The Pathway to the Fall of U.S. Power

1. Nature of Reality

Consider two of the seven principles of biocentrism, an ethical point of view that extends inherent value to all living things:

First Principle of Biocentrism: What we perceive as reality is a process that involves consciousness.

Second Principle of Biocentrism: Our external and internal perceptions are inextricably intertwined. They are different sides of the same coin and cannot be separated. (Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe, by Robert Lanza, MD, with Bob Berman, 2009)

The first principle suggests that an observer affects what is observed, brings it to life.

The second says that what we are observing, the object of our observation, is literally determined by the observer’s internal perceptions — the external and the internal are associated, interlaced, connected.

And a third principle yet suggests that without the presence of an observer, particles and objects remain in the undetermined state of probability. That is, all is probability until someone brings an object to life through observations that are meshed with internal perceptions. We create the world we see, the world we want.

“Men make their own histories,” says Edward Said, in Orientalism, followingVico. “That what they can know is what they have made, and extend it to geography: as both geographical and cultural entities — to say nothing of historical entities — such locales, regions, geographical sectors as ‘Orient’ and ‘Occident’ are man-made.”

These principles have everything to do with the fall of empires — we’ve perceived.

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The Authoritarian Man

If by now you’re still unsure whether the White House is moving forcefully towards vicious totalitarianism then you haven’t been paying attention.

Some have gotten the message, though, and interpret it as a license to punish, dehumanize, and demoralize. This is essential for The Authoritarian Man, who finds security in obedience.

Jewish cemeteries have been vandalized. Jewish centers in Albuquerque; Baltimore; Birmingham, Ala.; Milwaukee; and Wilmington, Del., have reported repeated threats; jarring graffiti of swastikas have been reported on some college campuses as well as the New York City subway. Two Indian engineers were shot in Kansas. According to the New York Times’s John Eligon, Alan Blinder, and Nida Najar, “It raised new alarms about a climate of hostility toward foreigners in the United States, where President Trump has made clamping down on immigration a central plank of his ‘America first’ agenda.”

A feces swastika was found in a gender-neutral bathroom at the Rhode Island School of Design.

The Southern Poverty Center reports that hate groups have increased for a second year following Trump’s election. The Center also reports that, “Comparing the language of Breitbart commenters to the language of the most aggressive far-right extremists online — e.g. language used by Twitter users who advocate for violence against minorities and are openly pro-Nazi — we can see a clear trend of increasing similarity over a three-year period, the bulk of it under Bannon.”

Continue reading The Uncanny in its new location, Medium.com…

Questions: What is The Idea of Justice in a New World (Order)?

What has happened to justice? How do we — today, now — perceive justice?

I sense that what has lead us to this strange, historical moment is our confusion about justice, our reluctance to struggle for a definition. We’ve instead become comfortable with injustice.

Is justice that elusive? Is it too difficult to define, too arbitrary? Is justice relegated to the eye of the beholder, justice for one an injustice for others? Is humanity normalized by injustice?

Or maybe it’s that injustice everywhere parades as justice and this is what we’ve become used to.

I want to know what justice looks like because I’m not sure I’ve ever seen it. Have you? Do you know what it is?

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2016 — What Barry Blitt’s New Yorker Covers Tell Us About the Year

Barry Blitt-The New Yorker

 

Let’s try something different. Let’s look at the year through the critical lens of one of the most profoundly effective and influential political cartoonists, Barry Blitt, whose dark humor is engaging, prophetic, and resolute. Blitt’s power is in his capacity to capture the essence of a person or a situation, while likewise describing the mood of the culture at-large.

Yes, I know, I’m talking about the elite New Yorker… but so, there’s something here.

At year’s end, we can conclude that 2016 has been harrowing, here in the USA and abroad — Iraq, Syria, Iran, still Afghanistan, Isis, nationalism on the rise, Brexit, the refugee crisis everywhere we look, walls on our southern border, rampant racism, violence, and the always ongoing disastrous confusion about guns, questions about cops, education in a crisis, the militarization and corporatizing of everything, a circus-like election, and, of course, president-elect Donald Trump pushing us kicking and screaming through the looking glass and into a potentially dark, parallel universe.

How did Blitt see the year? Let’s take a look, beginning with February….

continue reading here…