How to Recognize Lies

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Once I asked my friend Julian Assange how to recognize lies and disinformation in the media. He said something along the lines of disinformation being a response to a question that nobody has asked. It is too perfect. It leaves no room for doubt, no room for paradoxes. It explains things that have not yet been mentioned. Disinformation labels all the difficult questions as a sabotage. Or as an enemy attack. Or as a treason.
I have been thinking about this a lot lately and following the recent re-election of President Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela. The right-wing, reactionary opposition boycotted the election. They demanded the election be cancelled. This resulted in a lower turn out than in the previous elections.
The opposition then declared the election to be fraud. This was then fully backed by the USA and its allies.
However, the independent international election monitors, including CARICOM, confirmed that the election procedures and rules were very transparent and highly reliable.
Unfortunately, there is very little objective and accurate information about Venezuela in the Western mainstream media. No unbiased analysis of the situation, no analysis of the roots of the problems and their consequences. I do not find scaremongering about the collapse of 21st century socialism and blaming everything on the Venezuelan President to be an accurate information. Yes, The New York Times, The Guardian and other so called liberal media… I am looking at you. Sadly, you find it much easier to parrot the official propaganda about Venezuela. Sometimes the articles even look like they were written are press releases by the State Department. This results in a near impossibility for the public to be informed about the situation.
Venezuela has lots of problems and its society is divided. There is a severe economic crisis. High inflation, economic depression and shortage of many goods and that situation is getting worse.
There are many reasons for this. One such reason (arguably the main one) for economic problems in Venezuela is the oil business. The so-called Dutch disease, or as one OPEC founder called it “the Devil’s excrement”.
Venezuela has the largest proven oil reserves in the world. The Orinco Belt has far larger oil deposits than the deserts of the Arabian peninsula.
When Venezuela started the extracting business, the huge oil revenues went to foreign oligarchs while the domestic population was left to suffer through poverty and disease. Venezuela has also repeatedly accepted the conditions of the IMF. Strict IMF conditions which have caused a lot of problems.
There is also external pressure, in particular from the USA. The USA wants regime change in Venezuela and they likely want its oil too. The USA strategy has always been basically “what is bad for another country is good for the USA.”
The USA also hates the socialist agenda introduced by President Hugo Chavez. Chavez was inspired by Simón Bolívar (one of the main leaders of South American independence movement), Salvador Allende and Fidel Castro. He was also inspired by liberation theology. Same as Pope Francis. He said: “Capitalism is the way of the devil and exploitation. If you really want to look at things through the eyes of Jesus Christ - who I think was the first socialist - only socialism can really create a genuine society.”
After Chavez won the 1999 election, he started building a new political system to completely reform the Venezuelan society. He started a socialist policy, taking care of poor and dispossessed. Chavez used the oil industry and its resources to fund his social policy. True there were other issues; problematic spending on the Petrocribe program or the many corrupt speculators who were exploiting regulated prices. For example cheap pharmaceuticals were exported out of the country and sold for much higher prices causing a lack of pharmaceuticals in the country. This was really terrible. But now, the country has a socialist system and the USA, its allies and the Western liberal media, claim the country has gone to the dogs. However, I am sure that if Venezuela were a neoliberal, capitalist country and if it experiencing the same problems, such as the economic hardship and shortage of goods or problems with healthcare and its education systems, all would be presented as a normal state of affairs. It would be a the natural result of capitalism. Things as they should be.
Venezuela is not an authoritarian dictatorship. Opposition newspapers are still thriving, the opposition TV stations are broadcasting, there are many demonstrations, there are opposition parliamentarians in the parliament; in fact the only election which the west claims was not fraudulent is the one that Maduro’s party lost in 2015 (the National Assembly election).

People of Venezuela are not supporting the current government because it’s a dictatorship. The strong support of the opposition is from the rich and privileged. Many people see this as a class struggle.
The fact is that the poorer (and more numerous) Venezuelans find the program of the opposition – and a return to the situation before 1999 - even less attractive than the current socialist system with all its problems. The opposition leaders are not convincing, neither are their connections to the American oligarchy.
The opposition is widely supported by the USA, connected to the USA government and political forces, the media and NGOs. Their collaborators are also very skilled as far as violent tactics go, partially well trained ultra-right paramilitary groups form Columbia, the main ally of the USA in the region.
The USA is engaging in its usual double standard. On one hand, the USA government is issuing sanctions against Russia for alleged meddling with the USA elections. On the other hand, it levies sanctions on Venezuela in order to support the USA financed opposition and meddling in Venezuela’s elections. It’s pathetic.
Let’s not forget that the USA has been behind many interventions and coup d'états in Latin America which have led to the worst dictatorships in the region.
I am sure that if the US-backed opposition overthrows President Maduro, it will not be the end of the problem. The opposition should really accept the election results, accept the will of their people.
There is a need for dialogue and a common goal and Venezuela needs peace and compromise.
And we all need to seek accurate and comprehensive information. This is difficult and often uncomfortable. The lies are much easier and they are everywhere, all the time. The media should stop taking sides on an ideology and start, instead, to ask questions.

 

Lust for Love - Preface: The Sensual Revolution

When two people from radically different backgrounds agree wholeheartedly on something, listen closely. There is a good chance what they have to say might just be important. Let this book be the proof of that.

The co-authors of this book, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach and I, are indeed very different people, from very different traditions, and with very different approaches to life and the world.

An outspoken, courageous and prolific speaker and writer, Shmuley is also a religious teacher. The perspective he brings to the Sensual Revolution is drawn from years of experience providing advice and counselling to married couples.

My background contrasts with Shmuley's – many would consider it the opposite of his. But while the broad strokes of my biography are well known, there is also a private side of my life that few will have heard. I started modelling for Playboy at the age of 22, and spent my 20s as a cast member on Baywatch. At an age when most people are discovering themselves for the first time as adults – in a time before the internet had yet taken over our lives and everyone had a taste of celebrity – I found myself sharing my own image with a generation. I watched as my name broke out from my immediate circle of friends, eventually reaching households all over the world. Surreally, I was called a “sex symbol,” a “bombshell,” a “goddess.”

It was a disconcerting experience for a shy, small town girl from Vancouver Island – a quiet, studious, girl who loved her Mom and Dad, but who had also had to deal with no small amount of trauma. In the early days it was tough, grappling with uncertainty and the sense of exposure. But I discovered I felt comfortable as long as I pretended to be someone else – playing the part in public, finding within myself a different persona for every shoot.

Some may smirk, but in no way do I want to disown the Playboy years or diminish their importance to me. These experiences were a sort of university for me. There I was given the opportunity to meet and befriend fascinating and beguiling people: men and women, souls and intellects, whose experiences and character and wisdom shaped me. It was an education: unique and brilliant and precious. Thinking of these years I am reminded of the words Anais Nin wrote on the development of woman on her own terms, rather than as an imitation of man. The theme of “woman finding her own language, articulating her own feelings, discovering her own perceptions.”

It's sometimes assumed that I should want to renounce those years as decadent or foolish. This is not the case. In hindsight I am very proud of the independent, unorthodox path I took: a path that allowed me to develop on my own terms, and not – as some might presume – on the terms of men. I am proud of the intense spiritual rewards my life has brought me and the wisdom I have been lucky enough to receive.

Most of all I am proud and in awe of the women I've met along the way: powerful, wise, fascinating women; women as diverse and varied, as contradictory and manifold, as the types Nin lists in her diaries: “the masculine, objective one; the child woman of the world; the maternal woman; the sensation-seeker; the unconsciously dramatic one; the churlish one; the cold, egotistical one; and the healing, intuitive guide-woman.”

I want to do justice to these women. I don't at all renounce my past. It is out of those experiences – and with these companions and guides – that I was able to define myself. It would have been so easy to lose myself then, eclipsed behind a stream of images. But I was there, among these women and it is there I came to understand the power and autonomy that was available to me in sensuality, there that I came to possess myself in that power, and that is what saved me.

It hasn't all been roses. Over the years fame can also be a prison. It can leave very little room for a real person to live behind it, very little space for honesty, very little time to age, or mourn, or love. Life is untidier than celebrity makes out. At times in my life it has been hard to shake the sense that it was happening to someone else – that I was the lesser twin to my public image: Pamela and I. It was Pamela who won the praise and the credit, renowned but shallow, never really allowed or expected to have any depth, while I was the thoughtful, sensitive one, reading voraciously, searching for meaning, suffering through my divorce and raising my boys, sometimes waking up and wondering where the last twenty years had gone.

“Look for something hard enough, and you will find it,” as my father told me once. Lately, I have taken a hard look at my life and experiences, and realized that I have a lot to say. Playboy models aren't supposed to have much to say – at least according to some – but it is that very background that I draw on for my philosophy. That's why, when I first met Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, I did not expect that we would find so much to agree on.

I was introduced to Shmuley through mutual friends based in Malibu. He wanted to recognize my activism at the Jewish Values awards. I was honored that I – having no Jewish background – would be recognized in this way. I went along, curious to meet him. Our first conversations were cordial but fascinating. He had heard I was a very good mother and was interested how this reconciled with my public image.

At the time I was going through a difficult stage of my life, and was preoccupied with the problem of happiness in marriage. Naturally, the discussion turned to this theme – to marriage and the difficulties it faces in our society. I was fascinated to discover the wealth of insight he had into both the eternal and the modern problems of love. He had a great ability to put his finger on the complexities of romantic life, concisely and simply. It was a surprise to me to discover a religious teacher who was so awake to the needs of intimacy between lovers, who understood that love must closely trace the contours of passion if it is to endure.

I was also intrigued to discover my beliefs about the importance of sensuality and sex in marriage being reflected back in fluent quotations from scripture. My father gave me a keen interest in mythology and folklore, and I have always had a huge respect for the wisdom buried in the mythologies of ancient cultures. So it was there – not in religious scripture - that I always looked to get perspective on human sexuality. On reflection though, it was not surprising there was agreement. Religious traditions are also human traditions, and sex and love are at the core of human experience. Such timeless and enduring expressions of human experience would naturally contain the same basic truths, the same delicate wisdom.

As fascinated as I was with his ideas, Rabbi Shmuley was also intrigued by mine. He was very interested in what he saw as apocalyptic contradictions in my character, and how they related to the topics we were talking about. It was clear from our discussion that I – just like anyone – have experienced my share of heartache in life. But, he exclaimed, if anyone should be free of the loneliness of our society, surely, it should be me. It should be Pamela – the lifelong cover girl. The woman who – as the tabloids and gossip blogs would have it – could have any man she wants. If Pamela could be lonely, if her heart could be broken, that's an apocalypse! What hope is there for anyone else?

Of course, as we both knew, this is a myth – I am a human being just like anyone else. Experiences affect me as much as they do anyone else. And, as the great psychologist Carl Jung once wrote, “Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.”1 But the question itself was fruitful. We decided that perhaps, instead of despair, it would give people hope or reprieve to know that we are all – without exception – on the great quest for romantic companionship and sexual contentment. And thinking over it during our conversation, we realized that this supposed contradiction in me led deeper into the issues we were discussing, towards an understanding of the reasons for the dearth of love, of passion, of sex, in our contemporary society.

That was when we decided to work together on a book – a book which would capture these tensions, which would diagnose the problems of romantic passion in the 21st century, and which would point towards the solutions.

The title of our book – the Sensual Revolution – refers to a revolution in human affairs that we believe must happen to afford the greatest possibility of romantic fulfilment to the greatest number of people. It is a revolution that follows other cultural and sexual upheavals in our recent past, an adjustment that can restore balance to the way men and women relate to each other.

But the Sensual Revolution is also something that happened a long time ago. Ancient mythologies carry its secrets. It is the first flowering of human sexuality in a time before histories were written, and it can be found throughout the literature and poetry and philosophy of every age and every culture. It is the enduring art of human intimacy.

Our book is about how it has been lost, and not for the first time. Human intimacy has been distorted before, by new technologies which changed the way people connected to each other, and it was necessary each time for society to relearn how to love. In 1946 Nin wrote of “the dangerous time when mechanical voices, radios, telephones, take the place of human intimacies, and the concept of being in touch with millions brings a greater and greater poverty in intimacy and human vision.”

We are living through a similar change. How much has the “communications revolution” impoverished intimacy? There have been great strides forward in recent decades: sexual liberation, global activism, a revolution in information. These are precious gains and should not be lost. But without a practised understanding of the mysteries of human intimacy, of sensuality, the technologies of our age can easily lead us into alienation, disaffection and loneliness.

Shmuley and I agree: if the arts of intimacy and sensuality have been forgotten, they must be remembered again. Our culture must rediscover sensuality and sexiness, for the sake of meaning and value in our intimate lives. Our hope is that this book – the joint efforts of the most unlikely of co-authors: a Rabbi and a Playboy cover girl – can help that happen.

Peace for Twilights to Come

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“PAZ para los crepúsculos que vienen,
paz para el puente, paz para el vino,
paz para las letras que me buscan
y que en mi sangre suben enredando
el viejo canto con tierra y amores…”

“Peace for the twilights to come” by Pablo Neruda, Chilean poet and politician, is one of my favourite poems of all.

I have been reflecting on it, especially these days, when people claim the world is nearing another global war.

Poetry does not have as a big an outreach as other art forms but it is so important in the world and to me. It reflects the spirit of the time more truthfully, more precisely, more intensively.

I think Pablo Neruda’s poetry reflected the time in which he lived so perfectly. He wanted to reflect the creation of a socialist system in the region. He is the best representation of South American literature and poetry and a true ambassador for the fight for peace - xcuse the paradox in the term itself.

Neruda was also a great supporter of Salvador Allende, the first ever democratically elected Marxist President. Allende started a process of democratic revolution in Chile and refused to surrender to imperialistic forces, despite huge pressure from the United States. President Allende allegedly committed suicide during the 1973 coup by General Augusto Pinochet who had overthrown the Chilean socialist government. But some claim that he was “suicided” [killed]. Then earlier this year experts suggested that Neruda was probably poisoned by the secret service. If this is indeed the case, Neruda, same as Allende, was killed for speaking the truth and fighting for peace.

This was mostly because the USA was enforcing their vision of international affairs and acting as a self-imposed policeman of the world. Those who opposed them were punished...have times changed?

I am saying this because of my interest in Latin America. Since visiting Julian Assange in Ecuador Embassy over the last few years, I have always felt proud of a small country standing against the world super-bully. I was proud of the way Ecuador stood up to protect Julian whose work has been about bringing important news and information to the public and fighting for the world peace.

The first documents of Wikileaks exposed about the crimes committed by the US armed forces were thousands of military documents about wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. They provided testimony about the real face of these conflicts. So many secret reports about civilian victims, massacres of civilians. About war crimes. For example, Collateral Murder video showed how American soldiers shot at a civilian vehicle and killed 11 people, including journalists. For many years, Wikileaks has been publishing more documents revealing the truth behind the war machinery and military industrial complex.

Julian’s and Wikileaks’ work has never been more important than now. The international relations are getting more and more complicated.

I follow the situation in Latin America with baited breath. There are so many elections happening there now. Venezuela, Colombia, Mexico. Brazil... all of them important.

So as Ecuador stepped up to the USA in the past, maybe the other countries in the region can also step up, stop the USA from meddling in their affairs. Create a world, the world, their world, with a goal to get people closer, reduce tensions and build trust.

Maybe,
Just As Pablo Neruda wanted it.
 

NÎMES Pamela Anderson vient en porte-parole de luxe des anticorridas

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Elle était déjà venue il y a plusieurs mois pour une photo devant la statue de Nimeño II, devenant de ce fait un soutien de poids de l'Alliance Anticorrida de Claire Starozinski. Un coup médiatique qui avait fait parler, et qui a donc donné des idées aux militants anticorrida.

Ainsi, Pamela Anderson est revenue à Nîmes, cette fois pour remettre en mains propres au maire Jean-Paul Fournier une pétition contre les corridas dans les arènes de Nîmes qui a rassemblé près de 600 000 signatures. "Je viens pour être la porte-parole de ces près de 600 000 personnes qui ont signé la pétition, ce n'est pas normal qu'un pays civilisé on continue à tuer des animaux de cette manière", affirme la star avant d'estimer que "de plus en plus de personnes sont contre la corrida, nous y sommes presque." 

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Sans surprise, l'accueil en mairie a été plutôt froid, seules Pamela Anderson et Claire Starozinski parvenant à pénétrer dans l'hôtel de ville, les autres personnes présentes — dont l'avocat de l'Alliance Anticorrida et la presse, s'étant fait refouler par un policier municipal. "Une fois en haut la secrétaire de mairie et le directeur de la communication nous ont sèchement dit que nous ne serions pas reçues, s'étrangle Claire Starozinski au sortir de l'hôtel de ville. Nous lui avons répondu que nous avions le droit de voir le maire, et on nous a rétorqué que le maire avait le droit de na pas voir ses concitoyens. C'est un déni de démocratie."Reste que "nous avons pu montrer que près de 600 000 personnes sont contre les corridas à Nîmes", se félicite tout de même la militante.

 www.anticorrida.org

The Closer - A Ride Responsibly PSA Starring Pamela Anderson

Ride Responsibly is committed to ensuring the safety and protection of all ground transportation passengers and drivers. Following historic labor decisions by California’s Supreme Court and the California Public Utilities Commission, it is critical that lawmakers across the nation address the unfair labor tactics utilized by ride-hailing apps, and work to curb the abuse that drivers suffer on a daily basis. To learn more, please visit www.rideresponsibly.org