niktemadur

the problem is fear mongering by the likes of Fox

And that’s how you keep rednecks from red states feeling superior… through outright lying.

Back in the Cold War days, Albania was the poorest and most undernourished country in all of Europe, yet the population believed they were the richest.
The method for spreading this type of lie has been adopted and polished by the right-wing propaganda machine.

Who’s doing the work in the fields?
Immigrants, mostly from Latin America.

Blatant hysterical lies do not fall under “news” nor “entertainment”, rather under propaganda.

Halfway between a pizza and a pineapple!

Echoes of The Graduate…

“I’ve got one word for you, Benjamin. One word only. Are you listening?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Plastics.”

Meditation is better advice. By which I mean doing the exercises to approach grounding oneself in the present, sensing and feeling things from that perspective, instead of the YESTERDAY and TOMORROW clashing storms inside our minds.
But one can’t just start meditating one day - “from zero to sixty”, so to speak - and expect immediate results. It’s a discipline, like brushing your teeth every day.

You know… I’ve never really thought about it that way, but my three favorites may be the same most watched.
2001: A Space Odyssey
The Empire Strikes Back
Miller’s Crossing

Sometimes I’ll watch Miller’s Crossing with English subtitles/captions, just to take in all that insane and masterful dialogue, it truly is as if William Shakespeare had written a 1920s mob tragicomedy.

You ain’t got a license to kill bookies and today I ain’t sellin’. So take your flunky and dangle!

Isn’t Grosse Pointe Blank from around '98 or ‘99?
That’s when VHS was on its’ very last legs. I think my first DVD player was from around 2001, by that time the graph line of DVD rising and VHS falling had already intersected, and this was in Mexico, I’m not sure when other parts of the world made the transition, say in the US, Europe or Japan it happened earlier.

That mid-Almodovar peak was incredible, now that you mention it. My personal favorite from that time has to be Habla Con Ella (Talk To Her), in parallel Woody Allen filmography terms I would equate it with Hannah & Her Sisters, in artistic achievement.

Barry Lyndon is currently a rising “underrated masterpiece” topic with most of the best film critic podcasters. My personal favorite film has nearly always been 2001: A Space Odyssey, but I just recently rewatched Barry Lyndon and man… in any other filmography this would have stood alone at the top.
And we still have the rest of Kubrick’s work to contend with… Dr. Strangelove, The Shining, Paths Of Glory, Eyes Wide Shut… it’s just ridiculous.

For a long time now, I’ve regarded two people as my artistic heroes of the 20th century: Stanley Kubrick and John Coltrane. Mark Rothko could be up there, too, I cannot imagine my day-to-day life without his work to stop and look at, or to simply have as a presence in my surroundings.

“…the Rat Pack one with Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin!”
Imagine some crazy guy saying that.

This list of yours needs Werner Herzog’s Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo in there.

Oh lord… I LOVE Another Green World like few other albums in this world. Up there with Talk Talk’s Spirit Of Eden and Laughing Stock, in my book.

A blunt rewording of Seneca and Stoicism, leaning on the fatalism.

But now if I want to feel the spiritual and connectedness, I much prefer something like Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks (I see your username and salute!), or John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme. Stuff that challenges as it illuminates.
Musically, I’ve always been an enthusiastic searcher and have yet to stop delving, decades later.

One album that was tagged as New Age in the 80s that I still listen to every day - I use it for stretching before meditation - is Brian Eno’s Music For Airports.
In the 80s, Ambient and New Age were clumped together uneasily but we didn’t know better, until Techno came along and Ambient instantly found its’ proper, logical home.

For a taste of some of the sound of groups like Wyndham Hill or Mannheim Steamroller - every element of rock n roll completely absent, a bit of medieval vibe wafting throughout - I now prefer a band like Pentangle.

There’s one song I’d like to recommend to you at this moment - I can’t get it out of my mind right now as I write - I discovered it about a year ago thanks to fantastic UK music monthly Uncut Magazine, it is closer in spirit to Brian Eno and it may have shot all the way to my #1 favorite piece of music ever. Listen to it in a quiet place, or with headphones. Often. This piece has a way of unfurling differently every time you hear it.

Cluster - “Zum Wohl”

“Live on, survive, for the Earth gives forth wonders. It may swallow your heart, but the wonders keep on coming. You stand before them bareheaded, shriven. What is expected of you is attention.”

Salman Rushdie, from The Ground Beneath Her Feet.

A more recent one, meditation-related, short and simple and I have no idea who said it, I just happened to catch it a couple of years ago on a website-that-shall-not-be-named:

“I am not my thoughts.”

Here’s one out of my many “what was I thinking?” moments, this one from the eighties: A friend had this album that I taped and often listened to for at least a few months.
Andreas Vollenweider… “New Age” music with a harp at the front and center.

did the wave function even collapse or are we just one of the possible outcomes inside of it?

If you are asking the question, wouldn’t you be observing it, therefore the wave function most certainly did collapse?

I’m hearing the echo of Descartes in there. I think, therefore I am.
EDIT: “I ask, therefore I have observed, therefore the Universe is”.

And here’s the other thing I try to visualize:
Matter - both dark and “normal” - falling like water into these gravitational canyons that we see as giant strings, while the empty spaces in between expand and accelerate. The dynamics of this thing are mind-breaking.

He plans to keep it as a private foundation that is using a donation model to keep it going.

I abandoned Whatsapp several years ago and since then have used Signal nearly every day (to keep in touch with a handful of friends), have had a recurring monthly donation set up for a couple of years now.

One on the one hand there’s the privacy, but what clinched it for me originally was the ability to seamlessly switch from my tablet to the cellphone to the desktop, all Apple. Signal was (and probably still is) better at this than Whatsapp.

“I don’t want to give Zuckerberg all my information for free, or ever, at all” - is what I’ve said to people when they ask why I don’t have Whatsapp. For the most part, they shrug as if to say “fair enough”. By and large, it’s become an acceptable reason.

Through the past few years, I’ve been communicating with my five best friends via Signal. They installed the app and started using it just to stay in touch with me. Like I said - best friends, they did that for me.

But their gesture have been rewarded…! …with Twitter-thread-style text walls from Yours Truly! About whatever subject is on my mind that night.

From the 70s films of Robert Altman, to the impact of The Stone Roses on 90s British music, to the difference between Baroque and Rococo, to Major League Baseball rule changes, to Bitcoin miners in Xinjiang and Kazakhstan, to Neutrino Cosmic Background Radiation, to good ol’ fashioned meme shitposting - surreal memes, recursive memes, dank memes, bone hurting juice… you name it, we got it.

So far, they don’t seem to mind it too much. It doesn’t happen every day and I gotta feel inspired, as opposed to bored texting.