Peter Pomerantsev. As his army blatantly annexed Crimea, Vladimir Putin went on TV and, with a smirk, told the world there were no Russian soldiers in Ukraine.
He wasn’t lying so much as saying the truth doesn’t matter. And when Donald Trump makes up facts on a whim, claims that he saw thousands of Muslims in New Jersey cheering the Twin Towers coming down, or that the Mexican government purposefully sends ‘bad’ immigrants to the US, when fact-checking agencies rate 78% of his statements untrue but he still becomes a US Presidential candidate – then it appears that facts no longer matter much in the land of the free.
When the Brexit campaign announces ‘Let’s give our NHS the £350 million the EU takes every week’ and, on winning the referendum, the claim is shrugged off as a ‘mistake’ by one Brexit leader while another explains it as ‘an aspiration’, then it’s clear we are living in a ‘post-fact’ or ‘post-truth’ world. How did we get here? Is it due to technology? Many blame technology. . [2] [3] Postmodernity based on Wilber 'One Taste' The Economy Evolves, Chris Christie Devolves. Chris Christie’s Bridge Scandal We all know the story: in an apparent act of political retribution for the mayor of Ft.
Lee not endorsing his re-election, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’ staff ordered lane closings on the George Washington Bridge for four days, causing a dangerous gridlock over the week of 9/11. The thing I just can’t shake about this story is that it’s so stupid (not to mention evil and mendacious) that I have a hard time believing it’s true. So I guess that puts me in the same category as Chris Christie, who spent two hours with reporters saying roughly the same thing.
Which leaves me with two interpretations, either the Governor is telling the truth about not knowing about the plot, or he is a sociopath who is playing a high stakes game that he is destined to lose. I’m betting on the former: Christie is just too smart to be involved such an misbegotten act of political revenge. Wait but why: Putting Time In Perspective. Humans are good at a lot of things, but putting time in perspective is not one of them.
It’s not our fault—the spans of time in human history, and even more so in natural history, are so vast compared to the span of our life and recent history that it’s almost impossible to get a handle on it. If the Earth formed at midnight and the present moment is the next midnight, 24 hours later, modern humans have been around since 11:59:59pm—1 second. And if human history itself spans 24 hours from one midnight to the next, 14 minutes represents the time since Christ. To try to grasp some perspective, I mapped out the history of time as a series of growing timelines—each timeline contains all the previous timelines (colors will help you see which timelines are which). Mithraic mysteries. Double-faced Mithraic relief.
Rome, 2nd to 3rd century AD (Louvre Museum) The Mithraic Mysteries were a mystery religion practised in the Roman Empire from about the 1st to 4th centuries AD. The name of the Persian god Mithra (proto-Indo-Iranian Mitra), adapted into Greek as Mithras, was linked to a new and distinctive imagery. Human Evolution Enters an Exciting New Phase. If you could escape the human time scale for a moment, and regard evolution from the perspective of deep time, in which the last 10,000 years are a short chapter in a long saga, you’d say: Things are pretty wild right now.
In the most massive study of genetic variation yet, researchers estimated the age of more than one million variants, or changes to our DNA code, found across human populations. The vast majority proved to be quite young. The chronologies tell a story of evolutionary dynamics in recent human history, a period characterized by both narrow reproductive bottlenecks and sudden, enormous population growth. Modernity. Postmodernity. Defining “Postmodern” Postmodernism killed the avant garde. Lady Gaga is no substitute for Lou Reed. I wonder if any of the 260 complaints about Lady Gaga's performance on The X Factor were about the death of the avant garde, because that's mine.
If this doesn't get me in Pseuds Corner, nothing will. Indeed, other female performers have garnered more complaints, so if Gaga is working overtime to shock us, it just isn't happening. We are familiar with the panto of The X Factor and with Gaga's turns. We expect her to look bonkers, cram in a ADHD medley and probably get naked. The soundtrack/product that comes with it is pedestrian, but her USP is that she doesn't have to look pretty all the time.
Of course her hint of freakshow fits in perfectly with a good old-fashioned variety show. To demand a bit more from the audience, that they work it out, even stay with it, is not where it's at. Reed's death has hit my generation because his presence anchored us into a time and a place when the avant garde was still meaningful. There is not much of this any more.