How does evolution happen? By chance, we're told. Stuff just happens. Every step in evolution is an accident. The model we're all taught at school says that evolution happens through random mutations and natural selection. Natural selection is supposed to sort the good from the bad, so the only mechanism that produces any "new" information is mutation. This mutation amounts to random errors in DNA. (Yes, this may already sound bizarre, but that's the theory. You are the result of billions of years of accumulated errors. You were a bacterium back when you were flawless.) If these errors happen to be "helpful" (also a slightly bizarre concept), the organism survives and reproduces better than others, and passes the new genetic information on. As we know, most mutations are detrimental. The beneficial ones are rare. So if evolution happens only by chance and the good mutations are rare, we should ask ourselves, just how probable is evolution?

Douglas Adams famously suggested that the answer to life, the universe and everything is 42. In the world of the political elite, the answer is Russiagate. What has caused the electorate to turn on the political elite, to defeat Hillary and to rush to Brexit? Why, the evil Russians, of course, are behind it all.

It was the Russians who hacked the DNC and published Hillary's emails, thus causing her to lose the election because... the Russians, dammit, who cares what was in the emails? It was the Russians. It is the Russians who are behind Wikileaks, and Julian Assange is a Putin agent (as is that evil Craig Murray). It was the Russians who swayed the 1,300,000,000 dollar Presidential election campaign result with 100,000 dollars worth of Facebook advertising. It was the evil Russians who once did a dodgy trade deal with Aaron Banks then did something improbable with Cambridge Analytica that hypnotised people en masse via Facebook into supporting Brexit.

All of this is known to be true by every Blairite, every Clintonite, by the BBC, by CNN, by the Guardian, the New York Times and the Washington Post. "The Russians did it" is the article of faith for the political elite who cannot understand why the electorate rejected the triangulated "consensus" the elite constructed and sold to us, where the filthy rich get ever richer and the rest of us have falling incomes, low employment rights and scanty welfare benefits. You don't like that system? You have been hypnotised and misled by evil Russian trolls and hackers.

[Whether Trump and/or Brexit were worthy beneficiaries of the popular desire to express discontent is an entirely different argument and not one I address here].

It looks like another organized mass shooting is taking place in the USA, this time in El Paso on the US-Mexico border - a location obviously ripe for provocation given Trump's border wall mandate and Democrats' 'holy grail' of gun control.

Details are still coming in, but we fully expect the initial reports of multiple gunmen to be whittled down in the official narrative to another 'lone gunman'...

No word yet on the number of dead, but dozens have been injured.

Here's RT:

At least 18 people have been shot at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, local media reports. Police are searching for possibly multiple shooters, while footage of victims and shocking accounts of witnesses have emerged.

One suspect has been placed in custody, El Paso police told local TV, adding that the search of the crime scene and its surroundings continues. Police confirmed "multiple" people have been killed but have so far refused to reveal the exact number or the victims' identities.

Several extremely graphic videos, purportedly taken at the scene, have emerged online. One shows at least three bodies lying outside the Walmart and in its parking lot. In another one, people are seen fleeing the store past a person lying on the floor in a large blood puddle.

Meanwhile a short clip of a man hiding under furniture while multiple shots are heard in the background has been making the rounds in the media.

In his dystopian classic 1984, George Orwell introduced the concept of newspeak. Better known today as doublespeak or doubletalk, even those who haven't read the book will probably recognize the phrases "war is peace" or "freedom is slavery". Orwell was inspired by the Soviets' abuse of language in their propaganda, something that leaders and PR firms everywhere engage in, but which was particularly pervasive in USSR and the nations who later adopted the Soviets' socialist model. But there's a deeper reason for doublespeak, revealed by Andrew Lobaczewski in his book Political Ponerology.

Today on MindMatters, we look at the Czech "Dictionary of Totalitarianism", a project by several Czech academics analyzing the vocabulary of propaganda during the socialist period in Czechoslovakia. Using statistical analysis, the researchers were able to identify which words came into prominence and attached with that suggestive, emotional flavor typical of totalitarians and pathocrats, the euphemisms and stereotyped phrases, and the slurs used to demonize political enemies. We also look at a more modern text of revolutionary and potentially totalitarian ideology, The Anti-Fascist Handbook.


Running Time: 01:06:53

Download: MP3 — 61.2 MB

What's emotional infidelity?

Loosely:

"Intimacy with someone besides our partner that's emotional, not physical."

It happens to many people, and in a world of hyper-communication and connectivity, it's becoming an increasingly big topic. So, what do we do?

Let's take this in two parts...

• Part I: Attraction
• Part II: What To Do With It

In the centuries we humans have been studying anatomy, the fascia was never given much consideration. During dissections and autopsies, it was a nuisance to be cut away and removed to get to the important tissues beneath. But modern scientific study has brought a new appreciation of the fascia, as we continue to discover amazing functions of this misunderstood and underappreciated organ.

Considering how prevalent it is in the body, it's surprising how little we know about fascia. As well as its structural component, providing a counterbalance to the skeletal system through tensegrity, it's also a messenger system, a key organ of perception, and is integral for wound healing, inflammation control and pain relief. Yet, there is still so much more we don't know about this fascinating organ system.

Join us on this episode of Objective:Health as we delve into the fascinating topic of fascia. And stay tuned for Zoya's Pet Health Segment as she tells us all about dog dreams.


We're also now on Brighteon! Check it out here:


The mysterious world under the skin - https://youtu.be/bWU_DnC9t4I
Google talk - Tom Myers: "Anatomy Trains" - https://youtu.be/FOzsDItW7Bs

For other health-related news and more, you can find us on:
♥Twitter: https://twitter.com/objecthealth
♥Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/objecthealth/

And you can check out all of our previous shows (pre YouTube) here

Running Time: 01:16:07

Download: MP3 — 69.3 MB

In the race to determine who will serve as Commander in Chief of the most powerful military force in the history of civilization, night two of the CNN Democratic presidential debates saw less than six minutes dedicated to discussing US military policy during the 180-minute event.

That's six, as in the number before seven. Not sixty. Not sixteen. Six. From the moment Jake Tapper said "I want to turn to foreign policy" to the moment Don Lemon interrupted Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard just as she was preparing to correctly explain how President Trump is supporting Al-Qaeda in Idlib, approximately five minutes and fifty seconds had elapsed. The questions then turned toward the Mueller report and impeachment proceedings.

My husband and I are in bed at the end of what felt like a very long day.

We aim for equality every day: equal time working, equal time parenting. Time together. Time apart.

But today it felt like I was holding the world together by myself.

I'm trying to tell him how hard it was, looking for appreciation, looking for a promise that he'll help me get more me time tomorrow.

He's not hearing me: He's defending. He's explaining. He's excusing. He's rationalizing.

I take a deep breath, measure my words, make sure this comes out as an "I statement":

"I feel unappreciated and alone."

"Well, you're choosing to feel those things."

Clearly, we need some help communicating.

I came across some relationship advice claiming to fix everything.

A whole new frame for seeing the world:

To represent anything is to reduce and deform it, obviously, for even Leonardo's Mona Lisa is but a stick figure compared to the witty, voluptuous and redolent broad, whose repartees, smiles, jokes and burps, from moment to moment, can only increase her charm and terror, and that's why man never allowed himself to be engulfed by any medium, be it oil painting, music or literature. After the most satisfying page, he still looked up and walked outside. Traveling vast distances, Chekov discovered heaven in Ceylon and hell in Sakhalin, and Flaubert was only being reductive when he goofed, "The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy." He, too, had plenty of lust for the actual.

Well, a perpetual orgy is certainly here, but it has nothing to do with literature, or even literacy, and it's not voluntary. If pornography can be understood as a lurid usurpation of the real, then we're watching an endless pornographic movie. Most democratically, we're all trapped in this foul theater. An orgy of the virtual has taken over every aspect of our lives.

Pornography multiplies frequency, duration, angles, positions and sexual partners, an endless and eternal sexual buffet, except that none of it is really happening. Similarly, American democracy gives the appearance of boundless participation by all citizens, for they can't just vote in caucuses and elections, but cheer at conventions, march in protest, write letters to newspapers, comment on the internet and follow, blow by blow, the serial mud wrestling between opposing politicians. Pissed, they can freely curse Bush, Obama or Trump without fearing a midnight knock on the door. Alas, none of their "political activities" actually matters, for Americans don't influence their government's policies, much less decide them. It's all an elaborate spectacle to make each chump think he's somehow a player, in on the action, when he's actually all alone, in the dark, to beat his own meat, yet again.

He has railroaded, premasticated opinions on everything, but without the means to act on any of it. Only his impotence is real.

I moved out of Southern California in the summer of 1969. I was ten years old, and my parents were fleeing decadence and depravity in favor of the more wholesome Midwest.

Before our move, a story had circulated about some local (Newport Beach) high schoolers who had "gone on an LSD trip" and gotten caught by police. As I understood it, the teenagers had "taken LSD" and started leaping from rooftop to rooftop, "tripping" all over the neighborhood and waking people up to the sound of thundering hoofbeats overhead. At the time I wondered whether LSD conferred a miraculous leaping or flying ability, since the houses in Lido Sands, though rather tightly clustered, were mostly spaced perhaps eight or ten feet apart, which seemed like a long way to jump.

I vaguely recall this "LSD-fueled teenage midnight horsemen of the apocalypse" story having something to do with my parents' decision to move back to Wisconsin. Southern California circa 1969, a few years after the hippie movement had peaked and turned into a bad trip, didn't seem like a good place to send your kids to high school. (Little did my parents know that the 60s would hit Wisconsin high schools ten years late, putting me and my siblings directly in the path of the psychedelic hurricane.)

Years later, as an "experienced" (in the Jimi Hendrix sense) subversive teenage wannabe intellectual, I would read about the Manson murders and notice how convenient they had been for the Establishment. From the moment Charlie Manson's grinning, demonic face started leering from every front page and TV screen in America, the whole hippie-antiwar thing had seemed a whole lot scarier. I read the official version of the Manson myth, Vincent Bugliosi's Helter Skelter, and thought: This is too crazy to be true. None of the Wisconsin hippies I know are even remotely like these characters. Maybe it's something they add to the fluoride in the Southern California water.