How to Spot Phony Images and Online Propaganda

The biggest indicator of whether people believed an image was genuine or not was whether they agreed with its contents.

-- Emma Grey Ellis

Inconsistencies

I've noticed that it doesn't really work to hold out for people's consistencies.  Or, perhaps I could put it this way; holding others' inconsistencies against them (which I hate to admit, at times, I've done) is a futile endeavor.

We are all quite inconsistent, even if we try to project to others that we're not.

What bugs me sometimes is those who seem to promote (or even brag) about their consistencies.

A (really) small example; when someone says something like, "Now, I've always said...".  Besides being a fallacy on a merely literal level (but, setting technicalities aside, who is still keeping track of inconsistencies right now?), such statements seem much more about self-promotion than actual assertions to consider.  Sounds more like, "I've always known the truth and I'm here to bless you...with my knowledge" or, more simply, "...with me".

The truth is we are all inconsistent.  I sure am.

Holding that against someone or using perceived consistency to idealize myself is not only unhelpful, it also can be damaging simply because of its falseness...not to mention the dismissal of the many beauties of things like variation, diversity, and change that are often manifestly represented in inconsistent people...like myself.

Way of Knowing

If we over-use the intellectual center, then our work lies in bringing the emotional and moving centers fully online and integrating them.

Wisdom is a way of knowing that goes beyond one’s mind, one’s rational understanding, and embraces the whole of a person: mind, heart, and body. These three centers must all be working, and working in harmony, as the first prerequisite to the Wisdom way of knowing.

-- Cynthia Bourgeault

Instagram: kellycorrigan

The wholistic knowing referenced above would probably confirm what Kelly Corrigan is saying—we feel more than just physical things in our body.

Masquerading As Peace

Instagram: austinchanning

I believe firmly that to practice love is to disrupt the status quo which is masquerading as peace.

-- Austin Channing Brown

I tried to separate each of these (for different posts); just can't—too compelling in aggregate.

Visual: Dimensionality

Visual - "Dimensionality":

Winona Lake, IN

Owning Your Story

Owning your story is the bravest thing you will ever do.

-- Brené Brown


I'm wondering...what is keeping me from owning more of mine?

Not Just Adding Content

Learning isn't just adding more content to the buckets of knowledge we already have.

It's breaking some of our existing categories of assumptions (and conclusions)—unlearning some things and learning about different things, new things, including our ways of seeing things.

Most Powerful Thing

There is a pernicious cultural myth that our minds are the most powerful thing about us. 

We think we are thought-based creatures.  But what is actually shaping those thoughts?  

Thinking is the dumping ground of everything that is happening behind the scenes...in our body.

-- Hillary McBride

So much yet to learn about what we think we know and how we know it.

More from the source of the above (podcast), here....

Rarely Hear Questions

Ever noticed...how much people talk about what they think they know?

I rarely hear people asking questions—like "can you tell me more about that? " or saying things like "I wonder what is happening with this."

Is constantly talking about what we know...just another form of self-promotion?  What can I talk about that will make you like me more?

It seems to me that we can learn from talking, at least initially.  We learn a lot more, though, by being genuinely curious—asking questions, listening to others.

But, real knowledge gains seem to come through direct experience—personal encounter with realities other than my own.  It is then that I really know something, not just about something.

Then I don't need to talk to show others what I think I already know.

...sometimes I ask myself, "why am I talking about what I know right now?"

Hyper-Individualized Piety

My journey toward freedom from slaveholder religion has been one of unlearning a hyper-individualized piety.

-- Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

In my view, this is a significant part of what we are awakening to as our shared, cultural problems:

Love and Justice are not two. Without inner change, there can be no outer change. Without collective change, no change matters.

-- Rev. angel Kyodo williams, Sensei

Fathers Day

I don't know many kids who actually talk that way...at least in the moment.  

Now years later, yes—I've heard something like that over and over.  As I look back at my own childhood, I've thought it many times; so glad my folks did 'outside' things with me (especially when I wasn't talking like the kids above, 😇).

"Using Bible as a Prop"

Do you see a connection between today’s posts?



"...the madder they are, the more fearful they are, the more money they're going to send you.  We need more fear and more anger."

-- Robert Schenck

Thanks, Randy, for passing this along.

Mark Twain's Modest Proposal For Ending Lynching In The American South

After attending church on Aug. 19, 1901, 23-year-old Caseila Wild set off alone on the long walk back to her country home. Later that day, Wild’s twin brother found her body in a culvert by the road, her throat slit. The gruesome murder of the young white woman in Pierce City, Missouri, shocked the community, and ignited a far more deadly tragedy.

What followed after the discovery of Wild’s body was a 15-hour rampage in which Pierce City’s white citizens, using more than 50 rifles and 600 rounds of ammunition stolen from a nearby state militia arsenal, engaged in a brutal purge of the town’s 300 Black residents, driving them from their homes in pursuit of Wild’s killer, reportedly — backed up by no proof whatsoever — a Black male. Three Black suspects were lynched or killed on the spot — one was hanged from the porch of a local hotel, another burned to death in his own home.

The rampage appalled many in America, and it also stuck in the craw of perhaps the one man in Missouri with the influence and intellectual wherewithal to do something about it: Mark Twain, the state’s favorite son, and arguably the most beloved writer in America at the time. In response to the events in Pierce City, Twain penned a devastating indictment of his fellow citizens...continue here.

-- Sean Braswell

After a Reading of “Darkwater”

'Poem selection' for the week -- "After a Reading of “Darkwater”":

I did not think... I did not know... 
    What pale excuse is this I make
In answer to my brother’s woe, 
Age-long, for deep injustice sake!

Across his mute and patient soul, 
   While I have gone my heedless way,
The shadows of a fate might roll
   That deepened night and darkened day.

But I have read a burning page,
  That glowed with white and soul-wrung fire,
And now no more I may engage
    My conscience with a feeble hire. 

For all the wrong I did not heed, 
   Chance-born in happier paths to live,
I cry unto my brother’s need
  One word of love and shame... forgive!

-- Elizabeth Curtis Holman

As the author speaks about herself, I think she speaks about me, too.

True Strength

True strength is the courage to admit weakness.

-- Simon Sinek


If it's not obvious, this week I'm working with the relationship between things like strength and peace thru the consideration, if not use, of our perception of concepts like gentleness and weakness.

I bet this would go a long way towards peace, especially these days.

Gentleness

Gentleness can be a kind of strength that bears with another's weakness.

Keep The Peace

First keep the peace within yourself, then you can bring peace to others.

-- Thomas à Kempis

Surrender

I've noticed...so much of love is learning how to surrender—how to let go.

If the old saying is still true, you really are limited in your ability to love other people by your ability to love your self.

Then, it is only through letting go of the things I am holding on on to that allows me to truly love myself and therefore others.

Jesus taught us, grasping at what one has (trying to be God—being in control, etc) is something to let go of.

An unwillingness to surrender is the opposite of love and only leads to violence, rather than peace.

Justice vs Status Quo

Instagram: nakedpastor

Instagram: austinchanning

You can't choose justice and the status quo.

-- Austin Channing Brown

What Is Privilege?

Booze, Exercise, and Screen Time

Americans don’t typically sleep well. One large survey showed that people get a full, uninterrupted night of sleep on only about one out of four nights. During this anxious time, you might think the problem would get worse. But data from sleep-tracking apps and wearables suggests something different. Many people are actually getting more, better-quality sleep during our new stay-at-home lives.

Even with the drinking, screen time, and exercise factors seemingly working against us, the numbers show that we’re still sleeping okay. It may be that sleep is something more than a way to physically recharge. Sleeping, and dreaming vividly, may be part of our natural way of making it through hard times.  Continue here....

-- Mark Sullivan

The attention crisis is real

It’s all happening at once, and we have to choose.

What to read, listen to, answer?

A spam from a scammer

An @ mention on Slack

A voice mail from the boss

An email from a customer

A DM on Slack

A last-minute sale email from a store you’ve never visited

A year-old blog post

A new blog post

A new podcast

A …

[sorry, got distracted.]

The idea that we can strip mine attention, wasting what we don’t need, is long gone. Like oysters and oil before it, attention is a scarce resource, and we need to use it wisely. Too often, it feels cheaper to simply take what we can get, but when we overreach, the cost in trust is real.

And each of us gets the same amount of attention to spend each day. It’s a competitive advantage to figure out how to focus it to get something done.

-- Seth Godin, The attention crisis is real

Passion and Certainty

We live in a culture that fetishizes passion and certainty.

-- Elizabeth Gilbert

"Better get out in front of it!"

Better get out in front of it!

Is anybody willing to admit how exhausted they are trying to do this everywhere it seems to be required?

Are we so worried about heading things off that we are nearly incapable of just being present to the current moment?

This strikes me as a form of collective sleep-walking; a way (in spite of the perceivable hyper-activity involved) that we are not truly awake to what is actually going on around us.  Perhaps, even worse, to what is happening within us.

Is this partly why we are still SO surprised that things like racism can exist...even within ourselves (funny - actually sad - how everyone claims that they're not racist...well who is it, then, that is)?  Perhaps, this just underscores the point.

What If...the method we need to get a hold of is not so much running around trying to keep certain things from happening, as it is to re-deploy the energy we do have to the matters within ourselves, with each other, that we need to deal with.

"Better get out in front of it" doesn't sound right.

Rather Than In Judgment

It would seem that, quite possibly, the ultimate measure of health in any community might well reside in our ability to stand in awe at what folks have to carry rather than in judgment at how they carry it.

-- Gregory Boyle


...we’ve just forgotten that we belong to each other.

-- Mother Teresa

Progress

Ever noticed...that progress is rarely like a straight line?

Rethinking the Virus and the Future

An unbrief Saturday Morning consideration (good for a full cup of coffee):

It is very rare that human beings have a chance to rethink our place in Nature. The modern world is the fruit of a worldview that has placed Homo sapiens reigning supreme over all other life forms. This worldview seems only right and proper to the vast majority of people. In the course of just a few weeks, however, over seven billion people’s lives changed for the worse. Economies were halted, global transportation and supply chains were shut down to a crawl, and hundreds of millions of jobs were lost. More money has been lost globally than in any other moment in history. Amid the shock and panic, the catastrophe of COVID-19 has prompted some radical rethinking. Can a new and better world emerge? Not unless our worldview changes, because in many ways the virus isn’t a mindless primitive life form ravaging us, “the most superior life form on the planet”. Nor did Nature strike back to punish us. Something deeper is going on. To see what it is, we need to consider a worldview based not on humans-as-supreme, but on life-as-supreme.

We must realize that our superiority complex has quite literally put us in opposition to life on earth. Climate change can be laid at our doorstep. The prediction of the Earth’s sixth mass extinction is more than plausible, and 50% of biodiversity in plants and animals has been eliminated in mere decades, while hundreds of indigenous cultures have been virtually wiped out. The destructive human machine has been inexorable so far. The collective voices of Richard Attenborough and one million non-profits and NGOs have proved inadequate agents of change. There was no global pause.

Then, in January the world caught news of a virus, a new variant of a coronavirus, a family of viruses that has been with us for well over a thousand years. At no point did any science suggest, nor any public official report, that this virus would poison our ecosystems and threaten the survival of humans and much other life on the planet in the coming years. Instead, we were told that the virus would contribute to the passing of the millions of people that die of a myriad of respiratory illnesses every year. The death toll from the virus (even at its most hyperbolic predictions) would be a fraction of the deaths from chronic diseases that result each year from our polluted and depleted soil, water, air, and food systems. Nonetheless, this new threat was suddenly enough. We paused. 

If we needed more evidence that we are a shortsighted and self-interested species, it is here, but there is no time for self-condemnation. While the world’s leaders struggle to sort out the true implications of this virus, we have an opportunity to finally learn from our mistakes. The lesson is being taught by the humblest of messengers, a microscopic speck of genetic material. The virus is not our enemy—if we let it, it will be our greatest teacher.

First, we need to learn that the emergence of this coronavirus adaptation was predictable, and from Nature’s viewpoint, which oversees all living things, it was even necessary. As the stress levels of an organism increase, the speed of adaptation has to increase if it is to find a solution and survive. Since the beginning of life, the most significant biologic adaptations have been achieved through the viral communication network. Every form of DNA is constantly in touch with every other form. From bacteria in soils and water systems to the cells in our bodies, rapid transmission of new genetic updates can save a species from a new threat. 

If you adopt the perspective of life itself, earth is dominated by the genes of bacteria, fungi, and protozoa which hugely outnumber any other life forms. This vast microbial genome is the foundation of life on the planet, and its aim, as with all life forms, is to adapt, survive, and foster diversity. To the life force that is in the 1030 bacteria in existence, a major threat—we would argue that it is the major threat—is coming from the widespread, indiscriminate use of antibiotics in agriculture via animal feed and the management of poultry, swine, and cattle. 

As the collective bacterial stress levels increases, DNA “misspelling” (i.e., mistakes in reproduction) creates billions of trial-and error genetic variations. When a survival advantage is discovered (such as antibiotic resistance in a strain of bacteria), that beneficial gene can be transferred in various ways across many species, but for maximum impact over great distances, viral transfer is the vehicle of choice. Thus, millions of species of microorganisms work toward one goal, which isn’t to harm us, but to maintain a stable biodiverse ecosystem everywhere on earth.

The upshot is the change of worldview mentioned at the outset. A viable, balanced, dynamic, healthy microbiome (the sum total of all micro-organisms) benefits human beings far more than our self-centered, shortsighted focus on money, power, war, nationalism, endless consumerism chained to massive pollution, and the chemical degradation of our air, food, and water.

Viruses have long dispersed their vital genetic information throughout the planet via air and water currents.  The messages they carry are picked up by many species, including us., Each individual takes up a viral load on the basis of its own stress levels. For many people there are no clinical signs or symptoms of acute illness as cells of various organ systems integrate or reject the new genetic data, while for others the viral stress signal can call up an immune response from cell populations. Life adapts, and we humans are made more resilient by the encounter. That is how viral communication has worked for billions of years, and the latest findings have revealed that our own genome was built by genetic data from bacteria, fungi and other multicellular species. In concert they created the profound complexity and resilience of human biology.

But we have changed the playing field for the critical balance of viral communication, and COVID-19, when seen on a global scale, represents the continued effort of the four-billion-year-old microbiome seeking to put things right. In the old worldview, this is irrelevant. The only measure has been an either-or choice: Either things are good for human prosperity or bad for it. In the new worldview, there is no either-or. What is good for the global microbiome is good for the planet and for us. As self-aware creatures, we can support life or diminish its chance for survival. In short, a new world, if it emerges in the coming decade, will make choices that benefit the microbiome and us at the same time. 

It will take a shift in worldview for that to transpire. The separate elements for global healing are already present and known to everyone. But humans can be perverse as well as shortsighted. Achieving the abolition of global pesticides, herbicides, indiscriminate antibiotics, and carbon emissions is essential, and only our irrational resistance to reality, bound up with an outmoded, self-destructive worldview, keeps us on the downward path. The pleas for life-enhancing choices has proved ineffectual so far. In the name of healing and the salvation of life on Earth, no one can alter the course of destruction except us.

-- Zach Bush MD and Deepak Chopra™ MD


DEEPAK CHOPRA™ MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation, a non-profit entity for research on well-being and humanitarianism, and Chopra Global, a modern-day health company at the intersection of science and spirituality, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation. Chopra is a Clinical Professor of Family Medicine and Public Health at the University of California, San Diego and serves as a senior scientist with Gallup Organization. He is the author of over 89 books translated into over forty-three languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His 90th book, Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential, unlocks the secrets to moving beyond our present limitations to access a field of infinite possibilities. TIME magazine has described Dr. Chopra as “one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century.”

ZACH BUSH, MD is an internationally recognized educator and thought leader on the microbiome as it relates to ecology, human health, and consciousness. Board certified in Internal Medicine, Endocrinology and Metabolism, and Hospice Care, his published biomedical research ranges from chemotherapy development to the role of the microbiome and agricultural toxins in human health and disease. He is founder and CEO of Seraphic Group, Inc., an IP development firm committed to developing root-cause solutions to bring balance to the biome of our planet. His non-profit, Farmer’s Footprint, is raising awareness of the synonymous nature of human and soil health, and working to create a roadmap to end chemical food production and ecologic destruction through the universal adoption of regenerative agriculture.

The Case Against Riots

One recent-history perspective on the use of riots:

In the origin myth of post-1960s liberalism, all the defeats that the Democratic Party suffered in the years of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan were owed to the party’s heroic support for civil rights, which rectified a great injustice but opened the way for the Republicans to build majorities on racial backlash.

The riots of the ’60s, from Watts to Washington, D.C., were only part of this story; the wider surge of murder, battery and theft probably mattered as much to realignment. But there is a striking pattern of evidence, teased out in the research of the Princeton political scientist Omar Wasow, showing how peaceful civil rights protests helped Democrats win white votes, and then violence pushed white voters toward Republicans.  Continue here....

-- Ross Douthat

Photo Op - Really?

In the Year of Permutations

'Poem selection' for the week -- "In the Year of Permutations":

Go live with yourself after what you didn’t do.

Go and be left behind. Pre-package
                 your defense, tell yourself

                                you were doing
      your oath, guarding the futility of
            
         your corrupted good,

      discerning the currency of some.

                   As if them over all else.
                        Over us.
                     Above God and Spirit.
                                        
                 You over me, you think.

This is no shelter in justice not sheltering with
enclosure of soft iron a sheltering of injustices
into an inferno flooding of your crimes committed
and sheltered by most culprit of them all.

            These nesting days come
outward springs of truth,

            dismantle the old structures,

their impulse for colony—I am done
                             with it, the likes of you.

To perpetrate.
To perpetrate lack of closure, smolders of unrest.
To perpetrate long days alone, centuries gone deprived.

                 To be complicit in adding to the
      perpetration of power on a neck,
                 there and shamed,

                   court of ancestors to disgrace
    you, seeing and to have done nothing.

Think you can be like them.

Work like them.
Talk like them.

Never truly to be accepted,
                        always a pawn.

-- Mai Der Vang


From the author:

“I wrote this poem while sheltering-in and also feeling deeply outraged by the recent murder of George Floyd by the police, including the Hmong officer who stood by and did nothing. I am incensed by the long history of institutional violence and the harboring of inherent racist ideologies carried out by the criminal justice system and law enforcement. To watch and do nothing will not dismantle these structures put in place by the colonizer. Our liberation is bound together.”

The System

Instagram: brenebrown

The system is not broken.
It was built this way.

-- Brené Brown

To change it, we are going to have to un-build it in order to re-build it.

In Yoda-ese:  effort in specific forms, it will take.

What We Actually Do

Those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.

-- George Bernard Shaw


People will figure out what we really believe, by seeing what we actually do.

-- Bob Goff

Black Lives Matter

Resistance

I've noticed...that I sometimes resist things, because of ways I've felt resisted by others.  Not something I'm particularly proud of, but good for me to be aware of.

In other words, resistance isn’t something confined just to other people—it is in me as well.

I wonder how far my resistance would go, if pressed hard enough—if I felt desperate enough.

And, if I was that desperate, would I resist the same way I had been resisted?

In other words, if I (or someone I loved) had been the victim of specific and systemic violence, would my method of resistance not be the use of specific and systemic violence?  If you use power over me, what else would I resort to than to try to use power...to stop your power.  If you try to destroy me and what I love, would I not instinctively try to destroy you to stop you from continuing?

I can't really say in good faith, can I, that I really just don't understand...how people can react with violence?  That seems like a kind of denial; an avoidance of the truth; even a convenient dishonesty.  I'm afraid I would do the same thing, at least instinctively.


...unless we are shown another way to resist—to be more human in it.  We are the ones who must show what it means to be truly human...as a means of resistance.  But it requires action, especially now, to show this alternative way...in order to be it.