, is an all out attack on archaeologists. As an archaeologist committed to public engagement who strongly believes in the relevance of studying ancient people, I feel a full-throated defence is necessary.
Author Graham Hancock is back, defending his well-trodden theory about an advanced global ice age civilisation, which he connects in Ancient Apocalypse to the legend of Atlantis. His argument, as laid out in this show and in several books, is that this advanced civilisation was destroyed in a cataclysmic flood.
The survivors of this advanced civilisation, according to Hancock, introduced agriculture, architecture, astronomy, arts, maths and the knowledge of “civilisation” to “simple” hunter gatherers. The reason little evidence exists, he says, is because it is under the sea or was destroyed by the cataclysm.
“Perhaps,” Hancock posits in the first episode, “the extremely defensive, arrogant, and patronising attitude of mainstream academia is stopping us from considering that possibility”.
In the opening dialogue of Ancient Apocalypse, Hancock rejects being identified as an archaeologist or scientist. Instead, he calls himself a journalist who is “investigating human prehistory”. A canny choice, as the label “journalist” helps Hancock rebut being characterised as a “pseudo archaeologist” or “pseudo scientist”, which, as he puts it himself in episode four, would be like calling a dolphin a “pseudo fish”.
From my perspective as an archaeologist, the show is surprisingly (or perhaps unsurprisingly) lacking in evidence to support Hancock’s theory of an advanced, global ice age civilisation. The only site Hancock visits that actually dates to near the end of the ice age is Göbekli Tepe in modern Turkey.
Instead, Hancock visits several North American mound sites, pyramids in Mexico, and sites stretching from Malta to Indonesia, which Hancock is convinced all help prove his theory. However, all of these sites have been published on in detail by archaeologists, and a plethora of evidence indicates they date thousands of years after the ice age.
theepochtimes | A medical board has moved to strip top cardiologist Dr. Peter McCullough of his certifications in internal medicine and cardiovascular disease, claiming that he provided misleading medical information to the public about COVID-19 vaccines.
The American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) informed McCullough of the action in a recent letter.
The board stated that McCullough’s statements questioning COVID-19 vaccination for healthy people younger than the age of 50 and pointing out that Americans have died after getting a COVID-19 vaccine triggered a review, which led to a recommendation that McCullough’s board certifications be revoked.
The ABIM’s Credentials and Certification Committee found that McCullough had “provided false or inaccurate medical information to the public,” the letter states.
“By casting doubt on the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines with such seemingly authoritative statements, made in various official forums and widely reported in various media, your statements pose serious concerns for patient safety,” it reads. “Moreover, they are inimical to the ethics and professionalism standards for board certification.”
McCullough was given until Nov. 18 to appeal.
If he appeals, the matter will be considered by a panel designated by the ABIM’s Board of Directors and at least one hearing would be held. The panel could accept the recommendation, rescind it, or impose an alternative punishment.
A medical board has moved to strip top cardiologist Dr. Peter McCullough of his certifications in internal medicine and cardiovascular disease, claiming that he provided misleading medical information to the public about COVID-19 vaccines.
The American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) informed McCullough of the action in a recent letter.
In a May notice of potential disciplinary measures, the board said it had learned that McCullough made “numerous widely reported and disseminated public statements about the purported dangers of, or lack of justification for, Covid-19 vaccines.”
As an example, the board cites McCullough’s March 10, 2021, testimony before a Texas Senate panel in which he said that people who have recovered from COVID-19 have “complete and durable immunity” and that there was no rationale for vaccinating such a person.
McCullough also said at the time that there was “no scientific rationale” for people who are healthy and younger than 50 to receive one of the vaccines.
In a declaration in a court case, meanwhile, McCullough said that more than 18,000 COVID-19 vaccine deaths had been submitted to the U.S.-run Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System and that the number of reported deaths was far above that of all other vaccines combined.
ABIM says the statements might violate the board’s policy on false or inaccurate medical information, which states that “providing false or inaccurate information to patients or the public is unprofessional and unethical” and could lead to sanctions.
McCullough responded the following month, requesting the matter be dismissed and offering a point-by-point rebuttal.
To back up his statements on COVID-19 vaccination, for instance, McCullough referenced data that shows people younger than 50 have a minuscule risk of death after contracting the illness, particularly if they don’t have serious underlying medical conditions.
yahoo | Daniil Medvedev, the Russian player currently sitting at No. 1 in the ATP rankings, may not be allowed to play at Wimbledon unless he denounces Russian president Vladimir Putin.
That was the situation outlined during a meeting at British Parliament on Tuesday, where sports minister Nigel Huddleston confirmed discussions were taking place to prevent supporters of Putin from entering the world's oldest tennis tournament amid Russia's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.
Russia's tennis teams have already been thrown out of the Davis and Billie Jean King Cup, but Huddleston indicated the government wanted sanctions to go further.
From The Telegraph:
Giving evidence to the Digital, Culture, Media & Sport select committee, Huddleston said: “It needs to go beyond that. We need some potential assurance that they are not supporters of Vladimir Putin and we are considering what requirements we may need to try and get some assurances along those lines.”
Asked whether individual Russian and Belarusian athletes wanting to come to the UK would be required to “denounce” Putin’s invasion, Huddleston said the details were still being discussed, including with other countries.
He added: “It would be better if we can decide some broad global consensus on this.”
Such an action would affect Medvedev and any other Russian and Belarusian tennis players, who are currently not allowed to play under their national flags while the Ukrainian invasion continues. There are currently four Russian players in the ATP top 30, while the WTA has three Russians and two Belarusians in its top 30.
The world of sports has seen an overwhelming and potentially unprecedented wave of bans against Russia's teams and athletes since the country's military made its move across the Ukrainian border. That has included suspensions from international competition in hockey, soccer, figure skating and many more, as well organizations removing events and business from the country and governments freezing Putin allies' assets.
businessinsider | As Conservative MPs returned to their constituencies after another week of fresh allegations of lockdown-busting parties at Downing Street, they were left wondering what reaction they would find back home.
Boris Johnson, the man once seen as electoral dynamite, is now increasingly seen as politically toxic. The question his backbenchers will have to answer this weekend is whether his toxicity is terminal.
The prime minister's apology to the House of Commons – in which he acknowledged the public "rage" caused by ITV's revelation of a "bring your own booze" garden party held in May 2020 — did little to quell the anger on Tory benches. But it did initially appear to buy him some time.
Then came another set of revelations. This time, two leaving parties, for which a No. 10 staffer was dispatched to buy a suitcase's worth of wine, were held in Downing Street on April 16, 2021, the night before Prince Philip's funeral.
Australia’s immigration minister revokes Djokovic’s visa on ‘health and good order’ grounds.
Djokovic could be detained again on Saturday while he challenges the decision.
What would Djokovic’s departure mean for the Australian Open bracket?
Andy Murray: ‘I’m not going to sit here and start kicking Novak whilst he’s down.’
In Serbia, Djokovic’s friends and family have fumed and waited.
Just catching up with the Djokovic story? Here’s what you need to know.
The Australian government took a stand for the public good, our correspondent writes.
KRON4 | San Francisco school board members will move forward to remove Vice President Alison Collins from the board and other committee positions in a special meeting later this week.
This comes after derogatory tweets Collins made in 2016 recently resurfaced.
On Tuesday night, the school board held a regular meeting where we heard an apology from Collins for the first time.
Despite this apology, Collins still made no suggestion of plans to step down from her position.
That’s why two other school board members plan to introduce a resolution at Thursday’s special meeting, calling for Collins to be stripped of her titles.
The San Francisco School Board met on Tuesday for the first time since derogatory tweets resurfaced from the board’s vice president, Alison Collins.
While Collins gave no indication of plans to resign, she made a public apology.
“I’d like to reemphasize my sincere and heartfelt apologies and I’m currently engaging with my colleagues and working with the community for the good of all children in our district,” Collins said.
Fellow school board member Jenny Lam called for Collins to make this apology several days ago and stands behind demands for Collins to resign.
“I am not alone when I say I don’t have confidence in Commissioner Collins’s ability to fairly govern a school district that is almost half API with no bias. Restorative justice begins by acknowledging the harm and making the intentional effort to connect with those in the community that has been harmed,” Lam said.
Lam and board member Moliga will introduce a resolution at a special meeting on Thursday, calling for Collins to be stripped of her VP position and committee assignments.
consentfactory | So, according to Facebook and the Atlantic Council, I am now a “dangerous individual,” you know, like a “terrorist,” or a “serial murderer,” or “human trafficker,” or some other kind of “criminal.” Or I’ve been praising “dangerous individuals,” or disseminating their symbols, or otherwise attempting to “sow dissension” and cause “offline harm.”
Actually, I’m not really clear what I’m guilty of, but I’m definitely some sort of horrible person you want absolutely nothing to do with, whose columns you do not want to read, whose books you do not want to purchase, and the sharing of whose Facebook posts might get your account immediately suspended. Or, at the very least, you’ll be issued this warning:
Now, hold on, don’t click away just yet. You’re already on whatever website you’re reading this “dangerous,” “terrorist” column on (or you’re reading it in an email, probably on your phone), which means you are already on the official “Readers of Mass-Murdering Content” watch-list. So you might as well take the whole ride at this point.
Also, don’t worry, I’m not going to just whine about how Facebook was mean to me for 2,000 words … well, all right, I’m going to do that a little, but mostly I wanted to demonstrate how “reality” is manufactured and policed by global corporations like Facebook, Twitter, Google, the corporate media, of course, crowdfunding platforms like Patreon and PayPal, and “think tanks” like the Atlantic Council and its Digital Forensic Research Lab (“DFRLab”).
First, though, let me tell you my Facebook story.
What happened was, I made a Facebook post, and a lot of people tried to share it, so Facebook and the DFRLab suspended or disabled their accounts, or just prevented them from sharing it, and sent them the above warning. Facebook didn’t suspend my account, or censor the post on my account, or contact me to let me know that they have officially deemed me a “dangerous individual.” Instead, they punished anyone who tried to “boost” my “dangerous” post, a tactic anyone who has been through boot camp or in prison (or has watched this classic scene from Full Metal Jacket) will be familiar with.
KATV | Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., chastised Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas Thursday over his alleged mishandli...
