My interests: Journalism, Politics, International Relations.
1 - The New Yorker is the best magazine in the English-speaking world. They employ very good writers. If you like deep insightful long stories, try to get it.
2 - Without The Guardian, British democracy is utterly fucked. The Brits just don’t know it. Most UK papers are owned by shady characters such as Jonathan Harmsworth. The Brits even have a paper (The Independent) owned by a Russian mobster (Evgueni Lebedev). The Guardian’s non-profit structure gives it more freedom that most UK papers. They often investigate stories the rest of the UK press just won’t touch: Paradise Papers, Panama Papers, Cameron’s tax evasion, etc…
3 - The two best newspapers in France are Le Monde and Mediapart, hands down. Mediapart is a non-profit. Le Monde journalists have special rights and can’t be removed by shareholders. These 2 newspapers are more independent than the rest of the french press.
4 - The Financial Times is the favorite newspaper of elites worldwide. CEOs. Billionaires. Millionaires. Presidents. Prime Ministers. Everyone reads it. And honestly, it’s very solid. The information is always extremely reliable. The FT is also the most expensive newspaper on the planet. But they sometimes publish free stories.
5 - The editorial section of the Wall Street Journal is directly controlled by Billionaire Rupert Murdoch. The WSJ is the jewel of his global media empire. Fox News and the New York Post are for influencing the masses. WSJ editorials actually allow him to have influence over US high income readers.
6 - If you read WSJ editorials, Rupert Murdoch’s ideas are very simple. Labor unions must be crushed. Corporate concentration is good. Netanyahu is a brave man. US military spending is good. Unions should be restricted by tough laws. Environmental rules are bad. Slash taxes on large corporations. Of course, he doesn’t write it openly. But this what virtually most of the WSJ editorial content boils down to.
7 - Many talented reporters work for the Wall Street Journal and end up deeply ashamed of it. It feels like prostitution. Many would much rather work for The Financial Times, New York Times or ProPublica. Rupert Murdoch employs great reporters at the Wall Street Journal simply because he needs them to acquire credibility in order to influence readers through his WSJ editorials.
8 - The best coverage of Silicon Valley is an online newspaper called The Information. If you want to know what Meta or Microsoft are really up to, read The Information. Most of their readers are wealthy investors and tech executives who seek exclusive information.
9 - When it comes to television and radio, public media (PBS, BBC, NPR, CBC) is often more professional, more serious, than corporate media. PBS or CBC make outstanding documentaries. Stuff US/Canadian private networks just wouldn’t make.
10 - Generally speaking, journalism that you pay for is better than journalism you don’t pay for. This is a general rule, not a law of physics. There are exceptions. The Daily Mail has subscribers. It’s largely non-sense. I wouldn’t trust anything written in it. ProPublica is free. They do quality investigations.
11 - AIPAC is powerful. But there is limit to their power. There was an intense AIPAC campaign to stop the President Obama from signing a nuclear agreement with Iran. He defeated them .
12 - Most Trump tweets aren’t written by Donald Trump. They are written by a dude named Dan Scavino. He is behind 90% of his tweets. Most americans have no clue who Dan Scavino is. They wouldn’t know him if they met him in the supermarket.
13 - Having a lot of resources is a curse. Countries that have natural ressources (Iran, Algeria, Nigeria, Russia) tend to be highly corrupt and exploited by a small elite. It’s simple. The elite can take control of the oil fields, the gas fields, the mines. Just sell ressources. Shoot protesters. No need to invest in anything else. It’s much better to live a country with limited resources (Taiwan, Japan, Switzerland). Lack of resources force the elites to invest in science and education. The most unlucky country in Africa is Congo. It’s full of diamonds, forests, oil, gas, lithium, cobalt, rare earth. So Congo has suffered horribly because of that. In fact, it’s still being looted.
14 - If you want to transform an authoritarian regime into a democracy from within, the number 1 tool you need are powerful labor unions. Powerful unions can basically go on a general solidarity strike and shut down an entire economy.
15 - Everything Barack Obama predicted would happen if the US didn’t sign the nuclear agreement with Iran actually happened. Trump left the agreement. Iran started enriching nuclear fuel. Then a major war happened.
16 - Many Middle Easterners are very tribal. Most Israelis see themselves as Jewish first, Israeli second. Syrian druzes think of themselves as Druze first, Syrian second. Many lebanese Shias see themselves as Shia first, Lebanese a distant second. And so on. Their loyalty often lies more to their tribe than to the State they actually live in.
17 - Imperialism was bad. But imperialism didn’t actually cause instability in the Middle East. The most stable period was actually Ottoman Imperialism. For 5 centuries there was commerce and peace. Then, there was the British/French empire. Apart from some episodes of violence, it was stable. But when imperialism ended, it was basically a mess. Jews vs Arabs. Christians vs Sunnis. Arabs vs Persians. Jews vs Shias. Arabs vs Kurds. Alawis vs Sunnis. To this day, many of them have this tribal mindset.
18 - Saying “we don’t speak with terrorists” is completely dumb. Many terrorist organizations later became peaceful. Many terrorist leaders later became statesmen. It’s wrong to say “We can’t make any peace with those who hands are stained with blood”. Get out of here with that non-sense. If you truly want peace, seeking only decent leaders means you aren’t going to find anyone at all. Criminals make peace. This isn’t Scandinavia.
What are things you know because of your personal interests that most people have no idea about ?
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For all who don’t want to see any of my in-depth stuff, just block me on Lemmy.World, & the filter-bubble will protect you from perceiving any of my “polluting” your world, anymore, within-site.
For a perspective on what-was-benJoseph’s-actual-religion that is different, I’m asking you to please read these items, & see how they interlock excellently:
( you will notice that once one understands that benJoseph was Essene … then suddenly mainstream Judaism’s HATING him becomes … absolutely normal, doesn’t it? Essenes competed against the mainstream-establishment! )
In the end, it doesn’t matter what anyone believes: souls, aka ChildrenOfG-D, are a little like pinballs: they ricochet here, there, wherever, among their karma, what benJoseph called “what a continuum sows, that continuum reaps”…
If no-one checks that evidence-avalanche & sees what it’s saying, & accepts what it’s saying, that’s fine.
Natural Selection is UNIVERSE’s LAW, & IT will reap most of humankind, this century.
However, what the evidence is showing, is that the 1st of Judaism’s moshiaches/mashiaches, the benJoseph moshiach/mashiach, was benJoseph, the root-guru of the Christians.
According to the evidence, what the Christians call “the 2nd Coming” is at the same Punctuation ( between 2-millenia-long Equilibriums, or Ages, or “generations” ) as what Judaism calls benDavid, the 2nd moshaich: they both happen this century.
Eknath Easwaran’s “the Bhagavad Gita” ( recommended & is beautiful ) directly tells us that every “age” or “generation” ( benJoseph used the term “generation” to mean “world-age”, or about-2-millenia: each “day as a 1000 years” & “night as a 1000 years” is about 2 millenia, & there have been 6 of those “day”+“night” pairs since the FLOOD when the Laurentide-ice-sheet drowned all coastal-civilization from the North Atlantic, so the coming “generation” would be the “7th day as a 1000 years”, right? ) … every “age” or “generation” gets sent its own help by G-D.
THAT ties the help to roughly-now, doesn’t it?
Centuries-ago couldn’t possibly have been when the Rev predictions fulfilled, because the cascade-of-Industrial-Revolutions ( causing ClimatePunctuation’s acceleration to begin biting-in ) hadn’t happened, yet, right?
Please understand that I want you immoveably-disagreeing with me, if you don’t find what I gave here to be true: honesty’s best, for karma!
Anyways, from what I can see, seeing the 2-layers-deep-&-surface, what G-D has rigged, is that the benDavid moshiach/mashiach & the Muslim Al-Mahdi are the same guy, & that should “separate the wheat from the chaff” pretty damn well, here, through the “1st Seal” time, the time of Conquering ( the setting-up of the Empires, represented-as-3-serpents-in-Rev ), before the time of WAR.
The Christians, however, are going to have to wait until next-decade, for their promised 2nd-coming, which matches the time of the “2nd Seal”, the time of WAR.
The Muslims predicted the sequence correctly: 1st smaller help, for less than a decade, … then bigger help, the 2nd one staying for 4 decades or so…
Daniel’s “abomination which makes desolate” & the collapse-of-all-food-web-planetwide, in Rev, are also 2 distinct labels for the same stage in this-century’s future ( waaay later in ClimatePunctuation ), & the American Indians have scientifically-tesable-predictions about all this stuff, too…
The benDavid/Al-Mahdi guy is one they describe as being some kind of sky-galloping elk, who KNOWS what’s going-on, & teaches humankind the way of galloping ( on the inner-winds, the inner-abyss, climbing the inner-mountain ) “into the sky, in enduring galloping”…
It’s the same guy … just draped in different cultural “makeup”, is all…
Maybe the concept of 2 fundamentally-different-levels expressing “history” together makes more sense, with that last view added?
~ All the forest ( civilization ) afire, all the animals ( kinds of people ) were panicking, all over the place, there was 1 great bull elk, who stood calm, knowing, certain, & people began collecting around him, then he began moving, & his people stayed with him as well as they could, & his speed began picking-up, & his people were streaming out behind him in a great river, then his hooves parted the ground, & he began galloping up into the sky, his people following him ~
is an approximation of the American Indian prophecy about the guy that Jewish prediction calls benDavid, & Muslim prediction calls Al-Mahdi.
Same-guy, different cultural-appearances/labelings.
IOW, I’m saying that what’s going-on is HUGE, & individual-cultures are blinkered-views into this IMMENSE process, see?
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I wouldn’t mind taking a look into that, actually. I’ll have Neigsendoig do the same.
I apologize for not explaining why I was investing-in putting all that there, for the person I was replying-to:
They were focused on the religion of the 1st-century followers of benJoseph.
Why focus on those followers, when the religion of benJoseph himself is ignored by all of Christianity?
Why not see the religion of benJoseph himself?
That is what my motivation was.
Thinks like Donald Spoto’s book “The Hidden Jesus: A New Life” identifying how central meditation was to benJoseph, & the Essenes being the only Jews around who had a “The Book of Meditation” ( mentioned repeatedly in the Dead Sea Scrolls stuff, but after benJoseph got back from the East, … they systematically didn’t include it in the scrolls they tried saving for future-generations. Probably simply because he’d obsoleted the whole book/scroll, when he returned. )
whatever.
IF someone prefers the followers’ religion to the root-guru’s religion, that’s entirely valid: it’s their choice.
But for mainstream stuff to systematically keep people in the dark about that root-guru, that I’ve got problem with.
As Elisabeth Haich explained, back then, people enacted symbols, so the “5000 fed, but lots of leftovers remained” symbolized that the teachings given them didn’t all get in, see?
&, of course, “baptism” is simply a symbol-enactment representing that ChildrenOfG-D/souls immerse themselves in universes, OceansOfAllPhenomena, & when they “come up” from that, they’re “returning home” to G-D.
The “Prodigal Son” parable was the same soul-immersing-itself-in-samsara, but told from a different perspective ( climbing down "Jacob’s Ladder, relying-on the “kingdom of the worldly, without” then turning, when hitting rock-bottom, to “the kingdom of G-D, within”, & climbing “Jacob’s Ladder”, see?
Same fundamental-meaning, just different appearances on it. )
See through the appearances!
See the universal, that the traditions are hiding-so-as-to-protect-their-importance.
The universal is what continuums/souls are.
The whole Abrahamic-religion presumption that G-D discards all of its children who aren’t within that religion-regime, Gospel of Mary torpedoes that: when the soul says to ignosis/soul-ignorance “you never knew me”, that’s the ultimate-truth: ALL souls return home, to their origin.
Religions which claim otherwise, … they’re rejecting the infiniteness of G-D.
Let 'em.
But don’t be fooled by 'em, see?
Anyways, that’s the motivation: anchor to the root, not to the branch, & get a more-universal view.
If you want…
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