each piece she's torn from the whole she gathers up to organize in a way that makes sense... A discussion point where ideas, articles, and stories that contain much of what you want and need to become aware of the existing corrupt reality we are experiencing and of ways to solve them...
Friday, February 27, 2015
How Leonard Nimoy Left Us With the Best Scene in Star Trek
"Don't grieve, Admiral."
Paramount Pictures
Star Trek II not only has the honor of the best Star Trek film ever—a tight revenge plot whose special effects hold up today—but it not coincidentally contains the best and most powerful scene in the franchise's expansive oeuvre, and not least because of the performance of Leonard Nimoy, who came to the end of his long life on Friday. Spock dies. For fans still holding onto the harmless and dreamy experiment in applied liberalism that was the original 1960s series, this was a shock.
Not just a shock because moments before it had you thinking No way a major hero dies, but because of the deft sleight of hand director Nicholas Meyer performs. The slow ratcheting of tension—will they get out of there?—the small, heartbreakingly stoic look Spock gives as he makes his decision to fix the warp core, fatally, by hand; and then, after he bathes himself in its bright poisonous radiation, the cut back to the bridge where we have to wait for William Shatner's Kirk to find out what happened.
There are few love affairs in popular culture like that between Kirk and Spock that seem to rocket to a level for which the word bromance is a callow insult. They needed and complemented and liked each other to the utmost. With McCoy they formed a triumvirate of the human condition: courage, reason, compassion. But everything in the end could be found in the primary duo.
The death scene was so powerful and lasting—just try to recall Spock's attempts to comfort Kirk ("Don't grieve … I have been, and always shall be, your friend") without getting a little teary—that J.J. Abrams' second entry in his rebooted series attempted to create its twin. Though Spock of course came back to life, the story dominated Star Trek III, IV, and even V. From then on, it seemed, the franchise seemed to center not on two people, but on one.
Spock was the most important character in Star Trek. He cast his long shadow over every following edition. I came of age in the Next Generation era but his guest appearances there had the weight of a descended saint. Before Winona Ryder as Mother Spock so plaintively reminded us in the reboots, it was easy to forget or never know that his character was only half Vulcan. During the original series, the flashes of his famously in-check emotions seemed to come out as sub-human, angry, and barbaric. But careful watchers understood that his reserved but mindful demeanor could not be fully explained as merely an alien bearing. It was dignity, one impossible to fake.
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This Billionaire Governor Taxed the Rich and Increased the Minimum Wage -- Now, His State's Economy Is One of the Best in the Country
The next time your right-wing family member or former high school classmate posts a status update
or tweet about how taxing the rich or increasing workers' wages kills jobs and makes businesses leave the state, I want you to send them this article.
When he took office in January of 2011, Minnesota governor Mark Dayton inherited a $6.2 billion budget deficit and a 7 percent unemployment rate from his predecessor, Tim Pawlenty, the soon-forgotten Republican candidate for the presidency who called himself Minnesota's first true fiscally-conservative governor in modern history. Pawlenty prided himself on never raising state taxes -- the most he ever did to generate new revenue was increase the tax on cigarettes by 75 cents a pack. Between 2003 and late 2010, when Pawlenty was at the head of Minnesota's state government, he managed to add only 6,200 more jobs.
During his first four years in office, Gov. Dayton raised the state income tax from 7.85 to 9.85 percent on individuals earning over $150,000, and on couples earning over $250,000 when filing jointly -- a tax increase of $2.1 billion. He's also agreed to raise Minnesota's minimum wage to $9.50 an hour by 2018, and passed a state law guaranteeing equal pay for women. Republicans like state representative Mark Uglem warned against Gov. Dayton's tax increases, saying, "The job creators, the big corporations, the small corporations, they will leave. It's all dollars and sense to them." The conservative friend or family member you shared this article with would probably say the same if their governor tried something like this. But like Uglem, they would be proven wrong.
Between 2011 and 2015, Gov. Dayton added 172,000 new jobs to Minnesota's economy -- that's 165,800 more jobs in Dayton's first term than Pawlenty added in both of his terms combined. Even though Minnesota's top income tax rate is the 4th-highest in the country, it has the 5th-lowest unemployment rate in the country at 3.6 percent. According to 2012-2013 U.S. census figures, Minnesotans had a median income that was $10,000 larger than the U.S. average, and their median income is still $8,000 more than the U.S. average today.
By late 2013, Minnesota's private sector job growth exceeded pre-recession levels, and the state's economy was the 5th fastest-growing in the United States. Forbes even ranked Minnesota the 9th-best state for business (Scott Walker's "Open For Business" Wisconsin came in at a distant #32 on the same list). Despite the fearmongering over businesses fleeing from Dayton's tax cuts, 6,230 more Minnesotans filed in the top income tax bracket in 2013, just one year after Dayton's tax increases went through. As of January 2015, Minnesota has a $1 billion budget surplus, and Gov. Dayton has pledged to reinvest more than one third of that money into public schools. And according to Gallup, Minnesota's economic confidence is higher than any other state
Gov. Dayton didn't accomplish all of these reforms by shrewdly manipulating people -- this article describes Dayton's astonishing lack of charisma and articulateness. He isn't a class warrior driven by a desire to get back at the 1 percent -- Dayton is a billionaire heir to the Target fortune. It wasn't just a majority in the legislature that forced him to do it -- Dayton had to work with a Republican-controlled legislature for his first two years in office. And unlike his Republican neighbor to the east, Gov. Dayton didn't assert his will over an unwilling populace by creating obstacles between the people and the vote -- Dayton actually created an online voter registration system, making it easier than ever for people to register to vote.
The reason Gov. Dayton was able to radically transform Minnesota's economy into one of the best in the nation is simple arithmetic. Raising taxes on those who can afford to pay more will turn a deficit into a surplus. Raising the minimum wage will increase the median income. And in a state where education is a budget priority and economic growth is one of the highest in the nation, it only makes sense that more businesses would stay.
It's official -- trickle-down economics is bunk. Minnesota has proven it once and for all. If you believe otherwise, you are wrong.
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Leonard Nimoy, Spock of ‘Star Trek,’ Dies at 83
FEB. 27, 2015
Leonard Nimoy, the sonorous, gaunt-faced actor who won a worshipful global following as Mr. Spock, the resolutely logical human-alien first officer of the Starship Enterprise in the television and movie juggernaut "Star Trek," died on Friday morning at his home in the Bel Air section of Los Angeles. He was 83.His wife, Susan Bay Nimoy, confirmed his death, saying the cause was end-stage chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
Mr. Nimoy announced last year that he had the disease, which he attributed to years of smoking, a habit he had given up three decades earlier. He had been hospitalized earlier in the week.
His artistic pursuits — poetry, photography and music in addition to acting — ranged far beyond the United Federation of Planets, but it was as Mr. Spock that Mr. Nimoy became a folk hero, bringing to life one of the most indelible characters of the last half century: a cerebral, unflappable, pointy-eared Vulcan with a signature salute and blessing: "Live long and prosper" (from the Vulcan "Dif-tor heh smusma").
Click on photo for slideshow
CreditNBC, via Photofest
Yet he also acknowledged ambivalence about being tethered to the character, expressing it most plainly in the titles of two autobiographies: "I Am Not Spock," published in 1977, and "I Am Spock," published in 1995.
In the first, he wrote, "In Spock, I finally found the best of both worlds: to be widely accepted in public approval and yet be able to continue to play the insulated alien through the Vulcan character."
"Star Trek," which had its premiere on NBC on Sept. 8, 1966, made Mr. Nimoy a star. Gene Roddenberry, the creator of the franchise, called him "the conscience of 'Star Trek' " — an often earnest, sometimes campy show that employed the distant future (as well as some primitive special effects by today's standards) to take on social issues of the 1960s.
His stardom would endure. Though the series was canceled after three seasons because of low ratings, a cultlike following — the conference-holding, costume-wearing Trekkies, or Trekkers (the designation Mr. Nimoy preferred) — coalesced soon after "Star Trek" went into syndication.
The fans' devotion only deepened when "Star Trek" was spun off into an animated show, various new series and an uneven parade of movies starring much of the original television cast, including — besides Mr. Nimoy — William Shatner (as Capt. James T. Kirk), DeForest Kelley (Dr. McCoy), George Takei (the helmsman, Sulu), James Doohan (the chief engineer, Scott), Nichelle Nichols (the chief communications officer, Uhura) and Walter Koenig (the navigator, Chekov).
When the director J. J. Abrams revived the "Star Trek" film franchise in 2009, with an all-new cast — including Zachary Quinto as Spock — he included a cameo part for Mr. Nimoy, as an older version of the same character. Mr. Nimoy also appeared in the 2013 follow-up, "Star Trek Into Darkness."
His zeal to entertain and enlighten reached beyond "Star Trek" and crossed genres. He had a starring role in the dramatic television series "Mission: Impossible" and frequently performed onstage, notably as Tevye in "Fiddler on the Roof." His poetry was voluminous, and he published books of his photography.
He also directed movies, including two from the "Star Trek" franchise, and television shows. And he made records, on which he sang pop songs, as well as original songs about "Star Trek," and gave spoken-word performances — to the delight of his fans and the bewilderment of critics.
But all that was subsidiary to Mr. Spock, the most complex member of the Enterprise crew: both a colleague and a creature apart, who sometimes struggled with his warring racial halves.
In one of his most memorable "Star Trek" episodes, Mr. Nimoy tried to follow in the tradition of two actors he admired, Charles Laughton and Boris Karloff, who each played a monstrous character — Quasimodo and the Frankenstein monster — who is transformed by love.
In Episode 24, which was first shown on March 2, 1967, Mr. Spock is indeed transformed. Under the influence of aphrodisiacal spores he discovers on the planet Omicron Ceti III, he lets free his human side and announces his love for Leila Kalomi (Jill Ireland), a woman he had once known on Earth. In this episode, Mr. Nimoy brought to Spock's metamorphosis not only warmth and compassion, but also a rarefied concept of alienation.
"I am what I am, Leila," Mr. Spock declared. "And if there are self-made purgatories, then we all have to live in them. Mine can be no worse than someone else's."
Born in Boston on March 26, 1931, Leonard Simon Nimoy was the second son of Max and Dora Nimoy, Ukrainian immigrants and Orthodox Jews. His father worked as a barber.
From the age of 8, Leonard acted in local productions, winning parts at a community college, where he performed through his high school years. In 1949, after taking a summer course at Boston College, he traveled to Hollywood, though it wasn't until 1951 that he landed small parts in two movies, "Queen for a Day" and "Rhubarb."
Click on photo for slideshow
As part of the Yiddish Book Center Wexler Oral History Project, Leonard Nimoy explains the origin of the Vulcan hand signal used by Dr. Spock, his character in the Star Trek series.
Video by Yiddish Book Center on Publish Date February 27, 2015. Photo by Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project.
Mr. Nimoy served in the Army for two years, rising to sergeant and spending 18 months at Fort McPherson in Georgia, where he presided over shows for the Army's Special Services branch. He also directed and starred as Stanley in the Atlanta Theater Guild's production of "A Streetcar Named Desire" before receiving his final discharge in November 1955.
He then returned to California, where he worked as a soda jerk, movie usher and cabdriver while studying acting at the Pasadena Playhouse. He achieved wide visibility in the late 1950s and early 1960s on television shows like "Wagon Train," "Rawhide" and "Perry Mason." Then came "Star Trek."
Mr. Nimoy returned to college in his 40s and earned a master's degree in Spanish from Antioch University Austin, an affiliate of Antioch College in Ohio, in 1978. Antioch College later awarded Mr. Nimoy an honorary doctorate.
Mr. Nimoy directed two of the Star Trek movies, "Star Trek III: The Search for Spock" (1984) and "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home" (1986), which he helped write. In 1991, the same year that he resurrected Mr. Spock on two episodes of "Star Trek: The Next Generation," Mr. Nimoy was also the executive producer and a writer of the movie "Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country."
He then directed the hugely successful comedy "Three Men and a Baby" (1987), a far cry from his science-fiction work, and appeared in made-for-television movies. He received an Emmy nomination for the 1982 movie "A Woman Called Golda," in which he portrayed the husband of Golda Meir, the prime minister of Israel, who was played by Ingrid Bergman. It was the fourth Emmy nomination of his career — the other three were for his "Star Trek" work — although he never won.
Mr. Nimoy's marriage to the actress Sandi Zober ended in divorce. Besides his wife, he is survived by his children, Adam and Julie Nimoy; a stepson, Aaron Bay Schuck; and six grandchildren; one great-grandchild, and an older brother, Melvin.
Though his speaking voice was among his chief assets as an actor, the critical consensus was that his music was mortifying. Mr. Nimoy, however, was undaunted, and his fans seemed to enjoy the camp of his covers of songs like "If I Had a Hammer." (His first album was called "Leonard Nimoy Presents Mr. Spock's Music From Outer Space.")
From 1995 to 2003, Mr. Nimoy narrated the "Ancient Mysteries" series on the History Channel. He also appeared in commercials, including two with Mr. Shatner for Priceline.com. He provided the voice for animated characters in "Transformers: The Movie," in 1986, and "The Pagemaster," in 1994.
In 2001 he voiced the king of Atlantis in the Disney animated movie "Atlantis: The Lost Empire," and in 2005 he furnished voice-overs for the computer game Civilization IV. More recently, he had a recurring role on the science-fiction series "Fringe" and was heard, as the voice of Spock, in an episode of the hit sitcom "The Big Bang Theory."
Mr. Nimoy was an active supporter of the arts as well. The Thalia, a venerable movie theater on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, now a multi-use hall that is part of Symphony Space, was renamed the Leonard Nimoy Thalia in 2002.
He also found his voice as a writer. Besides his autobiographies, he published "A Lifetime of Love: Poems on the Passages of Life" in 2002. Typical of Mr. Nimoy's simple free verse are these lines: "In my heart/Is the seed of the tree/Which will be me."
In later years, he rediscovered his Jewish heritage, and in 1991 he produced and starred in "Never Forget," a television movie based on the story of a Holocaust survivor who sued a neo-Nazi organization of Holocaust deniers.
In 2002, having illustrated his books of poetry with his photographs, Mr. Nimoy published "Shekhina," a book devoted to photography with a Jewish theme, that of the feminine aspect of God. His black-and-white photographs of nude and seminude women struck some Orthodox Jewish leaders as heretical, but Mr. Nimoy asserted that his work was consistent with the teaching of the kabbalah.
His religious upbringing also influenced the characterization of Spock. The character's split-fingered salute, he often explained, had been his idea: He based it on the kohanic blessing, a manual approximation of the Hebrew letter shin, which is the first letter in Shaddai, one of the Hebrew names for God.
"To this day, I sense Vulcan speech patterns, Vulcan social attitudes and even Vulcan patterns of logic and emotional suppression in my behavior," Mr. Nimoy wrote years after the original series ended.
But that wasn't such a bad thing, he discovered. "Given the choice," he wrote, "if I had to be someone else, I would be Spock."
Daniel E. Slotnik and Peter Keepnews contributed reporting.
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History Lesson: America Is the Same ‘Ol Oligarchy It Was over a Century Ago
(Truthstream Media) When Americans see charts like this one which illustrate that virtually all the food on grocery store shelves basically comes from no more than 10 megacompanies, or hear statements like this one from our own Attorney General Eric Holder who told the Senate Judiciary Committee that some banks are just too big to prosecute, or check out studies like this one out of Princeton which openly declare we are not a democracy but an oligarchy…it's kinda hard to believe we aren't an oligarchy (because we are).
Come on, even our Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen (you know, the lady that runs the place that prints our money and sells it to us with interest) has basically admitted it.
But are things really getting worse these days or is this just par for the course — the same course we've been on for over a century now?
Tinkering around in an old bookstore in a small Texas town, we came across a set of old books on democracy; we got the first seven volumes of a set entitled, "The March of Democracy: A History of the United States" written by James Truslow Adams — the guy who coined the term "The American Dream" — for a mere $20.
The first book's copyright is 1932. The last book ends in 1958.
Fascinating stuff…
For example, in volume four "America and World Power," the book discusses how "Gradually and quite naturally, there grew up the belief in a great conspiracy on the part of the very rich to ruin the poor."
Read this and tell me — does any of it sound even the least bit familiar to you?
Most strikingly in the public eye were the great Titans of the new business era, the coal and meat "barons" and the copper, railway, steel, and other "kings," men of the type of the elder J.P. Morgan, of James J. Hill, William H. Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Frick, William H. Clark, and Rockefeller. Such men had certain broad traits in common, differ as they might from each other as individuals. They were men of wide economic but intensely narrow social vision, and of colossal driving power and iron wills. They could lay their economic plans with imperial vision in time and space, but for the effect of their acts on society they cared nothing whatever. They claimed the right to rule the economic destinies of the people in any way that would enure their own personal advantage. Illogically, they insisted upon the theory of laissez-faire for all except themselves, while they demanded and received every favor they wished in the way of special privileges from the government, as in the tariff and the silver purchase Act. The whole machinery of government must be at their disposal when desired — legislation, court decisions, and Federal troops. They combined their business units into "trusts" and combinations of almost unlimited power, yet they insisted on "freedom of contract" when dealing with labor, whose organization in any form they almost wholly refused to sanction.
They never taught you any of that back in school, did they?
That was written, by the way, in 1940; the author was discussing how America was run back in the late 1800s.
Not only is the emphasis on Democracy a distortion of the fact the nation was founded as a Constitutional Republic, where rights are preserved rather than subjected to the whims of the majority, but these passages demonstrate the familiar snow job surrounding the all-but-official banker's oligarchy that has ruled this country and many others for some time.
In fact, in volume five, "The Record of 1933–1941," Adams records the death of John D. Rockefeller, Sr., as the end of the era of this great wealth — never to occur again.
On May 23, John D. Rockefeller, Sr., died at the age of 97. Owner at one time of the largest fortune in the world, his lifespan had covered the entire history of American business from before the Civil War… Nearly $350,000,000 are handled by three of the Rockefeller Foundations for education, medical research and other uses. Whatever may be thought as to the methods of accumulating the beginnings of the fortune in a period of different business ethics and social outlook, no other man through his financial gifts has ever so widely benefited mankind. With our income and inheritance taxes no other such fortune will ever again be accumulated, and his death marked the end of an era in American history.
And so that's the end of the story, kids…
Everything ended happily ever after.
Well, not quite.
Despite appearances, the shift on the part of the Rockefellers and other Robber Barons of the day from outright monopoly to "philanthropic" "non-profit" charity work was not an end to the dominance by the super-rich of the early 2oth Century, but an intensification of their undue influence. The taxation of the wealthy as well as the anti-trust actions of the day, which included busting up megacorpses like Standard Oil and AT&T, were perhaps well meaning but fundamentally failed to reign in the disparity of power.
Instead, new tax laws, in reality, acted to restrict new wealth from reaching the heights of the oligarchy, allowing "the elite" the keep their own, and initiate new members as desired. The tax-free status of many institutions – including the Rockefeller Foundation, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Ford Foundation – allowed the incredibly wealthy to a) shield their fortunes from taxation, b) appear to do good works and boost public opinion of their principle members while c) influencing, writing and developing official public policy through the steering mechanisms of its own tax-free grant making, think tank and research powers. Much social engineering has taken place – with far too little public notice – through these bodies. Additionally, d) many of its directors and board members were in "respectable" positions to shift into official government positions through the revolving door without appearing to be acting on behalf of their corporate masters.
The Reece Committee Hearings, conducted in 1953, attempted to probe the role of tax-free foundations in public life and uncovered many outrageous and conspiratorial actions taking place, including very apparent agendas advancing a one-world corporate-dominated government. However, it did not succeed in a general public understanding of what was taking place, nor did it reign in their powers.
Yesterday, the markets in gold, silver, oil, steel and other commodities were successfully cornered by the Rothschilds and other top bankers. Under Wall Street direction, and through the powers of the then newly-created Federal Reserve, these titans were able to officially dominate nearly all the important areas of public life, including great expansions in consumer spending and government agency powers. The icons of this magnificent and terrible wealth were John D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, E.H. Harriman, Cornelius Vanderbilt and a handful of others.
Today, those icons of wealth are the likes of Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Carlos Slim, Larry Ellison, the Koch Brothers, Michael Bloomberg, Steve Jobs (now deceased), the Walton family descendants of Walmart and, again, a handful of others who are largely known for their role in the age of computers, the Internet, telecommunications and electronic devices.
The real wealth, from older robber barons accumulated in land, resources, banking and investment and commodities are still there, but remain under reported on the Forbes' list of the world's richest, instead ruling largely from the shadows and influential but secretive groups such as Bilderberg.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, as well as the Gates-Buffett led billionaires' "giving pledge" are keeping in stride with the groundwork laid and continued by the Rockefeller Foundation and Ford Foundation. Heavily funded initiatives to push vaccines, birth control, population control, Western-oriented "education," GMO and corporate-dominated agriculture and the like remain some of the most consequential and troubling policies done in the name of "good" by tax-free entities wielding enormous, nearly incalculable wealth and power.
In short, the myth of "democracy" and freedom in the United States – the beacon around the world – perpetuates, despite a few blemishes. But in reality, the Oligarchy took hold some time ago, has not let up and perhaps never will.
Let that sink in, kids. Take a good look, and let it all sink in.
And don't forget to read Charlotte Iserbyt's revealing and TRUE work, loaded with documents and footnotes, The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America.
It helps to explain why you don't know this stuff, why the reigns of power have been stolen from us, and why things are not soon going to get better.
Unfortunately, the late comedic genius George Carlin was all-too-right when he explained the owners of America and why the education system is broken:
And like Carlin said of James Truslow Adams' American Dream,
Come on, even our Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen (you know, the lady that runs the place that prints our money and sells it to us with interest) has basically admitted it.
But are things really getting worse these days or is this just par for the course — the same course we've been on for over a century now?
Tinkering around in an old bookstore in a small Texas town, we came across a set of old books on democracy; we got the first seven volumes of a set entitled, "The March of Democracy: A History of the United States" written by James Truslow Adams — the guy who coined the term "The American Dream" — for a mere $20.
The first book's copyright is 1932. The last book ends in 1958.
Fascinating stuff…
For example, in volume four "America and World Power," the book discusses how "Gradually and quite naturally, there grew up the belief in a great conspiracy on the part of the very rich to ruin the poor."
Read this and tell me — does any of it sound even the least bit familiar to you?
Most strikingly in the public eye were the great Titans of the new business era, the coal and meat "barons" and the copper, railway, steel, and other "kings," men of the type of the elder J.P. Morgan, of James J. Hill, William H. Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Frick, William H. Clark, and Rockefeller. Such men had certain broad traits in common, differ as they might from each other as individuals. They were men of wide economic but intensely narrow social vision, and of colossal driving power and iron wills. They could lay their economic plans with imperial vision in time and space, but for the effect of their acts on society they cared nothing whatever. They claimed the right to rule the economic destinies of the people in any way that would enure their own personal advantage. Illogically, they insisted upon the theory of laissez-faire for all except themselves, while they demanded and received every favor they wished in the way of special privileges from the government, as in the tariff and the silver purchase Act. The whole machinery of government must be at their disposal when desired — legislation, court decisions, and Federal troops. They combined their business units into "trusts" and combinations of almost unlimited power, yet they insisted on "freedom of contract" when dealing with labor, whose organization in any form they almost wholly refused to sanction.
They never taught you any of that back in school, did they?
That was written, by the way, in 1940; the author was discussing how America was run back in the late 1800s.
Not only is the emphasis on Democracy a distortion of the fact the nation was founded as a Constitutional Republic, where rights are preserved rather than subjected to the whims of the majority, but these passages demonstrate the familiar snow job surrounding the all-but-official banker's oligarchy that has ruled this country and many others for some time.
In fact, in volume five, "The Record of 1933–1941," Adams records the death of John D. Rockefeller, Sr., as the end of the era of this great wealth — never to occur again.
On May 23, John D. Rockefeller, Sr., died at the age of 97. Owner at one time of the largest fortune in the world, his lifespan had covered the entire history of American business from before the Civil War… Nearly $350,000,000 are handled by three of the Rockefeller Foundations for education, medical research and other uses. Whatever may be thought as to the methods of accumulating the beginnings of the fortune in a period of different business ethics and social outlook, no other man through his financial gifts has ever so widely benefited mankind. With our income and inheritance taxes no other such fortune will ever again be accumulated, and his death marked the end of an era in American history.
And so that's the end of the story, kids…
Everything ended happily ever after.
Well, not quite.
Despite appearances, the shift on the part of the Rockefellers and other Robber Barons of the day from outright monopoly to "philanthropic" "non-profit" charity work was not an end to the dominance by the super-rich of the early 2oth Century, but an intensification of their undue influence. The taxation of the wealthy as well as the anti-trust actions of the day, which included busting up megacorpses like Standard Oil and AT&T, were perhaps well meaning but fundamentally failed to reign in the disparity of power.
Instead, new tax laws, in reality, acted to restrict new wealth from reaching the heights of the oligarchy, allowing "the elite" the keep their own, and initiate new members as desired. The tax-free status of many institutions – including the Rockefeller Foundation, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Ford Foundation – allowed the incredibly wealthy to a) shield their fortunes from taxation, b) appear to do good works and boost public opinion of their principle members while c) influencing, writing and developing official public policy through the steering mechanisms of its own tax-free grant making, think tank and research powers. Much social engineering has taken place – with far too little public notice – through these bodies. Additionally, d) many of its directors and board members were in "respectable" positions to shift into official government positions through the revolving door without appearing to be acting on behalf of their corporate masters.
The Reece Committee Hearings, conducted in 1953, attempted to probe the role of tax-free foundations in public life and uncovered many outrageous and conspiratorial actions taking place, including very apparent agendas advancing a one-world corporate-dominated government. However, it did not succeed in a general public understanding of what was taking place, nor did it reign in their powers.
Yesterday, the markets in gold, silver, oil, steel and other commodities were successfully cornered by the Rothschilds and other top bankers. Under Wall Street direction, and through the powers of the then newly-created Federal Reserve, these titans were able to officially dominate nearly all the important areas of public life, including great expansions in consumer spending and government agency powers. The icons of this magnificent and terrible wealth were John D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, E.H. Harriman, Cornelius Vanderbilt and a handful of others.
Today, those icons of wealth are the likes of Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Carlos Slim, Larry Ellison, the Koch Brothers, Michael Bloomberg, Steve Jobs (now deceased), the Walton family descendants of Walmart and, again, a handful of others who are largely known for their role in the age of computers, the Internet, telecommunications and electronic devices.
The real wealth, from older robber barons accumulated in land, resources, banking and investment and commodities are still there, but remain under reported on the Forbes' list of the world's richest, instead ruling largely from the shadows and influential but secretive groups such as Bilderberg.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, as well as the Gates-Buffett led billionaires' "giving pledge" are keeping in stride with the groundwork laid and continued by the Rockefeller Foundation and Ford Foundation. Heavily funded initiatives to push vaccines, birth control, population control, Western-oriented "education," GMO and corporate-dominated agriculture and the like remain some of the most consequential and troubling policies done in the name of "good" by tax-free entities wielding enormous, nearly incalculable wealth and power.
In short, the myth of "democracy" and freedom in the United States – the beacon around the world – perpetuates, despite a few blemishes. But in reality, the Oligarchy took hold some time ago, has not let up and perhaps never will.
Let that sink in, kids. Take a good look, and let it all sink in.
And don't forget to read Charlotte Iserbyt's revealing and TRUE work, loaded with documents and footnotes, The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America.
It helps to explain why you don't know this stuff, why the reigns of power have been stolen from us, and why things are not soon going to get better.
Unfortunately, the late comedic genius George Carlin was all-too-right when he explained the owners of America and why the education system is broken:
"The reason they call it the American Dream is because you have to be asleep to believe it."
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9 things you think you know about Jesus that are probably wrong
For starters, it's unlikely that he had long, flowing hair, and he wasn't necessarily hung on a cross
Jesus has been described as the best known figure in history, and also the least known. If you mentioned the name "Jesus" and someone asked Jesus who, you might blink. Or laugh. Even people who don't think Jesus was God mostly believe they know a fair bit about him. You might be surprised that some of your most basic assumptions about Jesus are probably wrong.
We have no record of anything that was written about Jesus by eyewitnesses or other contemporaries during the time he would have lived, or for decades thereafter. Nonetheless, based on archeological digs and artifacts, ancient texts and art, and even forensic science, we know a good deal about the time and culture in which the New Testament is set. This evidence points to some startling conclusions about who Jesus likely was—and wasn't.
1. Married, not single. When an ancient papyrus scrap was found in 2014 referring to the wife of Jesus, some Catholics and Evangelicals were scandalized. But unlike the Catholic Church, Jews have no tradition of celibacy among religious leaders. Jesus and his disciples would have been practicing Jews, and all great rabbis we know of were married. A rabbi being celibate would have been so unusual that some modern writers have argued Jesus must have been gay. But a number of ancient texts, including the canonical New Testament, point to a special relationship between Mary Magdalene and Jesus. The Gospel of Phillip says, "[Jesus] loved her more than all the disciples, and used to kiss her often on her mouth."
2. Cropped hair, not long.Jewish men at the time of Christ did not wear their hair long. A Roman triumphal arch of the time period depicts Jewish slaves with short hair. In the Apostle Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, he addresses male hair length. "Does not nature itself teach you that if a man wears long hair, it is degrading to him?" (1 Corinthians 11:14 NRSV). During the 1960s, conservative Christians quoted this verse to express their disgust against the hippy movement and to label it anti-Christian.
3. Hung on a pole, not necessarily a cross.For centuries scholars have known that the Greek New Testament word "stauros," which is translated into English as cross, can refer to a device of several shapes, commonly a single upright pole, "torture stake" or even tree. The Romans did not have a standard way of crucifying prisoners, and Josephus tells us that during the siege of Jerusalem, soldiers nailed or tied their victims in a variety of positions. Early Christians may have centered on the vertical pole with a crossbeam because it echoed the Egyptian ankh, a symbol of life, or the Sumerian symbol for Tammuz, or because it simply was more artistically and symbolically distinctive than the alternatives. Imagine millions of people wearing a golden pole on a chain around their necks.
4. Short, not tall. The typical Jewish man at the time of the Roman Empire would have been just over five feet tall, which makes this a best guess for the height of Jesus. That he is typically depicted taller derives from the mental challenge people have distinguishing physical stature from other kinds of stature. Great men are called "big men" and "larger than life." In ancient times they often were assigned divine parentage and miraculous births, and the idea that Jesus was uniquely divine has created a strong pull over time to depict him as taller than is likely. A good illustration of this is the Shroud of Turin, which is just one of many such Jesus-shrouds that circulated during medieval times and which bears the image of a man closer to six feet in height.
5. Born in a house, not a stable. The miraculous birth story of Jesus is a late, maybe second-century addition to the Bible, and it contains many fascinatingmythic elements and peculiarities. But the idea that Jesus was born in a stable was added to the Christmas story even later. In the original narrative, Joseph and Mary probably would have stayed with relatives, and the phrase "no room for them in the inn (gr: kataluma)" is better translated "no room for them in the upper room." Later storytellers did not understand that people of the time might bring animals into their ground floor, as in Swiss housebarns, and they assumed that the presence of a manger implied a stable.
6. Named Joshua, not Jesus. The name Joshua (in Hebrew Y'hoshuʿa meaning "deliverance" or "salvation"), was common among Jews in the Ancient Near East as it is today. Joshua and Jesus are the same name, and are translated differently in our modern Bible to distinguish Jesus from the Joshua of the Old Testament, who leads the Hebrew people to the Promised Land. In actuality, the relationship between the two figures is fascinating and important.Some scholars believe that the New Testament gospels are mostly historicized and updated retellings of the more ancient Joshua story, with episodes interwoven from stories of Elisha and Elijah and Moses. A modern parallel can be found in the way Hollywood writers have reworked Shakespearean tropes and plot elements into dozens of modern movies (though for a very different purpose).
7. Number of apostles (12) from astrology, not history. Whether Jesus had 12 disciples who were above his other devotees is an open question. The number 12 was considered auspicious by many ancient peoples, and the fellowship of 12 disciples, who are depicted in Da Vinci's The Last Supper, likely get their count from the same source as the 12 signs of the zodiac and 12 months of the year. Astrotheology or star worship preceded the Hebrew religion, and shaped both the Bible and Western religions more broadly. One might point to the 12 Olympian gods or 12 sons of Odin, or the 12 days of Christmas or 12 "legitimate" successors to the prophet Mohammed. But since the Gospels echo the story of Joshua, the 12 apostles most closely parallel the 12 tribes of Israel.
8. Prophecies recalled, not foretold. Even people who aren't too sure about the divinity of Jesus sometimes think that the way he fulfilled prophecies was a bit spooky, like the writings of Nostradamus. In reality, Scooby Doo could solve this one in a single episode with three pieces of information: First, Old Testament prophecies were well known to first-century Jews, and a messianic figure who wanted to fulfill some of these prophecies could simply do so. For example, in the book of Matthew, Jesus seeks a donkey to ride into Jerusalem "that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet" (Matthew 21:4). Second, "gospels" are a genre of devotional literature rather than objective histories, which means that the authors had every reason to shape their stories around earlier predictions. Third, scholars now believe that some Bible texts once thought to be prophecies (for example in the Book of Revelation) actually relate to events that were current or past at the time of writing.
9. Some Jesus quotes not from Jesus; others uncertain. Lists of favorite Jesus sayings abound online. Some of the most popular are the Beatitudes (blessed are the meek, etc.) or the story of the woman caught in adultery (let he who is without sin cast the first stone) or the Golden Rule (do unto others as you would have them do unto you, which, we are told, sums up the Law and the Prophets).
Which words are actually from Jesus? This question has been debated fiercely by everyone from third-century Catholic Councils to the 20th-century Jesus Seminar. Even Thomas Jefferson weighed in, but much remains unclear. The New Testament Gospels were written long after Jesus would have died, and no technology existed with which to record his teachings in real time, unless he wrote them down himself, which he didn't.
We can be confident that at least some of the wise and timeless words andcatchy proverbs attributed to Jesus are actually from earlier or later thinkers. For example, the Golden Rule was articulated before the time of Christ by theRabbi Hillel the Elder, who similarly said it was the "whole Torah." By contrast, the much-loved story of the woman caught in adultery doesn't appear in manuscripts until the fourth century. Attributing words (or whole texts) to a famous person was common in the Ancient Near East, because it gave those words extra weight. Small wonder then that so many genuinely valuable insights ended up, in one way or another, paired with the name of Jesus.
The person of Jesus, if indeed there was such a person, is shrouded in the fog of history leaving us only with a set of hunches and traditions that far too often are treated as knowledge. The "facts" I have listed here are largely trivial; it doesn't really matter whether Jesus was tall or short, or how he cut his hair. But it does matter, tremendously, that "facts" people claim to know about how Jesus saw himself, and God and humanity are equally tenuous.
The teachings attributed to Jesus mix enduring spiritual and moral insights with irrelevancies and Judaica and bits of Iron Age culture, some of which are truly awful. That leaves each of us, from the privileged vantage of the 21st century, with both a right and a responsibility to consider the evidence and make our own best guesses about what is real and how we should then live. A good starting place might be a little more recognition that we don't know nearly as much as we'd like to think, and a lot of what we know for sure is probably wrong.
3. Hung on a pole, not necessarily a cross.For centuries scholars have known that the Greek New Testament word "stauros," which is translated into English as cross, can refer to a device of several shapes, commonly a single upright pole, "torture stake" or even tree. The Romans did not have a standard way of crucifying prisoners, and Josephus tells us that during the siege of Jerusalem, soldiers nailed or tied their victims in a variety of positions. Early Christians may have centered on the vertical pole with a crossbeam because it echoed the Egyptian ankh, a symbol of life, or the Sumerian symbol for Tammuz, or because it simply was more artistically and symbolically distinctive than the alternatives. Imagine millions of people wearing a golden pole on a chain around their necks.
4. Short, not tall. The typical Jewish man at the time of the Roman Empire would have been just over five feet tall, which makes this a best guess for the height of Jesus. That he is typically depicted taller derives from the mental challenge people have distinguishing physical stature from other kinds of stature. Great men are called "big men" and "larger than life." In ancient times they often were assigned divine parentage and miraculous births, and the idea that Jesus was uniquely divine has created a strong pull over time to depict him as taller than is likely. A good illustration of this is the Shroud of Turin, which is just one of many such Jesus-shrouds that circulated during medieval times and which bears the image of a man closer to six feet in height.
5. Born in a house, not a stable. The miraculous birth story of Jesus is a late, maybe second-century addition to the Bible, and it contains many fascinatingmythic elements and peculiarities. But the idea that Jesus was born in a stable was added to the Christmas story even later. In the original narrative, Joseph and Mary probably would have stayed with relatives, and the phrase "no room for them in the inn (gr: kataluma)" is better translated "no room for them in the upper room." Later storytellers did not understand that people of the time might bring animals into their ground floor, as in Swiss housebarns, and they assumed that the presence of a manger implied a stable.
6. Named Joshua, not Jesus. The name Joshua (in Hebrew Y'hoshuʿa meaning "deliverance" or "salvation"), was common among Jews in the Ancient Near East as it is today. Joshua and Jesus are the same name, and are translated differently in our modern Bible to distinguish Jesus from the Joshua of the Old Testament, who leads the Hebrew people to the Promised Land. In actuality, the relationship between the two figures is fascinating and important.Some scholars believe that the New Testament gospels are mostly historicized and updated retellings of the more ancient Joshua story, with episodes interwoven from stories of Elisha and Elijah and Moses. A modern parallel can be found in the way Hollywood writers have reworked Shakespearean tropes and plot elements into dozens of modern movies (though for a very different purpose).
7. Number of apostles (12) from astrology, not history. Whether Jesus had 12 disciples who were above his other devotees is an open question. The number 12 was considered auspicious by many ancient peoples, and the fellowship of 12 disciples, who are depicted in Da Vinci's The Last Supper, likely get their count from the same source as the 12 signs of the zodiac and 12 months of the year. Astrotheology or star worship preceded the Hebrew religion, and shaped both the Bible and Western religions more broadly. One might point to the 12 Olympian gods or 12 sons of Odin, or the 12 days of Christmas or 12 "legitimate" successors to the prophet Mohammed. But since the Gospels echo the story of Joshua, the 12 apostles most closely parallel the 12 tribes of Israel.
8. Prophecies recalled, not foretold. Even people who aren't too sure about the divinity of Jesus sometimes think that the way he fulfilled prophecies was a bit spooky, like the writings of Nostradamus. In reality, Scooby Doo could solve this one in a single episode with three pieces of information: First, Old Testament prophecies were well known to first-century Jews, and a messianic figure who wanted to fulfill some of these prophecies could simply do so. For example, in the book of Matthew, Jesus seeks a donkey to ride into Jerusalem "that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet" (Matthew 21:4). Second, "gospels" are a genre of devotional literature rather than objective histories, which means that the authors had every reason to shape their stories around earlier predictions. Third, scholars now believe that some Bible texts once thought to be prophecies (for example in the Book of Revelation) actually relate to events that were current or past at the time of writing.
9. Some Jesus quotes not from Jesus; others uncertain. Lists of favorite Jesus sayings abound online. Some of the most popular are the Beatitudes (blessed are the meek, etc.) or the story of the woman caught in adultery (let he who is without sin cast the first stone) or the Golden Rule (do unto others as you would have them do unto you, which, we are told, sums up the Law and the Prophets).
Which words are actually from Jesus? This question has been debated fiercely by everyone from third-century Catholic Councils to the 20th-century Jesus Seminar. Even Thomas Jefferson weighed in, but much remains unclear. The New Testament Gospels were written long after Jesus would have died, and no technology existed with which to record his teachings in real time, unless he wrote them down himself, which he didn't.
We can be confident that at least some of the wise and timeless words andcatchy proverbs attributed to Jesus are actually from earlier or later thinkers. For example, the Golden Rule was articulated before the time of Christ by theRabbi Hillel the Elder, who similarly said it was the "whole Torah." By contrast, the much-loved story of the woman caught in adultery doesn't appear in manuscripts until the fourth century. Attributing words (or whole texts) to a famous person was common in the Ancient Near East, because it gave those words extra weight. Small wonder then that so many genuinely valuable insights ended up, in one way or another, paired with the name of Jesus.
The person of Jesus, if indeed there was such a person, is shrouded in the fog of history leaving us only with a set of hunches and traditions that far too often are treated as knowledge. The "facts" I have listed here are largely trivial; it doesn't really matter whether Jesus was tall or short, or how he cut his hair. But it does matter, tremendously, that "facts" people claim to know about how Jesus saw himself, and God and humanity are equally tenuous.
The teachings attributed to Jesus mix enduring spiritual and moral insights with irrelevancies and Judaica and bits of Iron Age culture, some of which are truly awful. That leaves each of us, from the privileged vantage of the 21st century, with both a right and a responsibility to consider the evidence and make our own best guesses about what is real and how we should then live. A good starting place might be a little more recognition that we don't know nearly as much as we'd like to think, and a lot of what we know for sure is probably wrong.
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Why millions of Christian evangelicals oppose Obamacare and civil rights
MY THOUGHTS: Why do so many believe in a being external to themselves, a being they or anyone else have never met? Why does anybody believe in a God? To explain away the unknowns of life, from all that is good and bad around you as a person to all the major atrocities going around the world... in the end, they believe God will save them, Jesus will save them (the two seem to be interchangeable), because they have faith in someone riding to the rescue to make things better. What they don't have faith in is humanity. One can't imagine having faith in an ordinary human being with the capacity to try and fix the world let alone have faith in yourself as a human being to help make the world a better place. Humankind seems to have a collective self-esteem issue, the words coming out of their mouths as "I can't..." and so waiting for "God" to make it better. Look around you, look at the people in this world and how horrible it is, which human would you have faith in? According to the Bible it happened to Jesus. He wasn't accepted as the Messiah and still isn't by many because the understanding was that he was a normal person and why would anyone have faith in just a human, to save the world? The person to save the world had to become divine. Jesus himself declared he was the Son of God and once that meme became viral over decades, whoever the man Jesus was disappeared, if he ever existed, for there are no records, you can't keep records of a God or the son thereof. The best way to remove doubt of divinity is to remove real history and create a unverifiable history. You can't have blind faith with a proven history. And a proven history that violates your "beliefs" requires you to close your eyes to the truth and deny yourself the greatness that you are as a human being, that you are capable as much as anybody, to save yourself...
Okay, this is a great interview...
American evangelicals have been waiting for the world to end for a long time. But that's not to say they've just been sitting around. Apocalypticism has inspired evangelistic crusades, moral reform movements, and generations of political activism.
In his latest book, Matthew Avery Sutton, a professor of history at Washington State University, traces this history of American evangelical apocalypticism from the end of the 19th century to the present day. In the process, he proposes a revised understanding of American evangelicalism, focused on the urgent expectations of the end of human history. If you want to understand modern evangelicalism, Sutton says, you have to understand their End Times theology.
Daniel Silliman spoke with Sutton at the Heidelberg Center for American Studies, in Heidelberg, Germany.
Why write about evangelical Christian apocalypticism?
The question that initially sparked this research was why were fundamentalists and their evangelical heirs skeptical of the state? Why were and are they critical of the federal government? I started thinking about this in the context of the health care debates over the last decade. Why were so many Christians so reluctant to support national health care? I could see why they were critical of the Democratic party on gay rights. I could see why they were critical on abortion. What I didn't understand is why, as a conservative Bible believing Christian, you would be opposed expanding health care.
This book is a very long, 480-page answer to that question.
My argument in a nutshell is that the apocalyptic theology that developed in the 1880s and 1890s led radical evangelicals to the conclusion that all nations are going to concede their power in the End Times to a totalitarian political leader who is going to be the Antichrist. If you believe you're living in the last days and you believe you're moving towards that event, you're going to be very suspicious and skeptical of anything that seems to undermine individual rights and individual liberties, and anything that is going to give more power to the state.
How significant is apocalypticism in the history of American evangelicalism?
Okay, this is a great interview...
Religious fundamentalists believe end times are upon us. It's no wonder they're so desperate to cling to power
American evangelicals have been waiting for the world to end for a long time. But that's not to say they've just been sitting around. Apocalypticism has inspired evangelistic crusades, moral reform movements, and generations of political activism.In his latest book, Matthew Avery Sutton, a professor of history at Washington State University, traces this history of American evangelical apocalypticism from the end of the 19th century to the present day. In the process, he proposes a revised understanding of American evangelicalism, focused on the urgent expectations of the end of human history. If you want to understand modern evangelicalism, Sutton says, you have to understand their End Times theology.
Daniel Silliman spoke with Sutton at the Heidelberg Center for American Studies, in Heidelberg, Germany.
Why write about evangelical Christian apocalypticism?
The question that initially sparked this research was why were fundamentalists and their evangelical heirs skeptical of the state? Why were and are they critical of the federal government? I started thinking about this in the context of the health care debates over the last decade. Why were so many Christians so reluctant to support national health care? I could see why they were critical of the Democratic party on gay rights. I could see why they were critical on abortion. What I didn't understand is why, as a conservative Bible believing Christian, you would be opposed expanding health care.
This book is a very long, 480-page answer to that question.
My argument in a nutshell is that the apocalyptic theology that developed in the 1880s and 1890s led radical evangelicals to the conclusion that all nations are going to concede their power in the End Times to a totalitarian political leader who is going to be the Antichrist. If you believe you're living in the last days and you believe you're moving towards that event, you're going to be very suspicious and skeptical of anything that seems to undermine individual rights and individual liberties, and anything that is going to give more power to the state.
How significant is apocalypticism in the history of American evangelicalism?
The idea that Jesus is coming back soon was a fairly radical and unconventional idea in the 19th century, but by the 21st century it's the air American Christians breathe. The most recent polls said something like 58 percent of white evangelicals believe Jesus is going to return by 2050. They simply take for granted that there is going to be a Rapture and Jesus is going to come back.
I took those statistics and others like them and moved backwards in time. What I found in my research was that apocalypticism was central to fundamentalists and evangelicals. What made them most distinct, what set them apart from liberal Protestants is not what we've traditionally thought. It's not questions of the virgin birth or how you read the Bible or questions of the nature of the incarnation or the literal resurrection of Jesus or Jesus's miracles. All those matter, all of those things do set them apart, but they don't affect how they live their daily lives. The one thing that affects how they live their daily lives is that they believe we are moving towards the End Times, the rise of the Antichrist, towards a great tribulation and a horrific human holocaust.
In their minds, the imminent Second Coming would not be as important as getting people saved. Salvation, converting sinners, would be the most important thing driving them. But in terms of how they're shaping and organizing their own lives, I think apocalypticism has been the driving force for much of the last century. It has fueled the movement and shaped it in fundamental ways.
If you haven't been in the archives it's really unbelievable to read these articles, these sermons and these letters, to realize how much apocalypticism saturated the minds of fundamentalists and evangelicals in the 20th century. The looming rise of the Antichrist was just the forefront of their thinking.
And they say that. Over and over again. They're very clear.
This is significant because to believe the world is rapidly moving to its end effects how you vote, how you're going to structure your education, how you understand the economy, how you're going to treat global events, how you're going to look at organizations like the United Nations.
Apocalypticism is central to understanding how fundamentalists and then evangelicals acted.
Can you give a broad outline of this theology?
It's a relatively complicated theology that fundamentalists and then evangelicals drew from a lot of different influences, a lot of different impulses. The key to unlocking their theology is to see some fairly obscure passages from the books of Daniel, Ezekiel, Revelation, and Jesus's sermon in Matthew 24 through their eyes.
But their conclusions, broken down to their simplest form are these: We're living in the church age and we're moving towards the Rapture. Jesus will Rapture all true believers out of this world, they'll just disappear, they'll go up to heaven with Jesus, and then with the loss of Christian influence in the world, Satan will have free rein to take power through a political leader, called the Antichrist, who is then going to rule over the world for seven years. This period is called the Tribulation. Antichrist rule will lead to a series of wars, which will then culminate with Jesus coming with an army of saints and fighting the battle of Armageddon, in the literal land of Palestine. Jesus will defeat the Antichrist, vanquish evil and then establish a new kingdom.
There's been a long debate in Christian history about the timing of Jesus's Second Coming. Would he come to initiate the start of a new millennium, a 1,000 years of peace and prosperity, or would he come at its conclusion? Fundamentalists and most evangelicals believed that Jesus is going to come back before the millennium. From there they determined that there will be signs or indications that tell us we're approaching the Second Coming. They believe the Bible had laid out these signs, the sequence of events that would happen, as they understood it, as we get closer and closer and closer to the Second Coming of Christ.
The rough picture is that we're moving towards the End Times. Instead of the idea that Christians are building the kingdom of God on earth, the earth is on a quick, slippery slope descending to hell.
What is the practical effect of this expectation?
Traditionally, people have believed that this expectation that Jesus is coming back would lead to indifference, that people would focus on the next world, they would invest very little in this world. In fact, they've done just the opposite. This is a central argument in the book.
D.L. Moody is often used to illustrate the idea of indifference. He famously said that the world is a sinking ship and God has given him a lifeboat and told him to save as many as he could. That's the idea, that there's not anything you can do but save those who are sinking. At the same time, Moody turned around and established what were later known at the Moody Church and the Moody Bible Institute, which were extremely active in reform movements during the progressive era. They were focused on issues of crime in Chicago, sanitation, temperance, and in all kinds of moral reform efforts.
It's clear from Moody to Billy Sunday to Aimee Semple McPherson to Billy Graham to Jerry Falwell, that to believe that Jesus is coming at any moment does not make you less active or less involved in your culture. They say over and over and over again that this is not the case. We just haven't heard them. Every generation of evangelicals and fundamentalists says it. Their apocalyptic theology makes them more active not less.
There is a biblical argument for this that they use. It's the parable of the talents. In this story a ruler invests in his servants, giving each of them a number of talents, or money. He then goes away to another kingdom. When he comes back he wants to know what they've done with their talents. Some had buried their talents, afraid of losing it. Some had lost the money, wasting their talents. But some had invested wisely and made more money. So the returning ruler rewarded those who had invested wisely and maximized their talents and used them for greater good. For fundamentalists and evangelicals, the point here is that God has given them talents. He's gone away, he's coming back, he's coming back soon, and he's going to ask what you've done with your talents. Jesus ended the parable by instructing the disciples to "occupy" until I come. And that's what fundamentalists and evangelicals have done.
That means that, far more than many other Christians, they believe they have a responsibility to act as vehemently, as radically, as urgently as possible.
What I'm arguing is that in fact the conviction that Jesus is coming back very very soon creates a sense of urgency, or anxiety or excitement that means there is no time to spare, because the clock is ticking and they're almost out of time.
The standard narrative of white evangelical history is a great withdrawal from culture in the 1920s and then a reengagement in the 1950s, leading to the religious right in 1980s. Do you want to revise that?
Yes. That's one of the historiographical arguments I'm making in the book. The traditional argument is that fundamentalists were active and engaged in American society until the Scopes trial, the anti-evolution trial, in 1925. They were humiliated and defeated in the Scopes trial, they withdrew and focused on building their churches, their institutions, but they weren't engaged in mainstream culture until the rise of Billy Graham who helped turn them around. Then it's a few quick steps to the rise of the religious right.
That's incorrect. They never gave up. They never withdrew or disengaged from culture. In the 1930s, for example, most of these fundamentalists were very critical of the New Deal. For Americans who were actively looking for signs of the coming Antichrist in the context of the 1930s, in the context of Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini, Roosevelt had all the markings of someone setting the stage for the end times. He was concolidating power. Government was growing.
I found a letter from one of Franklin D. Roosevelt's operatives. He had gone out to survey the country and look for areas of strength and weakness before the 1936 election and what he told FDR is that the greatest threat was not from the economic reactionaries, that was his term, but from the religious reactionaries. He said the "so-called evangelical churches are strongly against you." It was shortly after that that FDR issued a letter to all the churches of the nation, asking for their support, and asking what he could do to better meet their needs.
Fundamentalists were involved in politics, they were involved in social reform. A few of them were talking about abortion and same-sex relations in the 1930s. They were very much active and involved with what was going on around them. There's just no evidence to show that they retreated.
I'm trying to decenter the Scopes trial as not that substantial of a moment in the history of evangelicalism.
What about African-American evangelicals? How were they apocalyptic?
This was one of my favorite parts of doing this book. I wanted to take seriously how African-American evangelicals compared and contrasted with white evangelicals. They started from the same theological premises, but came to very different political and social conclusions.
They had that sense of fever and anxiety and hope for Jesus's Second Coming, but for them, the signs of the times and the method of occupying until he comes were very, very different.
There were a number of important and substantial issues that were not on white evangelicals' radar screens, but for black evangelicals, they were absolutely central to what it meant to be living in an apocalyptic age. For them a sign of the End Times was not the supposed lawlessness of Martin Luther King, Jr., a claim made by some white evangelicals. No, for African Americans a sign of the coming tribulation was lynching. They didn't see the Antichrist coming out of the New Deal, they saw the Antichrist as an extension of state governments that were racist and had Jim Crowed them for generations. They too had a very strong sense that Jesus was coming back, but he was coming back for different reasons, he was going to right different wrongs, and he was going to bring a different kind of peace and a different kind of justice. A different kind of millennium.
While African Americans were having their own theological discussions among themselves, they were also aware of developments in the white evangelical community, but they were not engaging directly with white theologians. For them it was a different kind of discussion. For them, thinking through apocalyptic theology was happening in the context of a long black liberation tradition, so they put a lot of emphasis, for instance, on a verse in Psalms that talks about a great leader coming out of Abyssinia or Ethiopia. There was a sense in which Jesus's return was the coming of a black liberator.
White fundamentalists and evangelicals were very clear that they didn't want anything to do with African Americans for most of the twentieth century. They didn't see African Americans as able to contribute to their movement. The racial assumptions were built into who evangelicals and fundamentalists were as people, just like the vast majority of white Americans right alongside them. They were no different.
But what apocalypticism did was give white evangelicals a framework and a rationale for fighting the Civil Rights movement, for example. In the last days, they insisted, there will be lawlessness. So they saw the Civil Rights movement as an example of people who break the law. Whiteness influenced these evangelical theologians, and when we compare them with African American theologians we can see how their sensitivities influenced the way they read, understood, and applied the Bible.
How does apocalypticism shape someone like Billy Graham and, by extension, modern evangelicalism?
Billy Graham gets a pass from a lot of scholars who pay very little attenion to his apocalypticism. I think that's wrong. I think it's been a core of his ministry. In 1949, when Graham had his first major revival in Los Angeles, the famous one that put him on the map, the revival began just days after Harry Truman announced that the Soviets had tested an atomic bomb. So Graham used this to say, the end is near, the time is close. You have to get saved today because Jesus is coming back.
He would say getting people saved is the engine driving him, but the reason there's an urgency to getting people saved is that Jesus may be coming back before we wake up in the morning. And he would say that at every revival campaign. That was his message.
He wrote about it more than just about any other topic. He published books on apocalypticism in the 1960s and the 80s and the 90s and 2010. In 2010, writing as a 91-year-old, he believed this message was one of the most important things he could leave behind on this earth. In this book he says the signs are now clearer than ever. He's written a lot of books, but five on apocalypticism? I don't know that he's covered any other topic in five books.
At the same time, I want to be very clear: postwar evangelicalism grew far more diverse than interwar fundamentalism. After the war, the movement got bigger, broader, more inclusive and less tied to apocalypticism. What happens is essentially evangelicalism divides, and you have these more respectable people like Graham and Carl F. H. Henry and Harold John Ockenga, and others on one track preaching a respectable, moderate apocalypticism. Then you have populist apocalyptics who become incredibly popular, like Hal Lindsey in the 1970s, Tim LaHaye in the 1990s and into the 2000s. Then, you have growing numbers of self-proclaimed evangelicals completely rejecting the apocalypticism that had for so long given their movement its distinctive identity. The story of postwar evangelicals is this tension between the more respectable, more careful, more savvy, leaders and those who preached a radical populist apocalypticism that harkened back to the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s.
And yet the apocalyptic never leaves. It's still there, that's where the polls come back. It's now assumed by hundreds of millions of Americans that the rapture is a real thing and that Jesus is coming back.
It's a genius theology, because it allows people to look at very diverse, very troubling, very dark contemporary events and put them in a context; to say, "I know why this is happening, and it's going to turn out OK. We are going to be OK." It gives them peace, comfort and hope in a world that often offers none of those things.
I took those statistics and others like them and moved backwards in time. What I found in my research was that apocalypticism was central to fundamentalists and evangelicals. What made them most distinct, what set them apart from liberal Protestants is not what we've traditionally thought. It's not questions of the virgin birth or how you read the Bible or questions of the nature of the incarnation or the literal resurrection of Jesus or Jesus's miracles. All those matter, all of those things do set them apart, but they don't affect how they live their daily lives. The one thing that affects how they live their daily lives is that they believe we are moving towards the End Times, the rise of the Antichrist, towards a great tribulation and a horrific human holocaust.
In their minds, the imminent Second Coming would not be as important as getting people saved. Salvation, converting sinners, would be the most important thing driving them. But in terms of how they're shaping and organizing their own lives, I think apocalypticism has been the driving force for much of the last century. It has fueled the movement and shaped it in fundamental ways.
If you haven't been in the archives it's really unbelievable to read these articles, these sermons and these letters, to realize how much apocalypticism saturated the minds of fundamentalists and evangelicals in the 20th century. The looming rise of the Antichrist was just the forefront of their thinking.
And they say that. Over and over again. They're very clear.
This is significant because to believe the world is rapidly moving to its end effects how you vote, how you're going to structure your education, how you understand the economy, how you're going to treat global events, how you're going to look at organizations like the United Nations.
Apocalypticism is central to understanding how fundamentalists and then evangelicals acted.
Can you give a broad outline of this theology?
It's a relatively complicated theology that fundamentalists and then evangelicals drew from a lot of different influences, a lot of different impulses. The key to unlocking their theology is to see some fairly obscure passages from the books of Daniel, Ezekiel, Revelation, and Jesus's sermon in Matthew 24 through their eyes.
But their conclusions, broken down to their simplest form are these: We're living in the church age and we're moving towards the Rapture. Jesus will Rapture all true believers out of this world, they'll just disappear, they'll go up to heaven with Jesus, and then with the loss of Christian influence in the world, Satan will have free rein to take power through a political leader, called the Antichrist, who is then going to rule over the world for seven years. This period is called the Tribulation. Antichrist rule will lead to a series of wars, which will then culminate with Jesus coming with an army of saints and fighting the battle of Armageddon, in the literal land of Palestine. Jesus will defeat the Antichrist, vanquish evil and then establish a new kingdom.
There's been a long debate in Christian history about the timing of Jesus's Second Coming. Would he come to initiate the start of a new millennium, a 1,000 years of peace and prosperity, or would he come at its conclusion? Fundamentalists and most evangelicals believed that Jesus is going to come back before the millennium. From there they determined that there will be signs or indications that tell us we're approaching the Second Coming. They believe the Bible had laid out these signs, the sequence of events that would happen, as they understood it, as we get closer and closer and closer to the Second Coming of Christ.
The rough picture is that we're moving towards the End Times. Instead of the idea that Christians are building the kingdom of God on earth, the earth is on a quick, slippery slope descending to hell.
What is the practical effect of this expectation?
Traditionally, people have believed that this expectation that Jesus is coming back would lead to indifference, that people would focus on the next world, they would invest very little in this world. In fact, they've done just the opposite. This is a central argument in the book.
D.L. Moody is often used to illustrate the idea of indifference. He famously said that the world is a sinking ship and God has given him a lifeboat and told him to save as many as he could. That's the idea, that there's not anything you can do but save those who are sinking. At the same time, Moody turned around and established what were later known at the Moody Church and the Moody Bible Institute, which were extremely active in reform movements during the progressive era. They were focused on issues of crime in Chicago, sanitation, temperance, and in all kinds of moral reform efforts.
It's clear from Moody to Billy Sunday to Aimee Semple McPherson to Billy Graham to Jerry Falwell, that to believe that Jesus is coming at any moment does not make you less active or less involved in your culture. They say over and over and over again that this is not the case. We just haven't heard them. Every generation of evangelicals and fundamentalists says it. Their apocalyptic theology makes them more active not less.
There is a biblical argument for this that they use. It's the parable of the talents. In this story a ruler invests in his servants, giving each of them a number of talents, or money. He then goes away to another kingdom. When he comes back he wants to know what they've done with their talents. Some had buried their talents, afraid of losing it. Some had lost the money, wasting their talents. But some had invested wisely and made more money. So the returning ruler rewarded those who had invested wisely and maximized their talents and used them for greater good. For fundamentalists and evangelicals, the point here is that God has given them talents. He's gone away, he's coming back, he's coming back soon, and he's going to ask what you've done with your talents. Jesus ended the parable by instructing the disciples to "occupy" until I come. And that's what fundamentalists and evangelicals have done.
That means that, far more than many other Christians, they believe they have a responsibility to act as vehemently, as radically, as urgently as possible.
What I'm arguing is that in fact the conviction that Jesus is coming back very very soon creates a sense of urgency, or anxiety or excitement that means there is no time to spare, because the clock is ticking and they're almost out of time.
The standard narrative of white evangelical history is a great withdrawal from culture in the 1920s and then a reengagement in the 1950s, leading to the religious right in 1980s. Do you want to revise that?
Yes. That's one of the historiographical arguments I'm making in the book. The traditional argument is that fundamentalists were active and engaged in American society until the Scopes trial, the anti-evolution trial, in 1925. They were humiliated and defeated in the Scopes trial, they withdrew and focused on building their churches, their institutions, but they weren't engaged in mainstream culture until the rise of Billy Graham who helped turn them around. Then it's a few quick steps to the rise of the religious right.
That's incorrect. They never gave up. They never withdrew or disengaged from culture. In the 1930s, for example, most of these fundamentalists were very critical of the New Deal. For Americans who were actively looking for signs of the coming Antichrist in the context of the 1930s, in the context of Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini, Roosevelt had all the markings of someone setting the stage for the end times. He was concolidating power. Government was growing.
I found a letter from one of Franklin D. Roosevelt's operatives. He had gone out to survey the country and look for areas of strength and weakness before the 1936 election and what he told FDR is that the greatest threat was not from the economic reactionaries, that was his term, but from the religious reactionaries. He said the "so-called evangelical churches are strongly against you." It was shortly after that that FDR issued a letter to all the churches of the nation, asking for their support, and asking what he could do to better meet their needs.
Fundamentalists were involved in politics, they were involved in social reform. A few of them were talking about abortion and same-sex relations in the 1930s. They were very much active and involved with what was going on around them. There's just no evidence to show that they retreated.
I'm trying to decenter the Scopes trial as not that substantial of a moment in the history of evangelicalism.
What about African-American evangelicals? How were they apocalyptic?
This was one of my favorite parts of doing this book. I wanted to take seriously how African-American evangelicals compared and contrasted with white evangelicals. They started from the same theological premises, but came to very different political and social conclusions.
They had that sense of fever and anxiety and hope for Jesus's Second Coming, but for them, the signs of the times and the method of occupying until he comes were very, very different.
There were a number of important and substantial issues that were not on white evangelicals' radar screens, but for black evangelicals, they were absolutely central to what it meant to be living in an apocalyptic age. For them a sign of the End Times was not the supposed lawlessness of Martin Luther King, Jr., a claim made by some white evangelicals. No, for African Americans a sign of the coming tribulation was lynching. They didn't see the Antichrist coming out of the New Deal, they saw the Antichrist as an extension of state governments that were racist and had Jim Crowed them for generations. They too had a very strong sense that Jesus was coming back, but he was coming back for different reasons, he was going to right different wrongs, and he was going to bring a different kind of peace and a different kind of justice. A different kind of millennium.
While African Americans were having their own theological discussions among themselves, they were also aware of developments in the white evangelical community, but they were not engaging directly with white theologians. For them it was a different kind of discussion. For them, thinking through apocalyptic theology was happening in the context of a long black liberation tradition, so they put a lot of emphasis, for instance, on a verse in Psalms that talks about a great leader coming out of Abyssinia or Ethiopia. There was a sense in which Jesus's return was the coming of a black liberator.
White fundamentalists and evangelicals were very clear that they didn't want anything to do with African Americans for most of the twentieth century. They didn't see African Americans as able to contribute to their movement. The racial assumptions were built into who evangelicals and fundamentalists were as people, just like the vast majority of white Americans right alongside them. They were no different.
But what apocalypticism did was give white evangelicals a framework and a rationale for fighting the Civil Rights movement, for example. In the last days, they insisted, there will be lawlessness. So they saw the Civil Rights movement as an example of people who break the law. Whiteness influenced these evangelical theologians, and when we compare them with African American theologians we can see how their sensitivities influenced the way they read, understood, and applied the Bible.
How does apocalypticism shape someone like Billy Graham and, by extension, modern evangelicalism?
Billy Graham gets a pass from a lot of scholars who pay very little attenion to his apocalypticism. I think that's wrong. I think it's been a core of his ministry. In 1949, when Graham had his first major revival in Los Angeles, the famous one that put him on the map, the revival began just days after Harry Truman announced that the Soviets had tested an atomic bomb. So Graham used this to say, the end is near, the time is close. You have to get saved today because Jesus is coming back.
He would say getting people saved is the engine driving him, but the reason there's an urgency to getting people saved is that Jesus may be coming back before we wake up in the morning. And he would say that at every revival campaign. That was his message.
He wrote about it more than just about any other topic. He published books on apocalypticism in the 1960s and the 80s and the 90s and 2010. In 2010, writing as a 91-year-old, he believed this message was one of the most important things he could leave behind on this earth. In this book he says the signs are now clearer than ever. He's written a lot of books, but five on apocalypticism? I don't know that he's covered any other topic in five books.
At the same time, I want to be very clear: postwar evangelicalism grew far more diverse than interwar fundamentalism. After the war, the movement got bigger, broader, more inclusive and less tied to apocalypticism. What happens is essentially evangelicalism divides, and you have these more respectable people like Graham and Carl F. H. Henry and Harold John Ockenga, and others on one track preaching a respectable, moderate apocalypticism. Then you have populist apocalyptics who become incredibly popular, like Hal Lindsey in the 1970s, Tim LaHaye in the 1990s and into the 2000s. Then, you have growing numbers of self-proclaimed evangelicals completely rejecting the apocalypticism that had for so long given their movement its distinctive identity. The story of postwar evangelicals is this tension between the more respectable, more careful, more savvy, leaders and those who preached a radical populist apocalypticism that harkened back to the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s.
And yet the apocalyptic never leaves. It's still there, that's where the polls come back. It's now assumed by hundreds of millions of Americans that the rapture is a real thing and that Jesus is coming back.
It's a genius theology, because it allows people to look at very diverse, very troubling, very dark contemporary events and put them in a context; to say, "I know why this is happening, and it's going to turn out OK. We are going to be OK." It gives them peace, comfort and hope in a world that often offers none of those things.
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Thursday, February 26, 2015
Science Shows How Drummers' Brains Are Actually Different From Everybody Elses'
In the music world, drummers always bear the brunt of the joke. Most have the same punchline: Drummers are idiots. Take, for example, the following: "How do you tell if the stage is level? The drummer is drooling from both sides of his mouth."
Whether it's being ruthlessly mocked for their idiocy, repeatedly killed in This Is Spinal Tap or just lusted after less often than the lead guitarist, drummers walk a tough road. But it turns out science shows drummers have an advantage over everyone else. According to research, drummers have a rare, innate ability to problem-solve and change those around them.
For starters, rock steady drummers can actually be smarter than their less rhythmically-focused bandmates. A study from the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm found a link between intelligence, good timing and the part of the brain used for problem-solving. Researchers had drummers play a variety of different beats and then tasked them with a simple 60-problem intelligence test. The drummers who scored the highest were also better able to keep a steady beat. At last, hard proof that John Bonham really was a genius.
But even though a steady drummer may be more intelligent than his or her bandmates, the drummer's gifts can be shared: a tight beat can actually transfer that natural intelligence to others. In studies on the effects of rhythm on brains, researchers showed that experiencing a steady rhythm actually improves cognitive function. One psychology professor at the University of Washington used rhythmic light and sound therapy on his students and discovered that their grades improved. Similarly, one researcher at the University of Texas Medical Branch used that method on a group of elementary and middle school boys with ADD. The therapies had a similar effect to Ritalin, eventually making lasting increases to the boys' IQ scores.
Granted, these studies focused more on the effects of rhythm on the mind rather than on the mind behind the rhythm. Still, drummers' consistent rhythmic focus has positive effects on them and those around them. When drummers bring a steady rhythm (and their corresponding problem-solving abilities) to a group setting, they actually create a "drummer's high" for everyone around them. University of Oxford researchers discovered that when drummers play together, both their happiness levels and pain tolerance increase, similar to Olympic runners. Observing that high led researchers to hypothesize that drumming was integral to community-building and that sharing rhythms could be the sort of behavior necessary for the evolution of human society.
Drumming is a fundamentally human thing. A lot of modern music has shifted towards drum machines over humans to create ultra-precise electronic rhythms. But it turns out that what we typically perceive as error is really just a uniquely human sense of time: Researchers at Harvard found that drummers harness a different sort of internal clock that moves in waves, rather than linearly as a real clock does. They match an innate rhythm that has been found in human brainwaves, heart rates during sleep and even the auditory nerve firings in cats. When a human drummer plays, he or she finds a human rhythm.
So the stereotypes about drummers aren't just baseless, they're also plain wrong. Drummers are people tapped into a fundamental undercurrent of what it means to be human, people around whom bands and communities form.
And admit it, sometimes they even write great songs.
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