Wakeful Video Weekend 2019-10-06 (22 videos)

Imagine taking a modern online course to become astute in politics and economics, learning what is wrong with our system and how to fix it. That’s exactly what the Wakeful Video Weekend series amounts to, both new and old episodes. My suggestion: watch or listen, share and discuss. (and maybe even voluntarily donate to Beanstock’s World for all that hard curating work)

Channels: TEDx Talks, The Real News Network, Democracy At Work, The Michael Brooks Show, Rebel HQ, Democracy Now!, The Hill, John Spritzler, The Jimmy Dore Show, Corbett Report, and many more.

Topics:

1. Humor: What Does U.S. #1 Mean?
2. Non-Rich Lives: Spending all our Lifetime Not Living! ***
3. U.S. Poverty: Both Old & Poor And Mostly Kept Secret
4. Sick Society: The Capitalist Disease
5. Fascism as Flattery
6. Neoliberalism: Neoliberalism in Short
7. The Soviet Economy
8. Status Quo: Murder by Capitalism & Revolution vs Reformism
9. Truth & Lies: Real vs False Flag Whistleblowers
10. Elections: The Electoral College Favors Swing States, Not Rural Americans
11. Candidates: Bernie, Biden, Warren… True Progressive vs Fakes
12. Strategy: Why the D-Party SoSo-Works with Bernie Sanders
13. Money in Politics: The R & D Parties’ Race to the Bottom ***
14. No Piecemeal But a Big Determined Movement Needed
15. U.S.A. is a Paid Servant of Murderous Saudi Regime
16. Humor: X-Rated Politics (Jimmy Dore)
17. Ancient Wisdom (Fables)

 

1. Humor: What Does U.S. #1 Mean?

Can America Let Go Of Being Number One?
AJ+

Living to Live

The green-blooded moneycrats who rule us, think life is all about money. Well, it is not. That’s why they ruin our lives. Let’s take a look at people who have turned their back on the the corrupt system and hear what they have to tell:

Human connections and interactions count much more in human happiness than material things:

(Note: if the video linked above gets deleted, you may search the Internet for the title: “Route 66: Free living and liberty at a rural commune “)

Comment: In my imagination I would love to live in such a commune (except for my physical handicaps and the gross hunt for squirrels who I see neither as nasty tree rats nor tasty morsels). It would be so much better not having to fight over incomes and savings with my neighbors but rather support one another, be fellows and friends rather than desperate strugglers pitted against each other by a system that is set up to do so.  

One man’s wish: Let the people be free!

At the end of this short piece, I share a video that’ been gathering dust in my archives.

It may be rather long and rambling, but the great point Jamarl’s speech ultimately comes down to is: What kind of life do we want to live? He mentions nobody wanting to be a cog in a wheel which is what people end up being in our current human world. So, ask yourself what kind of life do you want to live?  

Our Meaningless Hell and the Heaven We Can Build

Summary: (1) The explosion of bullshit jobs and the need to uncouple our livelihoods from such bullshit jobs. (2) A jobless future from automation and the opportunity to create prosperity and leisure for all. (3) A cool video on these topics.

Here is some news: most of the productive manufacturing, agricultural, and useful service jobs of the past are gone. Meanwhile, useless or even harmful(!) administrative and clerical jobs have tripled. We have three times as many people pushing paper than we had in the 1930s, and that is so despite us having computers nowadays, computers which do many times a person’s work accounting, calculating balance sheets, documenting and measuring stuff, answering consumer questions, creating and disseminating communications, and, and, and… With the quickly improving artificial intelligence, we now even have industrial robots that that can learn their tasks, software that writes music and sports news, self-driving cars and patient care robots currently being tested, and so forth.

We must really get used to the idea that many of our jobs will never come back, and many more jobs will be taken over by machines. The trajectory is one of a world without jobs! 

Humor/Quickyrant: Our Tweet-Short Future

Twitter just sent out a recommendation for improving the chance of one’s tweets to be noticed: “Short and sweet. Sticking to 140 characters may be challenging, but Tweets that are even shorter (less than 70 characters) normally get more engagement. Here are some tips for writing effective Twitter Ads copy…”

OMG! Yes, I get it that our lives have become terribly busy, overloaded, and stressful. I am a prime example. Toiling for the moneycrats, we hardly have time to breathe, leave alone read articles of mine, watch independent news, catch up on our emails, or even read a whopping 140 characters on our hero site Twitter which came at us with the bright idea of shortening our communications (by force!) to 140 characters, just enough text to describe the booger you just picked out of your nose and that the whole world must know about. Yes, thank you Twitter! The dumbing down you have done for us is splendid. In this horrible world, which gets worse every year, a dumb mind is all we have left to help us tolerate it. A world made for twits, Twitter’s favorite customers.

I can see the trend continuing. 140 characters originally… 70 characters now… and in the end just one short word: HELP!

~

Independent media are critical! Help us help you! Share articles. Submit guest posts and comments. Help with outreach, operations, or finances (find out more here). Or snatch scientific literacy or the successful passing of science classes from the jaws of defeat in high school or college here with Beanstock’s help for a mutual win-win!