Not long ago I was writing in defense
of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. When she first entered Congress as an
inner-city twenty something who’d knocked off longtime insider Joe
Crowley with a Sandersian policy profile, her own party’s establishment
ridiculed her as a lefty Trump. Nancy Pelosi scoffed that her win just
meant voters “made a choice in one district,”
so “let’s not get carried away.” Ben Ritz, director of the Progressive
Policy Institute, an offshoot of the old Democratic Leadership Council,
groused, “Oh, please, she just promised everyone a bunch of free stuff.”
This was before AOC decided to bethe
next Pelosi, instead of the next Sanders. The above sit-down on MSNBC
shows the transformation. Having shed the mantle of an outsider who
shook the old guard with online savvy, she appeared in soft light for a
softball “interview,” by a literal Biden official (Inside With Jen Psakiis as close as you can get to a formal dissolution of the line between White House and media). In it, she seemed to argue
for the outlaw of Fox News. “We have very real issues with what is
permissible on air,” she said, adding people like Tucker Carlson are
“very clearly” guilty of “incitement to violence,” a problem in light of
“federal regulation in terms of what’s allowed on air and what isn’t.”
deadline |CAA has signed artist, organizer, educator, and public speaker Patrisse Cullors for representation in all areas.
Cullors is known as the co-founder of the Black Lives Matter Global
Network. In addition to her work with BLM, her advocacy shines through
as a Chairperson of Reform LA Jails, and Founder and Board Chair of
grassroots Los Angeles-based organization Dignity and Power Now.
On the TV side, Cullors is part of the writers’ room for the Freeform series Good Trouble. She initially served as a consultant for the first season of The Fosters spinoff
to help with Malika (Zuri Adele) activism and social justice storyline.
She joined the writers’ room for the second season.
Cullors also appeared in the Kenneth Paul Rosenberg’s documentary Bedlam, which sheds light on the state of mental health in the U.S. It premiered at Sundance earlier this year
and Cullors’ family is one of four that share their personal stories
about mental health. For her part, she shares the heartbreaking story of
her brother Monte and his struggle with mental health. This opens the
floodgates that unveil the country’s severely broken healthcare and
prison system.
In 2016, Cullors published her memoir When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir which wnet on to become a New York Times bestseller. She has directed and produced numerous theater and performance pieces as well as docu-series.
Cullors will continue to be repped by Keppler Speakers and Victoria Sanders & Associates.
westonaprice | Dr. David Martin, founder and chairman of M-CAM Inc, challenges our
presuppositions about the new mRNA Covid-19 vaccines. Quoting the
pharmaceutical companies themselves, David suggests that these are not
vaccines, but, in actuality, gene therapy. He explains what the vaccines
may do to us, what they are promising they can do for us, and how to
distinguish the difference. Fist tap Dale.
factcheck | If Event 201 is the backbone of the conspiracy theory in “Plandemic,”
then David Martin is the central character. He’s featured throughout
the video, making claims primarily about patents.
Martin runs a company calledM-CAM, which analyzes patents and intellectual property to estimate the investment value of companies.
M-CAM has five investment companies as clients, managing assets of $1.1 million, according to a recent statement filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
“Not big in investments, seems more like another guy using predictive
modeling as a selling tool for many types of information,” Suzanne
Lynch told FactCheck.org in an email, after looking through M-CAM’s SEC
filings. Lynch has worked on Wall Street and is now a professor of economic crime at Utica College.
Samuel Rosen,
an assistant professor of finance at Temple University’s Fox School of
Business, similarly described M-CAM, broadly, as an investment research
company and noted in an email to FactCheck.org that it appears Martin
manages a small hedge fund, too.
But Martin has also peddled conspiracy theories over the years. He published a novel
in 2011, which he claimed was based on real events, alleging a rigged
2008 presidential election that was somehow tied to the terror attacks
on Sept. 11, 2001.
Since the pandemic began, he has used hisYouTube channelto promote COVID-19 conspiracy theories. He repeats many of those claims in “Plandemic: Indoctornation.”
In one video from April, Martin referred to Event 201, saying: “COVID-19
is a branded campaign … that is funded by people in the software, data
sciences and social media industry. That’s who built COVID-19.”
The gist of Martin’s video was that wealthy philanthropists like Bill
Gates, technology companies, pharmaceutical companies and global health
organizations colluded to create a virus that would force governments
to fund research and development of vaccines and therapies in order to
enrich themselves.
For “Plandemic,” though, Martin shifts his focus away from “the
software, data sciences and social media industry.” Instead, he takes
aim largely at government entities.
Martin claims that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention saw “the possibility of a gold strike” when the SARS epidemic arose in 2003.
“They saw that a virus they knew could be easily manipulated was something that was very valuable,” he says, pointing to a patent filed by the CDC that year. The patent covered the isolated virus that causes SARS and ways to detect it.
Skimming across the screen while Martin makes that claim is a headline for a November 2003 news story
about the race to patent the virus. However, that story doesn’t support
his argument. It actually explains that the CDC wasn’t pursuing the
patent for profit. Rather, it was doing so to keep others from
monopolizing research.
“The whole purpose of the patent is to prevent folks from controlling
the technology,” the story quotes CDC spokesman Llelwyn Grant as
saying. “This is being done to give the industry and other researchers
reasonable access to the samples.”
Similarly, the director of the CDC at the time, Dr. Julie Gerberding, told
reporters that filing for the patent was “a protective measure to make
sure that the access to the virus remains open for everyone.”
“The concern that the federal government is looking at right now is
that we could be locked out of this opportunity to work with this virus
if it’s patented by someone else, and so by initiating steps to secure
patent rights, we assure that we will be able to continue to make the
virus and the products from the virus available in the public domain,
and that we can continue to promote the rapid technological transfer of
this biomedical information into tools and products that are useful to
patients,” Gerberding said in a May 2003 telebriefing.
So, Martin’s claim is at odds with the CDC’s publicly stated motivation, and he offers no evidence to support his argument.
Next, Martin claims that federal law wouldn’t have allowed for a patent on that isolated virus.
Again, he’s wrong.
Instead of reading from U.S. patent law,
as he says he is in the video, Martin reads from a 2013 U.S. Supreme
Court decision. That’s an important distinction since the decision,
which changed one aspect of patent law that’s relevant here, came 10
years after the CDC filed for a patent related to the virus that causes
SARS.
“Nature is prohibited from being patented,” Martin says, claiming that he was quoting from a section of patent law. Building on that, he claims, “either
SARS, coronavirus, was manufactured, therefore making a patent on it
legal, or it was natural, therefore making a patent on it illegal.”
But that’s a false dichotomy.
While the Supreme Court did find
that “[a] naturally occurring DNA segment is a product of nature and
not patent eligible merely because it has been isolated,” that decision
came a decade after the CDC sought the patent.
“Isolated genes (that is, genes extracted from a longer DNA sequence)
used to be patentable in the past because the courts decided that just
the act of extracting them and removing the non-coding segments caused
enough of a modification to turn them into patent-eligible things,” Mario Biagioli,
a professor at UCLA School of Law, told FactCheck.org in an email. “No
more. A few years ago the Supreme Court decided that simply isolating a
gene did not change it enough. It remained a ‘product of nature’ and
therefore unpatentable.”
So, claiming that the patent is either illegal or the virus was “manufactured” is wrong.
MTONews | Kevin Samuels is one of most popular dating gurus on Youtube, and today he's going viral MTO News can report.
Kevin has a very unique style of offering dating advice. Much of his advice, which is aimed at Black women, centers around telling Black women they should lower their dating standards. According to Kevin, Black women have unrealistic expectations when it comes to dating.
But it's not Kevin's advice that has people talking, it's his new much younger girlfriend. Kevin, who is 55, posted new pics online suggesting that he's now dating a 29 year old IG model.
He posted pics of her online:
whispersofawomanist | Earlier this month, self-proclaimed image consultant Kevin Samuels went viral for an on-air session
he had with a black female client. In the session, Samuels responded to
his client’s want for a man that brings home a six-figure income. The
client, a thirty-five-year-old woman who makes six figures herself, has a
teenaged son. Samuels contended that the client did not qualify for the
men that she desires. To clarify here, Samuel’s use of the word
“qualify” speaks specifically to the client’s physical appearance and
her status as a mother— a status he deems social suicide to her desire
partner and lifestyle.
I will be honest and say that few things make me feel as disappointed
and upset as the inauthentic aesthetic that has engulfed much of the
black female optic. From weaves to the false eyelashes and nails, this
aesthetic betrays the drastic measures the western world has taken to
assassinate the African-descended woman’s natural aesthetic.
Nevertheless, participating in what I perceive as slave culture, is not
grounds for disrespect. Particularly, it is the critical gaze and
ridicule that Samuels renders that is the reason why black women don
this aesthetic. It is this pervasive and normalized scrutiny espoused
with general disbelief in black female beauty that creates an internal
void, a deficit fictively oscillated with weaves, eyelashes, wigs, and
other social depressants. Rather than using his words to lift a young
lady knocked down by imbalanced standards, Samuels contributes to the
epidemic facing black people with his words and ideology
This brings me to my next point. Black women remain held to
impossible standards simply non-existent to women of other races. When
African-adjacent women approach or interact with black men, the issue is
not whether they are average, a mother, overweight, a high earner,
under or “over” educated; rather, their appeal lies in their
non-blackness. Samuels upholds this imbalance with his praise of
mixed-race and non-black women of all ages and circumstances as better
romantic investments than black women.
Thus, telling a black woman he deems average that she does not
qualify for what women with less going for them could acquire with
non-blackness adheres to the racism embedded in gender. Gender is not a
sister to biology, it is kin to racism, and it functions as another
means to globalize racism under a seemingly autonomous category.
Moreover, Samuel’s implementation of gender as racism illuminates his
plight to actualize the ways of a white man in a black male body.
patheos |Domestic Terrorist: Rep. Lauren
Boebert, a newly elected member of congress and a big QAnon supporter,
is facing calls for her arrest after live-tweeting Nancy Pelosi’s
location to terrorists as they stormed the U.S. Capitol earlier this
week.
Rep. Lauren Boebert
(R-CO), a gun-toting supporter of the QAnon movement, is facing backlash
after she was accused of live-tweeting House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s
(D-CA)
As Trump supporters were storming the Capitol, Boebert warned the terrorists that Pelosi had been moved, tweeting:
The Speaker has been removed from the chambers.
Before tweeting that Pelosi had moved, she had tweeted:
We were locked in the House Chambers.
In addition, Boebert tweeted encouragement to the domestic terrorists before the assault, declaring:
location during the attack on Capitol Hill last week.
KRDO | Friday at noon, the organization Rural Colorado United is holding
rallies at newly elected U.S. Congresswoman Lauren Boebert's offices all
across her district, including Pueblo, calling for her resignation in
the wake of Wednesday's riot at the US Capitol.
On Wednesday, Boebert objected to the certification of the 2020
Presidential election results in key battleground states, specifically
objecting to Arizona's electoral votes. However, all of the states
independently certified their votes before Boebert's objection.
"Madame Speaker, I have constituents outside this building right now
and I promised to be their voice," said Boebert on the floor of the
House of Representatives during the debate over an objection to the
Electoral votes in the state of Arizona. "It is my separate but equal
obligation to weigh in on this election and object."
Not long after Boebert's speech, supporters of President Donald Trump
stormed U.S. Capitol Building after a rally, attempting to stop the
certification of the election for President-elect Joe Biden. Five
individuals, including a U.S. Capitol Policeman, died as a result of the
riot.
selfishactivist | I understand that for some people this may draw confusion because the
hall-of-fame of somatics in our minds is plastered with the images of
white teachers and innovators.
Yet, somatics remains an Asian cultural form in its modern roots.
Acknowledging this is similar to how we may appropriately recognize
funk and rock n’ roll as Black music. While robust polyrhythms and
boisterous dance circles are a feature of almost any culture if you
excavate deeper, it is undoubtedly Black people and their culture, i.e.
the collective work of their ancestors, that have kept alive these
Afro-diasporic traditions and gifted them to those of us who live in the
context of the modern post-colonial project.
Somatics, the practice of affecting change through felt-sense
interoception of the body, has a similar story. Since the post-war era
of the 1950s, and even before that on a smaller scale, Asian cultural
practices such as qigong, yoga, zen, energetic martial arts, energy
work, and Chinese medicine proliferated throughout the Western world,
often accompanied by a variety of Asian philosophical orientations from
Buddhism to Daoism.
The modern Western somatic modalities we have come to commonly know,
from Somatic Experiencing, Hakomi Method, Generative Somatics, Embodied
Leadership (Strozzi Institute), Feldenkrais, and so on, all derive their
foundational somatic practices from these Asian cultural traditions. In
more recent years, these embodiment tools that have been traditionally
accessed for individual healing are now more and more being accessed for
politicized collective healing.
Now, here is a question: with all this resourcing from our ancestors,
how much do people actually know about Asian cultures? Or even better,
how much can people humbly admit that they DON’T know? Because while our
ancestors’ treasures have been sending gifts to the West, there has
been very little understanding of who we are, what it is, the essence of
‘Asianness’ we embody, even within social justice circles that
purportedly are about exploring and celebrating that which is
marginalized.
The reality is, we have continuously been the last thought,
constantly triaged out of relevance using a metric that we know as the
hierarchy of oppression. And perhaps, there is some twisted validity in
the idea that things just aren’t as bad for us so we matter less.
But lying deeper than this surface logic is a problem that eats
itself. The supposedly semi-reasonable idea that we are the least
important issue in the problem of racism, doesn’t mean that healing
anti-Asianness can’t be the most critical key to solving the koan that
systemic oppression is.
My aspirations in cultural somatics have always been about addressing
this very core issue – to reclaim somatics, as an Asian cultural form,
as an Asian person. In my own first explorations of the work that I now
refer to as cultural somatics was a yearning to create a framework that
understands change, even social change, as wholly encapsulated in the
body and its innate mysterious non-dual nature, that flips and
synthesizes yin and yang in a constant process of alchemy.
This mattered to me deeply because in all honestly, I just had enough
of activist spaces that touted banners of ‘resistance’ and ’solidarity’
but consequently had no room for the distinctly Asian embodied
sensibilities of ‘yielding’ and ‘fluidity’ as power and resource. I
definitely have the first-hand experience of getting shut down for
suggesting that these may be also valuable strategies for ‘fighting the
enemy’.
dailywire | A bombshell report from the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and
Governmental Affairs (HSGAC) and the Committee on Finance makes a
series of damning new allegations against Hunter Biden, the son of
Democrat presidential nominee.
The investigation launched after
Finance Committee Chairman Charles Grassley (R-IA) publicly raised
conflict-of-interest concerns about the sale of a U.S. company to a
Chinese firm with ties to Hunter Biden a month before Congress
was notified about a whistleblower complaint that was the catalyst for
Democrats’ impeachment of President Donald Trump. The Senate’s
investigation relied on records from the U.S. government, Democrat
lobbying groups, and interviews of numerous current and former
officials.
The report also stated that the investigation found that the Obama
administration “knew that Hunter Biden’s position on Burisma’s board was
problematic and did interfere in the efficient execution of policy with
respect to Ukraine.”
lamag | Influential California politician Willie Brown inserted himself into Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign this week, penning an op-ed for the San Francisco Chronicledetailing
his romantic relationship with her in the 1990s. The relationship was
never a secret, but the public acknowledgement ignited new criticisms of
Harris. Commentators began to imply she benefitted professionally from
the personal relationship, possibly even only getting to where she is
today because of their liaison.
Willie Brown was a fixture in
California politics for years, serving as speaker of the state assembly
for 15 years, and known as something of an unofficial deal-maker and
influencer. He first met Harris in 1994, when she was an assistant
district attorney in Alameda County. He was 60 years old at the time,
and had been estranged from his wife, Blanche Brown, since 1981.
In
his capacity as speaker, Brown appointed Harris to two political
positions. The first was a six-month appointment to the California
Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board; the second was a role on the
Medical Assistance Commission, a body tasked with negotiating contracts
to control Medi-Cal costs. At the time, Brown had a reputation for
filling many openings with his personal associates and inner circle;
when Harris vacated the Appeals Board gig, he replaced her with his
longtime buddy Philip S. Ryan.
Harris ended the relationship–which
was conducted in the open and frequently reported on at the time–in
late 1995, shortly before Brown was sworn in for his first of two terms
as mayor of San Francisco.
QAnon
is a far-right conspiracy theory and loosely organized network centered
around the belief that the U.S. is controlled by a cabal of child sex
trafficking, Democratic elites hell-bent on bringing down President
Trump.
Q
and others in the collective make it clear they believe the news media
is false. Kaplan says they often use the phrase “we are the news now”
and claim “they're identifying what's really going on as opposed to the
media lying to you,” he says.
Similar
to many evangelicals, QAnon supports seem to believe the world is on the
cusp of a great awakening. Adrian Hon, a game designer, says QAnon
reminds him of an immersive multiplayer game and he's worried people
could recreate the playbook.
Kaplan
says people have compared QAnon to larping — a real-life role-playing
game — because the group “puts what's going on, in some ways, in your
hands.”
“You can do the
research, you can feel involved, you feel like you can explain and
figure out what's really going on behind the scenes and can make sense
of ... what seems like chaos going around the world,” he says.
Given that “personnel is policy,” I’ll first reduce people mentioned
in the Wall Street Journal story, and the scientists who signed the
March-April deliverable to tabular form. After that, I will take a quick
look at the scientists’ deliverable, focusing especially on issues of
governance and restoring our economy.
As a sidebar, I must protest at the PR-driven use of “Manhattan
Project. The Manhattan Project cost $23 billion in US dollars and
employed 130,000 people. I don’t think anything of that scale is being
proposed, unfortunately. End sidebar.
Now let’s look at the billionaire and multimillionaire backers of…
well, whatever the project is really called; I’ll call it, following the
Wall Street Journal, the Secret Group. In addition to backers, there
are also fixers, who connect the backers and the scientists to the
administration, agencies, and other firms, primarily in Big Pharma. I
have ordered the backers and fixers not alphabetically but by net worth.
Having looked at personnel, I’m going to look at two policy
recommendations. (I’m skipping over the Committee prioritizing
remdesivir[2]; my layperson’s sense is that there are a lot of potentia
treatments out there, and it makes more sense to accelerate many rather
than one. I also note that the stock market just had a massive pop based
on a preliminary remdesivir result from Gilead, and I certainly hope
that none of the backers were front-running it.)
strategic-culture | There may have been subtle hints of slightly increased activity at
clinics in Wuhan in late November and early December. But at the time
nobody – Chinese doctors, the government, not to mention U.S. intel –
could have possibly known what was really happening.
China could not be “covering up” what was only identified as a new
disease on December 30, duly communicated to the WHO. Then, on January
3, the head of the American CDC, Robert Redfield, called the top Chinese
CDC official. Chinese doctors sequenced the virus. And only on January 8
it was determined this was Sars-Cov-2 – which provokes Covid-19.
This chain of events reopens, once again, a mighty Pandora’s box. We have the quite timely Event 201; the cozy relationship between the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and
the WHO, as well as the Word Economic Forum and the Johns Hopkins
galaxy in Baltimore, including the Bloomberg School of Public Health;
the ID2020 digital ID/vaccine combo; Dark Winter
– which simulated a smallpox bio-attack on the U.S., before the 2001
anthrax attack being blamed on Iraq; U.S. Senators dumping stocks after a
CDC briefing; more than 1,300 CEOs abandoning their cushy perches in
2019, “forecasting” total market collapse; the Fed pouring helicopter
money already in September 2019 – as part of QE4.
And then, validating the ABC News report, Israel steps in. Israeli intel confirms
U.S. intel did in fact warn them in November about a potentially
catastrophic pandemic in Wuhan (once again: how could they possibly know
that on the second week of November, so early in the game?) And NATO
allies were warned – in November – as well.
The bottom line is explosive: the Trump administration as well as the
CDC had an advance warning of no less than four months – from November
to March – to be properly prepared for Covid-19 hitting the U.S. And
they did nothing. The whole “China is a witch!” case is debunked.
Moreover, the Israeli disclosure supports what’s nothing less than
extraordinary: U.S. intel already knew about Sars-Cov-2 roughly one
month before the first confirmed cases detected by doctors in a Wuhan
hospital. Talk about divine intervention.
That could only have happened if U.S. intel knew, for sure, about a
previous chain of events that would necessarily lead to the “mysterious
outbreak” in Wuhan. And not only that: they knew exactly where to look.
Not in Inner Mongolia, not in Beijing, not in Guangdong province.
It’s never enough to repeat the question in full: how could U.S.
intel have known about a contagion one month before Chinese doctors
detected an unknown virus?
Mike “We Lie, We Cheat, We Steal” Pompeo may have given away the game
when he said, on the record, that Covid-19 was a “live exercise”.
Adding to the ABC News and Israeli reports, the only possible, logical
conclusion is that the Pentagon – and the CIA – knew ahead of time a
pandemic would be inevitable.
That’s the smokin’ gun. And now the full weight of the United States
government is covering all bases by proactively, and retroactively,
blaming China.
fox5ny | One police department in Oregon posted a reminder on their Facebook
page, asking the public to not call for an emergency if they run out of
toilet paper due to the coronavirus outbreak.
"It’s hard to believe that we even have to post this," police in
Newport, Oregon wrote. "Do not call 9-1-1 just because you ran out of
toilet paper. You will survive without our assistance."
The post then pointed out the different methods used throughout
history before suggesting other items that could be used in lieu of
"your favorite soft, ultra plush two-ply citrus scented tissue."
Among their suggestions: grocery store receipts, newspaper, cloth rags, magazine pages, cotton balls and even leaves.
"Be resourceful. Be patient. There is a TP shortage. This too shall
pass. Just don’t call 9-1-1. We cannot bring you toilet paper," the post
concluded.
abcnews | Two state attorneys general ordered a prominent televangelist to stop peddling an alleged coronavirus elixir on his show.
Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt filed a lawsuit Tuesday against
Jim Bakker for misrepresentations about the effectiveness of "Silver
Solution" as a treatment for coronavirus.
Schmitt's lawsuit came a week
after the office of New York Attorney General Letitia James sent a cease-and-desist order to Bakker, ordering him to stop promoting the supplement as a COVID-19 treatment.
During a Feb. 12 episode of the "The Jim Bakker Show," guest Sherrill
Sellman claimed the so-called Silver Solution was able to eliminate some
strains of coronavirus.
Asked if the Silver Solution would be effective against COVID-19,
specifically, Sellman replied, "Let's say it hasn't been tested on this
strain of the coronavirus, but it's been tested on other strains of the
coronavirus and it has been able to eliminate it within 12 hours."
According to the World Health Organization, there are no current cures
or direct treatments for the novel coronavirus, and the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention said there's no known cure for other
coronavirus variants that cause SARS and MERS.
"Your show's segment may mislead consumers as to the effectiveness of
the Silver Solution product in protecting against the current outbreak,"
the the New York cease-and-desist order said. "Any representation on
the Jim Bakker Show that its Silver Solution products are effective at
combating and/or treating the 2019 novel coronavirus violates New York
law."
cultofthebloodmoon | The Evolution of Faith - Göbeli Tepe bridges a large gap between humanity's earliest ideas
on religion in the ice age, and the major religions of the world today,
showing, for the first time, an evolution of faith that just might
cross tens of thousands of years.
Below, each section of the book has been broken up to make things
easier to manage, but only certain documents will be available for now.
The rest will be rolled out through 2019-2020, whether public or
password-protected. AVG012 - Pillar 33
contains special evidence, available now for academics to argue over
and yell at me about. Just remember, it's supposed to be a genealogy
report for everyone!
To be clear, Part One has speculation about other sites up to the end
of the ice age, but there's little to no speculation in Part Two.
Göbekli Tepe is what it is. Part Three explores the supernova after
agriculture and domestication took root, right up to the invention of
the telescope, which ended a way of thinking about the sky that could,
just maybe, have been held by the majority of humans for over a hundred
thousand years.
Part One - On The Potential for a Common Root Religion
AVG001: Introduction, and a look at some key capabilities of early humans.
AVG002:
Persistence hunting compared to lunar tracking, plus the human tendency
to link things together, like the moon to tides, water and shells,
leading to gratitude, perhaps, with the moon being a major helper while
South Africa was a desert during the last ice age, over a hundred
thousand years ago. And one interpretation of the Blombos Cave ochre
etching, dated around 70,000 BCE.
AVG003, AVG004, AVG005: Race for the Danube. The evolution of social
sky watching in Europe and some new interpretations of famous ice age
art, partly inspired by new findings from Göbekli Tepe.
AVG006, AVG007: Coming out of the ice age
(Kebaran/Natufian/Epigravettian), and the evolution of mobile art. Two
pebbles are considered as possible pocket almanacs.
Part Two - Göbekli Tepe
AVG008, AVG009: Pillar 43 as being like the welcome sign at a big theme park. Alpha and omega for one particular serpent.
AVG010, AVG011, AVG012,
AVG013: Full tour of every pillar in Enclosure D, and the incredible
evidence on Pillar 33 that makes this entire book plausible.
AVG014:
The central pillars and their potential relationship to the cult of
Cybele and other hermaphroditic gods, and sky fathers everywhere.
AVG015: Highlights from the remaining enclosures, and special snakes.
Part Three - Supernova
AVG016: Supporting evidence from other sites, circa 9000 BCE, and
further interpretations of Göbekli Tepe's cultural output as what led to
gods like Uranus, Gaia, Namma, Tiamat, Cybelle, An, and more.
AVG017: The case for the Göbekli Tepe region as the mythical Garden of Eden.
AVG018: Gorgon Generation, Jericho
AVG019: The founding of Catalhoyuk, and Memories of Göbekli Tepe
AVG020: Lepenski Vir, Seated Goddess
AVG021: Bird Feet, circa 6200 BCE
AVG022: A Beheading, circa 5800 BCE
AVG023: Founding of the first Mesopotamian cities, circa 5500 BCE.
AVG024: The Gods Must Be Crazy, circa 5000 BCE
AVG025: Ninurta Gets the Ball, 4333 BCE
AVG029: Uruk, Predynastic Egypt, etc.
AVG030: Symbols turn into writing, after 3500 BCE
AVG031: Anzu Rips the Sky
AVG032: The mysterious Asag demon, and Ninurta vs Adad vs Teshub
AVG033: Between the Primordial and Patriarchal, circa 2000 BCE
AVG034: Baal, Zoroastrianism, more birds
AVG035: El, Yahweh, Thoth
AVG036: Good News
AVG037: The Vine
AVG038: The Vine
AVG039: A Philosophical Theory-of-Everything, After 1600 CE
NYTimes | Years ago I
spoke with a 16-year-old girl who was considering the idea of having a
computer companion in the future, and she described the upside to me.
It’s not that the robot she’d imagined, a vastly more sophisticated
Siri, was so inspiring. It’s that she’d already found people to be so
disappointing. And now, for the first time, she explained me, people
have options. Back then I thought her comments seemed prescient. Now I find them timely.
“There
are people who have tried to make friends, but stumbled so badly that
they’ve given up,” she said. “So when they hear this idea of robots as
companions, well … it’s not like a robot has the mind to walk away or
leave you or anything like that.”
This
girl had grown up in the time of Siri, a conversational object
presented as an empathy machine — a thing that could understand her. And
so it seemed natural to her that other machines would expand the range
of conversation. But there is something she may have been too young to
understand — or, like a lot of us — prone to forget when we talk to
machines. These robots can perform
empathy in a conversation about your friend, your mother, your child or
your lover, but they have no experience of any of these relationships.
Machines have not known the arc of a human life. They feel nothing of
the human loss or love we describe to them. Their conversations about
life occupy the realm of the as-if.
Yet through our interactions with these machines, we seem to ignore this
fact; we act as though the emotional ties we form with them will be
reciprocal, and real, as though there is a right kind of emotional tie
that can be formed with objects that have no emotions at all.
urbanfaith | In the Black Church it is popular to give leaders a free pass.
Usually when someone dares to speak out against someone in ministry they
are quick to hear “Touch not mine anointed” or “Don’t put your mouth on
the man of God.” The idea is that God calls the preacher/pastor and
therefore he is answerable only to God. Therefore there is no
accountability between him/her and the congregation or other pastors.
Having been in the pastor role myself I believe that we should give
pastors the respect they deserve because it is a tiresome and demanding
job to shepherd a faith community. At the same time, I think that when
the pastor breaks some of the standards for a Christian leader outlined
in the New Testament (1 Timothy 3:1-7, Titus 1:5-9) someone should call
them to account for their actions.
But is it right for a pastor to let another pastor know when they are
out of line? Is it right for church members to correct their pastor?
Based on scriptural principles and examples the answer to both questions
is an emphatic “Yes!” In regard to church members calling their leaders
to account we can examine 1 Timothy 5:19-20.
Here Paul lets Timothy know that he is not to receive an accusation
against an elder unless two or three witnesses can support it. By
stating how these accusations are to be received these verses assume
that accusations can be brought against an elder or church leader.
In regard to pastors calling other pastors to account Paul provides
an excellent example. When Peter shows prejudice against the Gentiles at
Antioch, Paul rebukes him to his face Galatians 2:11-12.
Paul went in on Peter in front of everyone! Paul was also vocal in
calling out false teachers. He warns Timothy not to follow in the
footsteps of Hymenaeus and Alexander in regards to his Christian faith 1 Timothy 1:19-20. Notice that he calls them out by name. Paul also calls out Hymenaeus and Philetus in 2 Timothy 2:17-18.
When leaders are out of line other leaders need to publicly let them
know. When leaders are out of line their followers need to let them
know. One thing that needs to be taken into consideration is whether
the preachers have been given the opportunity to change. The site warns
others of their faults and sins but is there a way to offer grace and
restore these fallen pastors.
Another thing that we do not know is whether the church members have
already addressed these issues with the pastor according to Matthew 18:15-17.
Pimppreacher.com has taken it upon themselves to be an advocate for
those who feel abused by their pastor but have the members themselves
done the biblical thing and talked it out with the offenders. This would
be the best way to handle these situations.
What do you think? Should pastors be held accountable by other
pastors? Should pastors be held accountable by other members? Is a site
like pimppreacher.com necessary?
riordanclinic | On one particular day in the early 1970s, Olive was sitting under a
hair dryer reading a review about a new book, Nutrition and Your Mind,
by George Watson. The review stated that nutrition, or the food you eat,
has an effect on your mind. This struck a chord in Olive. She did not
believe that wallowing in your childhood and reliving traumas in your
life would lead to a healthy mind. She differed with her former
classmate, Karl Menninger, who became famous for starting the Menninger
Clinic in Topeka. She couldn’t wait to read this book and immediately
ordered it.
After reading the book, she began to formulate an idea
that would eventually lead to The Center for the Improvement of Human
Functioning. She had Clifford Allison, executive director of the Garvey
Foundation, get in touch with Bill Schul, a freelance writer who had
ties to Menninger Clinic, to study what was being done on the effect of
nutrition on the mind. Although Bill thought the book was interesting,
he did not think he was qualified to make that kind of study. Allison
assured him that he was the correct person for the job since he would
not be defending any discipline or philosophy, he would not be bringing
any bias to the effort. Bill devoted more than six months to this
research effort.(32) Except for one flight to the west coast the rest of
the 12,000 miles covered during the course of this study were by car
and commercial bus. Bill visited Centers in Kansas, Oklahoma, Missouri,
Illinois, Wisconsin, Washington, D.C., Maryland, New Jersey, New York,
Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Colorado, Arizona, and California. After
reading many books and research articles and interviewing leaders in the
field of nutrition, with the help of the International Academy of
Metabology, Inc., Bill was ready to give his preliminary findings. In
November 1973 Bill presented Olive with the results of his research in a
printed report, Preliminary Study: the effects of nutrition on the mind
and related subjects. Bill authored a book, Frontiers of Medicine, from
that research. He also recommended to Mrs. Garvey that he do some
additional research into holistic medicine, which he thought was going
to become the way of the future. Another book, Psychic Frontiers of
Medicine, was published as a result of that study.
In the first
study Bill focused on the state of treatment for mental diseases. Then
he presented theoretical concepts between the mind and body.
Psychosomatic medicine was also touched upon, along with the emerging
practice of treating the whole person rather than the symptoms.
Nutrition and the mind deserved several pages of the study as well as
allergy and human ecology. He had included recommendations as to how a
new type of medicine could be delivered, along with the estimated costs.
nautil-us | In April 1901, after crossing an unusually calm English Channel,
Metchnikoff for the first time exposed his newly formulated theory of
aging to the public in the notoriously rainy Manchester. He traveled
there to receive the Wilde Medal of the Manchester Literary and
Philosophical Society, the first foreigner to achieve this honor. In the
society’s compact lecture hall, he delivered an hour‐long lecture in
French, “The Flora of the Human Body,” in which he outlined his
brand‐new explanation of why we age and die too soon.
The culprit, he announced, was the body’s flora—microscopic organisms
inhabiting our internal organs, primarily the large intestine, or
colon, the body’s largest microbe container. The idea that waste
products in the intestines poison the human body went back at least to
ancient Egyptians. In the late 19th century, with the establishment of
the link between germs and disease, this belief had gained new validity,
turning into a short‐lived obsession among physicians. The contents of
the gut were thought to putrefy and release toxins through the action of
bacteria. Physicians were attributing anything from headaches and
fatigue to heart disease and epilepsy to these toxins, having their
patients swallow disinfecting mixtures containing charcoal, iodine,
mercury, or naphthalene to “sterilize” the intestines.
Metchnikoff conceded that intestinal flora could be beneficial too,
but most of these microbes, he argued, exert a harmful effect on the
body, “and this leads to premature aging of our tissues and organs.”
Lashing out with a bitter invective against the colon, Metchnikoff,
as a zoologist and a Darwinist, pointed to the animal origins of human
beings. In our evolutionary past, the colon had helped mammals to
survive. It contained not only microbes that facilitated the digestion
of plant food but also remnants of digested food, enabling the animals
to chase prey and escape predators without stopping to empty their
bowels. Humans, on the other hand, he said, “derive no benefit from this
organ,” particularly since they cook their food, making it easier to
absorb. Though the colon was already known to play a role in the
absorption of water and minerals, Metchnikoff believed it was less
essential in this respect than the stomach or the small intestine. He
was certain the colon should have long been eliminated by natural
selection, if only the latter were more effective.
Burnham renounced his allegiance to
Trotsky and Marxism, in all its forms in 1940, but he would take the
tactics and strategies for infiltration and subversion, (learned as a
member of Leon Trotsky’s inner circle) with him, and would elevate the
Trotskyist management of ‘identity politics’ to become the fragmentation
‘device’ primed to explode national culture onto a new stage, in the
Western sphere. His 1941 book, “The Managerial Revolution,” caught
the attention of Frank Wisner, subsequently, a legendary CIA figure,
who saw in the works of Burnham and his colleague a fellow Trotskyite,
Sidney Hook, the prospect of mounting an effective alliance of former Trotskyites against Stalinism.
But, additionally, Wisner perceived its
merits as the blueprint for a CIA-led, pseudo-liberal, US-led global
order. (‘Pseudo’, because, as Burnham articulated clearly, in The Machiavellians, Defenders of Freedom,his version of
freedom meant anything but intellectual freedom or those freedoms
defined by America’s Constitution. “What it really meant was conformity
and submission”).
Trump evidently has heard the two key
messages from his constituency: that they neither accept to have (white)
American culture, and its way-of-life, diluted through immigration;
and, neither do they wish – stoically – to accommodate to America’s
eclipse by China.
The issue of how to arrest China’s rise is
primordial (for Team Trump), and in a certain sense, has led to an
American ‘retrospective’: America now may only account for 14% of global
output (PPP – Purchasing Power Parity basis), or 22%, on a nominal
basis (as opposed to near half of global output, for which the US was
responsible, at the close of WW2), but American corporations, thanks to
the dollar global hegemony, enjoy a type of monopoly status (i.e.
Microsoft, Google and Facebook, amongst others), either through
regulatory privilege, or by marketplace dominance. Trump wants to halt
this asset from decaying further and to leverage it again as a potent
bargaining chip in the present tariff wars. This is clearly a political
‘winner’ in terms of US domestic grass-roots, politics, and the upcoming
November mid-term elections.
America’s dollar hegemony has proved toxic
to the rest of the world in very many ways, and Trump - in leveraging
that hegemony so gangsterishly: “We’re America, Bitch”,
as one official described America’s approach – is fueling antagonism
towards dollar hegemony (if not yet towards America per se). It is
pushing all of non-America into a common stance of rebellion against
America’s unipolar financial dominance.
sciencedaily | According to a new paper published in Science, there is a
quantifiable answer: Roughly 25% of people need to take a stand before
large-scale social change occurs. This idea of a social tipping point
applies to standards in the workplace and any type of movement or
initiative.
Online, people develop norms about everything from what type of
content is acceptable to post on social media, to how civil or uncivil
to be in their language. We have recently seen how public attitudes can
and do shift on issues like gay marriage, gun laws, or race and gender
equality, as well as what beliefs are or aren't publicly acceptable to
voice.
During the past 50 years, many studies of organizations and community
change have attempted to identify the critical size needed for a
tipping point, purely based on observation. These studies have
speculated that tipping points can range anywhere between 10 and 40%.
The problem for scientists has been that real-world social dynamics
are complicated, and it isn't possible to replay history in precisely
the same way to accurately measure how outcomes would have been
different if an activist group had been larger or smaller.
"What we were able to do in this study was to develop a theoretical
model that would predict the size of the critical mass needed to shift
group norms, and then test it experimentally," says lead author Damon
Centola, Ph.D., associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania's
Annenberg School for Communication and the School of Engineering and
Applied Science.
Drawing on more than a decade of experimental work, Centola has
developed an online method to test how large-scale social dynamics can
be changed.
In this study, "Experimental Evidence for Tipping Points in Social
Convention," co-authored by Joshua Becker, Ph.D., Devon Brackbill,
Ph.D., and Andrea Baronchelli, Ph.D., 10 groups of 20 participants each
were given a financial incentive to agree on a linguistic norm. Once a
norm had been established, a group of confederates -- a coalition of
activists that varied in size -- then pushed for a change to the norm.
When a minority group pushing change was below 25% of the total
group, its efforts failed. But when the committed minority reached 25%,
there was an abrupt change in the group dynamic, and very quickly the
majority of the population adopted the new norm. In one trial, a single
person accounted for the difference between success and failure.
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