Edition IV - 2021 

THE INTERESTING STUFF 

Here are some of the stories that are capturing our attention at the moment.

Chinese Hackers and API

Chinese hackers have taken control of the world's servers, somehow surprising Cloud computing technologists who gave them the keys. Use this link.  

Living to Work a Long, Long Time

If you are five years old and reading this, you are amazing but not nearly as amazing as you'll be when you are 100 years old and still working. Use this link. 

Binge Watching Jesus

A group called Angel Studios is using crowd funding to develop seasons worth of dramatic retellings of the story of Jesus. It seems to be working. Use this link.   

Study Suggests Evolution Pattern 

It turns out that elected officials slide into alarmingly polarized patterns of behavior as they flock together in the nests of political power. It is part of why we are doomed. Use this link.

Iconic Brainiacs Not All That

Oh-oh, it turns out the guy performing your brain surgery isn't any smarter than you are. Use this link.

The Church of MyResearch

Google, Bing and the other search engines have given ordinary people the impression that they can figure things out for themselves, sometimes leading them to some really strange conclusions. Use this link.

The Sun Will (Not) Shine Tomorrow

Researchers are learning that people are depressed and lacking optimism for the future, but sleeping more helps. Use this link.

________________________  

Close Encounters, Interior Kind  

This is one of the more intriguing stories I have heard of late. 

It seems obvious to me that people who have experiences outside of the usual are influenced in dramatic ways. They become changed. It often shows up in forms of obsession. People report seeing Bigfoot and then spend the rest of their lives trying to have another such encounter to confirm for themselves that they saw what they saw. A number of the Navy personnel who encountered the now-famous "Tic-Tac" phenomena report that they are haunted by shared dreams of Armageddon. 

In the cases explored for this story below, shared responses of "experiencers" seem to have shown up in medical imaging. A Stanford University researcher headed down this path of discovery after first being asked to investigate the also now-famous Atacama skeleton, the remains of a tiny being discovered in Peru, long a hot-bed of strange, UFO-related phenomenon. 

He identified the remains as human, but that of a human deformed by abnormalities in its genetic makeup. This set him on a years-long study of the brains of people who have reported encounters with UFOs and extraterrestrials, and he noticed a scarring that would eventually take the lives of many of these people. 

They had experiences that may have caused there to be "an 'over-connection of neurons between the head of the caudate and the putamen.'” It is a condition now being seen in people complaining of the yet-to-be-understood "Havana Syndrome", which the U.S. Intelligence community suspects is being created by a yet-to-be-understood Russian technology. 

The Stanford research seems to have immediately garnered the attention of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). As this story mentions, this all comes at a time when the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) have announced their openness to the possibility of extraterrestrial life, and the Chinese report finding a structure on the dark side of the Moon.

A look inside people’s brains who say they’ve had a UFO encounter

TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE

 

Citizen Arrest/Right to Defend

If you happen to live in the U.S., there is a good chance that you have a right to act as a private citizen in enacting a “citizen arrest”. 

Most states have determined that anyone can appoint themselves to deal with others who contravene laws, including acts of felony, misdemeanor, and "breach of peace", this providing you witness the crime as it is being committed. 

The details of how this might work depend upon the state a person happens to self-appoint in, so in Wisconsin and Georgia, where people are legally allowed to carry firearms, we have recently experienced events that have challenged our notions of what it is to live in an ordered society: the Kyle Rittenhouse case in Wisconsin, and the Amaud Arbery case in Georgia. 

Are we free to fire? If you are a self-appointed law enforcer, carrying a weapon, and out on the streets doing your thing, with or without training, and some perpetrator of a crime resists your attempts to enforce your understanding of the law, can you just shoot him? 

The answer is “probably, yes”, if somehow the action includes having the criminal perpetrator bring threat against you. That is depending upon the state in which the incident takes place. 

We saw that happen in Florida, with the George Zimmerman shooting of Trayvon Martin. And we just saw that in Wisconsin, with the Rittenhour case. 

Second Amendment enthusiasts argue that crime will come under control when regular folk are all packing firearms, though we have mass shootings every day in America, including in open firearm carry states, and rarely does a public hero save the day by gunning down an active shooter. Cops are even challenged to accomplish that, because U.S. gun laws allow people to use military assault weapons, which regular cops don’t even carry. 

While institutional barriers to firearm sanity erode and crumble, there is a parallel development taking place in which people are resisting legitimate police authority. A message has gone out that police authority is violently racist and corrupt, and it behooves no one to do anything less than resist their demands. 

You probably have the right to defend yourself in any situation, right? If the person trying to arrest you is not someone you deem to have legal or moral authority, do you not have the right to resist? 

The structural collapse of our institutions has created a future filled with contradiction and conflict, citizen against citizen, and citizen against institutional authority. It has encouraged fear in people, which has fed the political right wing with justification for anti-government and racist sentiments, an embrace of distorted nationalism and fascism. 

And in the political left, it has created a strong sense of a now moment in history when society’s ills can no longer be ignored. 

The left hasn’t found a way to constructively address its concerns. The right doesn’t care about anybody’s feelings. And somehow their monstrous marriage has created a violent bastard child, torn between polar extremes of entitlement and woke idealism. - RAR

 ______________________________

EDITOR'S NOTE: Google places advertisements on this site based on their algorithms' generalities regarding content on the site. This leads to some odd ad placements that in no way reflect the nature of Revolution Culture Journal. This site neither encourages nor condones violence of any kind. We are anti-gun and opposed to any interpretation of the Second Amendment that would confer upon any individual the right to carry a gun. Even if the founders' language could be construed in that way, it would be a stupid thing to encourage and is certainly not condoned by this site.  

The Tucker Carlson Illusion

It seems that only the competing cable channels are really concerned about the propaganda channel Fox News. CNN and MSNBC go on about Fox constantly. 

It hardly matters, in the overall scheme of things, as almost no one other than people really locked into political obsession are watching. 

From a Google search of “who is the biggest cable news draw”: According to live-plus-same-day data from Nielsen, Fox News' 8 p.m. offering Tucker Carlson Tonight was the No. 1 cable news show for the third quarter of 2021, not just in average total audience (3.24 million), but also among adults 25-54 (549,000). According to government research (see https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-7/television-capturing-americas-attention.htm), the 8 to 9 p.m. slot is the hottest slot in television. Sixty percent of Americans who watch television, watch television during that time slot. In a country of 330 million people, 0.009 percent are watching Tucker Carlson, America’s most popular cable news personality. 

What has amplified Tucker Carlson’s little voice is the internet, where followers can share Tucker’s reportage. There it finds a receptive audience of echo bots who broadcast Carlson’s essential attitude, which is far more potent than his diatribes, which seem to be knowingly filled with factual inaccuracies. That is the nature of propaganda media, so to the Left Tucker Carlson is in a league with Joseph Goebbels, the chief propagandist for the Third Reich. And to the Right, he is a truth teller, a guy who speaks truth to power. 

He is also a guy who recognizes opportunity, as he has recently by embedding a documentary crew with Kyle Rittenhouse. Knowing Wisconsin law would preclude a guilty verdict, Carlson’s team has erected a mythical persona for Rittenhouse, describing him as a young man on a hero’s journey, ala Joseph Campbell creating myth and mythology.

Dump our Obsolete Institutions

Here at the Revolution Culture Journal, we have some strong feelings about a lot of what we do in America, namely that a lot of it should not continue to exist in its present forms. 

_________________________________

Does Any of this Work for You?

DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA: The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs reported recently that just 16% of Americans surveyed think democracy in the U.S. is working "well" or "extremely well," while 38% said it is only working somewhat well. 

GUNRIGHTS: According to HealdData.org, among “high-income countries with populations of 10 million or more,” the U.S. experiences 4.12 firearm homicides per 10,000 population. (Chile is second at 1.82, then Canada at .5.) Around 15,000 Americans die that way every year. That is only 37 percent of the deaths resulting from firearms. People mostly use guns to commit suicide, or they kill themselves accidentally. From 2006-2016, just under 7,000 people in the U.S. died from unintentional shootings. Accidental gun deaths occur mainly to those under 25 years old. In 2014, 2,549 children (age 0-19) died by gunshot and an additional 13,576 were injured (see reference). The U.S. has had 1,316 school shootings since 1970 and these numbers are increasing. (See reference.

PUBLIC SCHOOL SYSTEM: Among 79 advanced countries, USA ranks ninth in reading and 31st in math literacy (see reference).  According to a Business Insider report in 2018, students in the U.S. ranked 38th in math scores and 24th in science. 

U.S. CAPITALISM: In the United States, the richest 1 percent of Americans own 40 percent of the country’s wealth, while a larger share of working-age people (18-65) live in poverty than in any other nation belonging to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (O.E.C.D.). (See reference). Only 10 percent of American wage and salaried workers carry union cards. The United States scored 0.3, tied for second to last place with Malaysia. How easy is it to fire workers? Countries like Indonesia (4.1) and Portugal (3) have strong rules about severance pay and reasons for dismissal. Those rules relax somewhat in places like Denmark (2.1) and Mexico (1.9). They virtually disappear in the United States, ranked dead last out of 71 nations with a score of 0.5. 

U.S. HEALTHCARE: Despite spending far more on healthcare than other high-income nations, the US scores poorly on many key health measures, including life expectancy, preventable hospital admissions, suicide, and maternal mortality. (See reference.) Prescription Drug Prices in the United States Are 2.56 Times Those in Other Countries. Prescription drug prices in the United States are significantly higher than in other nations, with prices in the United States averaging 2.56 times those seen in 32 other nations, according to a new RAND Corporation report. (See reference.) 

COVID-19 VACCINATIONS: Since Delta began circulating widely in the U.S., Covid has exacted a horrific death toll on red America: In counties where Donald Trump received at least 70 percent of the vote, the virus has killed about 47 out of every 100,000 people since the end of June, according to Charles Gaba, a health care analyst. In counties where Trump won less than 32 percent of the vote, the number is about 10 out of 100,000. (See reference.)

Alex Jones Suspects Joe Biden of Weaponizing the Weather

Madness mogul Alex Jones, fresh off his courtroom defeats related to his conspiracy theories around the Sandy Hook school shootings, is now pretty certain Joe Biden is causing terrible weather events.   

Alex Jones Wonders If Joe Biden Used 'Weather Weapons' To Cause Deadly Tornadoes

The RCJ doubts that President Biden is really manipulating the planet for his barely left of center "socialist" purposes, but throwing water on Jones' paranoia is perhaps not the most prudent thing one might do.

Scientists at the University of Colorado are reporting that their attempts to alter weather conditions - specifically to seed clouds and bring rain - have been working!

Controversial practice of seeding clouds to create rainfall becoming popular in the American West

Cloud seeding has been practiced for decades, but the problem has been quantifying its success. Weather is chaos, influenced by microclimates and all kinds of physics impossible for accurate prediction, so cloud seeders have never been certain if rain was caused by their technological intervention, or if it was going to fall anyway. Now, it sounds like researchers are finding ways to put an ROI on cloud seeding practices.  

As for Alex Jones' wild accusations, he could be forgiven for knowing things that he knows not what to do with. His conspiracy world feeds that confusion, for some of what Alex hears and says is true.

Weather, for instance, can be manipulated as the University of Colorado people are apparently showing. And have you heard about the Gateway Arch of St. Louis? Of course you have, everybody has. But did you know that it was designed to control the weather?

The Arch’s TRUE Purpose Revealed? Gateway Arch Built to Control Weather, Claims Builder

 The RCJ doesn't know if the Gateway Arch story is true, but if it is then they need to build one of those on the south side of Oklahoma City because that place seems to get hit with every major tornado outbreak that comes through that state.  

Proposing a Better Way of Schooling our Kids 

As a Baby Boomer who was almost 43 when my first child was born, and as someone long-married to a woman with long experience in California’s school systems, I have come to these conclusions: 

• My kids faced public school experiences unlike anything that I experienced when I was a school-aged kid. This includes bullying and violence, a disintegration of classroom decorum, and abdication of responsibility and authority on the part of litigation-fearing school administrators. 

• Public schools today function as day care programs and food services more than they do as educational facilities. 

• Kids come out of their middle school and high school experiences scarred in ways that affect them for the rest of their lives, usually limiting their future successes. 

We have tons of data to tell us how well our present approach to public school education is working, and not working, all of which has to do with the choices we have made as a society. 

We have institutionalized our children in ways similar to what we have done with incarcerated criminals, forcing more-and-more students into fewer-and-fewer facilities. In 1937, more than 119,000 public school districts operated in the United States. That number had fallen to around 13,500 by 2011. 

In 2020, there were 67, 408 elementary schools and 30,160 public secondary schools. There are around 7,400 public charter schools in the U.S., and more than 32,000 private schools. 

The U.S. education system, like the U.S. healthcare system, often ranks #1 in reports produced based on total dollars spent in those areas, but the U.S. has more money to spend than most countries and our return-on-investment stinks. According to a Business Insider report in 2018, the U.S. ranked 38th in math scores and 24th in science. We are in a three-decade long slide against international standards, the blame usually being put on government spending that doesn’t keep up with inflation. (In healthcare, the U.S. spends vastly more and yet fields fewer physicians, provides fewer hospital beds and fewer technological resources, like CT scanners, than do countries like Germany, where you also have university educations provided free of charge.) 

Our public-school systems don’t seem to be designed to produce any result beyond day care. And for that reason, I would propose that we dump our entire public school system and rebuild another based on specific curricula designed to the specific interests of individual students. I would suggest that we develop, starting with Grade 1, schools where similarly-minded students study disciplines of shared interest. For instance: 

• Mechanical Engineering – students would study mechanics in all forms, including construction, plumbing, auto engineering, and power systems. 

• Math and Science – students would explore our universe in all of its extraordinary aspects, and those concepts in math and science that open up our understanding of the world’s dynamics. 

• Music and Arts – students would learn how to play musical instruments, read and write notation, study geometric form and perspective, and learn about those concepts and resources that support creative, artistic pursuits, and how they influence societies. 

• Communications Media - students would learn about concepts and resources for communicating thoughts and ideas, including literature and journalism and supporting technologies. 

• Athletics – while participating in sports, students would study anatomy, physical sciences, sports conditioning, and study sports in detail, including abstract concepts like play design, skills, and team development. 

• Life Sciences – students would study home economics in all of its aspects, including food preparation, homemaking, and the management of life operations. 

• Business Administration – students would study organizational and management practices, including accounting, logistical operations, and human resources. 

• Agriculture and Horticultural Sciences, Animal Husbandry – students would study farming, gardening, animal husbandry, crop sciences and related feilds. 

All of these disciplines should be provided in separate facilities where learning is experiential and students are involved in activities specific to their reason for being in that particular school. And students should be allowed to change schools to delve into the various learning environments to find where they feel most comfortable. This would assist that slow rollout humans experience in trying to figure out who they are in life, and how they might fit in. 

In each school, beyond the main curriculum, students would learn those basic, transferable skills (like reading and writing, and analyzing problems and thinking up solutions) that would equip them to move between these various disciplines as they see fit. 

Those basic skills, withering in our current system, would become obvious building blocks toward achievement in students’ chosen environments. Learning would have purpose, and students would graduate, not with scars but with skills. 

I’d bet all the money you’ve got that, were this system instituted, we could fix much of what ails young America in less than a single generation. We would pull legitimate professionals into the educational system, and America would prosper, counter to the trajectory we are currently on with regard to the future of education in the U.S. - RAR

 


Contact Us

 
 Grass Valley, California
P: (530) 446-6021 

Social

 Archived Editions

About Us

RARWRITER Publishing produces several websites covering a range of subjects from arts & entertainment to politics, public policy, and environmental issues. See the links provided to access those sites.