Many people believe UFOs visit Earth from other planets far, far away. A Montana Tech professor believes UFOs are much closer to home.
Many people believe UFOs visit Earth from other planets far, far away. A Montana Tech professor believes UFOs are much closer to home.
The Southern Poverty Law Center is an American nonprofit legal advocacy organization specializing in civil rights and public interest litigation. Wikipedia
Founded: August 1971Endowment: 471 million USD (2018 FY)
Morris Dees, founder and director of the Southern Poverty Law Center, an element of the Israel Lobby that smears and demeans truth-tellers, was fired. The article reporting Dees’ removal speculates that he was fired for sexual harassment. More likely he was fired for having to pay out $60 million of the SPLC’s $500,000,000 endowment to settle defamation lawsuits.
Ask yourself how is it that an organization committed to smearing people has an endowment of a half billion dollars and not the Institute for Political Economy that focuses on providing truthful information that is contrary to official explanations. Clearly, there is far more money available for “hitman” organizations dedicated to destroying truth tellers than there is for the targets of such organizations.
If truth tellers criticize Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, the truth tellers are branded “anti-Semites.”
If truth tellers question official government explanations such as 9/11, they are branded “conspiracy theorists.”
If truth tellers correct the official lies that portray Russia as a dire threat to the United States and Russia’s President Putin as the “New Hitler,” they are branded “Russian agents,” and “Putin dupes.”
$500,000,000 is a huge endowment for a reputation-smearing organization operating in Montgomery, Alabama. Where did that money come from?
Why, in contrast, are organizations struggling to present facts and rational analysis operating on shoe strings?
The philanthropic foundations, which once supported information independent of government and private agendas, have been taken into the propaganda Matrix that has blinded Americans to the demise of their liberties. Every day another piece of America withers away. Soon there will be nothing left.
Readers need to understand that there is an infinite number of people worldwide who are devoid of all morality and all integrity. Their only concern is money, and they will do anything to get it. Many are paid to smear truth tellers on Internet sites that have comment sections and on Facebook and other social media. Entire websites, such as ProporNot, have been created in order to discredit truth-tellers. Government agencies and special interests employ agents to spread propaganda via social media in order to create public support for overthrowing targeted governments such as Venezuela, Cuba, Libya, Iraq, Syria, Iran.
It is very expensive for a person to exercise the right of free speech for the purpose of telling the truth. But if you attack truth, you get a half billion dollar endowment.
In the United States, the only hope for truth lies in the pocketbook of ordinary people. If they do not support the alternative media websites that are dedicated to truth, the truth will wither away with the country.
Support IPE: https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/pages/donate/
As Karl Marx said, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.”
Western Culture Has Died A Politically Correct Death
https://www.rt.com/news/455007-political-correctness-art-west-culture/
It is amazing the power that politically correct kooks have acquired over language, art, and literature. It is a sign that the West is culturally dead.
When high museums rename paintings because some emotional weakling declares the name to be offensive, it becomes obvious that the custodians of Western culture have lost their belief in Western culture.
When universities cover up murals because of a claim they are offensive to people whose presence on the campus is minuscule if present at all, you know that learning is no longer the purpose of the university.
When people are afraid to use the words and terms of their forefathers, you know they have been intimidated to abandon even their own language and ways of speaking.
Western culture today consists of pornography, sexual deviants, whining wimps devastated by mere words, self-hatred, and craven cowards afraid to stand up for themselves against the onslaught of hate directed toward them by political correctness freaks.
The political correctness people are the most alienated and emotionally weak element in society. Yet they dominate in the media, entertainment, universities, and art world. How is it possible that the Washingtonians are prepared to take us to war with real people—Russians, Chinese and North Koreans—two countries that have already whipped us once—and Persians, an ancient race that even the Romans had a hard time with? Do the fools in Washington really think that our homosexualized, feminized, transgenderized military can take on Russians, Chinese, and Persians? Hollywood can make all the movies it wants with female superheroes, but superheroes are the last thing whining American feminists are.
The real questions for the politically correct crowd are: (1) why isn’t war politically incorrect, and (2) why isn’t it politically incorrect for the politically correct arbiters of language to call the rest of us names? The real racists in America are those who call white people racist.
Universities in the 20th century were dedicated to the advancement of knowledge. Scholarship and research were pursued, and diverse opinions were exchanged and argued in the “marketplace of ideas.”
This is no longer the case. Particularly in the social sciences, humanities, education, social work, and law, a single political ideology has replaced scholarship and research, because the ideology presents fixed answers to all questions. And, although the most important thing in universities today is the diversity of race, gender, sexual practice, ethnicity, economic class, and physical and mental capability, there is no longer diversity of opinion. Only those committed to the ideology are admitted to academic staff or administration.
Universities have been transformed by the near-universal adoption of three interrelated theories: postmodernism, postcolonialism, and social justice. These theories and their implications will be explored here.
Postmodernism: In the past, academics were trained to seek truth. Today, academics deny that there is such a thing as objective Truth. Instead, they argue that no one can be objective, that everyone is inevitably subjective, and consequently everyone has their own truth. The correct point of view, they urge, is relativism. This means not only that truth is relative to the subjectivity of each individual, but also that ethics and morality are relative to the individual and the culture, so there is no such thing as Good and Evil, or even Right and Wrong. So too with the ways of knowing; your children will learn that there is no objective basis for preferring chemistry over alchemy, astronomy over astrology, or medical doctors over witch doctors. They will learn that facts do not exist; only interpretations do.
Our social understanding has also been transformed by postmodern relativism. Because moral and ethical principles are deemed to be no more than the collective subjectivity of our culture, it is now regarded as inappropriate to judge the principles and actions of other cultures. This doctrine is called “cultural relativism.” For example, while racism is held to be the highest sin in the West, and slavery the greatest of our historical sins, your children will learn that we are not allowed to criticize contemporary racism and slavery in Africa, the Middle East, and the equivalents in South Asia.
The political manifestation of cultural relativism is multiculturalism, an incoherent concept that projects the integration of multiple incompatible cultures. Diversity is lauded as a virtue in itself. Imagine a country with fifty different languages, each derived from a different culture. That would not be a society, but a tower of babble. How would it work if there were multiple codes of law requiring and forbidding contrary behaviors: driving on the left and driving on the right; monogamy and polygamy; male dominance and gender equality; arranged marriage and individual choice? Your children will learn that our culture is nothing special and that other cultures are awesome.
Postcolonialism, the dominant theory in the social sciences today, is inspired by the Marxist-Leninist theory of imperialism, in which the conflict between the capitalist and proletariat classes is allegedly exported to the exploitation of colonized countries. By this means, the theory goes, oppression and poverty take place in colonies instead of in relation to the metropolitan working class. Postcolonialism posits that all of the problems in societies around the world today are the result of the relatively short Western imperial dominance and colonization. For example, British imperialism is blamed for what are in fact indigenous cultures, such as the South Asian caste system and the African tribal system. So too, problems of backwardness and corruption in countries once, decades ago, colonies continue to be blamed on past Western imperialism. The West is thus the continuing focus on anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist sentiment. Your children will learn that our society is evil, and the cause of all the evil in the wider world.
This ahistorical approach of postcolonialism ignores the hundreds of empires and their colonies throughout history, as well as ignoring contemporary empires, such as the Arab Muslim Empire that conquered all of the central Middle East, North Africa, southern Europe, Persia, Central Asia, and northern India, and occupied them minimally for hundreds of years, but 1400 years in the central Middle East and North Africa, and occupy them today. China, once the Communists took power, invaded Inner Mongolia to the north, Chinese Turkestan to the west, and Tibet to the south. Once in control, the government flooded these colonies with Han Chinese, in effect ethnically cleansing them. Postcolonialists have nothing to say about any of this; they wish to condemn exclusively the West. Your children will learn to reject history and comparisons with other societies, lest the claimed unique sins of the West be challenged.
Postcolonialists like to stress the racial dimension of Western imperialism: as an illustration of racism. But postmodernists are not interested in Arab slave raiding in “black” Africa, or Ottoman slaving among the whites in the Balkans, or the North Africans slave raiding of whites in Europe, from Ireland through Italy and beyond. Your children will learn that only whites are racist.
Social justice theory teaches that the world is divided between oppressors and victims. Some categories of people are oppressors and other are victims: males are oppressors, and females are victims; whites are oppressors, and people of color are victims; heterosexuals are oppressors, and gays, lesbians, bisexual, etc. are victims; Christians are oppressors, and Muslims are victims. Your sons will learn that they are stigmatized by their toxic masculinity.
Social justice theory has taken university life by storm. It is the result of the relentless working of Marxist theory, adopted by youngsters during the American cultural revolution of the 1960s, then brought to universities as many of those youngsters became college professors. Marxism as an academic theory was explicitly followed by some in the 1970s and 1980s, but it did not sweep everything else away, because the idea economic class conflict was not popular in the prosperous general North American population. The cultural Marxist innovation that brought social justice theory to dominance was the extension of class conflict from economics to gender, race, sexual practice, ethnicity, religion, and other mass categories. We see this in sociology, which is no longer defined as the study of society but has for decades been defined as the study of inequality. For social justice theory, equality is not the equality of opportunity that is the partner of merit, but rather equality of result, which ensures the members of each category at equality of representation irrespective of merit. Your sons will learn that they should “step aside” to give more space and power to females. Your daughters, if white, will learn that they must defer to members of racial minorities.
As there is allegedly structural discrimination against all members of victim categories, in order for equality of result to prevail, representation according to percentages of populations must be mandated in all organizations, in all books assigned or references cited, in all awards and benefits. Ideas such as merit and excellence are dismissed as white-male supremacist dog whistles; they are to be replaced by “diversity” of gender, race, sexual preference, ethnicity, economic class, religion, and so on. (Note that “diversity” does not include “diversity of opinion”; for only social justice ideology is acceptable. Any criticism or opposition is regarded as “hate speech.”) Academic committees now twist themselves into pretzels trying to explain that “diversity is excellence.”
Of course, the requirement of representation according to population applies only one way: to members of victim classes. If whites, men, heterosexuals, Christians, etc. are underrepresented, that is fine; the fewer the better. For example, females now make up 60% of university graduates, although in the general age cohort males are 51%. There is no social justice clamoring for males to be fully represented. Members of disfavored oppressor categories are disparaged. The classics of Western civilization should be ignored because they are the work, almost exclusively, of “dead white men.” Only works of females, people of color and non-Western authors should be considered virtuous. So too in political history. The American Constitution should be discarded because its writers were slaveholders.
“intersectionality” is an idea invented by a feminist law professor. It argues that some individuals fall into several victim categories, for example, black, female lesbians have three points in the victim stakes, as opposed to male members of the First Nations who receive only one point. Further, on the action front, members of each victim category are urged to unite and ally with members of other victim categories, because sharing the victim designation is the most important status in the world. This leads to some anomalies. Black victims of racism are urged to unite with Arab victims of colonialism, even though Arabs have been and still are holders of black slaves.
As Karl Marx said, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.” The objective of a university education today is to ensure that students chose “the right side” in changing the world. The idea that it probably makes sense to try to understand the world before attempting to change it, is rejected as outmoded, modernist empiricism and realism, now superseded by postmodernism and social justice. If there is no Truth, and whatever one feels or believes is one’s truth, then trying to gain an objective understanding of the world is futile.
Things you are not allowed to say anymore.
https://21stcenturywire.com/2019/03/26/video-censored-things-youre-not-allowed-to-say-anymore/
Every other week, it seems like there’s a new case of something “racist” or “culturally insensitive” being banished from view in this fight against anything that could conceivably be “offensive” to the eyes or ears of one group or another.
With more and more old literary classics, theatre plays and works of art being ‘reexamined’ over their ‘problematic’ themes and words, it’s almost like the West’s is in a fight against its own cultural history.
Read by millions of American schoolchildren for more than one hundred years, Mark Twain’s ‘Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’ has suddenly become too controversial for curricula.
Sensitive lawmakers in New Jersey recently introduced a resolution that would remove the book from school programs. Why? Because the novel, written in the 1880s, uses racial slurs and depicts racial attitudes and stereotypes which could “cause students to feel upset.”
Instead of using the American classic to perhaps teach kids about racism and history, the lawmakers have decided to just get rid of it instead. It doesn’t even seem to matter that the racial slurs are used by characters who are portrayed negatively in the book, their mere existence in the text is apparently enough to warrant the banishing.
Two more cherished classics to add to the literary and cinematic naughty corner are P. L. Travers’ ‘Mary Poppins’ and Disney’s ‘The Lion King’, which are both now too racist for consumption, apparently.
Europe’s oldest university at the Sorbonne has seen many a banning controversy in its day — the works of Erasmus were banned by the university in the 16th century, for example — but it looks like the hallowed place of learning is not yet done with censorship.
Activists at the Sorbonne university have just blocked a theater performance of ‘The Suppliants’ by Greek playwright Aeschylus, because some characters wear black masks, which they said could promote racial stereotypes.
Not all hope is lost, however. In this case, the university itself lashed out at the activists saying the blockage of the performance was “a very serious, totally unjustified attack on freedom of creation.”
France’s education minister even weighed in on the ‘scandal’ and said that while growing racism was an issue in France, some activist groups were perpetrating a “certain violence in the name of anti-racism.”
In another attempt at cultural ‘sensitivity’, a French museum has launched a special exhibition in which a number of masterpieces have been renamed after their black subjects. Manet’s Olympia, for example, has been renamed ‘Laure’ after the woman who posed as her black maid in the background — although the renaming seems to be temporary for this particular exhibition.
But renaming art as a form of ‘reconciliation’ is not a new idea. Last year, the Art Gallery of Ontario renamed a painting by Canadian artist Emily Carr in an effort to “eliminate culturally insensitive languages” from the titles in its collection. The painting of a white church in an indigenous village was originally called ‘Indian Church’ but its new name is ‘Church at Yuquot Village’.
Shield your eyes from the Columbus muralsNot everyone was delighted by the move, with some in the art community saying that the renaming displaces the work from its historical context, which does even more damage. Back in 2015, a Dutch museum also began renaming works of art to ensure that modern museum goers were not offended.
To shelter sensitive students from the sins of the past, the University of Notre Dame announced earlier this year that it would cover up murals of Christopher Columbus, the explorer who committed atrocities against native people after he ‘discovered’ the Americas while seeking to find a new trade route to India — a moment in history which sparked centuries of transatlantic colonization.
Notre Dame president John Jenkins wrote in an email that the murals on campus were “demeaning” to the “indigenous peoples.” The decision outraged the Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) chapter at the university whose spokesperson said Notre Dame had decided to “coddle its students by shielding them from a painting of an important figure in world history.”
The attitude now seems to be, if history is upsetting or too hard to handle, we should just try to forget it ever happened and destroy anything that might remind us.
With delicate modern sensibilities dictating everything these days, it looks like it’s time to enjoy these creations of the past before it’s too late.
The northern lights shine over Wood Buffalo National Park during the Thebacha and Wood Buffalo Astronomical Society’s Dark-Sky Festival. (Nicole Mortillaro/CBC)
It’s just after dusk on a cool August night in Wood Buffalo Park in Alberta, roughly 50 kilometres southwest of Fort Smith, N.W.T. For two days and nights, clouds and cool weather have hampered the group of astronomy enthusiasts hoping to enjoy the dark skies and perhaps even catch a display of the northern lights.
It’s the final day of the Thebacha and Wood Buffalo Astronomical Society’s Dark-Sky Festival. and, as if the sky takes pity on the group — made up of amateur astronomers and families with young children — the clouds begin to break up as the sun sets. But there’s one streak that remains in the dark blue sky.
“Keep an eye out,” says Roland Dechesne, a guest speaker and member of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada. “Could be aurora.”
Salt River First Nation elder Paul Boucher, who is standing nearby, looks skyward. “What? That?” he says. “Yeah. That’s the northern lights.”
Elders David Poitras and Paul Boucher bless the society’s camping area in Pine Lake, Alta. (Nicole Mortillaro/CBC)
The northern lights, or aurora borealis, are a familiar sight in northern skies. But those dancing lights mean much more in many Indigenous cultures.
The recognition of First Nations contributions to science has been on the rise in recent years. In astronomy, instead of teaching constellations and stories from the Greeks and Romans, many Indigenous people are turning to teaching the star stories of the people who have lived on this land for thousands of years.
For the Cree (Salt River First Nation is made up of Cree and Chipewyan) the sight of the dancing lights means spirits are dancing across the sky.
“In the wintertime, when these lights were in the sky most prominently, there was a connection, a connection to alternate realities, to the spirit world,” Wilfred Buck, a science facilitator at the Manitoba First Nations Education Resource Centre (MFNERC) says of the northern lights. “And that connection was strong.”
Buck, from Opaskwayak Cree Nation, has a goal: to teach science from an Indigenous perspective, something that he’s been doing for 14 years. He’s a hard man to pin down; for many days of the year, he is traveling, often with his portable planetarium.
Wilfred Buck, a Cree science specialist, brings his planetarium to First Nations communities around Canada.(MFNERC)
When he took the position at MFNERC, he wanted to teach First Nations in science. In an effort to determine the best way to do this, he reached out to the elders who told him he had two ways he could approach it: he could teach it from a Western system and infuse First Nations’ culture into the subject areas or he could do it the opposite way. He opted for the latter.
“The students have to understand … they’ve been educated and told and colonized to think that our people were savages in a bush and surviving and we didn’t know anything,” Buck said. “That’s not true.”
Buck’s interest in the stars began when he was about five years old.
“I remember sitting on the banks of the river and looking up at that night sky, and wondering … what’s out there and where our place is in it,” he says.
And then it dawned on him: the skies were heavily embedded in his culture.
“Sitting in the sweat lodge, singing these ceremonial songs, partaking in [the] sun dance, partaking in fasting, partaking in ceremonies — a lot of these ceremonial songs are in reference to the stars,” he says. “And all the ceremonies that are done are done in regards to the sun.”
Like Buck, Hilding Neilson wanted to bring Indigenous astronomy to the public. Neilson, who is Mi’kmaw from the Qalipu First Nation in Newfoundland and Labrador, is an assistant professor in the University of Toronto’s department of astronomy and astrophysics. He teaches Indigenous astronomy in his courses.
“I wanted to see more of Indigenous knowledge in classrooms, because we are on Indigenous land,” he says. “Simply put, if we’re going to be here, we should be learning about the peoples whose land we colonized. We should be learning about their knowledge and learning to appreciate that knowledge.”
Buck says most people don’t realize First Nations people had a deep understanding of the sky and even pondered such topics such as cosmology and quantum physics.
One example is the star cluster called the Pleiades or, in Western culture the Seven Sisters. The Cree referred to it as the “hole in the sky.”
“When they’re referring to a hole in the sky, they’re referring to a spatial anomaly. They’re referring to a wormhole, an alternate reality,” Buck says. “They meditated on these things, they dreamed about these things, they debated on these things and they philosophized on these things.”
See an elder explain the Cree traditions around the winter solstice:
What does the winter solstice mean in the Cree tradition?
Elder Wilfred Buck explains how the Cree observe the shortest day and the longest night of the year. 1:00
And it’s time that astronomers and scientists considered Indigenous contributions and their worth, Buck says.
“All these ceremonies and all these so-called mythologies … there’s a depth of knowledge involved. They’re not just quaint little stories. … Every Indigenous culture in the world has that depth of knowledge, that intellectual capacity,” he says. “It’s just that through the colonial process it’s been minimized and it’s been marginalized.”
Neilson says many of the stories have been lost, but he’s happy to see renewed interest in not only telling the stories, but respecting what they have to offer. The worry is that much of it may have already been lost.
“Like every aspect of Indigenous knowledge, we know we have to be very worried about what has been lost and what is unavailable,” Neilson says. “And who knows if we’ll ever get it all back? But preserving it is a big, important part of all this.”
It’s important that no one underestimates the importance stars play in the daily lives of Indigenous people from around the world, Buck says.
“Stars are part of our lives,” Buck says. “Every night they’re out there and my people believe we come from the stars.”
CBC.ca
In this Feb. 15, 2018 file photo, Judith Enck, centre, former regional administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency addresses those gathered at a protest against President Trump’s plan to expand offshore drilling for oil and gas. A U.S. judge in Alaska says Trump exceeded his authority when he reversed a ban on offshore drilling in vast parts of the Arctic Ocean and dozens of canyons in the Atlantic Ocean. (David Klepper/The Associated Press)
President Donald Trump exceeded his authority when he reversed bans on offshore drilling in vast parts of the Arctic Ocean and dozens of canyons in the Atlantic Ocean, a U.S. judge said in a ruling that restored the Obama-era restrictions.
Judge Sharon Gleason in a decision late Friday threw out Trump’s executive order that overturned the bans that comprised a key part of Obama’s environmental legacy.
Presidents have the power under a federal law to remove certain lands from development but cannot revoke those removals, Gleason said.
“The wording of President Obama’s 2015 and 2016 withdrawals indicates that he intended them to extend indefinitely, and therefore be revocable only by an act of Congress,” said Gleason, who was nominated to the bench by Obama.
A message left Saturday for the Department of Justice was not immediately returned.
The American Petroleum Institute, a defendant in the case, disagreed with the ruling.