The original lyrics of Nina Simone’s SINNERMAN were a hymn of challenge, beckoning the foul sinner back to the fold. But Nina Simone answers the dimestore evangelism with a more powerful rebuttal: the tragic unjust plight of the Black Man in cruel America.
Headlines proclaiming the big success of this vaccine are ubiquitous. Write-ups virtually cut and paste across all corporate media. It’s the same angle repeated a thousand times: 90% effective – what a triumph, millions of doses ready before year’s end, billions of dollars next year… Something fishy is going on here. The results don’t match the reporting. At all.
In COVID-19, the media industry finally found an alternative clickbait to Trump with a better click-through rate and a lower political cost. Many daily newspapers devote two-thirds of their headline articles to rehashed coronavirus fear-porn. Covering every angle? Not at all. That wouldn’t serve the mainstream media’s long-term purpose…
“Nothing appears more surprising… than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few, and the implicit submission with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers.… force is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinion. It is, therefore, on opinion only that government is founded, and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments, as well as to the freest and most popular.”
Meditation and mindful practices – Vipassana, Jungian ‘ego death’, Buddhism nondualism, transcending the Maya, Mahayana Buddhism advaya, Dzogchen samadhi – wonderful aspirations, complex practices, a handbook for reaching ego-death liberation from the emotional animal idiot within. OR ARE THEY?
Joe Rogan Experience, the world’s biggest and most influential podcast, migrated to Spotify on Sept 1st 2020. Dozens of the show’s key episodes have been purged from the migration; and there’s a sly opacity about the apparent censorship – a familiar authoritarian strategy. The media bogeymen and policed language episodes excluded follow a clear theme. Is it Spotify abusing corporate privilege, preying on Rogan’s contract loopholes, or is Joe bending the knee and sacrificing his reputation for the big money payoff?
Left v Right, Blue v Red, Biden or Trump? This false dichotomy has been the first and (so far) only test the ruling elites have needed. Its results let citizens self-select a life as one of the 300+ million suckers at the low-stakes plutocracy table…
Everybody’s waiting for a coronavirus vaccine and the media is full of hot takes, parsed to suit their politics and their audience. We’ve been tracking the reality of the vaccine progress. Here’s the August 2020 latest.
A sculpture of a black woman who took part in a Black Lives Matter #BLM protest in Bristol, England has been installed on the plinth where a statue of slave trader Edward Colston used to stand. It lasted 24 hours. The city council removed it without consultation or vote. Another missed opportunity.
As the plutocracy’s assault on the nation’s social safety net intensifies, recent data shows that billionaires and corporations are refusing to pay hundreds of billions of dollars in owed taxes every single year. Criminal evasion on such a scale should put all the hand-wringing about recent George Floyd “looting” into perspective.