"Government, to survive, must commit violence regularly, and government must gain a monopoly on violence. If you want to find the government look for the group committing the most violence..."
The hardest working person in the world likely lives in poverty. Hard work almost never translates to wealth. But exploitation of labor often does. The hard work myth needs to dıė
the way ppl expect children to bend the knee to parents is the same model as black ppl, dark ppl anywhere, being expected to bend the knee to white or lighter ppl, same model as "sinners" who are expected to bend the knee to jesus. there is a world order at play to destroy.
Celia Cruz performing "Guantanamera" at a sound check in Kinshasa. Featuring Johnny Pacheco on flute.
Live at Zaire '74, the festival staged alongside the Rumble in the Jungle.
parents who will listen VERY INTENTLY to what their pastor is saying but as for hearing their child, no space. rubbish!! when you believe your soul is on the line, this is the result.
Many people go through a law of attraction and manifesting your best matrix life phase because being able to play around with the simulation can feel like you have arrived. And for some this will be enough. But others will not be satisfied and will remember there is so much more.
Stop trying so hard to be a “good person” whatever that even means and learn how to respond to life with presence, care, intention and authenticity in each moment. The divine dance of intimacy with life isn’t meant to be scripted.
Right now, the energy isn’t asking you to chase anything. It’s asking you to sit with yourself. To face your patterns. To be honest about where you abandon yourself just to feel chosen. The world is no longer rewarding survival versions of you, it’s calling forward the version that chooses peace, alignment, and truth, even when it’s lonely currently. ✨
Roxanne Shante discusses whether anything goes off-limits in rap battles
"Nothing's off limits. What I don't like is when people say that they're doing freestyles or they're doing these rap battles, but you have three months to prepare. That's not a battle. But if anybody ever wanted to impress a Roxanne Shante, you just got to take all their names, put it in a hat, shake it up, and whatever name you pick out, right then and there, do it. That's it. No preparations, no three months looking into your past, no trying to figure it out and all this stuff. None of that. Right here, right now, that's it. Let's do it."
This reminds me of a fascinating story I read,of when in the 1970s Daniel Everett,a linguist and Christian went to the Amazon jungle to convert a tribe called the piraha people to Christianity and completely failed for one crazy reason 😂😂
When Daniel Everett arrived with his wife and kids at the remote Pirahã village in the Amazon, His mission was clear…learn their language,translate the New Testament,and convert this isolated hunter gatherer group to Christianity.
What he encountered instead was one of the most radical cultural and linguistic worldviews ever documented 😂.
From his experience,Everett eventually formalized what he called the “Immediacy of Experience Principle”. What this means in essence is the Pirahã culture and grammar strongly constrain what can be meaningfully discussed or believed…to them,knowledge must be anchored in direct,personal observation or at most in the recent testimony of living people you know.
Things that happened long ago,that no one alive has seen,or that exist only in abstract or supernatural realms fall into the category of what they called xibipío (“gone out of experience”). They don’t deny it outrightly.. to them, such things simply carry no weight and are not worth serious talk.
This principle shapes everything for them… and is why they have No creation myths or origin storis , No numbers beyond rough quantities like “a few” or “many.” , No recursive embedding in grammar (you can’t easily say “kelvin’s brother’s house” … you say two separate sentences). Their Stories and discourse stay tethered to the here and now.
Now Christian theology, by contrast, is built on precisely the kind of claims the Pirahã worldview filters out…A distant creation,Miracles and events from thousands of years ago, A savior no living person has met, Salvation and afterlife described in ancient texts.
Everett tried …He told them the story of Jesus..his birth,teachings,death,and resurrection. The Pirahã listened politely,then asked the questions their language and culture demanded…
“Have you met this man?”
“Did you see him?”
“Did your father see him?”
When Everett admitted he had not , that these events happened 2,000 years earlier and were known only through a book,the conversation effectively ended 😂.
“That’s interesting,” some of them would say, treating the Gospel the same way they treated any other distant tale…as something outside lived experience, therefore irrelevant to how they live and what they believe.
Notice It wasn’t hostile rejection(like the one you’d get from the people of the sentinel islands in India). It was epistemological incompatibility. The theology couldn’t even gain traction because their entire system of knowledge validation rejected second hand ancient testimony.
Everett kept trying for years. He failed to produce a usable Bible translation. Meanwhile, living among people who were profoundly content, generous, and empirically grounded …with no concept of sin, eternal punishment, or a distant deity.
By 1982 he himself started havinv serious doubts about his beliefs and by 1985 he had quietly become an atheist. The man who had come to convert the Pirahã had instead been “converted” by their way of seeing reality.😅
As Everett later wrote and said in interviews, the deepest challenge wasn’t an argument against Christianity. It was living inside a culture where the very criteria for what counts as real knowledge made supernatural historical claims feel as weightless as yesterday’s dream.
The Pirahã didn’t need to debate theology. Their language and worldview simply had no slot for it and, in the process, they helped a missionary lose his faith without ever raising their voices.😂
Makes you wonder, what would a Christian say the fate of these people is? Eternal torment? We can all see how that would be problematic.
Would they somehow make heaven and get judged by how they live their lives? But That would make the whole Christian message irrelevant. 🙂
In 1995, Jersey City MC Heather B dropped “All Glocks Down”—a bold statement during a time when much of Hip Hop was leaning into gun talk and street bravado. 💥 The track was the lead single from her debut album Takin’ Mine, produced by Kenny Parker
I don’t think you understand how catastrophic the oil refinery bombing in Tehran is.
Burning petroleum releases sulfur and nitrogen oxides that mix with rain to form sulfuric and nitric acid, essentially turning rainfall toxic.
When Saddam burned Kuwaiti oil wells in 1991, the fallout contributed to what became known as Gulf War Syndrome, with veterans developing chronic illness and cancer decades later.
The difference now: this isn’t a desert battlefield, it’s a city of 10 million people, most of which women and children.
Many of you are losing the ability to truly connect w people because you’re building connections in survival mode. You won’t truly connect or experience people because you’re just trying to get by. Trying to forget a person, trying to ensure you have financial security, trying to make sure you’re not alone, trying to make sure you’re getting validation. Whatever it is that you’ve convinced yourself you need and can’t provide yourself, you’ll attach yourself onto the next person in desperation to gain it. Your focus is on the relief they might give you so the connection becomes transactional in a way, even if you don’t consciously realise it.
this quote from Carl Jung hits so hard.
“The world is full of people suffering from the effects of their own unlived life. They become bitter, critical, or rigid, not because the world is cruel to them, but because they have betrayed their own inner possibilities. The artist who never makes art becomes cynical about those who do. The lover who never risks loving mocks romance. The thinker who never commits to a philosophy sneers at belief itself. And yet, all of them suffer, because deep down they know: the life they mock is the life they were meant to live.”
Fasting in its truest sense is an opportunity to examine our relationship with all forms of consumption. Not just pausing our food intake but noticing how conscious or unconscious we are about where our resources come from, who labored for them and what systems they reinforce.