It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
UNITED STATES /POLICE BRUTALITY- 06/05/2020 Did the TV show The Simpsons predict the protest movement that has swept the United States after the murder of George Floyd on May 25? You might mistakenly think so if you’ve come across several fakes screengrabs that have gone viral in recent days.
When there are similarities between things that have happened in the real world and various scenes from the 31 seasons of the American animated series The Simpsons, fans often interpret them as predictions. Recently, a series of fake screengrabs have gone viral, making it look as if the writers of The Simpsons predicted the Covid-19 pandemic, the death of basketball star Kobe Bryant and the meeting between President Donald Trump and Greta Thunberg.
There are also fake screengrabs circulating online that make it look like the writers of The Simpsons predicted the murder of George Floyd, a black American who was killed by a police officer and his colleagues on May 25 as well as the protests that ensued.
The arrest
Posts shared hundreds of thousands of times, especially on Twitter, claimed that an episode of The Simpsons (some posts specified it was from the 90s) included a scene eerily similar to the arrest that ended in George Floyd’s murder. Facebook user Chirz posted in French: "Do you think Trump will survive? Because it’s not over yet #anonymus #Anonymous"
Turns out, however, that two independent cartoonists made these images in reaction to these events, not before. A reverse image search (check out how to run one yourself by clicking here) pulls up the original tweets by these two artists sharing the images for the first time. The duo often produce Simpson spoofs, to make fun of celebrities, for example, or to encourage people to respect lockdown
The Simpsons did it again... From the 1990's????#Anonymouspic.twitter.com/FP6GMA7eaL Minal khan ✊???? (@model_hun) June 1, 2020 Mais ces deux images ont en fait été réalisées par deux dessinateurs indépendants en réaction à l'événement - et non antérieurement. Une recherche d'images inversée (voir ici comment procéder) permet de retrouver les tweets d'origine de ces deux artistes, qui ont d’ailleurs l’habitude de publier des détournements des Simpson, par exemple pour caricaturer des célébrités ou pour inciter à respecter le confinement.
Protests
Aside from the fake screengrabs that supposedly predict Floyd’s arrest and murder, other images have also been circulating that claim to show the the writers of The Simpsons also predicted the ensuing protests and unrest.
A police station in Minneapolis was burned down during protests on May 28. But, as highlighted by fact-checkers at Snopes, the photo of a building on fire that appeared in numerous tweets has nothing to do with that event it’s actually a building near the station under construction. Moreover, the fire in the police station in Springfield, the town where The Simpsons takes place has nothing to do with protests. The scene is from episode 6 of season 11 and it makes fun of the police chief’s failure to act as the building burns behind him
DESPITE SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, THIS REMAINS FOR ME ONE OF THE CLASSIC WWII MOVIES BRUTAL AND HONEST FOR 1962. MY OTHER FAVORITE IS CROSS OF IRON, WHICH GIVES THE GERMAN SIDE.
The events of D-Day, told on a grand scale from both the Allied and German points of view. 1962 epic war film based on Cornelius Ryan's 1959 book The Longest Day, about the D-Day landings at Normandy on June 6, 1944, during World War II. LIKE PRIVATE RYAN THIS TOO SHOWS THE MASS DEATH OF AMERICAN GI.'S AT NORMANDY, ITS NOT THAT THE YANKS WON THE WAR, AS THEY LIKE TO SAY, ITS CAUSE THEY LOST THE MOST MEN ON D-DAY WHICH SAYS SOMETHING ABOUT THEIR COMMAND ABILITY AFTER THE FAILURES OF DEIPPE AND DUNKIRK BOTH USED CANADIAN TROOPS AS SACRFICIAL LAMBS, BUT WE DON'T GO AROUND SAYING WE WON WWI OR WWII FOR THE ALLIES.
TRUMP MINI-ME Bolsonaro threatens to quit WHO as Covid-19 kills 'a Brazilian per minute' Issued on: 06/06/2020
NBA legend Michael Jordan pledges $100 million to social justice groups
Michael Jordan said Friday he is making a record $100 million donation to groups fighting for racial equality and social justice amid a wave of protests across the United States.
The NBA legend said in a statement his Jordan Brand would distribute the money over 10 years to different organisations in a bid to stamp out "ingrained racism."
The pledge is believed to be the largest financial contribution to non-profit groups ever made by a figure from the sports world.
"It's 2020 and our family now includes anyone who aspires to our way of life," a joint statement from Jordan and his Jordan Brand said. "Yet as much as things have changed the worst remains the same.
"Black lives matter. This isn't a controversial statement. Until the ingrained racism that allows our country's institutions to fail is completely eradicated, we will remain committed to protecting and improving the lives of Black people," the statement added.
"Today we are announcing that Michael Jordan and Jordan Brand will be donating $100 million over the next 10 years to organisations dedicated to ensuring racial equality, social justice and greater access to education."
Jordan's donation comes after a week of unprecedented nationwide protests across the United States following the death of an unarmed black man during an arrest in Minneapolis.
Large scale demonstrations have been held in all 50 states, with protesters demanding an end to police brutality and systemic racism after George Floyd's death on May 25.
'Saddened, angry'
Jordan, regarded by many as the greatest player in NBA history with an estimated net worth of $2.1 billion, had already issued a passionate statement decrying Floyd's killing.
Jordan's donation and impassioned recent statements followed criticism during his playing career over his reluctance to take a more prominent role in activist causes.
In the recent "The Last Dance" documentary, he addressed his infamous quip that he had steered clear of politics because "Republicans buy sneakers too."
Jordan said the remark had been a flippant comment made as a joke.
Michael Jordan and Jordan Brand to donate $100M over the next 10 years to causes that ensure racial equality, social justice and greater access to education. @brkickspic.twitter.com/1dw3fZqD2j— Bleacher Report (@BleacherReport) June 5, 2020
Jordan added that he never saw himself as an activist athlete in the vein of former heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali. "I do commend Muhammad Ali for standing up for what he believed in," Jordan said. "But I never thought of myself as an activist. I thought of myself as a basketball player."
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Jordan acknowledged that his apolitical stance might be viewed as selfish in some quarters.
"I wasn't a politician when I was playing my sport. I was focused on my craft," Jordan said. "Was that selfish? Probably. But that was my energy. That's where my energy was."
Jordan said he had instead sought to set an example by his achievements as an athlete.
"The way I go about my life is I set examples. If it inspires you? Great, I will continue to do that. If it doesn't? Then maybe I'm not the person you should be following."
This book sheds light on an important but neglected part of Nazi history – the contribution of new religions to the emergence of Nazi ideology in 1920s and 1930s Germany.
New Religions and the Nazis 1st Edition
Post –World War I conditions threw Germans into major turmoil. The loss of the war, the Weimar Republic and the punitive Treaty of Versailles all caused widespread discontent and resentment. As a result Germans generally and intellectuals specifically took political, paramilitary, and religious matters into their own hands to achieve national regeneration. Taken together such cultural figures as Jakob Wilhelm Hauer, Mathilde Ludendorff, Ernst Bergmann, Hans F.K. Günther, and nationalist writers like Hans Grimm created a mind-set that swept across Germany like a tidal wave. By fusing politics, religion, theology, Indo-Aryan metaphysics, literature and Darwinian science they intended to craft a new, genuinely German faith-based political community. What emerged instead was an anti-Semitic totalitarian political regime known as National Socialism. Looking at modern paganism as well as the established Church, Karla Poewe reveals that the new religions founded in the pre-Nazi and Nazi years, especially Jakob Hauer’s German Faith Movement, present a model for how German fascism distilled aspects of religious doctrine into political extremism.
New Religions and the Nazis addresses one of the most important questions of the twentieth century – how and why did Germans come to embrace National Socialism? Researched from original documents, letters and unpublished papers, including the SS personnel files held in the German Federal Archives, it is an absorbing and fresh approach to the difficulties raised by this deeply significant period of history.
FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE SPECIAL THANKS TO New Age "Asiatic" thought ... is establishing itself as the hegemonic ideology of global capitalism. (Zizek) SATURDAY, MARCH 18, 2006 FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE Came across a book today that was published just a year ago by Cambridge University Press: Russian Roots of Nazism: White Émigrés and the Making of National Socialism 1917-1945. Bummer that it costs 80 bucks. No wonder nobody ever hears about these things. Saul Friedlander of Tel Aviv University says... Kellogg's work succeeds in introducing a dimension never so thoroughly explored: the essential impact on early Nazi world-view of ideological elements and political themes carried over to Germany by White-Russian émigrés. Hmmm... And an Amazon reader-reviewer writes: "I strongly recommend this book which should be read alongside Karla Poewe New Religions and the Nazis" -- which I first mentioned a month ago in connection with the esoteric Yoga "scholarship" of Nazi German Faith Movement leader Jakob Wilhelm Hauer. There is also much fascinating occult -- and just plain bizarre -- Russian background in the literally wonder-full Tournament of Shadows: The Great Game and the Race for Empire in Central Asia, including, lots of stuff about Madame Blavatsky. Russia... double hmmm. In my post of 27 December last year, The Russians Are Coming, I included a quote from Gurdjieff: The Key Concepts about the proliferation of occultism in Russia. Here it is again... Moscow and St. Petersburg were centres for the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century occult revival. From 1881 to 1918 thirty occult journals and more than 800 occult titles were published in Russia, reflecting interests in spiritualism, Theosophy, Rosicrucianism, alchemy, psycho-graphology, phrenology, hypnotism, Egyptian religions, astrology, chiromancy, animal magnetism, fakirism, telepathy, the Tarot, black and white magic, and Freemasonry (Carlson 1993: 22). Gurdjieff took notice of contemporary interests and presented his teaching accordingly. The cosmological form of his teaching was fully outlined between 1914 and 1918 in a form that takes account of the occult revival in Russia.Tournament of Shadows certainly corroborates that statement, and adds much detail. For instance (p. 234): At Tashilhunpo, seat of the Tashi or Panchen Lama, [George] Bogle heard about "Shambul." Madame Blavatsky, founder of Theosophy, kept the legend alive, offering a geographic variation in The Secret Doctrine (1888), writing that "fabled Shambhallah, the headquarters of the Mahatmas, the sacred brotherhood" was located "somewhere in the Gobi." To see where I, up-close-and-personal-like, came in on all this -- and part of the reason I'm writing this book -- clap your hands together while repeating "I want to Tinkerbell to live!" Then click the graphic... Whoops, sorry. Looks like you didn't clap hard enough. But back to Tournament of Shadows, the story continues (p. 242) with a description of a trip to Ceylon in 1891 by the young Tzar-to-be, Nicholas II, and his considerable entourage... Now his imperial highness informs the Russian Consul in Colombo that he wishes to "have the honor of meeting" Colonel Olcott (1832-1907), a retired American officer who sports an enormous Santa Claus beard and is the champion of a worldwide Buddhist revival. It happens that Henry Steel Olcott, now resident in Colombo (the Sinhalese are Buddhists), is also the "chum" and associate of the Tsar's compatriot Helena P. Blavatsky. Together in 1875 they founded the Theosophical Society. Imagine: Madame B. hangin' with the Tzar. Who knew? The answer to that one, apparently, is damn few -- then or now. The history is there if you know what you're looking for and you dig for it like a demented dog. That would be me, rabidly indefatigable in the cause of grinding new lenses for a credulous world so awash in the occult it can no longer see the trees for the forest. Carl Solomon, I am with your mother, baby, standing in the shadows. Howl on that. One more clip from Tournament, this one concerning the set designer (and so much more) for Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes production of Rite of Spring (p. 450)... The ballet's composer, Igor Stravinsky, claimed Roerich looked "as though he ought to have been a mystic or spy." In fact, recently opened intelligence archives suggest that at points in his career, he was both. Nicholas Roerich was a worthy successor to Madame Blavatsky. A Russian mystic with a devoted following, he managed like her to baffle the intelligence departments on three continents. Like her, he was a Theosophist in quest of Shambhala who eventually made his home in India. But in two respects he surpassed HPB. Roerich gave his name to an an international treaty and in America he played an off-stage role in two Presidential campaigns. And then there's a highly specialized treatise called No Religion Higher Than Truth: A History of the Theosophical Movement in Russia, 1875-1922 by Maria Carlson. Its publisher (Princeton UP) says... Among the various kinds of occultism popular during the Russian Silver Age (1890-1914), modern Theosophy was by far the most intellectually significant. This contemporary gnostic gospel was invented and disseminated by Helena Blavatsky, an expatriate Russian with an enthusiasm for Buddhist thought and a genius for self-promotion. What distinguished Theosophy from the other kinds of "mysticism" -- the spiritualism, table turning, fortune-telling, and magic -- that fascinated the Russian intelligentsia of the period? In answering this question, Maria Carlson offers the first scholarly study of a controversial but important movement in its Russian context. Carlson also wrote a paper called "Fashionable Occultism: Spiritualism, Theosophy, and Hermeticism in Fin-de-siecle Russia," which was collected in The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture. In this piece, Carlson writes: Mme Blavatsky's new Theosophy seemed to offer an alternative to the dominant materialism, rationalism, and positivism of the nineteenth century. Sometimes called Neo-Buddhism, Theosophy strikes the modern student as an eclectic, syncretic, dogmatic doctrine, strongly pantheistic and heavily laced with exotic Buddhist thought and vocabulary. Combining bits and pieces of Neoplatonism, Brahminism, Buddhism, Kabbalism, Rosicrucianism, Hermeticism, and other occult doctrines, past and present, in a frequently undiscriminating philosophical mélange, Theosophy attempted to create a "scientific" religion, a modern gnosis, based on absolute knowledge of things spiritual rather than on faith. Under its Neo-Buddhism lies an essentially Judeo-Christian moral ethic tempered by spiritual Darwinism (survival of those with the "fittest spirit" or most advanced spiritual development). One might describe Theosophy as an attempt to disguise positivism as religion, an attempt that was seductive indeed in its own time, in view of the psychic tension produced at the fin de siècle by the seemingly unresolvable dichotomy between science and religion.In The New York Review of Books (subscription required), Frederick C. Crews reviewed Madame Blavatsky's Baboon: A History of the Mystics, Mediums, and Misfits Who Brought Spiritualism to America. After describing the strange attraction Blavatsky held for William Butler Yeats -- who was similarly drawn to many forms of occultism and ritual magic -- Crews writes: If Yeats's case were unique, we could dismiss it as a curious footnote to modern cultural history. But from the 1880s straight through the 1940s an imposing number of prominent figures, from Kandinsky and Mondrian through Gandhi and Nehru to Huxley and Isherwood, intersected the Theosophical orbit long enough to have their trajectory significantly altered by it. Following is Publishers Weekly brief review of Blavatsky's Baboon... Around the turn of the century, renegade Russian aristocrat Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky declared herself the chosen vessel of the wisdom of the East through her reputed contact with a dematerializing Tibetan master, who unveiled a Hidden Brotherhood located in the Himalayas and Egypt. The Theosophical Society, which she cofounded in 1875 in New York City with Civil War veteran Col. Henry Olcott, attracted a wide following with its amalgam of Hinduism, Buddhism and occultism. In this enormously entertaining, witheringly skeptical, highly colorful chronicle, British journalist Washington deflates the self-mythologizing and woolly philosophizing of theosophists and rival schools and gurus, including flamboyant Armenian-Greek mystic George Gurdjieff, Austrian philosopher/holistic healer Rudolf Steiner and Jiddu Krishnamurti, Indian ex-theosophist turned California sage. Those who came under their influence include Aldous Huxley, Katherine Mansfield, Christopher Isherwood, W.B. Yeats and Frank Lloyd Wright, making this a heady intellectual adventure as well as a clear-sighted saga of human foibles, charlatanry, bizarre antics and genuine spiritual hunger extending to New Age cults from the 1950s to the present.Am I making notes for a book that's been written dozens of times already? In my darker moments, I can begin to think so. But if that's so, why do so many people continue to be surprised by this sort of material? To wrap this up on no less depressing a note, in the end, it seems, people believe what they want to. Which I guess is why we live in the best of all possible worlds. http://mysticbourgeoisie.blogspot.com/2006/03/from-russia-with-love.html
Russia's bizarre obsession with psychics and the occult
A fortune-telling session in Moscow.Anastasiya Markelova/Sovfoto/UIG/Getty Images)
Modern Russia is, apparently, a hotbed of psychic activity. Recent reports have estimatedthat Russia's psychic industry is worth between $15 million and $2 billion. These aren't super-reliable figures, but that they exist at all indicates the scale of psychic devotion in Russia. A new book, by freelance journalist Marc Bennetts, explores the scale of this phenomenon — and the reasons behind it.
In a tweet advertising his book, Bennetts advertises stories of "Kremlin-backed psychics, 'resurrections' for $1,500 a corpse, [and] urban witches with too much make-up." His previous reporting on Russia's psychic underground, like this piece inSabotage Magazine last year, certainly delivers some equally crazy stories:
"Town halls that had once hosted Communist Party meetings [and] now saw sorcerers armed with ouija boards attempting to conjure up Lenin's spirit."
A Moscow witch who promised that her "mixture of psychic and magical abilities as yet unknown to science" could help a client land a promotion (maximum six year guarantee).
Since 2008, the Russian government has required an official license to advertise any services as "magic." In other words, the Russian state is formally licensing magicians, as well as any sorcerers, wizards, witches, or other characters who would like to sell themselves as performing magic. But it does not require a license to advertise "paranormal" services.
So why is this so prevalent?
The basic explanation offered by Bennets and others has to do with Soviet communism's collapse. Since the Warsaw Pact began falling apart in the late 80s, large numbers of Russians turned to psychic and spiritual beliefs to make up for the ideological void that communism left.
Take faith healer Anatoly Kashpirovsky, who first became famous in October 1989. Kashpirovsky "would appeal to viewers to place pots and pans full of water by their television sets during his show, so that their contents would be charged with healing properties by being exposed to his waves of telepathic energy," Radio Free Europe correspondent Tom Balmforth writes in Russia Profile. According to Balmforth, a 1990 poll found that 52.3 percent of respondents believed that Kashpirovsky's techniques could cure illnesses.
Bennetts reports that Kashpirovsky began performing mass healings again in 2010, despite claims that his hypnosis sessions had driven hundreds if not thousands of people insane. And Kashpirovsky is just one man. There's a lot more in Bennetts' book, which you can buy here
The Occult in Modern Russian and
Soviet Culture AUTHOR: Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal https://www.ucis.pitt.edu/nceeer/1993-806-03-Rosenthal.pdf THE NATIONAL COUNCIL
FOR SOVIET AND EAST EUROPEAN
RESEARCH CONTENTS Summary Introduction 1 Occult as Symptom of Social and Cultural Stress 2 The Occult in Late Imperial Russia 4 Background 4 The Russian Fin de Siecle 7 Occultism in the Early Soviet Period 1 3 Stalinist Assimilation of the Occult 1 7 The Current Scene 1 8 Summary of Conference Papers 24 Annex I 28 Summary "Occult" means that which is covered or hidden . The term applies to a wide variety of doctrines and practices, ranging from elaborate belief systems such as Theosophy an d Anthroposophy to sorcery, witchcraft, and a wide-range of divinatory practices (astrology , palm-reading tarot cards, et . al), and from the seances of the Spiritualists to the orgiasti c rituals of certain sectarian cults. Occultism comes to the fore in times of social stress, cultural confusion, and religious uncertainty . The occult revival of late 19th and early 20th century Russia was a response to th e fading credibility of the Russian Orthodox Church, the spiritual/psychological inadequacy of intelligentsia ideologies, the destabilizing effects of rapid industrialization, and continue d political upheaval. Interest in the occult cut across political divisions and class lines, but ha d a special appeal to women . Sophisticated doctrines coexisted, often in the same persons , with ideas or practices taken from Kabbala, Buddhism, Yoga, Siberian shamanism, an d practices of the mystical sectarians, and folk beliefs, often taken from the pagan Slavs, in magic and "spoiling . " Occult doctrines influenced the art and thought of late Imperial Russia . Symbolist writers and painters of the era held that there was another higher world which only the artist ,with his/her special powers, could perceive . Cubo-futurist and suprematist painters belui that geometric and abstract forms constituted the authentic reality hidden beneath or beyond the illusions of empirical reality . Occult emphasis on mind-body interaction , parapsychology, and hypnotism helped set the agenda for the new science of psychology . Occultism blended with apocalypticism, and with radical political doctrines which preached the dissolution of the (egoistic) self in a larger macrocosmic Self . On the right, all sorts of demonic conspiracies were attributed to Jews and freemasons . " Occultism reached the highest circles of the Imperial Court; Rasputin was but the tip of an ice-berg . Occultism was an element in Soviet culture as well. The line between magic and science disappeared in the utopianism of the early Soviet period . Hopes formerly invested inreligion and magic were transferred to technology and science . Stalinist political culture utilized ideas taken from the occult elements in its attempt to influence the masses . Stalin' s name assumed incantational significance . Contemporary Russian occultism is fueled by destalinization, the collapse o f communism, and the resulting spiritual/cultural confusion and economic chaos . There are marked parallels to the New Age Movement in the West, but on the far right, a occul t variant of Russian messianism, seems to be developing .
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