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Today we examine quantum mechanics, the existence of god, and near death experiences to see the truth of spirituality.

Posted: September 15, 2019 at 6:30 pm

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In this compelling lecture by Alan Watts, we take a cosmic perspective on reality to make sense of our existence.

Soundtracks by PBO & Lockjaw

Posted: March 24, 2018 at 3:38 pm

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Leo Gura, founder of Actualized.org, shows what is necessary to get the most out of life. Through discipline, self mastery, and a compelling vision, you can unleash your full potential through your life purpose.

The full speech can be found here:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ey3x1...

Edited by Focus Shift Media: https://www.facebook.com/TheFocusShift

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"If the universe began in the past, when that happened it was Now. And it trails off like the wake of a ship from Now and just as the wake fades out, so does the past. Things aren't explained by what happened in the past. They're explained by what happens Now"-Alan Watts

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Exponential technological and cultural progress have given us the opportunity to more fully realize our potential.

Speech by Jason Silva

Posted: July 23, 2017 at 6:23 pm

Posted: July 9, 2020 at 5:12 pm

By Rose Vaughan

Student Intern, Davie

Cooperative Extension

The trend of the agricultural industry in Davie County is looking up.

Despite the threats of farmland loss, Davie farmland is growing. North Carolina ranks number two in the top 12 states at risk for loss of farmland due to urbanization.

Davie County is resisting that trend. Before 2012, the county was losing 12 percent of its farmland. Since then, there has been a 29 percent increase in the total amount of farmland. Farmers in Davie County are beginning to gain land back and they have used it to more than double the income of the industry.

Across all farms in the county, costs are decreasing and profits are increasing. In just five years the net profits for farmers increased by 270 percent. These improvements took place despite the fact that the number of farms declined by eight percent. Theres no doubt that the strength of agriculture in Davie County has grown.

Although data shows that Davie County agriculture is becoming stronger, it is evident that some things are changing. Some crop sales have decreased substantially. The production of tobacco has gone to zero dollars in sales, which was a significant decline since 2012 when the sales were nearly $1 million. On the other hand, the value of fruit, nut and berry products has gone up by 29 percent and the value of sod, greenhouse, nursery and floriculture products is up by 17 percent.

The amount of land used to harvest forage, corn, soybeans and wheat has grown.

Even more, modern and unique forms of agriculture like agritourism have taken off. In less than a decade, revenue from agritourism has increased by 121 percent. Therefore, many crops and other forms of agriculture have been in an upward trend in terms of production and profits. Its easy to think that the loss of one crop leads to a decline in agriculture as a whole based on those numbers, but the industry is making progress in other areas.

Being ranked No. 20 in the state, one of the strongest agricultural programs in Davie County is in the production of layer hens. Layers are the breed of chickens that are produced primarily for the purpose of laying eggs, hence the name layers. Whereas pullets are the chickens that are produced to replace the layers that die. The numbers of both the layers and the pullets have been increased to more than 318,000 chickens. On top of that, the county was able to raise the profits from egg production by $782,000 in a single year; thats a lot of eggs. The growth in layer hen and egg production has coincided with a 14 percent increase in the value of animal products since 2012.

What does that mean?

While the county is experiencing loss in some areas of agriculture, its making up for those losses by making progress in other areas of production. The shift from tobacco to grains and forages, for instance, may be more profitable for farmers because it allows them to focus their efforts on the more successful crops. On top of that, Davie County is resisting the threat for loss of farmland and even gaining more farmland back.

Ultimately, the changes in the industry seem to just be redirection. As George Bernard Shaw said, Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything. The changes in Davie County agriculture has produced an overwhelmingly positive result which is evidence of progress, not decline.

Farmers are supported by consumers through local sales. They have grown their sales to consumers by 21 percent in five years. The Cooperative Extension Davie County Center has made an effort to increase the connection of farmers to consumers through local farmers markets and by giving consumers access to local farm information. You can support these farmers further by visiting our Web page at https://davie.ces.ncsu.edu/davie-local-farms/ for more information on how to reach local farms.

Link:Agriculture alive and well in Davie County - Davie County Enterprise Record - Davie Enterprise Record

Posted: at 5:12 pm

If one wishes to count in decades, the 1920s was surely the greatest single decade in Irish writing in English. What other one could equal it for the sustained quality of its artistry, the immediate and lasting impact of its major works, its conviction in the value of the written word?

There is scarcely a year in the decade in which something remarkable did not occur. In 1920, George Bernard Shaws Heartbreak House premiered in New York. In 1921, WB Yeats published Michael Robartes and the Dancer, the volume that contains Easter 1916, The Second Coming and A Prayer for My Daughter. Ulysses made 1922 a watershed in modern literary history. Yeats received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1923.

The Abbey Theatre produced The Shadow of a Gunman, the first work in Sean OCaseys Dublin trilogy, that year, and Shaws Saint Joan, a play about political martyrdom, was premiered in New York. In 1924, OCaseys Juno and the Paycock was staged at the Abbey; Daniel Corkerys The Hidden Ireland, probably the most significant work of cultural criticism produced in Ireland that decade, appeared too. In 1925, Shaw received the Nobel Prize and Yeats published A Vision. This was the only the decades midpoint.

In 1926, OCaseys The Plough and the Stars was staged in the Abbey, prompting riots. The year 1927 was a quiet one, though Shakespeare and Company published Joyces Pomes Pennyeach in Paris. In 1928, The Tower, one of Yeatss finest volumes, was published. Anna Liva Plurabelle, extracted from Joyces Work in Progress, was also published by Faber & Faber and the Gate staged Oscar Wildes Salom for the first time in Ireland. Elizabeth Bowens The Last September was published in 1929.

In 1930, Yeatss Words Upon the Window Pane appeared and a 24-year old Samuel Beckett, making a beginning, published Whoroscope.

Across the Atlantic, Irish-American writers made a real mark in the 1920s. Eugene ONeills The Emperor Jones was staged in New York in 1920 and established ONeills reputation as an experimental playwright. F Scott Fitzgeralds The Great Gatsby was published in 1925. In 1927, ONeills All Gods Chillun Got Wings premiered with Paul Robeson starring in New York, and in 1928 ONeill won a Pulitzer Prize for Strange Interludes, premiered in New York that year.

They dont belong to Irish writing in any direct sense, but ONeills and Fitzgeralds works mark a moment when Irish-Americans left a permanent stamp on American literature. ONeills grandparents emigrated from Kilkenny in the wake of the Famine. His Irish-born father, James, grew up in a Buffalo slum, the family cared for by his mother Mary ONeill when her husband returned to Ireland. James made a considerable fortune in American touring theatre. In two generations, the family had moved well up the class system, though Eugene ONeill never forgot his fathers terror of the famine poorhouse or his familys Irish or class origins.

The collective contribution these writers Irish and Irish-American made to the arts of modern poetry, fiction and theatre in a single decade is immense. It is worth remembering, too, that many of them engaged, some occasionally, some consistently, with public political issues.

Roy Fosters biography of Yeats relates how on February 7th, 1921, the poet gave an address to the Oxford Irish Society, declaring to a young Irish republican student, James OReilly, that he would tell his audience their kings soldiers are murderous. As good as his word, he used his oration to praise Sinn Fin justice and denounce the Prussianism of the Black and Tans.

On November 8th, 1923, he defended Joyce in Trinity College against the charge of dullness. Ulysses, Yeats responded, might be as long as Johnsons dictionary and as foul as Rabelais, but Joyce was the only Irishman who had the intensity of the great novelist.

His 1925 Senate speech challenging the Cosgrave governments anti-divorce legislation is better remembered today than these earlier contributions. Knowing his side would lose, Yeats told his listeners on that occasion that There is no use quarrelling with icebergs in warm water and that while his opponents would now carry the day when the iceberg melts [Ireland] will become an exceedingly tolerant country.

OCaseys The Plough and the Stars prompted a riot at the Abbey which still possessed an audience passionate or excitable enough to make one. Norah Hoults short story collection Poor Women! (1928) portrayed the inner consciousness of women from varied class backgrounds struggling with religion and suggested that new constituencies were starting to find their own voices. Bowens first novel launched the career of a superb stylist.

Still, if the 1920s was a glorious literary decade, changes soon to come would irrevocably alter Irish writing and literary production generally. The first Pan-African Congress met in Paris in 1920 and the Harlem Renaissance was getting into its swing in New York. The Chinese Communist Party was founded in 1920 and in 1922 Gandhis Non-Cooperation Movement began in India.

ONeills The Emperor Jones, in its own way a critical commentary on the 1915 US occupation of Haiti, and a work that gave a leading role to an African-American character, now looks a decidedly dated play that deploys crass stereotypes of African-Americans and Caribbean peoples. The African-American actor Charles Gilpin, who played the lead role of Brutus Jones quarrelled continuously with ONeill and throughout the production changed the n-word in the dialogue to Negro or coloured to ONeills chagrin.

As the non-white colonies of Britain and the US asserted themselves in the decades ahead, the kind of casual racism to be found in most white writing in the 1920s would be called out more and more vigorously. And as Irish society settled into conservative state consolidation, and most Irish writers failed to connect with new struggles emerging across the British Empire, much Irish writing lapsed into its own version of a post-independence insularity and would not long remain to the fore in the annals of anti-colonial struggle.

In 1925, John Logie Baird transmitted the first television image and in 1928 made the first transatlantic TV transmission from London to Hartsdale, New York. In 1929, the Academy of Motion Pictures conferred its first awards, known as the Oscars, in Los Angeles. Though the full effects would take time to impinge on Ireland, when TV and cinema created new publics locally and globally, and shaped new kinds of attention and distraction, the literary authors authority, like an iceberg in hot water maybe, slowly declined.

In the familiar narratives of the 20th century, TV and cinema threw light on a darkened autarchic Ireland and created a more open society. This seems at best partially true. They also locked Ireland even more firmly into an Anglo-American transatlantic perspective, to the point that it could sometimes seem that anything happening beyond Great Britain or the United States scarcely mattered.

In any event, as the world became media-saturated over the course of the 20th century, in western-style liberal democracies especially, fewer and fewer writers would enjoy the immense public esteem once commanded by major 19th-century writers such as Victor Hugo or mile Zola in France, Charles Dickens or George Eliot in England, or Leo Tolstoy in Russia. Yeats in Ireland and Sartre in postwar France could inspire and provoke a nation in ways few writers in any contemporary liberal democracy can do today.

It is easy to criticise in retrospect, but the writers themselves may not always have helped matters. When Yeats rejected Sean OCaseys The Silver Tassie in 1928 and OCasey left in dudgeon for London, the fallout may have damaged both. The Abbey Theatre lost its only serious left-wing political writer; OCaseys experimental works in London never had the impact of his Dublin plays . The Abbey, Irish political drama and OCasey may all have been the long-term losers.

More generally, with the advent of what was already beginning to be called mass culture (FR Leaviss Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture was published in 1930), many of the greatest writers of the time tacked in the opposite direction towards avant-garde difficulty and specialist-audience obscurity.

Joyces Work in Progress, published as Finnegans Wake in 1939, is an astonishing feat with many admirers but few avid readers. Yeatss alienation from the new Ireland to which he had tied his fortunes led to works such as On the Boiler, published by the The Cuala Press in 1939; it was a fanatic rant seething with eugenicist disdain for the lower classes, mainly Catholic in Ireland. The strident anti-populist impulse that disfigures his later life especially set a pattern in Irish letters repeated later by others including Francis Stuart and Conor Cruise OBrien, the former drawn to Hitlers Germany, the latter indulging in late career belligerent Zionism and Islamophobia.

In an age of celebrity, Beckett would win celebrity by apparently eschewing celebrity. One way or another, the tango between writer, media and public remains even now tortuously difficult.

For those to whom it matters, the coming decade will be a time to look back, to celebrate, to think critically about Irish literary achievement. No commemorations or conferences in the 2020s, however, will return us to the 1920s. Nor will any amount of Booker Prizes or Tony Awards greatly change the situation of the contemporary writer either.

Today, accomplished poetry, literary drama and maybe even the literary novel are typically quiet niche pursuits closer to ballet or opera than to the novel and poetry a century ago. TV or cinema can make an occasional sensation of The Commitments, The Butcher Boy, Brooklyn or Normal People, but transmedia adaptability doesnt typically do much for the work of a Derek Mahon or Sinad Morrissey. Even when they do serve fiction writers, such as Colm Tibn with Brooklyn, they rarely serve as their more ambitious works, such as Tibns The Master.

The streaming companies that secure strong ratings on the back of works like Normal People rarely repay the favour to the literary world. Though a good novel with a neat story will always serve their purpose, it would be idle to look to Hulu or Netflix for serious critical programming on modern writing. Since writers contract to publishing corporations, and publishing corporations to distribution behemoths like Amazon, or to conglomerates like Disney or Time Warner, the writer, as much any other profession, lives in a world saturated in neoliberal capitalist hierarchy and values.

Looking back on Irish writing in the 1920s, two obvious things stand out: how male that world was and how Protestant. After the fall of Gaelic Ireland, the world of Irish writing and the Irish visual arts were a Protestant stronghold and Joyces exile and Daniel Corkerys crankiness need to be understood in that context.

Neither privileged masculinism nor Protestant patricianism inhibited work of quality. Yet, like ours now, the 1920s world was changing faster then than anyone could keep up with. Did Yeats in 1901 look farther into the future than he knew in Ireland and the Arts when he wrote: We who care deeply about the arts find ourselves the priesthood of any almost forgotten faith, and we must, I think, if we would win the people again, take upon ourselves the method and fervour of a priesthood. We must be half humble and half proud.

In a 21st-century Ireland where almost forgotten faiths are the norm, writers struggle, like priests or ministers, for real vocation and publics that care. Still, young writers continue to appear and even Trinity College, the early 20th-century heart of Irish dullness, continues to produce a few. The Irish generation that came of age after the 2008 financial crash has moved sharply leftwards and wants its own new Ireland. Its support for causes like that of the Palestinians or Black Lives Matter indicate that its views are more internationalist than narcissistically nationalist. The current pandemic and its fallout may push them further to the left.

Today, several youthful Irish writers, most prominently Sally Rooney and Oisn Fagan, announce themselves Marxists, resurrecting another almost forgotten faith, and are doing their best to create a new Irish political fiction capable of speaking to their own era. Their task will not be easy. For all the attention, nationally and internationally, lavished recently on Rooney, what her Marxism might mean for Irish writing today has generated little comment.

What does it mean to be a Marxist writer in the 21st century? Or to be an Irish one more particularly? How can it become something more than a marketing tag a distinguishing brand image? These are questions for critics even more than for writers like Rooney. However, for Irish critics to address such questions well, they will need to take capitalism, Marxism and literature all equally seriously, a rare enough occurrence in Irish studies.

The fact that Rooney and Fagan both attended Trinity reminds us, if reminder is needed, that the literary arts have always been, for better or worse, the preserve of elites. This has not changed greatly since the 1920s. No one can cut a leftist swathe in that world without difficulty. Still, the ambition is to be admired and bespeaks of the writers a faith in themselves and in literature, and a hope for a responsive public willing to consider the issues they raise seriously.

As we move into the centenary of the 1920s, we must wish these young starters well and hope that they, and their readers, can be half humble, half proud, and set our ambitions high. There is a literary tradition to inspire, much in it to emulate, much to avoid, much to renew.

Joe Cleary teaches English and Irish literature at Yale University. Cambridge University Press will publish his Modernism, Empire, World Literature next year.

See original here:Golden decade: How Irish writing roared in the 1920s - The Irish Times

Posted: at 5:12 pm

By Vejas Liulevicius, Ph.D., University of Tennessee, Knoxville The Haymarket Riot, May 4, 1886, Chicago. Beginning as a strike rally, an unknown person threw a dynamite bomb that killed eight police and a number of civilians.. (Image: Everett Historical/Shutterstock)

During the decades after the death of Karl Marx, the socialist movement expanded in many countries. Although there were fears among the Marxists that his ideology might grow faint or diverge from its initial principles, it continued to thrive, although with internal clashes between theory and practice. Also, there were many factions based on the interpretations of the principles in many countries.

Learn more about the Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital.

In Austria-Hungary, under the rule of the Habsburg Empire, Marxists struggled to reconcile Marxs idea of fading nationalism with their ethnically diverse social structures. These Austro-Marxists came up with novel ideas and models such as federalism and autonomy to prevent the fading of ethnic identity. This was a problem that was persistent in the coming years and proved especially challenging to practice.

Another peculiar aspect of the Austro-Hungarian socialist movement was the immense mass power it had. This power was demonstrated through rallies in the streets. This was hugely impressive for a young man who had just arrived in the city in 1908. His name was Adolf Hitler. Although he was not attracted by the Social Democrats, the idea of mass politics was highly fascinating to him. In his book, Mein Kampf, he recalls how impressed he was with those masses selling to the proportions of a menacing army.

In the late 18th century, Poland was divided by Russian, German, and Austrian empires. Different regions of the country were ruled by these empires. As a result, the socialist parties were not able to form unified and long-lasting parties in this country. Different parties under different names were formed, including the Proletariat Party, a Polish Socialist Party, the Polish Social Democratic Party, and the radical party of SDKPiL (Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania). These were all underground parties that broke up in the early stages.

This is a transcript from the video series The Rise of Communism: From Marx to Lenin. Watch it now, on The Great Courses Plus.

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