The Black Panther Movie
From The Ramparts
Junious Ricardo Stanton
The Black Panther Movie
“On a
fundamental, emotional level, superheroes, whether in print or on film, serve
the same function for their audience as Golden Age movie stars did for theirs:
they create glamour. If that sounds crazy, it’s because we tend to
forget what glamour is really about. Glamour isn’t beauty or luxury; those are
only specific manifestations for specific audiences. Glamour is an imaginative
process that creates a specific, emotional response: a sharp mixture of
projection, longing, admiration, and aspiration. It evokes an audience’s hopes
and dreams and makes them seem attainable, all the while maintaining enough
distance to sustain the fantasy.” Superhero Worship Virginia
Postrel https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2006/10/superhero-worship/305224/
The recently released Marvel/ Disney film Black
Panther is generating excitement around the world as it breaks box
office records on a fast track to bring in at least one billion dollars if not
more. As of this writing after two weekends the film has grossed over $704,000,000
world wide! I’m not a movie guy but saw it twice in less than a week. The film
is sparking conversations and discussions about film, politics, portrayals of
African people and the new ground the film is breaking.
Some have postulated superhero movies are fostering
regression and an infantile mentality in our society. For me I think it is a
form of escapism a way of disconnecting and focusing on the day to day grind by
slipping into a fantasy world. I do agree
we are being programmed by Hollywood,
dumbed down and victimized by a nefarious agenda of social engineering designed
to create non-thinking, dysfunctional, unproductive zombies and automatons.
For people of African descent the film Black
Panther offers a respite from the depictions of Black people started by
D.W. Griffith in his 1915 film Birth of
A Nation which imagined us as degenerate criminals, dullards and reprobates.
D.W. Griffith’s vile depiction of Black’s (played by white actors in blackface)
set the tone and tenor for over one hundred years of despicable US (and
foreign) filmmaking and film iconography. Following Griffith’s
films we were subjected to Tarzan and Jungle Jim in the movies, Ramar of the
Jungle on US
television and a host of other films depicting continental and Diasporan Africans
as savages and ignoramuses.
Sadly
today filmmakers even Blacks still mimic Grifith’s iconography and acquiesce to
white America’s
projection of us as grossly sub-human, hyper-sexual dysfunctional personalities,
especially in the music videos and so called “reality Shows”. Black men are criminals or at best the sidekick
of the white hero and our women were portrayed as Mammies, Jezebels, hoochie
mommas or Sapphires.
Fast
forward to 2018, in the Black Panther film we are witnessing
a sea change and a revolution. Black Panther it is not a Black film
per se, it was produced by Marvel Studios a successful studio that is cranking
out block buster movies based on their comicbook characters. The Black Panther character
was first introduced in Marvel’s Fantastic Four comic in 1966. Later in 1973 the
Black Panther and his fictional Wakanda home were given with their own comicbook.
Over the years the comic has enjoyed a successful run in a genre where there
were few Black superheroes in the comicbooks and none on television or in the
movies.
Marvel changed all that when they introduced Wakanda
in the block buster film Avengers Age of
Ultron and Black Panther was introduced in a follow up movie Captain America Civil War. Yes Wakanda is a fictional place and its pure
fantasy but so are most films even when there are supposedly based on real life
people and places. It offers a vision or idea of what African people can do and
be and it is based upon the historical reality of a time when African people
were highly civilized and advanced.
Director
Ryan Googler offers a unique vision of African people more powerful, imaginative
and positive than the images and depictions of African people shown in any previous
motion picture, even Eddie Murphy’s Coming
To America which was a comedy. Even though the film is based on a fictional
superhero and a mythical place in Africa, the
film is resonating on a deep psychological level with Black folks around the
world.
The
images of richly melanin endowed people living in a secret highly advanced
technological culture far superior to anything in our present reality,
functioning in an highly ethical and traditionally based society is inspiring
and glamorous! It is mind-blowing for many. This is uncharted territory for
most of us. The set designs, costumes, hair styles and imagery are awesome. And
the idea and depiction of a place like Wakanda is exhilarating because it
offers possibilities and inspires us to imagine a better us and a better world.
I saw the film twice within a week both times
except for a few scenes that evoked mild laughter, the audience sat in rapt
quiet attention, no talking to the screen, no side conversations just watching.
Most of the audience was white (owing to the successful Marvel movies that have
generated billions of dollars and millions of fans). The second time I saw it the people in the
theater applauded when the film ended. When I saw it on the first Friday, I
think people were so awestruck at what they saw they walked out talking quietly
amongst themselves. I was waiting outside and a few people nodded and gave the
approval sign.
While
I concerns about the violence in the film which is standard fare in these mega
budget CGI films, I feel are desensitizing and manipulating us for war killing
and imperialism, I was impressed and intrigued by the philosophical and
emotional tension the film raises amongst the main characters especially King T’Challa
the newly installed native born king of Wakanda who is still trying to determine
the kind or ruler he will be and his cousin Erik Killmonger a African-American
who has never seen Wakanda nor been initiated into the society who when we see
him as an adult is sociopathic mercenary. The tension is driven by the questions:
should Wakandans share their resources and knowledge with the rest of the
world, lead a global revolution to free all oppressed people or remain
isolated, hidden and secret. I am not going to spoil it by revealing anything
more.
At a
later date I will probably examine these questions and share some of my
thoughts on the deeper story lines, like are comicbook superheroes making us
infantile, explore the character relationships, the parallels to other mythical
stories themes and personalities and the irony the film is being distributed so
widely by Disney whose founder was an avowed racist and alleged pedophile.
The good news is, I don’t have to exhort you
to see the film because it is doing buffo at the box office, but if you haven’t
seen it, go see it.
-30-
Yamagochi
Yamagochi
Junious Ricardo
Stanton
In 1960 when he was twenty one
years old Baba Yatahma was taught to play chess by Robert Kenyatta when they
were attending Opportunities
Industrial Center
taking a drafting class. They both were culturally conscious and they had an Afrocentric
worldview. Kenyatta was an advanced chess player and he greatly influenced Baba
Yatahma and to the point he too became a chess enthusiast.
On December 23, 1973 he was in
prayer asking God to show him how to educate our people. That night Yatahma had
a vision of a game board similar to chess but it had more pieces and a larger
board . “I was teaching people chess but there was a part of me that wanted
something more. I went into prayer mediation and asked God to give me something
I could teach my people with. That night I had a vision of a nine by nine board
and showed me I should add a few more pieces. It took me about eighteen years
to perfect Yanagochi.”
“I left Philadelphia
and moved to Miami Florida and I met a lot of different people
from around the world, having been an avid reader and I looked at the African
continent and I took the names of different ancient people and put them in the
game, naming the pieces.”
While it is similar to chess
Yamagochi is a unique board game that has its own pieces, strategies and
objectives. Instead of knights, kings, bishops, rooks, pawns and queens,
Yamagochi has Nasut, Cleopatra, Akoben, Abun, Obrafo, Nyumba and Mujahadin. Baba
Yatahma created the game to develop thinking skills, mental discipline,
decision making, tactical awareness, analysis, and long term strategic
proficiency.
“One thing for sure Yamagochi is
not based on color it’s not white moves first and black responses. It’s based
upon the concept that everybody is placed on this planet with an equal
opportunity by nature, by our Creator’s will and whatever happens after that is
based on our experiences on this planet, the circumstances we find ourselves in
and our ability to handle the daily issues. Yamagochi has eighty one squares forty
one dark squares and forty light squares. We determine who goes first by
placing a piece in your closed fist and the other person if he or she picks the
hand with the piece in it, they go first.”
Yamagochi is a fascinating board
gaming concept. It is deeper than merely a board game. Explaining the game’s name Yatahma stated,
“It’s meaning is the Ninth Crown Wisdom. Yama
means crown or mountain in Japanese so I wanted to utilize crown. Go is the number nine in Japanese and
it’s the ninth principle, the number nine is always showing up and Chi represents wisdom and intellect and
it also represents blood and the father. The spiritual and metaphysical part of
it speaks to the soul of our people.” When the ancestors and Creator take you,
you think you are doing something but they are doing something to you. Along
with the learning of the mechanics of the piece sand how each piece moves on
the Website I have what is called valuing the nine an explanation of the nine
the nine natures of man the added two piece of the board is the development of
our conscious nature and develop our super conscious mind.
Yamagochi has seven pieces while
chess has six. One feature that differs from chess is if a Mujahadin (similar to a pawn in chess) promotes to the last rank it
can only become a piece the opponent has already captured (it’s like a prisoner
exchange). The extra piece in Yamagochi
is called Akoben which is an
extremely powerful piece. The Akoben can move in an L shape like the knight in
chess but also moves vertical and horizontal like a rook in chess.
Also unique in Yamagochi is the ability of one piece called the Abun that sits on a dark square but the
player may use a one time only move called Abracadabra to place the Abun on a
light square.
Baba Yatahma teaches a Yamagochi master
class at Black and Nobel bookstore at Broad and Erie Wednesday evenings from 6-8 PM. He also
offers classes at the Riletta L. Cream Ferry
Avenue Public Library in Camden New Jersey.
Baba Yatahma is planning a Yamagochi tournament sometime in the spring.
Baba Yatahma creates the Yamagochi
pieces, he and his son created the mold and they make them for each game and
they provide a certificate of authenticity.
A complete Yamagochi game includes thirty six hand crafted pieces, one
vinyl roll up board (for easy travel) one official handbook with the rules,
piece description and movement and one book with the history, strategy and
origin. The cost of
the game is $39.99.
For more information or to purchase games call (856) 208-7707 or go to
www.yamagochi.ws.
-30-
gochi
Rigged Markets
Rigged Markets
Junious Ricardo
Stanton
Several weeks ago I posted a piece
saying the Trump Tax Cuts were a scam. Several readers chided me and showed
their lack of knowledge how the global markets game is played by pointing to
the record volume of trading on the New York Stock Exchange and the continuous
increases traders were experiencing. It was clear to me they did not know the
ins and outs of this rigged system so I didn’t continue the discussion.
For decades the gloom and doomers
have predicted what they call a “correction” meaning the high prices, high volume and high returns of
the stock, commodities and futures markets would come crashing down on us but we
didn’t see it until 2007-08. The corporate owned media spun the Wall Street
caused financial implosion in 2007-08 as a few bad apples or that it was caused
by poor people buying houses and assets they could not afford rather than out
and out fraud on the part of traders, brokers, rating agencies, the media and
the government.
Astute readers know that the
financial collapse was caused by greed and recklessness exacerbated by the fact
the Glass–Steagall
Act, the legislative fire wall put in place by the Roosevelt administration in 1933
that separated commercial banks and investment banks was abolished during the Clinton administration.
This along with other forms of deregulation that permitted massive
consolidation and ultimately tax payer underwriting of failed investment and
commercial banks, home mortgage exchange entities Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac
paved the way for the so called “Too Big Too Fail” banks to be bailed out at
taxpayer expense.
Meanwhile not one CEO, not one
rating agency executive, not one hedge fund manager, not one day trader, stock,
commodities or futures broker was indicted or went to jail. How is that possible?
How can these CEO who earn several hundred time the salaries of their workers
not be held accountable under the law? Well,
the 1% never go to jail, they just manipulate the situation and use their influence
and their media to spin it anyway they want.
The wild fluctuation of this past
week were stopped preventing a wipe out of pension funds, derivatives, savings,
futures and other wealth. What happened to stop the collapse? Was it the work of
the Plunge Protection Team? What is the Plunge Protection Team you ask? Here’s
some background on it. “Toward the end of his time in office in 1989, Ronald
Reagan created something called The President’s Working Group on Financial
Markets. There had been a stock market crash in 1987 and a near-crash in 1989,
so everyone was worried.
The Working Group was ostensibly an advisory body that was meant to help
politicians in general and the person in the White House specifically
understand the markets. The members would write papers, talk and come up with
solutions. A lot of us thought it was something much more, and the Working
Group unofficially became known as the Plunge Protection Team. Heller suggested
that the Fed — through, I suspected, its favored brokerage houses — purchase
stock index futures as a way to stop a market collapse in its tracks. Heller
said that since the Fed already rigs the bond market through securities
purchases, the stock market would be easy to control.
Nobody has ever proven that the Fed and its friends actually protect Wall
Street against plunges. It is, you might say, the Loch Ness monster of the
financial world — people get glimpses of something but never see a clear
picture. That’s what happened during the financial crisis of 2007 and 2008.
Telephone records I obtained showed numerous calls between then-Treasury
Secretary Hank Paulson and contacts on Wall Street on days when the stock
market was tanking and the decline needed to be stopped. The action in stocks
on those days looked a lot like what happened on Monday, when the Dow was down
nearly 1,600 points and was suddenly jerked back to a smaller loss.” DC Plunge
team may have halted Monday’s unprecedented Dow Jones spiral John Crudele
https://nypost.com/2018/02/05/dc-plunge-team-may-have-halted-unprecedented-dow-jones-spiral/
Many people
suspect the PPT was the reason the massive free fall “miraculously” abated this
week. “So, ask yourself, would you purchase equity futures while experiencing cumulative
stock market drops? One can understand shorting a dropping market, but not
buying futures. Unless
this is what happened, seeing the beginning of a correction, the Plunge
Protection Team placed a futures bid just below the existing price. Traders saw
the bid, recognized that the government was intervening to support the market,
and the bid was front-run with the hedge fund algorithms automatically picking
up the action. Who but
the Federal Reserve with its unlimited ability to create money would take the
risk of buying futures in the face of a falling market. Moreover, such an
infusion of money into the market does not show up in the money supply figures.
The futures purchases prevented margin calls and stop/loss
orders in a heavily leveraged equity market that would have collapsed the
market.
What are the pros and cons of this kind of intervention (which might have
occurred also in May 2010 and August 2015)? By stopping a correction, the
intervention prevented a pension fund collapse, both private and state.
However, by propping up over-valued equities that the Federal Reserve’s
quantitative easing created, the intervention rewarded over-leveraged
speculative risk-taking and prevented price discovery. We still have an equity
market whose values rest on record margin debt, stock buy-backs, and prices
pumped up by money-printing. The problems waiting to come home continue to
build.” Is The Stock Market Rigged? Paul Craig Roberts, Dave Kranzler and Michael
Hudson.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/48762.htm
I suspect the PPT went into action
to halt the slide which would have wiped trillions of dollars in equity, pension,
derivative and commodities reserves. Keep in mind the Federal Reserve is a key
player as are the hedge fund managers who can manipulate the markets using high
frequency logarithms. Keep your eye on this situation in the coming days, it
may be a harbinger or omen of things to come.
-30-
Appreciating African Genius
From The Ramparts
Junious Ricardo
Stanton
Appreciating African Genius
“Just
as the Memphite Theology is the source of Greek philosophy or primitive
science, so it is also the basis of modern scientific belief.” George G.M.
James Stolen Legacy page 145 originally
published in 1954
As we
celebrate Black History Month, let us not fall into the trap of European
historiography and pedagogy where we only focus on names and dates, failing to
grasp the underlying philosophical, ethical and moral catalysts for what
happened and what the people accomplished. In his classic and well documented
work Stolen Legacy, George G.M.
James makes the compelling case Greek philosophers plagiarized most of their
philosophical and scientific ideas from Nile Valley Africans. In addition to
proving a slew of Greek “philosophers” traveled to and studied in ancient
Egypt, he documents the various theories and schools of thought attributed to
men like Thales, Anaximander, Socrates, Plotinus, Anaxagoras, Pythagoras, Plato
and a host of others were all taught and influenced by the Africans in KMT (now
called Egypt).
When they
returned to their native lands the Greeks were confronted by their city state leaders
and charged with teaching alien doctrines. Some were banished while others like
Socrates were put to death because of their teachings. Aristotle was able to
survive and thrive because he befriended Alexander III of Macedon the invader
conqueror who allowed him total access to KMT scholarship.
Modern
scientists, physicians, astrophysicists just like the ancient Greeks, explain
the universe using African concepts they don’t fully understand; and like the
Greeks before them, they are unable to discern or admit the existence of divine
intelligence acting within and behind all creation, both animate and inanimate.
Africans
believed the universe was teleological, meaning it was designed and created with
purpose by divine intelligence. Despite the popularity of the Western notion of
the “random Big Bang Theory” supposedly caused by nothing out of nothing, a few
Western scientists are saying what Africans said thousands of years ago,
everything in the
universe, no matter how small has consciousness. Modern Western scientists call
this Panpsychism.
“
Panpsychism is the
view that consciousness, mind or soul (
psyche)
is a universal and primordial feature of all things. Panpsychists see
themselves as minds in a world of mind. Panpsychism is one of the oldest philosophical
theories, and has been ascribed to philosophers like Thales, Parmenides, Plato,
Averroes, Spinoza, Leibnis and William James. Panpsychism can also be seen in
ancient philosophies such as
Stoicism,
Taoism,
Vedanta and
Mahayana
Buddhism. During the 19th century, panpsychism was the default
theory in
philosophy of mind, but it saw a decline during
the middle years of the 20th century with the rise of
logical positivism. The recent interest in
the
hard problem of consciousness has
revived interest in panpsychism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism.
Notice how
Wikipedia fails to credit this ancient idea to Africans, from whom Greeks like
Thales, Plato and Parmenides plagiarized it. This is consistent with how
African philosophy, metaphysics, spirituality and science have been ignored or
written out of history by our adversaries. This is unfortunate because if the
Europeans weren’t so bigoted and narrow-minded they might actually learn
something about the nature and makeup of the universe and themselves. The ancient
Memphite Theology specifically states that an unseen, non corporal
consciousness/energy/intelligence created the universe out of itself and all
matter contains its essence or consciousness/energy/intelligence.
The West
eschews the notion of Spirit and unseen intelligence. White folks talk about
“soul” but it makes them extremely uncomfortable because it cannot be seen,
felt or discerned as a material entity. The best they can do is measure or
capture electromagnetic frequencies or images (EKG, EEG and MRIs) on their
machines but they cannot discern the ethereal essence which is the source of
these electromagnetic frequencies. Worse, they do not equate this
electromagnetic energy with the CREATOR or intelligent design because it is too
subtle to be seen, measured or quantified by human senses or machines. The closest they come is the Genesis account
which says God spoke creation into existence. (Genesis 1 and 2:1-3) but unlike ancient
and traditional Africans who fully embraced the spirit reality, whites
dichotomize their limited understanding of the spiritual from material matter
which they are far more familiar. Even though they use terms like Atom which
the Greeks took from the Africans (Atum), they cannot discern the connection
between the unseen Spirit/Intelligence/Energy, atoms, DNA, subatomic particles
and all that exists!
If they
would expand their thinking, the universe would make much more sense and they
would actually live more harmoniously in this dimension as an integral part of
it and its universal consciousness instead of psychologically alienated beings
like they do now. This alienation is what allows them to believe they can usurp
the natural order or wage war against nature itself.
A modern physicist named Gregory
Matloff is saying what our African ancestors said eons ago, the universe is
conscious and we humans share the same essence and substance as the universe
itself. http://bigthink.com/philip-perry/the-universe-may-be-conscious-prominent-scientists-state
As we
celebrate Black History Month let us apply the Akan idea of Sankofa,
meaning returning to embrace and applying the wisdom and science of our African
ancestors. Let us expand our minds to celebrate African genius. Sankofa and embracing African spirituality,
philosophy and science will bring us into a whole new relationship with all
creation and eliminate much of the stress and confusion we experience now.
-30-
