What perked my interest, from this video, is the mention of giants by plenty of witnesses that were there that day. Could these visitors be the old Annunaki? This is from 1989. This week we discovered planet X. We do live in interesting times.
While you are here, take a look at this classic UFO sighting. Children do not know how to lie properly.
Nearly three years ago, a New England Journal of Medicine study revealed that mammograms are largely ineffective in preventing deaths from breast cancer. According to Dr H. Gilbert Welch, in a New York Times oped, the mortality benefit of mammography is much smaller, and the harm of overdiagnosis much larger, than previously recognized.
According to Welch, one of the co-authors, the outcome of three decades of mammogram screening has been the diagnosis of 1.5 million women with early stage breast cancer. While this number might seem impressive, mammography has only diagnosed 0.1 million women with late-stage (potentially fatal) breast cancer. This means that nearly a million women underwent unpleasant, invasive and unnecessary treatment (surgery, chemotherapy or radiation) for a non-lethal “cancer.”
In 2014 a second Canadian study, published in the February 11 British Medical Journal, has replicated Welch’s findings. In the Canadian National Breast Screening Study, researchers followed almost 90,000 women for 25 years. Like Welch, they found that annual screening didn’t reduce breast cancer deaths. Instead they tended to lead to over-diagnosis and unnecessary treatment. In other words, cancers were found – and treated – that would have caused no problems during the patients’ lifetime.
In his New York Times editorial, Dr Welch laments misleading statements issued by the Komen Foundation and public health officials that early screening (by mammography) saves lives. The message they should be giving women is that they have a choice.
While no one can dismiss the possibility that screening may help a small number of women, there’s no doubt that it leads many more to be treated unnecessarily for non-lethal cancers. Women need to decide for themselves about the potential benefit and risks. One serious potential risk Dr Welch doesn’t mention is the burden of radiation exposure from a lifetime of unnecessary mammograms.
Instead of screening all women with mammography, he recommends that health professionals only target women with a strong family history or genetic predisposition to breast cancer.
“One can never be alone enough to write,”Susan Sontag observed. Solitude, in fact, seems central to many great writers’ daily routines — so much so, it appears, that part of the writer’s curse might be the ineffable struggle to submit to the spell of solitude and escape the grip of loneliness at the same time.
In October of 1954, Ernest Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. But he didn’t exactly live every writer’s dream: First, he told the press that Carl Sandburg, Isak Dinesen and Bernard Berenson were far more worthy of the honor, but he could use the prize money; then, depressed and recovering from two consecutive plane crashes that had nearly killed him, he decided against traveling to Sweden altogether. Choosing not to attend the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in Stockholm on December 10, 1954, Hemingway asked John C. Cabot, the United States Ambassador to Sweden at the time, to read his Nobel acceptance speech, found in the 1972 biography Hemingway: The Writer as Artist (public library). At a later date, Hemingway recorded the speech in his own voice. Hear an excerpt, then read the transcript of the complete speech below:
Having no facility for speech-making and no command of oratory nor any domination of rhetoric, I wish to thank the administrators of the generosity of Alfred Nobel for this Prize.
No writer who knows the great writers who did not receive the Prize can accept it other than with humility. There is no need to list these writers. Everyone here may make his own list according to his knowledge and his conscience.
It would be impossible for me to ask the Ambassador of my country to read a speech in which a writer said all of the things which are in his heart. Things may not be immediately discernible in what a man writes, and in this sometimes he is fortunate; but eventually they are quite clear and by these and the degree of alchemy that he possesses he will endure or be forgotten.
Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer’s loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.
For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.
How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him.
I have spoken too long for a writer. A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it. Again I thank you.
As I have permission to only quote half of the posts from this site, I focused on the actual gems: Do go see the original site and read their preamble.
(…) 1. The most important person in your life is the person who agreed to share their life with you. Treat them as such.
2. You might live a long life, or you might live a short one — who knows. But either way, trust me when I say that you’re going to wish you took better care of yourself in your youth.
3. Stuff is just stuff. Don’t hold onto material objects, hold onto time and experiences instead.
4. Jealousy destroys relationships. Trust your significant other, because who else are you supposed to trust?
5. People always say, ’’Make sure you get a job doing what you love!’’ But that isn’t the best advice. The right job is the job you love some days, can tolerate most days, and still pays the bills. Almost nobody has a job they love every day.
6. If you’re getting overwhelmed by life, just return to the immediate present moment and savour all that is beautiful and comforting. Take a deep breath, relax.
7. Years go by in the blink of an eye. Don’t marry young. Live your life. Go places. Do things. If you have the means or not. Pack a bag and go wherever you can afford to go. While you have no dependents, don’t buy stuff. Any stuff. See the world. Look through travel magazines and pick a spot. GO!
8. Don’t take life so seriously. Even if things seem dark and hopeless, try to laugh at how ridiculous life is.
9. A true friend will come running if you call them at 2am. Everyone else is just an acquaintance.
10. Children grow up way too fast. Make the most of the time you have with them.
11. Nobody ever dies wishing they had worked more. Work hard, but don’t prioritize work over family, friends, or even yourself.
12. Eat and exercise like you’re a diabetic heart patient with a stroke — so you never actually become one.
13. Maybe this one isn’t as profound as the others, but I think it’s important… Floss regularly, dental problems are awful.
14. Don’t take anyone else’s advice as gospel. You can ask for advice from someone you respect, then take your situation into consideration and make your own decision. Essentially, take your own advice is my advice…
15. The joints you damage today will get their revenge later. Even if you think they’ve recovered completely. TRUST ME!
16. We have one time on this earth. Don’t wake up and realize that you are 60 years old and haven’t done the things you dreamed about.
17. Appreciate the small things and to be present in the moment. What do I mean? Well, it seems today like younger people are all about immediate gratification. Instead, why not appreciate every small moment? We don’t get to stay on this crazy/wonderful planet forever and the greatest pleasure can be found in the most mundane of activities. Instead of sending a text, pick up the phone and call someone. Call your mother, have a conversation about nothing in particular. Those are the moments to hold onto.
18. Pay your bills and stay the hell out of debt. If I could have paid myself all the money I’ve paid out in interest over the years, I’d be retired already.
19. If you have a dream of being or doing something that seems impossible, try for it anyway. It will only become more impossible as you age and become responsible for other people.
20. When you meet someone for the first time, stop and realize that you really know nothing about them. You see race, gender, age, clothes. Forget it all. You know nothing. Those biased assumptions that pop into your head because of the way your brain likes categories, are limiting your life, and other people’s lives.
Reality ain’t what it used to be. Could this be true?
Jan 19, 2016
Thunder Energies Corp (TNRG:OTC) has recently detected invisible entities in our terrestrial environment with the revolutionary Santilli telescope with concave lenses (Trade Mark and patent pending by Thunder Energies). Thunder Energies Corporation has previously presented confirmations of the apparent existence of antimatter galaxies, antimatter asteroids and antimatter cosmic rays detected in preceding tests. In this breaking news, Thunder Energies presents evidence for the existence of Invisible Terrestrial Entities (ITE) if the dark and bright type.
Technical information can be obtained from the scientific paper R. M. Santilli, “Apparent Detection via New Telescopes with Concave Lenses of Otherwise Invisible Terrestrial Entities (ITE),” American Journal of Modern Physics (in press), http://www.thunder-energies.com/docs/… or from the scientific archives of the R. M. Santilli Foundation. http://www.santilli-foundation.org/ne…
ABOUT Thunder Energies Corp:
Thunder Energies Corporation is a breakthrough technology company featuring three cutting edge technologies in the fields of optics, nuclear physics and fuel combustion. Thunder Energies is led by Dr. Ruggero Santilli, CEO and Chief Science Officer and Dr. George Gaines, President & COO. Dr. Santilli is a former faculty at MIT, Harvard and other leading institutions around the world.
Voltaire Network | Damascus (Syria) | 4 January 2016
The best-kept secrets must be revealed in the end. The mafia cartel which governs Bulgaria has been caught supplying drugs and weapons to Al-Qaïda and Daesh, at the demand of the CIA, both in Libya and Syria. The affair is all the more serious since Bulgaria is a member of NATO and the European Union.
Head of one of the two Bulgarian mafia cartels, the SIC, Boïko Borissov has occupied the post of Prime Minister since 2014. While his country was a member of both NATO and the European Union, he supplied drugs and weapons to Al-Qaïda and Daesh in Libya and Syria.
It seems that everything began by accident. For about thirty years, fenetylline was used as a performance-enhancing drug in the West German sports world. According to trainer Peter Neururer, more than half of the athletes took it regularly [1]. Bulgarian drug dealers spotted an opportunity in this situation, and from the dissolution of the Soviet Union until Bulgaria’s entry into the European Union, they began to produce it and illegally export it to Germany under the name of Captagon.
Two mafia groups were locked in serious competition – Vasil Iliev Security (VIS), and Security Insurance Company (SIC), the company which employed the karateka Boïko Borissov. This high-level athlete, professor at the Police Academy, created a company supplying protection for important personalities, and became the body-guard for pro-Soviet ex-President Todor Jivkov as well as for pro-US Simeon II Saxe-Cobourg-Gotha. As soon as Simeon II became Prime Minister, Borissov was named as the central Director of the Ministry of the Interior, then was elected mayor of Sofia.
In 2006, the United States ambassador in Bulgaria (and future ambassador to Russia), John Beyrle, sketched his character in a confidential cable which was revealed by Wikileaks. He presented Borissov as being connected to two major mafia bosses, Mladen Mihalev (alias « Madzho ») and Roumen Nikolov (alias « The Pacha ») [2], the founders of SIC.
In 2007, basing its article on a report drawn up by a large Swiss company, the U.S. Congressional Quarterly claimed that he had smothered a number of enquiries at the Ministry of the Interior, and was himself implicated in 28 mafia murders. He apparently became a partner of John E. McLaughlin, Deputy Director of the CIA. He is said to have set up a secret prison for the Agency in Bulgaria, and helped to provide a military base in the context of the project for an attack on Iran, the Quarterly continued [3].
In 2008, the German specialist in organised crime, Jürgen Roth, qualified Boïko Borissov as a « Bulgarian Al Capone » [4].
Having himself become Prime Minister, and while his country was already a member of NATO and the EU, he was solicited by the Agency to help in the secret war against Mouamar el-Kadhafi. Boïko Borissov supplied Captagon, manufactured by the SIC, to the al-Qaïda jihadists in Libya. The CIA rendered this synthetic drug more attractive and more powerful by mixing it with a natural drug, hashish, which made it easier to manipulate the fighters and make them more terrifying, in line with the work of Bernard Lewis [5]. Following that, Borissov extended this market to Syria.
But most importantly, the CIA, using the profile of an ex-Warsaw Pact member which had recently joined NATO, bought from him 500 million dollars’ worth of Soviet-type weaponry and transported it to Syria — mainly 18,800 portable anti-tank grenade launchers and 700 Konkurs anti-tank missile systems.
When Hezbollah sent a team to Bulgaria to gather information about this traffic, a bus-load of Israeli holiday-makers were the object of a terrorist attack in Burgas, leaving 32 wounded. Immediately, Benjamin Netanyahu and Boïko Borissov accused the Lebanese resistance, while the Atlantist Press spread a number of allegations about the supposed Hezbollah kamikaze. Finally, the forensic scientist, Dr. Galina Mileva, noticed that the corpse did not correspond to the witness descriptions – while a counter-intelligence chief, Colonel Lubomir Dimitrov, noted that he was not a kamikaze, but a simple carrier, and that the bomb had been triggered from a distance, probably without his knowledge. The Press accused two Arabs of Canadian and Australian nationality, but the Sofia News Agency quoted a US accomplice known by the pseudonym of David Jefferson. The outcome was that when the European Union sought to use the affair in order to classify Hezbollah as a « terrorist organisation », the Minister for Foreign Affairs – during the short period when Borissov was excluded from executive power – Kristian Vigenine, made it clear that in reality, nothing was found that could tie the attack to the Lenbanese resistance [6].
From the end of 2014, the CIA ceased its orders and was replaced by Saudi Arabia, who were thus able to buy weapons which were no longer ex-Soviet left-overs, but modern NATO material, such as the wire-guided anti-tank BGM-71 TOW missiles. Soon, Riyadh was supported by the United Arab Emirates [7]. The two Gulf states themselves handled the deliveries to Al-Qaïda and Daesh, via Saudi Arabian Cargo and Etihad Cargo, either at Tabuk, on the Saudi-Jordanian border, or the Emirati-Franco-US base at Al-Dhafra.
In June 2014, the CIA turned up the pressure. This time, they forbade Bulgaria to allow access to the Russian gas pipeline South Stream, which could have supplied Western Europe [8].This decision, which deprived Bulgaria of some very important income, not only helped to slow down the growth of the European Union, as described in the Wolfowitz plan [9], but also to apply the European sanctions against Russia which had been implemented under the pretext of the Ukranian crisis, to develop the exploitation of shale gas in Eastern Europe [10], and finally, to maintain the interest of overthrowing the Syrian Arab Republic, a possible major gas exporter [11].
The latest news is that Bulgaria – a member-state of NATO and the European Union – continues to illegally supply drugs and weapons to Al-Qaïda and Daesh, despite the recent Resolution 2253, which was unanimously adopted by the UN Security Council.
We are being dumbed down and depopulated. The question is, is this done on purpose, is there a devious agenda, or are the powers that be, Monsatan, just merely ignorant and oblivious? You decide.
Are we creating a zombie class?
“Laibow believes that the impetus may be to create an entire class of autistic individuals who will be suited only for certain types of work.”
“The rate of autism has skyrocketed from roughly one in every two thousand in the 1970’s to the current rate of one in every sixty eight. Alzheimer’s has become almost universal in the elderly.”
A senior scientist at MIT has declared that we are facing an epidemic of autism that may result in one half of all children being affected by autism in ten years.
Dr. Stephanie Seneff, who made these remarks during a panel presentation in Groton, MA last week, specifically cites the Monsanto herbicide, Roundup, as the culprit for the escalating incidence of autism and other neurological disorders. Roundup, which was introduced in the 1970’s, contains the chemical glyphosate, which is the focal point for Seneff’s concerns. Roundup was originally restricted to use on weeds, as glyphosate kills plants. However, Roundup is now in regular use with crops. With the coming of GMO’s, plants such as soy and corn were bioengineered to tolerate glyphosate, and its use dramatically increased. From 2001 to 2007, glyphosate use doubled, reaching 180 to 185 million pounds in the U.S. alone in 2007.
If you don’t consume corn- on- the -cob or toasted soybeans, however, you are hardly exempt from the potential affects of consuming glyphosate. Wheat is now sprayed with Roundup right before it is harvested, making any consumption of non- organic wheat bread a sure source for the chemical. In addition, any products containing corn syrup, such as soft drinks, are also carrying a payload of glyphosate.
According to studies cited by Seneff, glyphosate engages “gut bacteria” in a process known as the shikimate pathway. This enables the chemical to interfere with the biochemistry of bacteria in our GI tract, resulting in the depletion of essential amino acids .
Monsanto has maintained that glyphosate is safe for human consumption, as humans do not have the shikimate pathway. Bacteria, however, does—including the flora that constitutes “gut bacteria.”
It is this ability to affect gut bacteria that Seneff claims is the link which allows the chemical to get on board and wreak further damage. The connection between intestinal flora and neurological functioning is an ongoing topic of research. According to a number of studies, glyphosate depletes the amino acids tyrosine, tryptophan, and phenylalanine, which can then contribute to obesity, depression, autism, inflammatory bowel disease, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
Monsanto disagrees. The food and chemical giant has constructed a webpage with links to scientific studies pronouncing the safety of glyphosate.
Other science writers have also taken up the Monsanto banner, scoffing at the scientific studies that prompted Seneff to make her claims. “They made it up!” pronounced Huffpost science writer Tamar Haspel, in an article thin on analysis but heavy on declarative prose.
Others, such as Skeptoid writer and PhD physicist Eric Hall, take a more measured approach, and instead focus on the studies which prompted the glyphosate concerns. According to Hall, Seneff is making an error known as the “correlation/causation error,” in which causality is inaccurately concluded when there exists only the fact that two separate items—in this case, the increased use of glyphosate and the increased incidence of autism—may be observed but are not, in fact, directly related.
Seneff’s pronouncements focus specifically on the glyphosate issue. As we know, there are other potential tributaries which may be feeding the rise in autism and also causing age-related neurological conditions, such as Alzheimer’s. These may include contents of vaccines, aluminum cooking ware as well as other potential sources for chemical consumption.
Some individuals, such as M.D. and radio host Rima Laibow have speculated on the intentionality behind this ostensible chemical siege against our gray matter. Laibow believes that the impetus may be to create an entire class of autistic individuals who will be suited only for certain types of work.
This harks back, eerily, to Aldous Huxley’s classic Brave New World, in which individuals were preprogrammed from “conception” for eventual placement in one of five groups, designated as Alpha, Beta, and so on down to Epsilon, based on their programmed brain power. In Huxley’s dystopian world, this class delineation by intellectual ability enabled society to function more smoothly.
Whatever may driving the autistic/Alzheimer’s diesel train, one thing is for certain: the spectre of half of our children coming into the world with significant brain damage constitutes a massive and undeniable wound to humanity. The rate of autism has skyrocketed from roughly one in every two thousand in the 1970’s to the current rate of one in every sixty eight. Alzheimer’s has become almost universal in the elderly. Seneff’s predictions can only be ignored at grave risk to the human race.
Janet C. Phelan, investigative journalist and human rights defender that has traveled pretty extensively over the Asian region, an author of a tell-all book EXILE, exclusively for the online magazine
To protect the Kurds and Yazidis from genocide carried by Daesh (Islamic State) terrorists in Syria, one needs to support Kurdish forces fighting against the jihadist groups, renowned US Professor Noam Chomsky told Al Jazeera’s political commentator Mehdi Hasan during an episode of UpFront.
Although the US government has been supporting some Kurdish groups in Syria, it must work with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) as it is this Kurdish organization which has been primarily responsible for defending Yazidis and Kurds from Daesh, Chomsky said.
“They [Daesh] are killing Yazidis. What do you do? You support the people who are saving the Yazidis, who happened to be in the US terrorist list,” Chomsky told Al Jazeera.
Chomsky added that when it comes to fighting Daesh and protecting minority groups, such as Yazidis and Kurds, in Syria and Iraq, airstrikes against the Sunni terrorist group are a legitimate action.
If it’s straightforward in regards to Daesh — they’re the bad guys and airstrikes against them are legitimate — the problem arises when it comes to other terrorist groups, such as al-Nusra Front. Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar openly support al-Nusra Front, which is in fact no different from Daesh, Chomsky said.“The Kurds have to defend them [the Yazidis] against al-Nusra Front too,” Chomsky said, pointing out that the Turkish government openly supports al-Nusra Front, which creates a big problem.
Instead of supporting the PKK in their fight against Daesh, Turkey, the US ally in the Middle East, has been brutally suppressing the Kurds. Chomsky said that if Turkey is truly interested in defeating Daesh and protecting the Yazidis, Ankara should stop attacking the PKK. As for the United States, if Washington wants to protect Kurds it should tell the Turkish government to stop killing Kurds.
“If you want to defend the Kurds you cannot be attacking the Kurds,” Chomsky explained in a straightforward manner.
When asked whether the United States and its allies can fight Daesh, forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and other terrorist groups in the country all at the same time, Chomsky said that it’s essential that the US government and its allies need to set their priorities straight and concentrate on Daesh and other terrorist groups in Syria to effectively solve the crisis.
“You cannot fight both sides, which are attacking one another, it’s an incoherent strategy, so you have to concentrate on what you’re doing,” Chomsky stressed.Although the US Professor himself is not a fan of al-Assad, he still thinks that the only way to fix Syria is to negotiate with the current government.
Syria has been in a state of civil war since 2011, with government forces fighting opposition factions and militant groups.
The United States is leading the coalition of over 60 countries conducting airstrikes against the terrorist group both in Syria and Iraq. Russia is conducting its own air campaign in Syria at the request of the Syrian government.
MIND diet, healthy fats and smoothies are crucial for preventing Alzheimer’s disease, research shows.
“The MIND diet is a simple, wholesome lifestyle eating template that is proven to slow cognitive decline. When it was followed moderately, it was found to lower the risk of Alzheimer’s by 35 percent. When the diet was followed rigorously, it lowered the risk of Alzheimer’s by 53 percent.”
When a loved one begins to struggle with extreme memory loss and cognitive impairment, we may suddenly be overcome with a loss of words. As dementia or Alzheimer’s overtakes a loved one, we often see it as some genetic curse, a tragic genetic code we could never overwrite.
But in the field of epigenetics (epi- meaning above), we learn that genetic expression is influenced by multiple governing factors that are within our control. For example, a person gives their cells instructions through the foods they eat, and these nutritional components can strengthen genes’ ability to adapt to their environment, and express themselves in positive or negative ways. Likewise, the frequency of a person’s strongest emotions and thought patterns may affect the expression of genes in their physical body.
MIND diet is a great template to prevent cognitive decline, Alzheimer’s
Researchers at Rush University Medical Center are now confirming that a hybrid Mediterranean diet, including healthy fats, blueberries and whole fruit and vegetable smoothies, with the fiber intact, can have a powerful governing effect on a person’s cognitive abilities, preventing memory loss and Alzheimer’s disease.
The Rush researchers are praising their newly formulated MIND diet which stands for: “Mediterranean Intervention for Neurodegenerative Delay.” The diet was developed by nutritional epidemiologist Martha Clare Morris, PhD, and fellow colleagues at the Rush medical center.
The MIND diet is a simple, wholesome lifestyle eating template that is proven to slow cognitive decline. When it was followed moderately, it was found to lower the risk of Alzheimer’s by 35 percent. When the diet was followed rigorously, it lowered the risk of Alzheimer’s by 53 percent.
The Rush study was funded by The National Institute of Aging. The study investigated cognitive change over a period of 4.7 years, among 960 older adults averaging 81.4 years old, who had no dementia at the onset of the study.
MIND diet makes brain 7.5 years younger
Rush researchers also revealed that when older adults follow the MIND diet over longer periods of time, their cognitive abilities become sharper with age. After the researchers studied the older adults’ episodic memory, working memory, semantic memory, visuospatial ability and perceptual speed, they found that those who rigorously followed the MIND diet exhibited cognitive abilities that were 7.5 years younger than their actual age.
The diet revolves around eating 10 brain-healthy food groups, including nuts, berries (particularly blueberries and strawberries), whole grains, green leafy vegetables, olive oil, beans, poultry, fish and wine. The diet also restricts five unhealthy food groups (red meats, cheese, pastries and fried fast foods).
“With late-onset AD, with that older group of people, genetic risk factors are a small piece of the picture,” said Dr. Morris. “Past studies have yielded evidence that suggests that what we eat may play a significant role in determining who gets AD and who doesn’t.”
“Everyone experiences decline with aging; and Alzheimer’s disease is now the sixth leading cause of death in the U.S., which accounts for 60 to 80 percent of dementia cases. Therefore, prevention of cognitive decline, the defining feature of dementia, is now more important than ever,” Morris says. “Delaying dementia’s onset by just five years can reduce the cost and prevalence by nearly half.”
How well we age, how well we process information and retain memory into old age, is mostly within our control. Even a few changes can make all the difference, providing new instructions for positive genetic expression and a graceful aging experience.
Recently, Tyler Allen, an Orlando, Florida-based sports bar and nightclub owner, handed over $3 million in cash for a luxury condo near Concordia, Kansas; it wasn’t the indoor swimming pool, hydroponic vegetable garden or 17-seat movie theater that impressed and attracted him.
The main selling point, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal, was not the 1,820-square-foot apartment at all, in fact. It was the underground, decommissioned missile silo buried 174 feet below — a silo capable of withstanding even a nuclear attack.
Like so many who are concerned about the direction and future of the country feel obliged to do when the media comes calling, Allen insisted to the WSJ that, hey, he’s no crazy conspiracy nut or “tinfoil hat-wearing” type. Rather, he says, he is concerned about growing security threats like a global health pandemic, cataclysmic weather and terrorist attacks.
“There’s a Camp David for the president,” he told the paper. “If you’re at a certain level where you can afford it, you can get that, too.”
‘Insurance plan’
His “Survival Condo” complex comes complete with full and half-floor units that cost between $1.5 million and $3 million apiece. Each building can accommodate 75 people; buyers include physicians, entrepreneurs and scientists, according to developer Larry Hall. In all, the condo complex is 15 stories — underground.
Hall, who lives in a suburb of Denver, says he purchased his first missile-silo site in Kansas in 2008 and finished construction in December 2012. A year later, he told the paper, the unit had completely sold out.
Now, he has begun construction of a second security complex — where Allen bought his unit — and he is considering even more sites, in Texas and elsewhere.
WSJ further reported:
As former nuclear missile sites built under the supervision of the Army Corps of Engineers, the structures were originally designed to withstand a direct hit by a nuclear bomb. At ground level, they can be sealed up by two armored doors weighing 16,000 pounds each. Mr. Hall added sophisticated water and air-treatment facilities, state-of-the-art computer network technology and several alternate power generation capabilities.
Such hide-aways are becoming more popular, especially among more affluent Americans, and follow a trend that began after the 9/11 attacks. In addition, the Great Recession of 2007-2008 coupled with the Ebola scare and the rise of the Islamic State have all fed into simmering concerns. Some, no doubt, also are worried about the state of civil society in the United States.
‘She won’t go in there – for now‘
Hall’s company claims that the condos give residents the chance to live an uninterrupted life of luxury underground. Besides standard perks like a spa, dog park and fitness and medical facilities, the complexes come with enough emergency food to last up to five years. Furthering security, the condos also feature a holding cell for unruly tenants.
Each individual unit comes with 9-foot ceilings, and lighting mimics natural sunlight as much as it can. There are no windows, of course, but there are video screens that portray a resident’s choice of scenery — everything from landscapes to city skylines.
Not everyone wants to make it public that they have purchased one of the uber-bunkers, like Allen has done. WSJ reported that one executive on a tobacco-product firm in Connecticut who requested anonymity said he paid $12 million in cash for four entire floors in the first condo-silo complex, which was enough room for his large family and a number of close friends.
He said he hired a decorator and installed fireplaces in all four full floors, as well as antique furniture and more “windows” than the spaces initially came with.
“I look at is as a life insurance policy,” he told WSJ, adding that he’ll only use the condo in extreme emergencies. He went on to say that his wife “hates the idea” and won’t even set foot in the condo. But he added that was just “for now.”
By the time you get this letter, I’ll have gotten hold of some of the recent issues of The Sun. Unless it looks totally worthless, I’ll let my offer stand. And don’t think that my arrogance is unintentional: it’s just that I’d rather offend you now than after I started working for you.
Fresh out of the military working his first job as a copy boy at Time magazine in New York City. Hunter S. Thompson was already frustrated that his profession was “overrun with dullards, bums. and hacks, hag-ridden with myopia, apathy, and complacence.”
Sick of being broke, hunter wrote a letter to Jack Scott, the editorial director of the Vancouver Sun, offering to move to British Columbia, to work at the new paper.
Vancouver Sun
TO JACK SCOTT, VANCOUVER SUN
October 1, 1958 57 Perry Street New York City
Sir,
I got a hell of a kick reading the piece Time magazine did this week on The Sun. In addition to wishing you the best of luck, I’d also like to offer my services.
Since I haven’t seen a copy of the “new” Sun yet, I’ll have to make this a tentative offer. I stepped into a dung-hole the last time I took a job with a paper I didn’t know anything about (see enclosed clippings) and I’m not quite ready to go charging up another blind alley.
By the time you get this letter, I’ll have gotten hold of some of the recent issues of The Sun. Unless it looks totally worthless, I’ll let my offer stand. And don’t think that my arrogance is unintentional: it’s just that I’d rather offend you now than after I started working for you.
I didn’t make myself clear to the last man I worked for until after I took the job. It was as if the Marquis de Sade had suddenly found himself working for Billy Graham. The man despised me, of course, and I had nothing but contempt for him and everything he stood for. If you asked him, he’d tell you that I’m “not very likable, (that I) hate people, (that I) just want to be left alone, and (that I) feel too superior to mingle with the average person.” (That’s a direct quote from a memo he sent to the publisher.)
Nothing beats having good references.
Of course if you asked some of the other people I’ve worked for, you’d get a different set of answers. If you’re interested enough to answer this letter, I’ll be glad to furnish you with a list of references — including the lad I work for now.
The enclosed clippings should give you a rough idea of who I am. It’s a year old, however, and I’ve changed a bit since it was written. I’ve taken some writing courses from Columbia in my spare time, learned a hell of a lot about the newspaper business, and developed a healthy contempt for journalism as a profession.
As far as I’m concerned, it’s a damned shame that a field as potentially dynamic and vital as journalism should be overrun with dullards, bums, and hacks, hag-ridden with myopia, apathy, and complacence, and generally stuck in a bog of stagnant mediocrity. If this is what you’re trying to get The Sun away from, then I think I’d like to work for you.
Most of my experience has been in sports writing, but I can write everything from warmongering propaganda to learned book reviews.
I can work 25 hours a day if necessary, live on any reasonable salary, and don’t give a black damn for job security, office politics, or adverse public relations.
I would rather be on the dole than work for a paper I was ashamed of.
It’s a long way from here to British Columbia, but I think I’d enjoy the trip.
Iben Thranholm just called European males a bunch of effeminate wimps. By the way, this is offered as public debate material. I do not necessarily agree with Iben Thranholm. As far as I am concerned, we need more wimps, not testosterone driven ape-like fools like most American Republicans. John Wayne is dead, long live David Bowie!
After the incidents of sexual assault in Cologne, Germany on New Year’s Eve committed by Muslim refugees against German women, feminist apologetics have acquired renewed vigor in the European debate.
Iben Thranholm examines political and social events with focus on their religious aspects, significance and moral implications. She is one of Denmark’s most widely read columnists on such matters. Thranholm is a former editor and radio host at the Danish Broadcasting Corporation (DR), at which she created a religious news program that set a new standard for religious analysis in the newsroom. She has traveled extensively in the Middle East, Italy, the United States and Russia to carry out research and interviews. She has been awarded for her investigative research into Danish media coverage of religious issues.
After the incidents of sexual assault in Cologne, Germany on New Year’s Eve committed by Muslim refugees against German women, feminist apologetics have acquired renewed vigor in the European debate.
Pundits and politicians assure the public that refugee males now storming the gates of Europe from the Middle East, Northern Africa and Central Asia will be required to learn that Western women are independent and sexually liberated. Such arguments, however, are obviously too weak to have any impact on the male cultures representative of certain refugee groups.
To these individuals, strong European women are ‘easy’ and easy victims; they have respect only for strong men – and strong men aren’t exactly thick on the ground in Europe.
The deficiency of masculinity in European culture renders it impotent in the face of the political and cultural chaos that has escalated along with growing immigration.
Instead of a single-minded focus on imposing liberal feminist values on Muslim males, it might well be much more beneficial for Europeans to consider if the feminist war on masculinity might be the underlying cause of the weakness of European culture – feeble and defenseless as it is – against the culture of immigrants and refugees. The irony is that the vacuum feminism has created means that women become victims of an aggressive male culture.
A recent survey conducted by the Pew Research Centre shows that the number of young men in the US who want to marry has dropped to the lowest level ever recorded.
American author Suzanne Venker claims that the pervasive cultural influence of feminism is the cause. Venker states that men explain their lack of desire to marry with the observation that “women are no longer women”; feminism has programmed women to see men as the enemy. As a result, males have been made redundant in post-modern Western culture. Women no longer need men as a provider, protector or father of her children; an anonymous semen donor can do the job of creating a baby if a woman so chooses.
Since the 1960s, modern mothers have raised their sons to be women, soaking them in feminine values like accepting responsibility for household chores, being caring, understanding and attentive, and bend to every wish of the woman. This has produced a generation of soft, insecure men, who are out of touch with their masculine nature, identity and strength.
Today, many boys also grow up with no father in the home and have no male role models. The average modern Western male has been feminized, with no knowledge or habit of manly virtues like courage, resolve, self-sacrifice, justice, temperance, self-reliance, self-discipline and honour. He has no sense of true expression of manliness. Feminism despises and rejects these virtues, and this has had a profoundly detrimental impact on a European culture, the “battered wife” of a feeble continent.
The massive feminization of culture has had a major impact on politics. The prevailing ideology of Western liberal democracy is secular humanism, which is particularly feminine in character. Policy, especially as applied to immigrants, is a motherly embrace of goodness and overbearing indulgence. One could also interpret it as naivety, weakness and accommodation. As the refugee crisis erupted and overwhelmed Europe, its political leaders – spearheaded by German Chancellor Angela Merkel – acted like timid mother hens, not as strong men responsible for guarding their country from an invasion.
Indeed, Danish police officers were seen playing with refugee children on motorways instead of doing their job of enforcing the law. They were lauded as heroes in the media. They acted like women with soft hearts and not as men entrusted with defending their country and the rule of law.
Camille Pagilla, self-professed “feminist dissident”, put it like this in the Daily Mail: “The entire elite class now, in finance, in politics and so on, none of them have military service – hardly anyone, there are a few. But there is no prestige attached to it anymore. That is a recipe for disaster… These people don’t think in military ways, so there’s this illusion out there that people are basically nice, people are basically kind, if we’re just nice and benevolent to everyone they’ll be nice too. They literally don’t have any sense of evil or criminality.’ According to Paglia, the results are there for all to see in the on-going dysfunction in Washington, where politicians ‘lack practical skills of analysis and construction’”.
The precise problem is that Europe’s political leaders have no military background, unlike leaders of the past, for instance Roosevelt, de Gaulle and Churchill. For this reason, they lack the basic understanding for defending their culture, their country and its inherent values. They are self-deprecating and apologetic, gullible and caring to the point where their policies become severely harmful to the populations they are supposed to protect.
The feminine approach threatens to throw society into chaos and outright collapse because the rule of law and its enforcement are made subject to the priorities of care, understanding and inclusion. The shortage of masculine virtues affects society and the political system. The shortage of masculine virtues is the underlying cause of the immigration problems.
The present clash with Islam, driven as it is by a dominant male culture, reveals the lamentable shortcomings of post-modern feminist culture, which does not possess the strength to defend itself against a male-dominated culture. The gross violations against women on New Year’s Eve in Cologne provide a chilling reminder of the contrast; male aggression has gained a foothold and feminine values are helpless and unable to resist.
At the moment, Europe resembles a woman who allows herself to be battered and abused by her man. Like many battered women, she tries to cover her man’s violations, makes excuses for him, and returns to him time after time.
At the same time, immigration is inevitable in a globalized world. If Europe is to survive in an age of mass migration, there must be a male revolution. This revolution will be as important as the struggle for women’s rights in the 1960s. It is vital for Western men to acknowledge this need and start building social, cultural and political capital based on masculine virtues to defend the values upon which Europe is based.
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT. (Or Tales)
“There will be earthquakes and floods causing great disasters, changes in the seasons and in the weather, disappearance of wildlife, and famine in different forms. There will be gradual corruption and confusion among the leaders and the people all over the world, and wars will come about like powerful winds. All of this has been planned from the beginning of creation.”
Hopi Prophecy and the End of the Fourth World – Part 1
More than any other tribe in North America, the Hopi Indians have developed according to the dictates and demands of what may be called a legacy of prophecy. The predictions of the life to come do not merely pertain to the Hopi themselves but deal with impending events on a global scale. These prophecies began to be made public shortly before the mid-20 th century. The Hopi are an aggregation of clans that came together at the “center-point” ( Tuuwanasavi) in northern Arizona during the course of their migrations. Because they are not a monolithic tribe, the sources of their prophecies are fragmentary and multifarious. Part of the lack of narrative clarity also has to do with the secretive nature of the Hopi. These isolated, sedentary farmers living in unpretentious pueblos (basically stone apartment buildings) on the high desert of the American Southwest have looked into the future from their kivas (subterranean, communal prayer-chambers) and have seen some rather disturbing scenarios. Many times they simply do not wish to share these visions with the outside world. Considering the history of exploitation and genocide of Native Americans in general, this is understandable.
Snake Kiva in the village of Oraibi, the oldest continuously inhabited community on the North American continent, established about 1100 AD.
Like the Maya, among whom the Hopi once lived and with whom they later traded, the Hopi conceptualize the cycles of time as world-ages. The Hopi believe that we have suffered three previous world cataclysms. The First World was destroyed by fire—a comet, asteroid strike, or a number of volcanic eruptions. The Second World was destroyed by ice—a great Ice Age. As recorded by many cultures around the globe, a tremendous deluge destroyed the Third World. These three global destructions were not the result of merely random earth changes or astrophysical phenomena but of humankind’s disregard both for Mother Earth and for the spiritual dictates of the Creator. In other words, cataclysmic events in the natural world are causally connected to collective transgressions, or negatives human actions.
Unlike the Maya, the Hopi are rarely specific about the dates for the shifting of these ages. It has been said that the Maya were masters of time, whereas the Hopi are masters of space. The verb tenses here are deliberate, given that the Maya no longer follow the Long Count calendar of 394-year cycles. Instead they now use the Tzolk’in calender of 260 days—an amazingly complex system nonetheless. Living on their three primary mesas, the Hopi continue to perform a series of annual sacred rituals within their ceremonial cycle in order to keep not just themselves but rather the whole world in balance.
As time goes by, this task is increasingly difficult because our contemporary lifestyle, with its technological gadgetry and unseemly allurements, continues to erode traditional ways of life and ancestral Hopi values. Fewer and fewer young Hopis are learning their indigenous language, customs, and ceremonies. More youth are leaving Hopi-land to seek employment in urban areas. Those that do stay on the reservation are confronted with intra-tribal squabbles and, much worse, with high rates of alcoholism and increasingly available lethal street drugs. The dire signs of a Native American version of the “End Times” are everywhere.
Many Hopi spiritual elders (singular, kikmongwi) claim that we are living in the final days of the Fourth World. For more than 60 years, different Hopis have predicted various Earth changes that signal the conclusion of the current age and the onset of the Fifth World. In 1970, Dan Katchongva, Sun Clan leader from the village of Hotevilla, who died at age 112, spoke about deteriorating conditions of our time:
We have teachings and prophecies informing us that we must be alert for the signs and omens which will come about to give us courage and strength to stand on our beliefs. Blood will flow. Our hair and our clothing will be scattered upon the earth. Nature will speak to us with its mighty breath of wind. There will be earthquakes and floods causing great disasters, changes in the seasons and in the weather, disappearance of wildlife, and famine in different forms. There will be gradual corruption and confusion among the leaders and the people all over the world, and wars will come about like powerful winds. All of this has been planned from the beginning of creation.
The Two Life-Paths On Prophecy Rock
Another spiritual elder from the same Third Mesa village, David Monongye, who may have lived even longer than Grandfather Dan, had warned: “When earthquakes, floods, hailstorms, drought, and famine will be the life of every day, the time will have then come for [either] the return to the true path, or going the zig-zag way.”
A jail cell, dark with sunlight on the floor. Secure prison. Photo Credit: TerryM
If you are poor, you will almost never go to trial—instead you will be forced to accept a plea deal offered by government prosecutors. If you are poor, the word of the police, who are not averse to fabricating or tampering with evidence, manipulating witnesses and planting guns or drugs, will be accepted in a courtroom as if it was the word of God. If you are poor, and especially if you are of color, almost anyone who can verify your innocence will have a police record of some kind and thereby will be invalidated as a witness. If you are poor, you will be railroaded in an assembly-line production, from a town or city where there are no jobs, through the police stations, county jails and courts directly into prison. And if you are poor, because you don’t have money for adequate legal defense, you will serve sentences that are decades longer than those for equivalent crimes anywhere else in the industrialized world.
If you are a poor person of color in America you understand this with a visceral fear. You have no chance. Being poor has become a crime. And this makes mass incarceration the most pressing civil rights issue of our era.
The 10-part online documentary “Making a Murderer,” by writer-directors Moira Demos and Laura Ricciardi, chronicles the endemic corruption of the judicial system. The film focuses on the case of Steven Avery and his nephew, Brendan Dassey, who were given life sentences for murder without any tangible evidence linking them to the crime. As admirable as the documentary was, however, it focused on a case where the main defendant, Avery, had competent defense. He was also white. The blatant corruption of, and probable conspiracy by, the Manitowoc County Sheriff’s Office in Wisconsin and then-Calumet County District Attorney Ken Kratz is nothing compared with what goes on in the well-oiled and deeply cynical system in place in inner-city courts. The accused in poor urban centers are lined up daily like sheep in a chute and shipped to prison with a startling alacrity. The attempts by those who put Avery and Dassey behind bars to vilify them further after the release of the film misses the point: The two men, like most of the rest of the poor behind bars in the United States, did not receive a fair trial. Whether they did or did not murder Teresa Halbach—and the film makes a strong case that they did not—is a moot point.
Once you are charged in America, whether you did the crime or not, you are almost always found guilty. Because of this, as many activists have discovered, the courts already are being used as a fundamental weapon of repression, and this abuse will explode in size should there be widespread unrest and dissent. Our civil liberties have been transformed into privileges—what Matt Taibbi in “The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap” calls “conditional rights and conditional citizenship”—that are, especially in poor communities, routinely revoked. Once rights become privileges, none of us are safe.
In any totalitarian society, including an American society ruled by its own species of inverted totalitarianism, the state invests tremendous amounts of energy into making the judicial system appear as if it functions impartially. And the harsher the totalitarian system becomes, the more effort it puts into disclaiming its identity. The Nazis, as did the Soviet Union under Stalin, broke the accused down in grueling and psychologically crippling interrogations—much the same way the hapless and confused Dassey is manipulated and lied to by interrogators in the film—to make them sign false confessions. Totalitarian states need the facade of justice to keep the public passive.
The Guardian newspaper reported: “The Innocence Project has kept detailed records on the 337 cases across the [United States] where prisoners have been exonerated as a result of DNA testing since 1989. The group’s researchers found that false confessions were made in 28 percent of all the DNA-related exonerations, a striking proportion in itself. But when you look only at homicide convictions—by definition the most serious cases—false confessions are the leading cause of miscarriages of justice, accounting for a full 63% of the 113 exonerations.”
“[T]he interrogator-butcher isn’t interested in logic,” Alexander Solzhenitsyn writes in “The Gulag Archipelago,” “he just wants to catch two or three phrases. He knows what he wants. And as for us—we are totally unprepared for anything. From childhood on we are educated and trained—for our own profession; for our civil duties; for military service; to take care of our bodily needs; to behave well; even to appreciate beauty (well, this last not really all that much!). But neither our education, nor our upbringing, nor our experience prepares us in the slightest for the greatest trial of our lives: being arrested for nothing and interrogated about nothing.”
If the illusion of justice is shattered, the credibility and viability of the state are jeopardized. The spectacle of court, its solemnity and stately courthouses, its legal rituals and language, is part of the theater. The press, as was seen in the film, serves as an echo machine for the state, condemning the accused before he or she begins trial. Television shows and movies about crime investigators and the hunt for killers and terrorists feed the fictitious narrative. The reality is that almost no one who is imprisoned in America has gotten a trial. There is rarely an impartial investigation. A staggering 97 percent of all federal cases and 95 percent of all state felony cases are resolved through plea bargaining. Of the 2.2 million people we have incarcerated at the moment—25 percent of the world’s prison population—2 million never had a trial. And significant percentages of them are innocent.
Judge Jed S. Rakoff in an article in The New York Review of Books titled “Why Innocent People Plead Guilty” explains how this secretive plea system works to thwart justice. Close to 40 percent of those eventually exonerated of their crimes originally pleaded guilty, usually in an effort to reduce charges that would have resulted in much longer prison sentences if the cases had gone to trial. The students I teach in prison who have the longest sentences are usually the ones who demanded a trial. Many of them went to trial because they did not commit the crime. But if you go to trial you cannot bargain away any of the charges against you in exchange for a shorter sentence. The public defender—who spends no more than a few minutes reviewing the case and has neither the time nor the inclination to do the work required by a trial—uses the prospect of the harshest sentence possible to frighten the client into taking a plea deal. And, as depicted in “Making a Murderer,” prosecutors and defense attorneys often work as a tag team to force the accused to plead guilty. If all of the accused went to trial, the judicial system, which is designed around plea agreements, would collapse. And this is why trial sentences are horrific. It is why public attorneys routinely urge their clients to accept a plea arrangement. Trials are a flashing red light to the accused: DO NOT DO THIS. It is the inversion of justice.
The wrongly accused and their families, as long as the fiction of justice is maintained, vainly seek redress. They file appeal after appeal. Those convicted devote hundreds of hours of study in the law library in prison. They believe there has been a “mistake.” They think that if they are patient the “mistake” will be rectified. Playing upon such gullibility, authorities allowed prisoners in Stalin’s gulags to write petitions twice a month to officials to proclaim their innocence or decry mistreatment. Those who do not understand the American system, who are not mentally prepared for its cruelty and violence, are largely helpless before authorities intoxicated with the godlike power to destroy lives. These authorities advance themselves or their agendas—Joe Biden when he was in the Senate and Bill Clinton when he was president did this—by being “tough” concerning law and order and national security. Those who administer the legal system wield power largely in secret. They are accountable to no one. Every once in a while—this happened even under the Nazis and Stalin—someone will be exonerated to maintain the fiction that the state is capable of rectifying its “mistakes.” But the longer the system remains in place, the longer the legal process is shrouded from public view, the more the crime by the state accelerates.
The power elites—our corporate rulers and the security and surveillance apparatus—rewrite laws to make their criminal behavior “legal.” It is a two-tiered system. One set of laws for us. Another set of laws for them. Wall Street’s fraud and looting of the U.S. Treasury, the obliteration of our privacy, the ability of the government to assassinate U.S. citizens, the revoking of habeas corpus, the neutralizing of our Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable searches and seizures, the murder of unarmed people in the streets of our cities by militarized police, the use of torture, the criminalizing of dissent, the collapse of our court system, the waging of pre-emptive war are rendered “legal.” Politicians, legislators, lawyers and law enforcement officials, who understand that leniency and justice are damaging to their careers, and whom Karl Marx called the “leeches on the capitalist structure,” have constructed for their corporate masters our system of inverted totalitarianism. They serve this system. They seek to advance within it. They do not blink at the victims destroyed by it. And most of them know it is a sham.
“We have to condemn publicly the very idea that some people have the right to repress others,” Solzhenitsyn warned. “In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousandfold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.”
Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, writes a regular column for Truthdig every Monday. Hedges’ most recent book is “Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt.”
American business magnate and investor George Soros no longer views Russia as an enemy of the EU and is now openly calling on Brussels to cooperate with Moscow, German newspaper Deutsche Wirtschafts Nachrichten (DWN) wrote.
American business magnate and investor George Soros no longer views Russia as an enemy of the EU and is now openly calling on Brussels to cooperate with Moscow, German newspaper Deutsche Wirtschafts Nachrichten (DWN) wrote.
According to him, the European Union may soon collapse due to the refugee crisis and the lack of leadership. In order to survive, European leaders need a “new Marshall Plan” in which Russia should play a key role, the investor stressed.Soros has always been a supporter of the idea of the EU’s existence, but now he sees that the EU is “falling apart”.
In an interview with Bloomberg, the American financier said that there is “a panic in the European asylum policy” and that the EU needs strong leaders and external assistance — including from Russia — in order to survive.
DWN found it interesting that Soros, who “had always presented Russia as an enemy of the EU,” is now “calling on Brussels to increase cooperation with Moscow.
Soros is well-known American business magnate and philanthropist of Jewish-Hungarian descent. The financier who possesses a huge financial empire and wrote 12 books on subjects ranging from terrorism to global capitalism is one of the most influential and richest people in the world.
Postdoctoral Research Associate, The Rockefeller University
Disclosure statement
Yoav Litvin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.
The Conversation is funded by Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Knight Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Alfred P Sloan Foundation, Rita Allen Foundation and the Simons Foundation. Our global publishing platform is funded by Commonwealth Bank of Australia.
Intellectuals, academics and artists play a unique role in society: they preserve and defend both freedom of expression and the morality of choices. Artists can use their work as a means to communicate messages of dissent and hope in the face of injustice, repression and despair.
Meanwhile, those in power who seek to control public opinion typically consider untethered freedom of thought and expression a threat.
But in any capitalist system, it’s difficult to survive as a full-time artist. Artists need to be industrious in order to make a living from art, and may choose to work with government organizations or corporations to supplement their income.
Herein lies what I’ve dubbed the “artist’s dilemma”: how does one cooperate with a large entity while ensuring moral ground? In other words, what constitutes “selling out,” arguably the worst insult that can be lobbed at an artist?
It’s an issue that has come to the forefront, especially for street artists, who seem to be increasingly collaborating with businesses and corporations. Companies will often seek to cultivate artists as a way to enhance their brand, and street art can have the effect of making a product look more authentic, edgy and gritty.
Recently, a blogger and a group of artists have partnered with Amazon to produce and sell a series of limited edition prints, and the USA Network commissioned artists to promote a new TV series by producing ads that look like authentic works of street art.
Meanwhile, in some instances, the boundaries between political activism and commodification have blurred. Earlier this year, the street artist Gilf! made headlines for wrapping yellow caution tape with the words “Gentrification in Progress” around shuttered buildings throughout New York City. But the caution tape can now be had for the price of US$60.
In response to these trends within the world of street art, some claim that the genre – specifically, its festivals – have “sold out.” Others make the puzzling argument that this debate is outdated because the genre of street art “has been recognizable since the ‘70’s and ’80’s.”
What is apparent is that with the growth of corporate control over public spaces – along with the relentless attempt of corporate entities to commodify anything and everything – the debate about street art and artists “selling out” is not only relevant, it’s necessary.
The Prisoner’s Dilemma: an analogy
In order to methodically tackle this issue, it’s useful to look at it through the lens of The Prisoner’s Dilemma, a game analyzed by use of principles of game theory.
The Prisoner’s Dilemma, developed by mathematicians Merrill Flood and Melvin Dreshner, is an analysis of a hypothetical situation. The police apprehend two accomplices for committing a minor crime, but they’re suspected of a greater offense. The evidence for the greater offense, however, is circumstantial. The police need their confession to convict.
For this purpose, the accomplices are separated and individually presented with the following options: squeal on your partner and go free (and be absolved of the lesser crime) or remain silent and risk your partner squealing on you, in which case you’ll get the maximum prison term for the major offense.
But there are two more possible scenarios: if both prisoners squeal, they each get an intermediate sentence. Lastly, if both prisoners stay silent, they’ll be tried for the lesser offense, and could still end up in jail.
Studies show that although game theory predicts that the rational choice for each prisoner (dictated by self-preservation) is to squeal on his or her partner, most humans will attempt to at least remain faithful to their partner once before giving them up, which demonstrates the tendency of humans to value social bonds.
The artist’s dilemma
So what does this have to do with artists, their art and the idea of selling out?
Let’s apply a similar “two-by-two” approach to the artist’s dilemma.
Many artists use the streets as an ad space for their art; they view the public as potential clients and pride themselves on corporate partnerships, which can be quite lucrative.
In this case, as long as artists are clear about their overarching goal – promoting sales in a capitalist market – they can’t “sell out.” In a sense, these artists are smaller versions of commercial enterprises that use public space to advertise their products (often without having to pay for the space).
At the same time, artists who have any kind of moral presumptions guiding their work need to assume certain responsibilities. For one, if they are receiving funding from a corporation or government organization, they need to research each entity’s respective agendas. It could simply mean doing some background research on the internet, but it could also entail communicating with the organization itself and asking what it stands for, what it opposes and what its mission and goals are.
If, after adequate research, the entity’s agenda coincides with the artist’s, the work is morally kosher.
However, education also entails risk: if the artist discovers the entity is morally corrupt, at least by his or her definition, it’s the obligation of the artist to forfeit the financial opportunity in order to hold moral ground.
If the artist has found that the organization is morally corrupt and still chooses to work with it – well, the artist is, by definition, selling out.
There’s another outcome: the artist can choose to stay ignorant and work with any organization solely for the money. If the artist is lucky, the organization turns out to be morally sound. However, if the organization turns out to be morally corrupt, the artist can’t simply plead ignorance when being called a sellout.
Pleading ignorance, of course, doesn’t excuse the artist from the consequences of collaborating with a morally corrupt organization. At the very least, he or she must assume responsibility after the fact.
Organizations and corporations involved in the arts also have a moral responsibility. They need to be transparent about their policies and political agendas so that artists can make informed decisions, and don’t have to do all the work themselves.
The case of Shepard Fairey
Shepard Fairey (known for his iconic OBEY slogan) is one of the world’s most renowned street artists. But in addition to his work on the streets, Fairey runs a thriving graphic design business that caters to big corporations, including some with questionable moral standing, like Nike and Saks Fifth Avenue. (For a full list, click here.)
if it was not supplied to the corporations by me, then it would be supplied by other hungry designers.
According to this statement, it’s apparent that even though Fairey is aware of the questionable moral agendas of some of the corporations that commission him, he still takes their money.
So is he a sellout? Not according to Fairey’s definition of selling out.
In one interview, Fairey defines selling out as “compromising your values to pander to the lowest common denominator.”
In another, he elaborates: “To me selling out is doing things purely for the money without concern for the consequences to integrity.”
And in his new book Covert to Overt, Fairey details what he calls his “inside/outside” strategy of work:
…doing things on my own terms outside of the system when necessary, while also seizing opportunities to infiltrate the system and use its machinery to spread my art and ideas, hoping to change the system for the better in the process.
Here, Fairey assumes a Robin Hood-like approach: taking from exploitative corporations and using his commissioned art to chip away at their influence by, for example, raising awareness about war.
Fairey’s dealings with corporations fall within the definitions of selling out, as outlined by the artist’s dilemma. And one must wonder how much influence corporate entities have over Fairey’s art and messaging – surely the commissioned work, but also his street works.
Nevertheless, it is undeniable that these dealings have enabled him to devote significant time and resources to putting up works on the streets that endorse progressive, noncommercial (even anti-commercial) causes. So in order to evaluate whether or not Fairey is selling out, it seems that one must weigh the influence of corporate interests on his work versus the benefits of Fairey’s works on the streets.
The example of Fairey demonstrates the limitations of applying a simple two-by-two theory as a sweeping criterion. Nevertheless, the artist’s dilemma can act as a frame for this important discussion: it unequivocally demonstrates that artists need to be transparent and accountable. They have a responsibility to forge moral alliances with employers that could have potentially conflicting agendas.
“Our citizens should know the urgent facts…but they don’t because our media serves imperial, not popular interests. They lie, deceive, connive and suppress what everyone needs to know, substituting managed news misinformation and rubbish for hard truths…”—Oliver Stone