We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Wednesday, January 26, 2022

Posts that I especially recommend for Wednesday, January 26, 2022

Former CBS journalist Sharyl Attkisson in an interview last week said mainstream media’s shift from investigative journalism toward a corporate-sponsored, “fact check” mindset originated with left-wing activists seeking to discredit conservative news outlets.

That shift has had a major impact on news coverage of the pandemic, Attkisson said. 
 
My reaction: Attkisson's assertion that "left-wing activists" were partly responsible for the shift in "news" presentations is wrong because such activists were trying to correct right-wing propaganda. The whole political spectrum has shifted to the right as the ruling capitalist class has become more desperate to control information in order to retain power. This class has always limited their control of information, but now it's getting worse.
  • Holocaust Survivor: Never Again Is Now. Unless We All Resist features Holocaust survivor Vera Sharav who describes the striking parallels between what she witnessed as a child in Nazi-controlled Romania, and COVID policies being enacted today by governments around the globe--from Children's Health Defense (12:50).
  • Graphika: The Deep State’s Beard for Controlling the Information Age by Alan Macleod, PhD from Mint Press News. My reaction: Macleod's sub-headline is "Semi-state actors play a very important role in today’s online landscape and in the 1970s, Graphika employees would likely have been working directly for the CIA.", and this is relevant given the fact of the ruling class's penchant (def.) to privatize every economic activity, that is, put everything under the control of the Deep State via their private ownership and control and away from government "interference" and accountability. Graphica has received a bulk of its funding from DARPA (Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), the CIA, and other "intelligence" services.
Humans are storytelling creatures; that’s why it’s possible to gain such a tremendous amount of power over us by controlling our stories. We are storytelling creatures whose primate brains weren’t evolved for the purpose of giving us any absolute understanding of ultimate reality, whose senses only take in a tiny fraction of our surroundings, whose minds don’t process what’s happening in the ways science tells us things are actually happening.

What do you get when you have a storytelling animal with a very limited capacity to perceive life as it really is?
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