- Professional Help Can’t Keep Up With Children’s Mental Health Needs + More from Children's Health Defense.
- WorldWide Walk Outs! from Children's Health Defense featuring a 01:07 video of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., CHD Board Chair and Lead Counsel, urging to participate in these protests.
- Humanity Is Sleepwalking Towards Medical Apartheid. We Need an Honest Debate Before It’s Too Late by Robert Bridges from Strategic Culture Foundation.
- Rationalizing The Chinese Communist Party by Ethan Yang from American Institute for Economic Research. My 💥commentary follows:
Yang tries to present an objective assessment of the economy of China in the context of a "liberal democracy". The latter term should read as a "capitalist version of democracy", and this applies to capitalist classes that form ruling classes in the West. In China they are attempting to use capitalist practices in part of the economy to speed up the process of socialism which means public ownership and control of the economy.
The astounding improvement of the Chinese economy no one can argue against, but what I fear is the power of Chinese capitalists taking control of the nation. China opted for this type of mixed economy to lure capitalist firms to exploit Chinese labor for greater profits, but meanwhile China insured a transfer of technology to increase their technological knowledge. It is a risky experiment, but they felt they had no choice given the slow pace of the economy under Mao. In addition to this risky experiment, they have also added to global warming which is currently threatening most species with extinction, including our own.
Except for the last paragraph, he frames his essay with assumptions about "liberal democracy", and on this scale China does poorly. Only in the last paragraph Yang acknowledges that the Communist Party is firmly in control,
At first glance, China’s policies may seem like economic contradiction or authoritarian madness. However, through the lens of public choice, onslaughts of regulation and the degradation of social freedoms represent calculated attempts to ensure the party is squarely in control of society. In the aggregate, the CCP behaves in a pragmatic and rationalizable manner, much like all other political actors. China’s leaders take deliberate steps to accomplish what is in their best interest within the constraints of their Leninist system. These objectives ultimately boil down to navigating a balance of control and freedom to maximize power.
"Liberal democracy" is thoroughly a fraud perpetrated by the ruling capitalist classes in all capitalist nations. They pretend to have different political parties, but the capitalist class controls all of them like they control every other institution.
"Liberal" has historically meant that people with money can buy and own the means of production, and with ownership comes control. This term "liberal" stemmed from a reaction to the King's required permission for capitalist operations like those of the East India Company. Capitalist ruling classes have maintained their appropriation of "democracy" as a kind of capitalist ideology for historical reasons: the French Revolution aspired to bring down the ruling classes, which at that time were the aristocracy and monarchy. Thus, "democracy" was the theme that destroyed the existing ruling classes. The new capitalist classes merely substituted "liberal" for true democracy.
This is precisely why capitalist nations rush to crush any hint of socialism (public ownership and control of the economy) which may arise in any form and in any nation as they have done to the Soviet Union, China, Iran, Nicaragua, Chile, Grenada, etc., and this capitalist determination has substantially formed history ever since the first attempt to bring socialism to Russia.
- As US freezes funds, a harsh winter awaits cash-strapped Afghans by Ali M Latifi from Al Jazeera.
- Africa, Raped by a “Humanitarian Mission” by Vladimir Platov from New Eastern Outlook.
- Biden Orders Ethiopia to Surrender Unconditionally by Ann Garrison from Black Star News.
- How the US enabled Ethiopia’s bloodletting, training its military while playing innocent observer by TJ Coles from The Grayzone.
- Special report: Inside Insulate Britain from the channel of Unherd (a British website) on YouTube (18:03).
The following post is selected by Brad Fredricks (and his reactions, commentaries, etc.) for this website:
- Facebook changes name to Meta to stress ‘metaverse’ plan accessed from the South China Morning Post, but from AP (Associated Press). My commentary follows:
This week Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a rebranding to
the name 'Meta', recognizing an attempt to focus on the "metaverse". So,
what does is jargon rich rebranding about?
As many parents out there are aware, one of the most popular video games in the world right now is the publicly traded Roblox. This game is a world in and of itself, or a "metaverse". Roblox took its form as a low resolution video game, copying much of what Minecraft began, working on laptops and mobile devices. Within Roblox are many persistent worlds, economies, and games, all of which are directly marketed towards children. This incredibly immersive world has no geopolitical borders and has provided direct access to kids around the world for anyone interested in messaging or monetizing their audience.
Years
ago I worked with Virtue Worldwide, VICE owned branding and creative
house, which essentially works with corporations to put a cool coat on
crap they sell to youth, be it ideas or goods. At the time, Virtue
worked with MTV to create a world called VLES, or "Virtual Lower East
Side", which turned into another one of their failed projects. Their
goal was to be the cool kids' version of Second Life, another virtual
world that was founded in 2003 and was notably popularized by Ray
Kurzweil, who created a female avatar named Ramona that he introduced to
the world via TED Talks.
Kurzweil,
who now works with Google and is considered a genius prodigy is an
advocate for an event called "the Singularity", as well as being a
devout trans-humanist, he promotes the idea of uploading one's mind to
the net and living forever. All of this would require a digital space
for the uploaded minds to interact. Enter the Metaverse. A virtual world
where, if Zuckerberg and Kurzweil have their way, would be how all experience reality.
Ask a kid or teen their thoughts on Facebook and immediately they will shutter and tell you it is where their parent's hangout online, "so not meta". Facebook has had a branding problem as it has become the place for old people to superficially argue and debate about things that they don't really know about. Kids just don't want to hang out with Grandpa online. It's not cool when Mom and Dad are posting their political views.
Basically, kids don't want to get tangled in this web. For Facebook, their audience is aging and they have been failing to bring on 'fresh blood', so to speak. So, here is where we pivot from the fantastical headlines of what's wrong with Facebook to the more nuanced concept of why kids won't go on Facebook, enter Meta. Meta is Facebooks direct attempt to target the kids of the world.
Facebook, with over 2.7 billion users, wants to be bigger. If your audience is dying why not go after their young, right? Meta is about immersing the youth in a virtual world, post-pandemic, where everyone is nothing more than an avatar representing who they truly want to be, as opposed to living in a harsh world where people judge, this seems like a lay-up for kids.
Zuckerberg, by targeting youth and distancing himself from the core age group of his current platform, is moving his brand towards a dystopic video game reality world he'd like our kids to live in. A world where he fully controls what is around them, what is said to them, and what they are being shown. That is a huge amount of trust in a company plagued by abuse and willfully hiding the toxic mental health issues that have evolved from its platforms.
So, why mention Kurzweil? Well, Kurzweil was certain this is the future, and he trumpeted Second Life as being it. Second Life became nothing more than a rather creepy world where unknown people connected to have virtual sexual encounters, which is pretty much what happens to everything on the internet at some level. Yet the vision of Kurzweil has not gone away.
Basically, kids don't want to get tangled in this web. For Facebook, their audience is aging and they have been failing to bring on 'fresh blood', so to speak. So, here is where we pivot from the fantastical headlines of what's wrong with Facebook to the more nuanced concept of why kids won't go on Facebook, enter Meta. Meta is Facebooks direct attempt to target the kids of the world.
Facebook, with over 2.7 billion users, wants to be bigger. If your audience is dying why not go after their young, right? Meta is about immersing the youth in a virtual world, post-pandemic, where everyone is nothing more than an avatar representing who they truly want to be, as opposed to living in a harsh world where people judge, this seems like a lay-up for kids.
Zuckerberg, by targeting youth and distancing himself from the core age group of his current platform, is moving his brand towards a dystopic video game reality world he'd like our kids to live in. A world where he fully controls what is around them, what is said to them, and what they are being shown. That is a huge amount of trust in a company plagued by abuse and willfully hiding the toxic mental health issues that have evolved from its platforms.
So, why mention Kurzweil? Well, Kurzweil was certain this is the future, and he trumpeted Second Life as being it. Second Life became nothing more than a rather creepy world where unknown people connected to have virtual sexual encounters, which is pretty much what happens to everything on the internet at some level. Yet the vision of Kurzweil has not gone away.
As technology caught up and
VR headsets became higher resolution kids flocked to virtual games.
Taking a cue from the pandemic, it seems Facebook wants to usher the
migration of kids playing VR into kids living virtual lives, and shed
its Dad-Hat.
The funny thing here is
that the word "meta", a Greek origin word meaning after or beyond, also
means "referring to itself", especially as it pertains to creative
work. I'd like to point out that the value of Facebook has become super-meta. It is, in large part, a self-referential bullshit machine.
Bravo
to Mark Zuckerberg, you've accomplished the improbable, encapsulating
the world in your self-referential bullshit. It is time to delete Meta,
an undeclared intelligence apparatus of whoever wants to pay them.
