Do you hear the people sing?
February 26, 2022
Do you hear the people sing
Lost in the valley of the night?
It is the music of a people
Who are climbing to the light.
For the wretched of the earth
There is a flame that never dies.
Even the darkest night will end
And the sun will rise.
They will live again in freedom
In the garden of the Lord.
They will walk behind the plough-share,
They will put away the sword.
The chain will be broken
And all men will have their reward.
Will you join in our crusade?
Who will be strong and stand with me?
Somewhere beyond the barricade
Is there a world you long to see?
Do you hear the people sing?
Say, do you hear the distant drums?
It is the future that they bring
When tomorrow comes!
Will you join in our crusade?
Who will be strong and stand with me?
Somewhere beyond the barricade
Is there a world you long to see?
Do you hear the people sing?
Say, do you hear the distant drums?
It is the future that they bring
When tomorrow comes…
Tomorrow comes!
[Les Miserables]
🇺🇦
“We are here.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky
Ukraine citizens in the Donetsk wave their flag and sing the national anthem before the Russia war
The whole world is watching. It’s unraveling quickly for Putin’s war. Former Ambassador to Russia under Obama Dr. Michael McFaul:
“I’ve watched and listened to Putin for over thirty years. He has changed. He sounds completely disconnected from reality. He sounds unhinged.”
From former German Chancellor Angela Merkel,
“who has had more experience with Putin than any other Western leader during 16 years win power & could also converse with/him directly in Russian: Russia’s war of aggression marks a profound turning point in European history after the end of the Cold War” [AFP].
Hear my dreams
Let us make a world
In which I believe
Hear my words
Hear my cries
Let me see a change
Through these eyes
-Celeste, Hear My Voice
W A R
February 23, 2022Will we not ever leave behind the most deadly century in human history?
“The 20th Century’s atrocities of war (42 million persons killed in the Second World War alone), of nuclear power (Hiroshima and Nagasaki as curtain raisers on this) and of ecological degradation, were not caused by evils forces ‘out there’ or ‘abroad somewhere.’ These happened and are happening at the hands and minds of university graduates and our university intelligentia. The 20th century accomplished mass slaughters of our species…90 million killed in military conflict and another 80 million killed in social pogroms by Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and others. Zbigniew Brzezinski calls this the ‘politics of organized insanity.’ These numbers are, as Brzezinski observes, ‘more than the total killed in all previous wars, civil conflicts, and religious persecutions throughout human history.’ Friedrich Nietzsche, as James Garrison points out, intuited a century earlier that human rationality was heading towards an ‘orgy of violence.’ We have passed through that orgy. What now? What is education’s role in all of this? It is time for some morality. For some choices. For some wisdom. It takes ethics and morality to use power humanely. It takes wisdom to curb knowledge, to steer it for the greater good, to turn the lead of power (knowledge) into the gold of wisdom. […] If our species cannot move from knowledge to wisdom, we are doomed (pp.59-60).
-Matthew Fox, 2006
War. Death. Annihilation.
One. Man.
One.
Again. And again. And again.
“War means pain, mud, blood and the death of thousands…tens of thousands of deaths.”
-Journalist based in Moscow for the NYTimes, Anton Troianovski
Photograph by Pierre Crom / Getty
“When Putin encounters Ukrainian resistance, he will respond the only way he knows: with devastating force. The loss of life will be staggering. Watching it will make it impossible to live and to breathe.”
-New Yorker writer Masha Gesson
The Crushing Loss of Hope
https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/the-crushing-loss-of-hope-in-ukraine
Lieutenant Igor Demischuk of 🇺🇦 Ukraine’s 95th Airborne Brigade.
Killed in action in Donbas on February 21.
He was 29.
Posted on social media by Illia Ponomarenko @IAPonomarenko 🇺🇦 Defense reporter with The Kyiv Independent. “A village guy from Donbas in a crusade for something better.”
War,
What is it good for?
Absolutely nothing.
only peace
February 21, 2022
ℒℴve.
“The chain reaction of evil — hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars — must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.”
—Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
‘Extreme political polarization. Weaponized misinformation. Media incentivized to divide. And growing inequality. Our democratic experiment has seen better days. How do we reimagine it for the betterment of all?
Spiritual thought leader, activist, and political writer Marianne Williamson says it begins with love.’
-Rich Roll
Sunday, February 20th, 2022
February 20, 2022“What’s the difference between a prison and a monastery?” Dass would ask. The answer: “Almost nothing. Both are filled with people who are alone in their cells all day, far from the world. The difference is that for the monks it is heaven, for the prisoners it is hell.”
-Ram Dass
[Feast for the Soul]
‘Something hard.’
I come back and pour two whiskeys neat and we stand in the kitchen and talk about it all, the dreams, the making the dreams happen and then we toast ourselves and our dreams and the pushing as hard as we can against the inevitability of death because that’s just what you should do with your once and only life.
-Korby Lenker
‘From Inside the Monastery’
This is not some simplistic “change your mind, change your life” solution. I can’t opt out of my corporeal reality; I don’t have the spiritual muscles to lift myself out of physical discomfort. So I have to learn to hold both: to be in great pain and, at the same time, to find some small respite. I can’t wait for dreamy, poetic moments of inspiration (as when the above image—of a roseate spoonbill holding me in an inflatable lifeboat—occurred to me), but work very hard to seek them anywhere and everywhere I can. And wonderfully, when I start looking, I find them more often. I feel them more often.
-Sulieka Jaouad
‘Look Down, Get Low, Think Small’
I once walked through the world with such certitude, convinced by what lay before me. Now I know reality comes in layers, complex and delicious. Crawling around the forest floor has slowed me down, brought me closer to the earth, and made me somehow braver. How can our world be so scary when there’s more beauty in a square foot of forest, more wisdom than we’d expect in an acre? Humbled, heart opened, desirous, now when I step outside I look down, get low, think small.
-Joanne Proulx
This love is actually part of you; it is always flowing through you. It’s like the subatomic texture of the universe, the dark matter that connects everything. When you tune in to that flow, you will feel it in your own heart — not your physical heart or your emotional heart, but your spiritual heart, the place you point to in your chest when you say, “I am.”
-Ram Dass
Pure
J
O
Y
☆҉
When you need it, loop it. :)
-dayle
Sister Tharpe
February 19, 2022STEADY, by Dan Rather.
“Sister Rosetta Tharpe was a trailblazer, a virtuoso on the electric guitar who influenced both Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley. Born in rural Arkansas, Tharpe was raised in the Pentecostal Church. Gospel music was her foundation and she became a superstar in that genre.
But Tharpe was an original who couldn’t be confined by any one musical style. And in doing so, she helped define a new music. Tharpe is often called the “Godmother of Rock and Roll.”
Tharpe was a celebrity throughout the 1940s, 50s, and into the 1960s, even as she faced the racial animosities and struggle of segregated America. She also endured gossiping about her sexuality. Eventually, Tharpe’s star faded. She died after a stroke in 1973 at the age of 58.
When people talk about the origins of rock and roll, Tharpe’s name is far too rarely mentioned. When people debate who were some of the greatest guitarists of all time, Tharpe is almost always overlooked. Well we can start to change that today, and hopefully smile a bit, by basking in the joy of this uniquely talented musician.
In 2018, Tharpe was inducted posthumously to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which tells her story like this:
In the fall of 1938, when she stepped out onto the storied stage of the Cotton Club, Rosetta Tharpe did what no performer sprung from the rich musical traditions of black Pentecostalism had ever previously dared, or perhaps even imagined. She presented the music of her church to a predominantly white audience in search of Saturday-night diversion, not Sunday-morning deliverance.”
Thank you, Dan Rather, for this Saturday smile. :)
Sister Rosetta Tharpe, 1960.
“This is not okay.”
February 18, 2022Written in response to SpaceX/Tesla founder Elon Musks comparison to Hilter and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on social media yesterday. [The meme will not be posted here. -dayle]
From from author and former CBS news anchor Dan Rather:
“To see this face [Hitler] staring back at us, with a message like this, is absolutely beyond the pale of any civilized communication. I think of the millions dead. I think of a world destroyed. I shake with anger. The pit of my stomach is sick. I am deeply saddened.”
From his blog, Steady:
“On the individual level this raises serious concerns about Musk, whose public pronouncements have become increasingly strident and aligned with fringe political actors. Meanwhile, his company Tesla is being sued in California for racism.
The opprobrium Musk is getting is well warranted. His behavior raises many questions. Will it hurt the popularity of his Tesla cars? What will it mean for his SpaceX company’s contracts with NASA? Or, will anyone really care? Is this all just normal now, within the spectrum of what is considered “acceptable”?
I am confident that the vast majority of Americans and people around the globe find this rhetoric reprehensible. Just because you are a feted centibillionaire (a new word for those in the $100 billion club) doesn’t mean you can get away with this outrageousness. When people rise up and say, “No,” “This is not okay,” “We will not let it stand unchallenged,” the world has no choice but to pay attention. There can be swelling choruses for good. Public pressure can lead to better outcomes.”
Musk eventually deleted the meme later in the day.
Full essay:
“Is this all just normal now, within the spectrum of what is considered ‘acceptable’?”
-Dan Rather
dayle: Thinking of this in context of seeing a clip of a photographer fall off a six-foot stage in LA while capturing a photo of the Rams quarterback and his wife at a victory celebration. The quarterback saw it and turned his back, not offering to help or ask for assistance.
Considered in larger context, how is the vitriol, hate, anger, and neglect centered in social media affecting our sense of collective compassion and kindness? Is being called out for turning his back the reason the couple is offering to pay the photographer’s medical bills? As documentarian Ken Burns shared in an interview with variety this week about his concerns for the U.S.,
“My whole question to America is where do you want to live?” says Burns. “This is a simple choice between Bedford Falls and Pottersville. Do you wish to be a community in which everyone is bound to each other and enjoys the blessings of liberty and free speech and freedom to assemble and religion? Or do you wish to live in an I’ll-get-mine Pottersville, in which everything is degraded and corrupted.”
Full interview:
Friday, February 18th, 2022
From the Flourish Foundation:
‘With this shift in feeling, we soften the illusory crust of independence and begin to sense a natural belonging with all of life—interdependence. From this place of infinite belonging a deeper sense of care awakens and inspires us to consider our role in the co-creation of reality. More simply, we may choose clothes that support humane working conditions, foods that replenish the planet, a circular economy, and love toward those of a different race, country, or political party.’
“Only the grace of Spirit can enable us to let go of our fears. True prayer (spiritual dialogue) is fundamental for life in Spirit. It is that grace of conversion that opens up our hearts to realize the humble presence in our lives. Prayer of the heart is unceasing prayer, where Spirit breathes in us and our hearts are turned. This deepening of our lives in the divine life is the path to self-discovery. In and through prayer we discover our true selves, the self that Spirit has created each of us to be. . . .
Life in <Divine Presence> should be a daring adventure of love but often we settle for mediocrity. We follow the daily practice of prayer but we are unwilling or, for various reasons, unable to give ourselves totally…to settle on the plain of mediocrity is to settle for something les…”
-Franciscan theologian Ilia Delio
Thursday, February 17th, 2022
February 17, 2022
‘Our minds our like crows. They pick up everything that glitters, no matter how uncomfortable our nests get with all the metal in them.’
-Thomas Merton, 1961, Seeds of Destruction
Apropos for contemporaneous news cycles and destruction of social media. -dayle
For the thousands who die everyday from the pandemic still, whose deaths are only felt in numbers, not souls…1,000,000 total as of today. -dayle
‘Any disaster you can survive is an improvement in your character, your stature, and your life.’
-Joseph Campbell
‘What is to give light must endure burning.’
-Victor Frankl
A prayer from Marianne:
‘I place my relationship with him in your hands. May my presence once again be a blessing in his life, and my his be blessing in mine. May my thoughts toward him be those of innocence and love, and may his toward me be the same. Amen.’
❀
Tuesday, February 15th, 2022
February 15, 2022
Power Path
|
From author and yogi Sean Corn:
‘This February full moon, the Snow Moon, rising at the peak of our North American winter, symbolizes the challenges we all face when the world seems cold, dark, and stark.
Basking in the chilly illumination of this deep and reflective moon can allow us to confront our internal challenges, eliminate unhealthy physical and emotional habits, and release the resentments, resistance, and limiting beliefs that often keep us stuck in a cycle of self-sabotage. The full Snow moon brings a sense of renewed focus.’
🥀Valentine’s Day
February 14, 2022
A statue of St.. Julian of Norwich (c.1342 – c. 1416) in the Norwich Cathedral, England.
She that made all things for love.
Revelations of Divine Love, written in the 14th century by an anchoress, Julian of Norwich, is remembered today as the first work in the English language written by a woman. She lived the entirely of her life during a pandemic, the bubonic plague, or Black Death.
S
O
P
H
I
A
Wisdom is the mother of all things.
Compassion is rooted in the word, womb. Julian was the first to address Jesus as mother.
Culture and spirituality author Matthew Fox:
A Pandemic is too important to waste.
This pandemic is here to wake jus up. To What? To a “new normal.” One that honors the sacredness of the earth and of all its life forms. One that honors the divine feminine alongside a sacred masculine. One that honors the human body and its basic needs, a long with those of the earth’s body, and on that basis give birth to a new body politic. One that does not put billionaires and the structures that create them on pedestals. And one that does not elect narcissistic politicians who incarnate the very meaning of fatalistic self-hatred by watching hundreds of thousands die with a shrug of the shoulder. Remember? “It is what is it.” 900,000+ have die. (With compassion and leadership, how many more would still be alive?-dayle)
[…]
Might I suggest this: maybe Julian of Norwich, and the rich tradition of creation spirituality that she carries in her bones, heart, and mind, from Jesus to Benedict, Hildegard, Francis, Aquinas, Mechtild, and Eckhart…maybe she is the vaccine that is truly needed today.
Virtual love
My Day
February 11, 2022
Eleanor Roosevelt, Newspaper Columnist
Six days a week for almost three decades, the pioneering first lady explored what it’s like to be an American
When humorist Will Rogers died in a plane crash in Alaska in 1935, millions around the world mourned his passing. For V. V. McNitt, Rogers’s death was a practical as well as a personal loss. McNitt managed the McNaught Syndicate, which distributed Rogers’s highly popular column to newspapers across America. What would McNitt do now without his star writer?
Will Rogers, posing circa 1928 in front of a Curtiss Condor U.S. Mail aircraft, penned an immensely popular newspaper column until his death in a plane crash in Alaska.
—Alamy Stock Photo
He thought he’d found a replacement with Alice Roosevelt Longworth, the sharp-tongued daughter of the late President Theodore Roosevelt. In short order, her new feature, “What Alice Thinks,” was in 75 newspapers, a seemingly auspicious beginning.
Then a rival company, United Feature Syndicate, recruited First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt to compete with her cousin. Longworth’s column quickly fizzled, and ER would go on to write her column, “My Day,” six days a week for nearly 30 years.
“My Day” far outlasted Eleanor’s time in the White House, ending only with her death in 1962. The sheer frequency of “My Day,” which ran with very few interruptions during its decades of publication, also extended ER’s influence immeasurably. She would become an almost daily presence in the lives of her audience in a manner that anticipated the social-media age.
When Roosevelt’s name was floated as a possible vice-presidential running mate for President Harry Truman in 1948, she demurred. “As an elected or appointed official,” biographer David Michaelis notes, “she would have felt that any office was a demotion or a constraint. Now free to speak her mind, she was uniquely influential because her audience was listening. Through her column she could give her opinion on matters six days a week. Firmly, unscoldingly she was there each day to remind people that a powerful America was supposed to be above racism, had a responsibility to find ways to give basic decencies to the poor.”
[…]
If FDR exemplified the heroic presidency as a champion of the New Deal and wartime leader on a global stage, then his wife tended to offer an alternative vision. Her columns suggested that presidents and first ladies, for all the trappings of high office, still lead much of their lives in the lowercase. They get tired. They get sick. They sometimes don’t want to be bothered.
Time magazine, commenting on “My Day,” lauded “Mrs. Roosevelt’s ability to make the nation’s most exalted household seem like anybody else’s.”
Roosevelt maintained a high profile early in her widowhood as an official at the fledgling United Nations. She later worked as a volunteer supporter of the U.N. and in many civic and Democratic party causes.
Beyond their quaint domestic observations, her “My Day” columns could also be boldly political, especially after she returned to life as a private citizen and felt at even greater liberty to speak her mind.
Many of Roosevelt’s “My Day” columns can be read online, and they’ve also been curated in several books, such as editor David Emblidge’s My Day: The Best of Eleanor Roosevelt’s Acclaimed Newspaper Columns, 1936–1962.
They’re written with a simplicity that ER’s critics found banal and her fans found appealing. Stella Hershan, who fled Nazi-occupied Austria and arrived in the United States penniless, learned about her new country by reading “My Day.”
“Her writing was so simple, even I could understand it. From her,” Hershan said of Eleanor Roosevelt, “I learned about America.”
Of one thing I am sure: Young or old, in order to be useful we must stand for the things we feel are right, and we must work for those things wherever we find ourselves. It does very little good to believe something unless you tell your friends and associates of your beliefs. Those who fight down in the marketplace are bound to be confused every now and then. Sometimes they will be deceived, and sometimes the dirt that they touch will cling to them. But if their hearts are pure and their purposes are unswerving, they will win through to the end of their mission on earth, untarnished.
Full piece with photos: https://www.neh.gov/article/eleanor-roosevelt-newspaper-columnist
Friday, February 11th, 2022
No one knows your path but you. The mystery belongs to you only, unveiled by you in pieces through time, through the span of your life. Your way is innate. Your navigation is inside-out. ~Jennifer Rose
“Compassion, then, is love at work. Compassion is a sweet gracious working in love, mingled with abundant kindness; for compassion works at taking care of us and makes all things become good. Compassion allows us to fail measurably and in as much as we fail, in so much we fall…”
-Julian of Norwich
“The great (wo)man knew not that (s)he was great. It took a century or two for that fact to appear. What (s)he did (s)he did because (s)he must; it was the most natural think in the world, and grew out of the circumstances of the moment. But now, every thing (s)he did, even to the lifting of (her) his finger or the eating of bread, looks large, all-related, and is called an institution.”
-Emerson
“A solitary sojourn in the country is, especially at this moment, only half really, because the sense of harmlessness in being with nature is lost to us. The influence on us of nature’s quiet, insistent presence is, from the start, overwhelmed by or knowledge of the unspeakable human fate that, night and day, irrevocably unfolds.”
-Rilke
Needs Improvement
The Economic Giants Must Do Better than Meh
by Bill McKibben
No one expects small businesses to be the leaders on climate change, though of course a noble handful are. It’s the giants—who have enormous brands to protect, and large margins to cover the cost of changing—that need to be out front. The ones with big ad campaigns with lots of windmills and penguins and cheerful shots of the smiling future. The ones who have made a lot of noise about ‘net zero.’ And how are they doing? Meh.
The New Climate Institute, a European think tank, just released a study of 25 of the biggest companies on earth, ranging from the shipping giant Maersk to the bookshelf giant Ikea to the stare-at-your-palm giant Apple. These titans account for 5 percent of the world’s carbon emissions all by themselves. And they’re not dropping those emissions anywhere near fast enough.
In fact, the report finds that for many companies the promised 100% reduction will look more like 40%. “It is not clear these reductions take us beyond business as usual,” Thomas Day, the researcher who compliled the report, toldthe Guardian. “We were very disappointed and surprised.” The “over-use of offsetting” was one of the main reasons most companies were marked down, said Day—i.e., these companies were promising to buy and protect forests. Except that too many credits go for forests that were never going to be cut down in the first place, or for forests that burn up in fires.
Two more notes: these companies are also often cash-rich, and there’s not yet been a proper accounting of how that money sitting in the bank is unwittingly underwriting the fossil fuel industry. And these companies don’t just make things—they also buy political influence with vast fleets of lobbyists. Too many of those lobbyists fanned out across Washington in recent months to wreck the Build Back Better bill—it was a target of the Business Roundtable and the Chamber of Commerce and of most of the Fortune 500, because it dares to raise corporate tax rates a smidge to pay for, you know, a working planet for capitalists to plunder, I mean consumers to live on, I mean—you know. As Rolling Stone pointed out at the height of the BBB battle in the fall, many of the tech execs who spoke loudest about the climate crisis were blocking the most useful effort so far to stop it.
The very low comedy of this particular drama was highlighted late in January when Biden hosted CEOs at the White House to build support for some version that Prime Minister Manchin might be persuaded to support. Mary Barra, the CEO of GM, was on hand—GM had actually supported the bill because it handed over a goodly sum for EVs. But Barra had also just taken over the rotating chairmanship of the Business Roundtable, which is the toppest of top CEOs, and as Politico reported, she was not planning to push the organization to change its implacable opposition.
“General Motors has been very clear about our support for Build Back Better, particularly the climate change provisions that will accelerate the adoption of electric vehicles and support to build out US supply chain,” Jeannine Ginivan, a spokesperson for General Motors, told Politico. “Mary was at the White House this week to support Build Back Better. She was there in her role as chair and CEO of General Motors.” And, as its part of this farcical pas de deux, the spokesperson for the Business Roundtable duly explained that of course they’d like the “climate investments” too but not if “Congress adopts the sweeping and anticompetitive tax increases included in the House-passed bill.”
One assumes that Nero’s tune was more on-pitch than this.
#
February 10th, 2022
February 10, 2022Seems particularly dire today, doesn’t it? -dayle
‘For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, but loses his soul?’
-Matthew 16:26
Dirty Laundry
February 9, 2022“It’s all about big dirty money.”
-Adam McKay
(Producer, screenwriter, ‘Don’t Look Up!’)
Corporate owned media. Pretty much all of it. -dayle
The Daily Poster
Corporate Media Is The Misinformation Problem
BY DAVID SIROTA
“Misinformation” is all the rage these days — it’s the topic du jour. Pollssuggest we all agree that it’s a problem, and lately liberals appear most mad at it — but seemingly only at certain kinds of misinformation that originate outside the corporate media sphere.
Notably, the ire is rarely directed at a corporate media machine that systematically rewards and praises the purveyors of misleading propaganda, and continues to flood the country with information sewage.
This selective outrage is a huge problem — because the only way to systematically combat misinformation is to construct a Fourth Estate that develops some trust with the audience. That trust will never be rebuilt if liberals pretend to hate misinformation while they patronize a media establishment that fortifies the pathologies that originally created a credibility crisis.
Consider the past week of media news, while the Joe Rogan controversy dominated headlines:
NBC News hired Stephen Hayes, one of the key architects of Iraq War misinformation, to serve as a political analyst across all of its properties amid a media drumbeat for a war with Russia. Despite Hayes publishing the seminal book amplifying one of the most egregious lies of the Iraq debacle, NBC’s Chuck Todd lauded him as “a principled reporter and analyst who always puts truth and facts above emotion and sentiment.” Meanwhile, CNN just hiredanother Iraq War proponent, right-wing propagandist Jonah Goldberg.
Speaking of CNN, its employees effusively praised their network’s recently deposed president, Jeff Zucker, even after Zucker oversaw the lionization of Andrew Cuomo while the New York governor was shielding his health care industry donors from legal consequences amid a massacre of nursing home residents. Rolling Stone reported that one source said Zucker was personally involved in engineering the Cuomo promotion — and even helped write talking points for the governor.
Corporate media began touting a comeback for Cuomo and his brother, Chris, with no mention of the nursing home catastrophe, as if nothing bad happened over the last two years.
An MSNBC-platformed Washington newsletter blasted out propaganda touting Kroger’s “great pay and benefits” — even as thousands of its employees are struggling to afford basic necessities, and even as the grocery chain bankrolls lobbying groups working to kill union rights legislation.
The New York Times told its readers that President Joe Biden’s “big climate goals depend on Congress” — somehow not mentioning that they also depend on Biden, who has been using his executive authority to expand drilling at a faster pace than President Donald Trump.
Less than two years after the New York Times told its readers that 100,000 pandemic deaths under Trump was “incalculable,” the newspaper has now decided that 900,000 deaths is now a ho-hum story that Americans are bored with. “Though deaths are still mounting, the threat from the virus is moving, for now, farther into the background of daily life for many Americans,” the paper wrote.
MSNBC aired an interview with a New York Times columnist blaming inflation on workers getting COVID relief money, rather than on corporations using their monopoly power to fleece consumers with higher prices that then fund giant executive pay packages and shareholder dividends.
Obviously, multiple wrongs don’t make a right. Rogan platforming public health nonsense and environmental misinformation — and using racial slurs — is not somehow absolved by corporate media concurrently immersing the world in an ocean of self-serving bullshit. His behavior is bad on its own merits. Full stop.
But corporate media doesn’t get to lie the country into a war and a financial crisis, continue enriching right-wing fabulists, offer up news literally “presented by” corporate villains, and then pretend that a podcaster is the singular source of misinformation. And it sure as hell doesn’t get to feign surprise when after decades of lies, almost nobody ends up trusting corporate media about anything.
Despite crocodile tears about “free speech,” none of the central players in the hullabaloo are heroes or victims — they are all making a mint off selling controversy, garbage, and fake outrage. And it’s hardly a surprise that the loudest of them screaming about censorship have had little to say about the most pervasive censorship of all: corporate media’s near-complete erasure of economic and anti-corruption reporting that might offend business sponsors.
The real victim here is the general public.
We need a Fourth Estate that does not reward peddlers of the most outrageous lies — like, say, a Saddam-Al Qaeda “connection” — with prominent gigs.
We need television networks whose anchors don’t run out onto the airwaves to defend top brass amid reports that they helped politicians and political operatives effectively cover up a public health disaster.
And we need an information infrastructure that preferences accurate, verifiable, and indisputable facts so that the public can make informed decisions.
We don’t have much of that right now, in part because political tribalism has taught audiences to selectively love and hate misinformation based on whether it comes from “their” team.
Many liberals love monikers like “believe science” and see themselves as dispassionate protectors of the truth. But let’s be clear: If you’re a liberal who purports to hate misinformation but also cheers on Liz Cheney or Bill Kristol or some other war propagandist as a beacon of integrity just because you see them defending Democrats or bashing Donald Trump on your favorite TV network, then you don’t actually hate misinformation — you just happen to like your misinformation colored blue (even if that misinformation was previously colored neocon red).
Likewise, if you are a Rogan fan or a Fox News maven who purports to want the “real truth” while you cheer him or Tucker Carlson peddling climate denial and vaccine misinformation, then you don’t actually care about truth at all.
And if you’re in corporate media and think it’s OK for your news outlet to routinely skew and cover up the crimes of politicians and business, then you’re not actually interested in journalism’s mission to comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable.
The difference between “media” and actual journalism is the root of the misinformation crisis. We’re drowning in content that is increasingly valued only for its potency in the political wars, rather than judged on its factual merits and its choice of targets. That kind of media content strays farther and farther from reality because it’s about entertaining and inflaming rather than educating and informing.
The answer to misinformation, then, is not some censorship regime, and it’s not more intense fan culture around individual media icons so that everything is a self-enriching culture war between cable TV pundits and Spotify hosts.
The answer is an audience that actually values accurate and necessary information, even if it offends their preconceived notions — an audience that runs away from corporate media outlets that force-feed them lies and liars, and runs toward news organizations that report hard truths.
That’s the kind of news organization we’re working to build here. And we know it’s going to take a long time to build a true independent and trustworthy Fourth Estate in the wreckage of a corporate media landscape, where the flames of bullshit smolder and suffocate the discourse.
But that’s the only way forward.
#
From David.
“Friends:
Yesterday, I learned that I am a nominee for an Academy Award in the best original screenplay category for my work on the film Don’t Look Up. The fact that the film, a climate allegory, has achieved such critical and popular success is a testament to the growing demand for efforts that buck corporate media narratives and challenge power. I am stunned and truly grateful for this Oscar nomination. To celebrate this honor, we are making the replay of our Don’t Look Up live chat with director Adam McKay free for all members — please click here to watch. https://www.dailyposter.com/1-5-live-chat/ Thanks again for your support, and if you are able to financially support our mission, please consider becoming a paying subscriber or donating through our tip jar. Onward!
Rock the boat,
Sirota
“I want to dedicate this song to Rupert Murdoch.”
https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=J_Q8ldj7TKQ&list=RDAMVMJ_Q8ldj7TKQ
Darrell Lee, this is for you. {xo}
~
Dirty Laundry
The Eagles
I make my livin’ off the evenin’ news
Just give me somethin’, somethin’ I can use
People love it when you lose
They love dirty laundry
Well, I coulda’ been an actor, but I wound up here
I just have to look good, I don’t have to be clear
Come and whisper in my ear
Give us dirty laundry
We got the bubble-headed bleached-blonde, comes on at five
She can tell you ’bout the plane crash with a gleam in her eye
It’s interesting when people die
Give us dirty laundry
You don’t really need to find out what’s goin’ on
You don’t really wanna know just how far it’s gone
Just leave well enough alone
Eat your dirty laundry
Dirty little secrets, dirty little lies
We got our dirty little fingers in everybody’s pie
We love to cut you down to size
We love dirty laundry
We can do “The Innuendo”, we can dance and sing
When it’s said and done, we haven’t told you a thing
We all know that crap is king
Give us dirty laundry!
“As a nation, we have begun to float off into a moral void, and all the sermons of all the priests in the country (if they preach at all) are not going to help much. We have got to the point where the promulgation of any kind of moral standard automatically releases an anti-moral response in a whole lot of people. It is not with them, above all, that I am concerned, but with the “good” people, the right-thinking people, who stick to principle, all right, except where it conflicts with the chance to make money. It seems to me that there are very dangerous ambiguities about our democracy in its actual present condition. I wonder to what extent our ideals are not a front for organized selfishness and systemic irresponsibility. If our affluent society ever breaks down and the facade is taken away, what are we going to have left?”
-Thomas Merton, 1961
Extremely American
2.9.22
Post by James Dawson at Boise State Public Radio on Twitter:
“The Idaho National Guard wants to repeal a section of state law that bans private militias, saying it’s unconstitutional. A prominent anti-extremist institute disagrees.” boisestatepublicradio.org/politics-gover #idpol #idleg
Why is the Idaho National Guard interested in repealing this? -dayle
“Militias have risen to prominence in recent years in Idaho.”
The 51st State
‘Way up in the Northern Rockies there’s a sort of mythical 51st state. It’s called the American Redoubt and it encompasses Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, and parts of Oregon and Washington. Adherents to its philosophy believe in a kind of theocratic limited government utopia, one with lots of guns. Alex Barron is the movement’s self-appointed “bard” and his rhetoric has all the violence of a Shakespearean tragedy.”What are you willing to kill for?” he asks a crowd of far-right activists wondering about where the line should be when responding to the government with force.Redoubters like Barron talk about their movement like evangelists and in a way they are – they are recruiting people to move there, live off the grid and run for office. And it’s working – they are reshaping their communities in Idaho and surrounding states, and as far as they’re concerned, those who disagree can leave.’
-Heath Druzin, @HDruzin, Boise State Public Radio
#MustListen podcast created and written by Druzin; immensely educational. It’s dark, yet absolutely necessary to unpack what is happening with the growth and organization of militia groups in Idaho and across the country. -dayle
February 9th, 2022
“One by one they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.”
-James Joyce
First published in 1914. It presents a naturalistic depiction of Irish middle class life in and around Dublin in the early years of the 20th century.
ℒℴve
“Für Elise” — Beethoven’s melody that plays in the streets of Taiwan to let residents know it’s trash collection time. Better than ‘clean up, clean up, everybody do you share.’
-the skimm
YES.
The “New Frontier” spot is part of Salesforce’s “Team Earth” campaign, which calls on businesses and individuals to rally around a fair and more sustainable future.
[adage.com]
Olympic and Super Bowl ad.
#TeamEarth
Monday, February 7th, 2022
February 7, 2022“At least the global pandemic brought us all together.”
-Ricky Gervais
Rumi:
The human shape is a ghost
made of distraction and pain.
Sometimes pure light, sometimes cruel,
trying wildly to open,
this image tightly held within itself.
Emmanuel Macron, President of France:
“…a response that makes it possible to avoid war, to build the elements of confidence, stability and visibility. Together.”
Marianne Williamson:
“The role I want to play right now is citizen.”
“When we grant ourselves permission to live the life we want, there is little in the world that can stop us.” -Marianne
(C’est vrai.)
Former President George H.W. Bush wrote to fellow ex-president Gerald Ford in 1996: “Too often we fail to tell our friends that we really care about them and we are grateful to them.”
‘Maybe pickone person today and say: You made a difference.’ [AXIOS]
ღ
From Seth Godin:
“…it’s a metaphorical green light, a window of opportunity, a shift in the culture you can feel disappearing, it might very well pay to speed up. Because that extra effort, done with safety on behalf of those you seek to serve, will compound.
It never pays to wait until a deadline, but when you see the world changing, it might be a good excuse to redouble your efforts.”
Reading this from Seth, reminded of Matthew’s book, which I loved. -dayle
Thomas Berry:
“We will not save what we do not love.”
And from Matthew Fox:
“In Invoking the divine feminine, Julian of Norwich is of course informing us about how we need a balanced sense of gender to survive and even thrive in a time of pandemic and after a pandemic has left us. […] All human life on the planet is born of woman.“
Sunday, February 6th, 2022
February 6, 2022p. 53
“…liberté, égalité, et fraternité triumphed, and here, a place of exchange between English and French thinking, we get to enjoy the spots of peace: literature, friendship, conversation, debate. Long may we enjoy them and may they…instead of guns and grenades…become the weapons of new rebellions.”
p. 49
“The world as we knew it has ended, and it’s time for something entirely innovative.”
From Seth Godin.
In defense of non-interactive media
It doesn’t talk back. It doesn’t beep or update or invite a click. It doesn’t change based on who’s consuming it. It doesn’t interrupt you, and it begs to not be interrupted.
It’s rarer than ever before, and sometimes, we need it.
Agree. Completely. I think all comments across all social media platforms should be muted for six months.We must recalibrate. Let us read, absorb, research…enact media literacy and ease the meanness, vitriol, hateful and polarization with our words. Practice Lectio Divine…contemplative interaction…not words…conversations through meaning and meditation. We need it…indeed. -dayle
From Dan Rather.
We often hear of the tides of history, as if the fate of the world shifts in unison – the rising and lowering of a great sea of fortune. Tides are predictable. They are unstoppable. They are acts of nature. Human affairs, while inextricably tied to planetary forces, are also shaped by the actions we take, and do not take. Our destinies do not move with any great cohesion or coordination. Rather we are more like boats tossed by the accumulation of countless individual waves (to stretch our maritime metaphor), cresting and receding, churning and placid, forceful and gentle. These can be waves that push us backwards, but they can also propel us forward to a better future.
When looking back at the past, it is tempting to see paths as preordained – narratives we neatly tuck into the contextual confines that make them easier to understand. In contrast, the present is always messy. It will only become clearer once we know how it ends, at which point we will be living in a new era of uncertainty.
We can never dismiss the many challenges we face or the threats they pose. They are particularly dire. The list of woes bears repeating and remembering – from the climate crisis, to the ongoing threat to our democratic institutions, to our continued struggle for racial justice, to the threats of war, to the pandemic, and onward.
In the future we may look back and see that one of these forces escalated to a point of even greater dominance, and disaster.
One of the few things I have learned with any certainty over the course of a long life is to be wary of certainty. Those who predict with the most confidence what will happen in the future are often the voices that should be treated with the greatest skepticism. These paragons of certainty invariably are the ones who talk the most and consequently do the least to make a difference.
Substack: Islands of Hope
Both sides…not working now. It’s lazy journalism. -dayle
‘Both sides’ journalism does not always show us the truth
Journalists are bound to tell the truth, not give platforms to positions which are demonstrably wrong in a misguided attempt to be ‘impartial’.
“Flat-earthers are not going to get as much space as people who believe the Earth is round, but very occasionally it might be appropriate to interview a flat-earther. And if a lot of people believed in flat Earth we’d need to address it more.”
The BBC’s director of editorial policy, David Jordan, tried to make a defence of impartiality. Instead, he inadvertently showed us why the dogma is so dangerous.
It’s time to end both-sidesism. For so long, the idea of impartiality has been treated as more a matter of faith than a principle to be debated.
Where does this end? If we’re giving airtime to flat-earthers, then surely Syrian war crimes deniers are entitled to a platform. How about genocide deniers, 9/11 conspiracy theorists, and people who think there’s no climate emergency?
In the UK, the dogma of impartiality led the media to the false equivalence trap during Brexit. Pro-EU campaigners were given their share of airtime, and then the other side said it had “had enough” of listening to experts and fed viewers factually incorrect claims.
On other issues, too, the shrine of impartiality has taken us to dangerous places.
It took the BBC until 2018 to recognise that it wasn’t necessary to host a climate crisis denier to balance a debate about the impending environmental emergency. The BBC briefing note read:
“To achieve impartiality, you do not need to include outright deniers of climate change in BBC coverage, in the same way you would not have someone denying that Manchester United won 2-0 last Saturday. The referee has spoken.”
But that was a long three years ago. Before COVID conspiracy theories and leaders in the UK and US began regularly mixing fact with fiction.
Why is impartiality valued more highly than truth? We know that we’re failing as journalists when around 25 percent of people avoid the news in the UK, and one of the main reasons is because they can’t trust the news to be true.
Journalists are not naive storytellers incapable of discerning fact from fiction.
If we don’t stop giving a platform to things we know are false, how are we going to win back that trust?
Ironically, it’s the BBC that is leading the way in the UK’s fight against fake news: they have a specialist reporter covering disinformation online, and in 2021, they appointed their first health disinformation reporter.
I know what you’re thinking: give them a platform, and then robustly challenge them. Let their arguments crumble in the face of a tough line of questioning. Here’s the danger with impartiality purists: simply repeating false claims – even if it’s challenged – can push people to believe the false statement.
This isn’t a manifesto for throwing impartiality out of the window. We’re not campaigners or activists. We shouldn’t have an agenda.
But we’re also not naive storytellers incapable of discerning fact from fiction. The New York Times and many other publications did readers a service when they called former President Donald Trump’s lies, lies.
Fairness doesn’t mean giving a platform to factual inaccuracies just because they’re popular. That’s what Twitter is for.
There are not always two sides to every story.
Sakhr Al-Makhadhi is Executive Producer for AJ+
Remember reading the paper?
by Scott Simon
NPR
Image: A worker at a San Francisco Chronicle printing plant arranges stacks of freshly printed newspapers in 2007. Its digital version, like that of so many newspapers’, is behind a paywall. -Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
The road to free information and opinions seems to run into a lot of paywalls.
Want to finish reading an article? You can, but only if you subscribe for just $1 for 3 months, which becomes $11.99 a month thereafter, and into perpetuity, until your credit card expires. Even if it’s after you do.
I have a strong, even personal interest in paying journalists fairly. But the cost most people have to pay these days if they want to try to stay informed and enrich their minds with a range of opinions is pretty steep.
It’s become harder to read more than an article or two in most publications, which may no longer be the word. News sites, from The New York Times and The Washington Post to The Des Moines Register, insist you subscribe. So do Ebony, The New Yorker, The Economist, Rolling Stone and opinion journals, including The Nation and National Review, and sports-reporting sites. And of course, there are proliferating newsletters and extra-access-plus plans, as news broadcasters begin their own subscription services. They don’t crave an audience, so much as what they call a “customer base.”
“You can’t do much web grazing of quality content these days without a paywall clanging shut on you,” Jack Shafer wrote last year in Politico. “What delights publishers about subscriptions is what everybody from Amazon to Spotify to the Dollar Shave Club to Netflix love — the annuity-like reliability of steady revenue.”
But the cost of inducing people to subscribe is to make news, information and a range of opinions available to only those who have the means to afford and receive them online. This skews the audience toward what Nikki Usher, a University of Illinois College of Media associate professor, calls the “rich, white, and blue,” as in left-leaning.
The political and social divides, which so many decry, may begin between those who can and those who can’t afford access to a wide range of fact-checked, accurate information.
Disinformation, of course, is utterly free.
Newspapers and magazines often got ink on your fingers. But they were cheap. Anyone with pocket change, rich, poor, students or job-seekers, could buy a copy of a magazine with Princess Diana or Oprah Winfrey on the cover or a newspaper when the headline said MAN WALKS ON MOON, or, yes, HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR.
The internet has made news and views of all kinds, from all over the world, available on screens we can keep in our pockets. But so many paywalls have pulled costly shades over those screens.
https://www.npr.org/2022/02/05/1078377406/opinion-remember-reading-the-paper
We need an opportunity to reestablish and recalibrate the purpose and necessity of the Fourth Estate. What should the institution’s moral compass be based on the ideals of the U.S. Founders? The U.S. Founders believed a free press vital to democratic debate. So how did the current contemporary news culture evolve into a climate of disinformation and false news? Further, how did an institution created for public service evolve into an influential economic profit platform more destructive than instructive? Free Press co-founder, author and professor Robert McChesney is an activist for government subsidized non-profit media, a model the United States Founders had encouraged for a free press. He believes the Founders did not “authorized a corporate-run, profit-motivated, commercially driven media system with the First Amendment.” Corporate owned media is complicit in misinformation, and disinformation, for ratings, clicks and profits. This must change. And the change begins with our consumer information behaviors and tech media regulation. Democracy may die in darkness, but right now it’s happening in broad daylight. The pillar of the Fourth Estate is crumbling. -dayle
“Some would say that humanity is destined for self-destruction; that our history of lethal violence towards our own kind has programmed us to be fearful, suspicious, revengeful and greedy; and, despite our modern age, this programming now threatens our well-being on a global scale never witnessed before. But does it have to be this way? Can we not consciously evolve into a different kind of human?”
-Helen Marriott
I propose a journalism renaissance based on spiritual companioning, or homo spiritus, and radical compassion (Khen Lampert), deep empathy for other within democratic social process, a heart-based journalism paradigm in necessary community; a Fourth Estate defined in the third space of spirit, love, dignity, and humanity. -dayle