More than $60 million and tens of thousands of hours of labor have been poured into building the arena.

In a ruling on Friday, Judge Amit P. Mehta wrote that the lawsuit arrived last minute and failed to show how the event irreversibly harmed the individuals who sued.

© Doug Mills/The New York Times

This week, Paris des Arts heads to the Czech Republic to visit Prague, a cultural capital and UNESCO World Heritage city. We meet one of the most provocative Czech artists of the international scene, David Cerny, who takes us inside his exhibition space – a former industrial site he's named the "Musoleum", a mashup of "museum" and "mausoleum".

President Donald Trump's handpicked board at the Kennedy Center is mounting a last-minute effort to keep his name on the facade of the iconic performing arts facility before a court-ordered deadline to remove it by Friday.

The Washington National Opera, which left the center amid the Trump administration’s takeover, says its efforts to retrieve its endowment and other assets have been blocked.

© Kenny Holston for The New York Times

President Trump brings a particular brand of reality TV-style renovations to the nation’s capital.

© Doug Mills/The New York Times

By Caitlin JOHNSTONE

Contact us: info@strategic-culture.su

They built this whole machine on our backs. All we need to do is stand up.

The human species has essentially been transformed into a giant machine to generate profit for corporations.

Under capitalism, humanity exists to serve the interests of the corporation. We are all livestock; beasts of burden used to carry margin expansion forward from quarterly statement to quarterly statement. Enjoyment of life has no value other than the extent to which it can be used to increase the net worth of the shareholders.

That’s why everyone’s so unhappy. We’re not living with purpose. We’re not working together to build a better world and a better future, we’re just pulling levers to turn gears to make the arrow line go up on the graph in the conference room. It’s a hollow, pointless way for people to live.

It makes our whole culture vapid and soulless.

Music is made to be as profitable as possible, which means giving it the broadest possible appeal using formulaic song structure calculated to cause a chemical response in the largest number of human brains.

Movies are designed to draw the largest possible box office revenue at the lowest possible risk to studios and investors, often by just rehashing a movie that’s already proven successful in the past or by slapping together a story about an IP with pre-existing mass appeal.

Food is made to be fast and addictive rather than nourishing.

Healthy human connection has been commodified as social media intertwines with friendships and dating apps insert themselves into the development of romantic relationships.

Human sexuality is being warped and twisted as internet porn normalizes violence and degradation for the maximum number of clicks.

Attention and engagement have been monetized, creating an information ecosystem dominated by conflict and gossip designed to appeal to our baser instincts.

Advertisement is injected into every possible corner of our waking sensory experience, with any available space where the eye might rest or the ear might listen being flooded with psychological manipulation compelling us to consume. They’ll start running commercials in our dreams the instant they have the technology to do so.

You spend eight hours at the office working to generate corporate profits, then you come home and consume products to profit other corporations. You need your beer and snacks to unwind, your streaming services and social media to distract your mind from the stress of it all, your online clothing purchase to try to feel good about yourself, and your prescription drugs to get to sleep at night. People live their entire lives like this.

And that’s those of us who are lucky enough to be living in the global north. In the global south you get wage slavery and exploitation with far more toil, far less relaxation time, and no cheap products made by impoverished workers on other continents with which to comfort yourself.

All of humanity has been roped into this mess. And for what? To make the numbers in some bank accounts increase. To get some green arrows pointing upward on the stock exchange. To enable a few billionaires to buy islands and elections.

All while destroying the biosphere we all depend on for survival.

This, we are told, is the best possible system we could possibly be living under.

I personally do not believe this is true. I personally believe we can have better. Those who benefit from this current arrangement are going to assure us it’s impossible and do everything they can to stop us from changing it, but we do have the means to reclaim the wealth, dignity and happiness that they have stolen from us.

They built this whole machine on our backs. All we need to do is stand up.

Original article: caitlinjohnstone.com.au

Cette semaine, Le Paris des Arts pose ses caméras en République tchèque, à Prague, capitale culturelle, inscrite au patrimoine mondial de l'Unesco.  L’occasion de rencontrer l’un des plus provocants artistes tchèques sur la scène internationale, David Cerny.

Classical pianist prepares to return to Co Down festival during a year of special anniversaries

One day before a deadline to take the president’s name off its facade, the arts institution appealed a federal judge’s ruling that also temporarily blocked it from closing.

© Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

The inquiry comes after a report that Dr. Neal ElAttrache, the physician for the team, supported the U.F.C. star Conor McGregor in using performance-enhancing drugs while recovering from an injury.

© The Yomiuri Shimbun, via Associated Press Images

Devlin Barrett has covered federal law enforcement for more than two decades. His new book pulls back the curtain on President Trump's Justice Department and the way he has used it as a tool to settle political scores. Amna Nawaz sat down with Barrett to discuss "The Department of Revenge: How Trump Took Control of American Justice."

The towering claw will be the site of an Ultimate Fighting Championship cage match on Sunday, which is President Trump’s 80th birthday.

© Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times

McGregor, the Ultimate Fighting Championship’s main attraction, had the support of the prominent sports physician Neal ElAttrache when he decided to use performance-enhancing drugs.

© John Locher/Associated Press

More than 2.5 million children across the U.S. live in households where grandparents have taken on the role of primary caregiver. But many grandparents face challenges navigating custody issues and accessing the resources and support they need. Geoff Bennett discussed these families with Donna Butts, author of "Grandfamilies: Stories of Children and the Loving Relatives Who Raise Them."

Maybe it's the midlife crisis talking, but the racist purge of straight white men from arts and entertainment has degraded all books and films, says Nick Dixon, and left behind only meaningless, endless culture war.

The post Why Books and Movies and Life All Suck Now appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.