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China’s Great Green Wall 🇨🇳

China is leading the world in green technology and afforestation efforts. Here is a very informative video about their monumental investment in environmentalism and how it’s been saving lives and helping their people!

Do you think the Capitalist US is capable of investment like this? We watch horrible wildfires and deforestation every year but don’t seem to have a longterm plan for combatting any of it.

As we can see, China is leading the world in reforestation, with some good efforts being made in certain European countries. However, it is important to note that much of the deforestation in big exporters like Brazil and other South American countries is done for the profits of Western powers. In a way, we are exporting our deforestation.

I will leave you with a quote from president Xi Jinping. It’s important to understand our bias against China and that we expect politicians to be power-hungry liars because ours are, but that doesn’t always have to be the case, and we should recognize China’s noble efforts when they are backing it up with real humanitarian action.

We must realize that lucid waters and lush mountains are invaluable assets and act on this understanding, implement our fundamental national policy of conserving resources and protecting the environment, and cherish the environment as we cherish our own lives.

  • Xi Jinping

Guatemala – An American Genocide (1999)

While the stories told in this documentary are especially harrowing and grim, I was personally very inspired by the diligent work and international cooperation of the forensic anthropologists. Their scientific pursuit of truth is inspiring revolutionary work.

This documentary also illustrated the evilness of the CIA—the amount of collateral murder they are willing to accept in order to punish revolutionary societies is totally incriminating.

White People, Black Authors are Not Your Medicine – Yaa Gyasi (2020)

Yaa Gyasi is a brilliant novelist whose debut work, Homegoing, spans generations of characters, giving us a 300-year depiction of “the afterlife of the Atlantic slave trade.” Her poignant article on the 2020 Black Lives Matter marches gives context to this contemporary movement.

I encourage you to read it as well as her two beautiful, powerful novels.

Why Read?

Dante Muñoz May 2021

I’ve been wondering what makes reading so impactful, fiction or non-fiction. Compared with watching media in video format, why do people who read feel so strongly about it?

I think it’s because of how conceptual reading is. Words are the building blocks of thoughts. For example, consider how difficult it is to think about those feelings we don’t have words for.

So reading becomes a conceptual link between your mind and the author’s. While documentaries can provide evidence clearly and compellingly, the words of their narration and interviews are what frame that evidence conceptually.

A glitzy TV show can show you a powerful scene with a beautiful setting, costume design, and soundtrack. That level of stimulation can feel infinitely more compelling than words on a page, but an essay can explain why all of that felt so compelling to you.

Reading is what elevates us from programmable consumer masses being entertained by flashing screens to conscious creators and participants in society.

Union Atlantic by Adam Haslett (2008)

Pulitzer Prize finalist Adam Haslett on his prescient novel he finished the week Lehman Brothers collapsed in the 2008 crash:

It’s a book not about the actual crash but the culture that lead to it. I spent 5 years wondering if anybody would think it mattered what banks did, but unfortunately history solved that problem.

The novel started out turning international financial scandals into entertaining satirical fiction then hit me with some of the darkest, most emotionally invasive gay sex scenes out of nowhere 😂

After reading a few of his novels, I really appreciate this trope he uses of a doomed revolutionary minded character who is chronically misunderstood.

Here are excerpts of each of the three main characters read with video elements: