#Remaking Civilization

[savage-kult-of-gorthaur]

SHOULD ANYONE WITH A PAST TO NAZI GERMANY REALLY BE TRUSTED IN THE AFFAIRS OF HUMANITY?

PIC INFO: Spotlight on World Economic Forum founder and driving force behind the so-called "Great Reset", Charles Schwab, mashed with the nefarious, unnamed alien species in John Carpenter's "They Live" (1988). Artwork by Hal Hefner, c. 2021.

"Is the real Klaus Schwab a kindly old uncle figure wishing to do good for humanity, or is he really the son of a Nazi collaborator who used slave labour and aided Nazi efforts to obtain the first atomic bomb? Johnny Vedmore investigates."

-- UNLIMITED HANGOUT, "Schwab Family Values," by Johnny Vedmore, published February 20, 2021

OVERVIEW: "On the morning of 11 September 2001, Klaus Schwab sat having breakfast in the Park East Synagogue in New York City with Rabbi Arthur Schneier, former Vice President for the World Jewish Congress and close associate of the Bronfman and Lauder families. Together, the two men watched one of the most impactful events of the next twenty years unfold as planes struck the World Trade Center buildings. Now, two decades on, Klaus Schwab again sits in a front row seat of yet another generation-defining moment in modern human history.

PART I: Always seeming to have a front row seat when tragedy approaches, Schwab’s proximity to world-altering events likely owes to his being one of the most well-connected men on Earth. As the driving force behind the World Economic Forum, “the international organization for public-private cooperation,” Schwab has courted heads of state, leading business executives, and the elite of academic and scientific circles into the Davos fold for over 50 years. More recently, he has also courted the ire of many due to his more recent role as the frontman of the Great Reset, a sweeping effort to remake civilization globally for the express benefit of the elite of the World Economic Forum and their allies.

PART II: Schwab, during the Forum’s annual meeting in January 2021, stressed that the building of trust would be integral to the success of the Great Reset, signalling a subsequent expansion of the initiative’s already massive public relations campaign. Though Schwab called for the building of trust through unspecified “progress,” trust is normally facilitated through transparency. Perhaps that is why so many have declined to trust Mr. Schwab and his motives, as so little is known about the man’s history and background prior to his founding of the World Economic Forum in the early 1970s.

PART III: Like many prominent frontmen for elite-sponsored agendas, the online record of Schwab has been well-sanitized, making it difficult to come across information on his early history as well as information on his family. Yet, having been born in Ravensburg, Germany in 1938, many have speculated in recent months that Schwab’s family may have had some tie to Axis war efforts, ties that, if exposed, could threaten the reputation of the World Economic Forum and bring unwanted scrutiny to its professed missions and motives."

-- UNLIMITED HANGOUT, "Schwab Family Values," c. February 2021

Source: www.simplelists.com/nfu/msg/16309232.

[cyarsk52-20]

[bragganhyl]

oh what I would give for some crumbs about the relationship between Eothas and Magran pre-Saint's War 😔

[bedlamsbard]

the 2010 film Centurion is deeply frustrating to me because it desperately wants to be about the Varian Disaster, every single beat in this movie would fit near-perfectly for the Varian Disaster, you could relocate this film temporally and geographically to Germania and not change literally anything except some of the names, and yet because Hollywood considers Britannia way sexier and more exotic than Germania it is set in Britain. this movie should be about the Varian Disaster! in every way but geographically including the drawback of the frontiers this movie is about the Varian Disaster! and yet. it is not about the Varian Disaster.

(the movie itself is fine. like, it's Agricola slander and Tacitus is rolling over in his grave, but my tolerance for historical inaccuracy is pretty high these days. don't go out of your way to watch it, but like, it's fine. if I had a nickel for every time Olga Kurylenko has played a Roman-hating British woman warrior I'd have two nickels, which is not a lot but it's weird it's happened twice etc.)

[carcarrot]

you guys have to watch the outrage (1964) its one of the worst movies ive ever seen

[mother-lee]

the beguiled (2017) dir. sophia coppola

[pitch-and-moan]

Grander Illusion

An AI-written remake of Grand Illusion about the Syrian Civil War, but with all of the pathos and humanity sucked out of it. It's not funny, nor is it even tragically or farcically funny.

[bogleech]

In your general appreciation of nature, I am curious about your take on this - do you believe nature has reached "peak complexity"?

There was a time without flying animals. There was a time without land animals. There was a time without vertebrates, without segmented exoskeletons, without fur, without feathers, without complex social structures, without eyes. There was a time without plants, or any kind of photosythesis. There was a time without multicellular life.

But at this point, do you feel nature on planet Earth has evolved all "milestones" there are (and from now on, all additional complexity will have come from civilization, one way or another)?

I mean in terms of potential, assuming for a moment "nature" of some kind still exist during the next billion years or so.

Yes or No would be enough (lol), but of course spec evo ideas would be even cooler!

Nah I think there's absolutely infinite things nature could evolve some day that we can't even imagine. You really never know. Like it's 100% biochemically possible for something to "breathe fire;" there just has to be a sequence of mutations and the right competition to gradually make it happen, possibly starting with something that sprays boiling hot compounds like a bombardier beetle. I could also imagine a whole class of animals evolving like the modular people from All Tomorrows, because we already have Siphonophores. It's just a matter of something evolving to be a colony that can also come apart and keep functioning. I'm also obviously obsessed with the concept of a creature that weaponizes its own little symbiotic bugs, since I've used that a million times. Like maybe millions of years from now, a descendant of sloths will have upgraded from being full of moths to being full of tiny wasps? And then what if that's so effective they actually start diversifying like crazy and there's a whole era dominated by mammaloid wasp nest beasts ranging from grazers merely cleaned and guarded by their insects to predators who hunt with their assistance. Plant/animal physical symbiosis is also another thing that's not really taken off outside a few insects. Why shouldn't a plant some day decide it likes growing on some kind of animal's body? It's not a plant, but lichens grow on a species of weevil. It's so rare there aren't even photos, but I swear I saw video of one on BBC when I was a kid:

What if a moss adapts just to the shell of some big reptile and eventually the reptile starts to derive sustenance from it too?? Over time what if this evolves into basically real life Bulbasaurs, where the animal part can be sustained off sunlight? It'd just have to slow its animal metablism way, waaay down to meet the plant halfway. Maybe it hibernates for years and years at a time or spends decades developing like a cicada and then it emerges in pure mating mode, using up all the food it conserved as its flower finally blooms. I know most of my examples are now elaborations on something that's kind of almost already begun happening somewhere but you get the idea. Furthermore you never know if all life as we know it will die out one day while there's still a couple billion years left of the planet's physical existence. Then a whole new line of life could evolve that we can't conceive of at all, from the ground up. Like crystalline mineral trees that start talking to each other with laser light. Or maybe only bacteria are left but for some reason bacteria develop what they need to start sticking together and building a new kind of multicellular organism. What the heck would an equivalent to "animals" look like if the ancestor was a bacterium????? Holy fuck I'm mad I won't see it. Fuming and seething actually. This is the worst thing ever. Why am I doomed to die on regular animal planet with google bots and disney remakes. I wanna see salmonella animal planet. It's not fair.

[girlwithherheadinthestars]

Supervillain monologuing to the entire civilization of Villains: I will burn this world down and remake it into a thriving, beautiful metropolis where we will all be free to do as we wish without all that bullshit --

Hero (leaning against the wall, studying their nails): Language.

*everyone turns to look at Hero in shock; they didn't see them come in*

Hero: Oh, were you having like an epic bad guy moment there? Sorry for that man, I’ll just back up and you take from the top…

Supervillain: What-what are you doing here? Didn't I kill you?

Villain (hanging from the ceiling): Yeah, well, it clearly didn't work did it?

Supervillain: AND DIDN'T I FIRE YOU?

Villain: *shrugs*

Supervillain: AND HOW DID YOU TWO EVEN GET IN THIS IS THE MOST FORTIFIED BUILDING IN THE WORLD?

Villain: Well I'm glad you asked allow me to explain my brilliant idea -

Hero: You mean my brilliant idea --

Supervillain: Why do I even bother -- what do you two want?

Hero: Um, it's literally in my name. I'm a hero. I'm here to beat up villains. So unless you can prove yourself to be a good guy in the next two seconds it’s gonna get ugly.

Villain: i am so in love with you right now.

[mingot-studios]

Not me

They stole all the melanin AND personality from my babies 😭

OFFICIAL LOOK OF THE ONE PIECE REMAKE

by: WIT Studio

[firebreathingpandas]

Parkour civilization Swap au!

Seawatt is a fugitive from the lost civilization trying to avoid detection. He wants to become champion to bring back his old layer and remake the rules. Starts as a noob.

Evbo is a enthusiastic parkour master known for doing strange jumps. He’s also known for talking a lot and battling anyone he meets.

Master friend is now an enforcer in charge of keeping the system in place. Seawatt is an anomaly and thus it’s his job to remove him.

[robertreich]

How Trump is Following Hitler's Playbook

You’ve heard Trump’s promise:

TRUMP: I’m going to be a dictator for one day.

History shows there are no “one-day” dictatorships. When democracies fall, they typically fall completely.

In a previous video, I laid out the defining traits of fascism and how MAGA Republicans embody them. But how could Trump — or someone like him — actually turn America into a fascist state? Here’s how in five steps.

Step 1: Use threats of violence to gain power

Hitler and Mussolini relied on their vigilante militias to intimidate voters and local officials. We watched Trump try to do the same in 2020.

TRUMP: Proud Boys, stand back and stand by.

Republican election officials testified to the threats they faced when they refused Trump’s demands to falsify the election results.

RAFFENSPERGER: My email, my cell phone was doxxed.

RUSTY BOWERS: They have had video panel trucks with videos of me proclaiming me to be a pedophile.

GABRIEL STERLING: A 20-something tech in Gwinnett County today has death threats and a noose put out saying he should be hung for treason.

If the next election is close, threats to voters and election officials could be enough to sabotage it.

Step 2: Consolidate power

After taking office, a would-be fascist must turn every arm of government into a tool of the party. One of Hitler’s first steps was to take over the civil service, purging it of non-Nazis.

In October of 2020, Trump issued his own executive order that would have enabled him to fire tens of thousands of civil servants and replace them with MAGA loyalists. He never got to act on it, but he’s now promising to apply it to the entire civil service.

That’s become the centerpiece of something called Project 2025, a presidential agenda assembled by MAGA Republicans, that would, as the AP put it, “dismantle the US government and replace it with Trump’s vision.”

Step 3: Establish a police state

Hitler used the imaginary threat of “the poison of foreign races” to justify taking control of the military and police, placing both under his top general, and granting law-enforcement powers to his civilian militias.

Now Trump is using the same language to claim he needs similar powers to deal with immigrants.

Trump plans to deploy troops within the U.S. to conduct immigration raids and round up what he estimates to be 18 million people who would be placed in mass-detention camps while their fate is decided.

And even though crime is actually down across the nation, Trump is citing an imaginary crime wave to justify sending troops into blue cities and states against the will of governors and mayors.

Trump insiders say he plans to invoke the Insurrection Act to have the military crush civilian protests. We saw a glimpse of that in 2020, when Trump deployed the National Guard against peaceful protesters outside the White House.

And with promises to pardon January 6 criminals and stop prosecutions of right-wing domestic terrorists, Trump would empower groups like the Proud Boys to act as MAGA enforcers.

Step 4: Jail the opposition

In classic dictatorial fashion, Trump is now openly threatening to prosecute his opponents.

TRUMP: if I happen to be president and I see somebody who’s doing well and beating me very badly, I say, ‘Go down and indict them.’ They’d be out of business.

And he’s looking to remake the Justice Department into a tool for his personal vendettas.

TRUMP: As we completely overhaul the federal Department of Justice and FBI, we will also launch sweeping civil rights investigations into Marxist local district attorneys.

In the model of Hitler and Mussolini, Trump describes his opponents as subhuman.

TRUMP: …the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country…

Step 5: Undermine the free press

As Hitler well understood, a fascist needs to control the flow of information. Trump has been attacking the press for years.

And he’s threatening to punish news outlets whose coverage he dislikes.

He has helped to reduce trust in the media to such a historic low that his supporters now view him as their most trusted source of information.

Within a democracy, we may often have leaders we don’t like. But we have the power to change them — at the ballot box and through public pressure. Once fascism takes hold, those freedoms are gone and can’t easily be won back.

We must recognize the threat of fascism when it appears, and do everything in our power to stop it.

[metamatar]

So the real crime of fascism was the application to white people of colonial procedures "which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the 'c***s' of India, and the 'n***s' of Africa." (p. 36) Here we must situate Cesaire within a larger context of radical black intellectuals who had come to the same conclusions before the publication of Discourse.

As Cedric Robinson argues, a group of radical black intellectuals,including W.E.B. Du Bois, C.L.R James, George Padmore, and Oliver Cox, understood fascism not as some aberration from the march of progress, an unexpected right-wing turn, but a logical development of Western Civilization itself. They viewed fascism as a blood relative of slavery and imperialism, global systems rooted not only in capitalist political economy but racist ideologies that were already in place at the dawn of modernity. As early as 1936, Ralph Bunche, then a radical political science professor at Howard University, suggested that imperialism birth to fascism. "The doctrine of Fascism" wrote Bunche, "with its extreme jingoism, its exaggerated exaltation of the state and its comic-opera glorification of race, has given a new and greater impetus to the policy of world imperialism which had conquered and subjected to systematic and ruthless exploitation virtually all of the darker populations of the earth." Du Bois made some of the clearest statements to this effect: "I knew that Hitler and Mussolini were fighting communism, and using race prejudice to make some white people rich and all colored people poor. But it was not until later that I realized that the colonialism of Great Britain and France had exactly the same object and methods as the fascists and the Nazis were trying clearly to use." Later, in The World and Africa (1947), he writes: "There was no Nazi atrocity-concentration camps, wholesale maiming and murder, defilement of women or ghastly blasphemy of childhood which Christian civilization or Europe had not long been practicing against colored folk in all parts of the world in the name of and for the defense of a Superior Race born to rule the world. The very idea that there was a superior race lay at the heart of the matter, and this is why elements of Discourse also drew on Negritude's impulse to recover the history of Africa's accomplish ments. Takirng his cue from Leo Frobenius's injunction that the "idea of the barbaric Negro is a European invention," Cesaire sets out to prove that the colonial mission to "civilize" the primitive is just a smoke screen. If anything, colonialism results in the massive destruction of whole societies-societies that not only function at a high level of sophistication and complexity, but that might offer the West valuable lessons about how we might live together and remake the modern world.

Robin DG Kelley's A Poetics of Anti Colonialism, published as introduction to a new edition of Aime Cesaire's Discourse on Anti Colonialism

[lilithvibeplace]

its 4am and i got more mad at this film i fucking hate how cowardly it was it makes me embarrassed to have wanted to be a journalist because of how lazy it is with its setting.

anyways, go watch it in IMAX it’s worth it because 1) I want to have more people to have discourse with and 2) it’s genuinely a fucking beautiful film but that’s because the ONLY fucking thing Garland knows how to do is make a pretty film. fuck this I’m rewatching Annihilation sometime this week

this film fucking wishes it was Annihilation—i mean this literally. Alex Garland just wants to make Annihilation again. He can’t fucking do anything else I swear to the gods WHY SET IT IN THE USA. AND SAY NOTHING. THIS COULDVE BEEN A SCI FI CIVIL WAR AND BE AN INSTANT 5/5. OR ANY OTHER SETTING. WHY AMERICA AND WHY SAY NOTHING? MARKETING?

yes it was just marketing.

i’m so glad i saw this film but it fucking pisses me off christ

Alex Garland is so deeply afraid to take an actual stance that it takes away from the fact he made such a beautifully stunning film. Civil War does so little with the momentum it gained that it's genuinely insulting, and it feels like Garland just wanted to make a sci-fi film again, gods bless Annihilation you glorious film, because his refusal to elaborate or give an opinion on the most tumultuous period of political upheaval in the USA in a film called Civil War is a fucking travesty that I can't ignore. (hyperlinked is my 2.5 star letterboxd review)

As an aside, the Battle of Washington is one of the best battle sequences I have ever seen. The film is probably one of the most beautifully shot films so far this decade. But holy fuck it's disappointing that it's one of the most cowardly films I've ever seen.

I want to love this film. I do love this film in a lot of ways. And I expected nothing more from this film. But I cannot let it slide how cowardly it was to take the position that Garland did.

[bleue-flora]

Ok, I recently wrote an essay [here] talking about the definition and duties of civil engineering as well as the ethics because of the brain rot @swordfright gave me with calling Dream Sam’s ultimate engineering project. So, because I actually am a civil engineer I took it upon myself to design the title and summary of quantities sheets just like I do at work for roads but with Dream as the project instead. And in honor of angst day sponsored by @sixteenth-day-event, I figured I’d share it because I feel like it kinda works for the prison of the mind prompt.

“Sam’s “ultimate engineering project” he deemed too damaged like a bumpy road or crumbling building that wasn’t worthy of patching and filling in the cracks or reinforcing, that’s too eroded to be fixed and preserved. So, Sam strived to tear him down to the bedrock so he could remake, remold, and reengineer Dream according to his design for the common safety, public health and well-fair.”

{These are very similar to the actual sheets I make day to day, which I shall not share for the sake of doxing my location, but yea pretty much everything has a significance. Some of it doesn’t necessarily make sense but that was because I was more so taking inventory of what we see in lore (so you know I counted ;) lol)}

[simply-ivanka]

Trump Gears Up for Change on Wokeness With Education Overhaul

The president-elect has laid out big changes for America’s classrooms, including expanding school choice—and shutting down the Department of Ed

By Matt Barnum and Douglas Belkin -- Wall Street Journal

President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to remake education in the U.S., pledging to exert more control over funding and classroom lessons, to curb what he views as left-leaning tendencies at universities and even to dismantle the Department of Education.

If his White House delivers on those promises, more families could get money to send kids to private school. Schools would face pressure to limit accommodations for transgender students and to end some initiatives aimed at addressing racial disparities.

The goals are at once ambitious and controversial.

“There are a lot of very smart people who are very excited to get into positions where we can actually start making change happen,” said Tiffany Justice, a Trump ally and the co-founder of the conservative parents group Moms for Liberty.

Eliminating the Department of Education

Trump has promised to close the Education Department and has criticized U.S. school spending. 

In his first term, he proposed merging the education and labor departments, but Congress didn’t proceed. It isn’t clear whether lawmakers would go for the idea in a second term, nor how the department’s functions—such as protecting students’ civil rights, providing funding for students with disabilities and distributing student loans—would be handled if it were closed. 

Some Republicans have been reluctant to eliminate the department or cut federal funding that flows to schools in their constituencies. An Associated Press poll last year found that nearly two-thirds of Americans said the federal government spends too little on education.

“I don’t think you’ll see enormous cuts because that’s super unpopular,” said Michael Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative education think tank.

Trump will have to fill the education secretary role for now. Cabinet positions often go to prominent politicians and political allies.

Presidents sometimes look to state education chiefs. High-profile leaders in Republican states include Oklahoma’s Ryan Walters, who has fought culture-war battles in schools; Louisiana’s Cade Brumley, who has supported private-school choice and tougher school disciplinary measures; and Florida’s Manny Diaz Jr., who has overseen many conservative policy changes.

In an interview, Walters said he is focused on implementing Trump’s agenda in Oklahoma. Through a spokesperson, Brumley said “my focus is on continuing the historic educational progress we are making in Louisiana.” Diaz, through a spokesperson, said if asked to serve, “Of course you listen.” Justice of Moms for Liberty said that she would be open to the position, though hasn’t spoken to the Trump team about it.

A Trump transition spokeswoman didn’t comment on specific candidates.

Waging war on ‘woke’

Trump has said he would use the power of the purse to limit left-wing ideology in schools and universities.

Although a president can’t immediately cut off money to any school, he could use various laws to pressure schools to address antisemitism on campus, disband programs that focus on nonwhite student groups or reduce accommodations for transgender students.

Trump has said that he believes that Title IX, which bars sex discrimination in education, should prevent transgender girls from playing on female sports teams. This would be a stark reversal from the Biden administration, which has interpreted Title IX to prohibit discrimination based on gender identity.

During the campaign, Trump attacked Kamala Harris for being too supportive of transgender rights, an issue that resonated with some voters.

Trump has also indicated that he would use civil-rights law to challenge critical race theory, a term used by conservatives to describe some efforts to teach about racism and racial disparities. This could include targeting university diversity, equity and inclusion offices, legal analysts have said.

“On issues that I worry about…this is at the top,” said Rachel Perera, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, a center-left think tank.

Another tool Trump has at his disposal is the accreditation system, which gives universities access to federal money. He has called it a “secret weapon.”

Colleges and universities need to meet standards set by independent accreditors to be eligible for federal funds.

Trump could weaken the influence of accreditors—which he considers too left-leaning—by reassigning some of their responsibilities to the Education Department, said Judith Eaton, past president of the Council for Higher Education Accreditation. Alternatively, the administration could replace current accreditors with ones more closely aligned with Trump’s vision, she added.

Members of Trump’s inner circle “regard the higher-ed cartel as fundamentally out of order,” said Frederick Hess, director of education policy studies at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute.

‘Universal school choice’

Trump wants “universal school choice for every American family,” according to his platform. That likely means providing a public subsidy for private-school tuition or other educational expenses outside the public school system.

Trump has indicated he would support the Educational Choice for Children Act, already proposed in Congress. The law would provide $10 billion in federal tax credits to go toward private-school tuition, home schooling or other educational costs.

Backers say the bill would provide money for up to two million children, and help parents direct and customize their children’s education. School-choice critics say that these programs drain resources from public schools.

Prior efforts by Republican presidents to subsidize private schools—including those supported by Ronald Reagan, and Trump in his first term—have failed to garner congressional support. And while many Republican-controlled state legislatures have adopted such programs in recent years, voters in Colorado, Kentucky and Nebraska rejected school-choice ballot measures on Nov. 5.

Some Republicans “are not fully on board yet,” said Jim Blew, who served as an education official during Trump’s first term. “I think they will be in the new administration.”