Society Is In Decay by Ralph Nader

The fall of society. Oil painting by Michael DeBonis

Source: Dandelion Salad

Plutocrats like to control the range of permissible public dialogue. Plutocrats also like to shape what society values. If you want to see where a country’s priorities lie, look at how it allocates its money. While teachers and nurses earn comparatively little for performing critical jobs, corporate bosses including those who pollute our planet and bankrupt defenseless families, make millions more. Wells Fargo executives are cases in point. The vastly overpaid CEO of General Electric left his teetering company in shambles. In 2019, Boeing’s CEO got a bonus (despite the Lion Air Flight 610 737 Max 8 crash in 2018). Just days before a second deadly 737 Max 8 crash in Ethiopia.

This disparity is on full display in my profession. Public interest lawyers and public defenders, who fight daily for a more just and lawful society, are paid modest salaries. On the other hand, the most well compensated lawyers are corporate lawyers who regularly aid and abet corporate crime, fraud, and abuse. Many corporate lawyers line their pockets by shielding the powerful violators from accountability under the rule of law.

Muslims of Early America by Sam Haselby

One of the biggest lies perpetrated is that we were all brought over here on slave ships from Africa. 

Source: AEON

The first words to pass between Europeans and Americans (one-sided and confusing as they must have been) were in the sacred language of Islam. Christopher Columbus had hoped to sail to Asia and had prepared to communicate at its great courts in one of the major languages of Eurasian commerce. So when Columbus’s interpreter, a Spanish Jew, spoke to the Taíno of Hispaniola, he did so in Arabic. Not just the language of Islam, but the religion itself likely arrived in America in 1492, more than 20 years before Martin Luther nailed his theses to the door, igniting the Protestant reformation. 

President Trump Wants a Promotion by Jamil Smith

Source: Rolling Stone

During a recent trip north to Santa Barbara, I escaped the rain in a used bookstore and struck up a conversation about America with the clerk. We talked about the limited shelf life of so many political books, especially those with words like “Trump” in the title. But after we migrated over to the nonfiction paperbacks, one immediately struck me as both evergreen and useful. It’s called On Tyranny, a 2017 book by Yale historian Timothy Snyder, and it is so small that it can nearly fit in the palm of my hand. It looks not unlike an instruction manual.

To Do Nothing: On Rediscovering Life Outside the Algorithms

Artist Jenny Odell makes the case for reclaiming time, and attention, from the demands of capitalism - as the attention economy of social media colonizes and commodifies more of our daily life, we must learn how to redirect our focus toward exploring our world and each other, unmediated by algorithms and brands.

Jenny is author of "How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy" 

Psychiatrist Bandy X. Lee: "Trump is an urgent threat . . . and we must no longer hesitate to act"

President Donald Trump clashed with Democrats all week, culminating in the President’s threat to refuse to work with them on infrastructure if they don’t end the Congressional investigations into misconduct by the President and his associates.

Raw Story spoke with Dr. Bandy X. Lee, a renowned expert on violence and forensic psychiatrist at Yale School of Medicine, about the president’s angry and petulant reaction to Congressional oversight. Lee has been a consultant to the World Health Organization since 2002 and is author of the authoritative textbook, “Violence: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Causes, Consequences, and Cures.” She is also the president of the World Mental Health Coalition and editor of the New York Times bestseller, “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 37 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President.” She and her coauthors recently prepared a damning mental health analysis of the Mueller report.

Denial of Racist History

The Clotilda, the last ship known to bring enslaved people from Africa to the US, was planned by Timothy Meaher, a steamboat captain and plantation owner who wanted to show he could sneak slaves into the country

Source: ThinkProgress

Two disparate stories this week expose America’s past and present inability to come to grips with its racist heritage:

• The Alabama Historical Commission this week announced its discovery of the Clotilda, the last known ship to import enslaved Africans into the United States.
• Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said the Trump administration would not move ahead with plans to replace the image of President Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill with that of black abolitionist and former slave Harriet Tubman.

Taken individually, these stories could easily pass as unrelated items in the daily stream of current events. But that would be a mistake. The two stories, if read in sequence, offer insights across a shameful century of American history that illuminates the hidden racial deceit of our nation’s past and the willfulness of modern-day public officials to perpetuate it into the future.

Musings

Barbados: The World’s First Slave Society: Featuring “The Barbados Slave Code” 1661

 

 The long shadow of slavery still casts a dark shadow across the land. History is not  simply "stuff that happened in the past" As the late great James Baldwin once said, "History, as nearly no one seems to know, is not merely something to be read.  And it does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past.  On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do.  It could scarcely be otherwise, since it is to history that we owe our frames of reference, our identities, and our aspirations.” 

 Indeed, everything has a history, and it matters.

Abortion: White Panic Over Demographic Dilution? by Manuel Garcia, Jr

What is behind the bigotry masquerading as sanctimonious religiosity fervently opposed to abortion in the United States?

A Fateful Showdown: Trump Threatens Iran

The Disintegrated Mind: The Greatest Threat to Human Survival on Earth by Robert J. Burrowes

(Source: Desultory Heroics)

Like many people who have struggled to understand why human beings are driving the sixth mass extinction event in Earth’s history, which now threatens imminent human extinction as well, over many decades I have explored the research and efforts of a great many activists and scholars to secure this understanding. However, with many competing ideas from the fields of politics, economics, sociology and psychology, among others, this understanding has proved elusive. Nevertheless, I have reached an understanding that I find compelling: Human beings are driving the sixth mass extinction event in Earth’s history because of the disintegrated nature of the human mind.

Poet's Nook: "For Colored Boys" by KOTA The Friend

LONELINESS & CAPITALISM

.
Contemporary notion of loneliness stems from cultural and economic transformations that have taken place in the modern West

‘God, but life is loneliness,’ declared the writer Sylvia Plath in her private journals. Despite all the grins and smiles we exchange, she says, despite all the opiates we take.

Today loneliness has become ubiquitous. Some call it ‘an epidemic’, a condition akin to ‘leprosy’, and a ‘silent plague’ of civilization. In 2018, the United Kingdom went so far as to appoint a Minister for Loneliness. Yet loneliness is not a universal condition; nor is it a purely visceral, internal experience. It is less a single emotion and more a complex cluster of feelings, composed of anger, grief, fear, anxiety, sadness and shame. It also has social and political dimensions, shifting through time according ideas about the self, God and the natural world. Loneliness, in other words, has a history. 

The above clip touches on this phenomenon, but I would strongly encourage the reader to delve more into this massive socio-political, biological & cultural condition which affects millions. 

Thanks to Dandelion Salad for bringing this to my attention. 

Poet's Nook: "white privilege" by Kyla Jenée Lacey

We learned your French, we learned your English, we learned your Spanish, we learned your Dutch, your Portuguese, your German,

you learned our "nothing", you called us stupid...that's white privilege and I'm sure

Musings

Poet's Nook: "For the Asking" by Denise Levertov

Augustine said his soul
was a house so cramped
God could barely squeeze in.
Knock down the mean partitions,
he prayed, so You may enter!
Raise the oppressive ceilings!

Augustine's soul 
 didn't become a mansion large enough
to welcome, along with God, the woman he'd loved,
except for his mother (though one, perhaps,
his son's mother, did remain to inhabit
a small dark room).  God, therefore,
would never have felt
fully at home as his guest.

Nevertheless,
it's clear desire
fulfilled itself in the asking, revealing prayer's
dynamic action, that scoops out channels
like water on stone, or builds like layers
of grainy sediment steadily
forming sandstone. The walls, with each thought,
each feeling, each word he set down,
expanded, unnoticed; the roof
rose, and a skylight opened.

                                                   *****

from for lovers of god everywhere by roger housden

Why You Like It: The Science and Culture of Musical Taste

/ / /

Nolan Gasser, chief musicologist for Pandora and architect of the Music Genome Project. Gasser has categorized more than 500 unique genes across seven genres of music, and his genome project is the most extensive categorization of music in history. Now, Gasser is trying to create data-driven music therapy. “Musicology,” which is directed by Jamie Schutz, is part of the “Collectors” series from FiveThirtyEight and ESPN Films.

 

America in Denial: Gabor Maté on the Psychology of Russiagate

/

Physician, mental health expert, and best-selling author Dr. Gabor Maté sits down with The Grayzone's Aaron Maté to analyze how Russiagate was able to take hold of U.S. society following Donald Trump's election.

To Decolonize Our Minds, Start With Words by Steven Newcomb

At least since historian Oswald Spengler published his prophetic The Decline of the West(1918), Western “civilization” has been portrayed as in a severe state of crisis and decline. For more than two centuries, the imperial enterprise of the United States has colonized the territories and resources of the original nations of this continent while pretending to have a “providentially assigned” or “God-given” destiny. This is the evidence of white Christian nationalism in U.S. law, based on the Bible and Christianity. Christendom was supposedly mandated to consume and eliminate heathendom.

Chris Hedges & Matt Taibbi: The Deep Rot of American Journalism

 

Behind Donald Trump's Bewildering Avalanche of Lies: Maybe the Death of Democracy (Part 2 of 2) by Paul Rosenberg

In Part 1, we looked at Trump’s lies through the lens of the Washington Post’s own “bottomless Pinocchio” lists as well as three academic studies based on their data, before turning to a broader perspective. That involves seeing Trump's lies as part of a larger rhetorical strategy, as described by Jennifer Mercieca, a historian of rhetoric, whose book, "Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump," [table of contents here] will be published next year.

The bottom line of Part 1 is that Trump’s lies can be understood as expressing his view of the world — how he would like things to be, for whatever purposes he may have, some quite enduring (as seen in his “bottomless Pinocchios”), others perhaps spur-of-the-moment. As Mercieca argued here, the Mueller report can be read as further confirmation of Trump’s authoritarian orientation in word and deed, in sharp contrast to the “total exoneration” he falsely claims it to be. This is entirely typical. Demagogues and tyrants have always used lies this way. But they cannot and do not act in a vacuum. The broader context in which they operate is the focus of Part 2.

The Census is a Battering Ram: Race, Tech and the Uses of Population Data

/

Investigative journalist Yasha Levine explores an interlocking century of technology and racism in the US census - from the state's earliest days deriving political power through racial sorting, to the ideological uses of population data throughout the 20th and 21st centuries to enforce ruling class will.

Yasha wrote the article "The Racist - and High Tech - Origins of America’s Modern Census" for Medium

Poet's Nook: "Every Seed’s a Bomb" by Elliot Sperber

Each seed is a bomb
Go and plant one.

Every seed’s a bomb,
And each tree’s an explosion.

Apple, maple, sweetgum, plum…
Each tree’s an explosion

Let’s go carpet bomb the continents
The cities, river valleys,

Every mountain range, and coastal plain,
before it’s too late —

Carpet bomb ‘em all,
Back to the Stone Age

Back when the forests were thick

The air wasn’t rich with carcinogens yet

Why waste your life
In this mess
paying debts
That don’t even exist?

Blow it all up

Be free,
Plant seeds,
Grow trees

Creeping Toward Tyranny by Chris Hedges

Source: Truthdig

The destruction of the rule of law, an action essential to establishing an authoritarian or totalitarian state, began long before the arrival of the Trump administration. The George W. Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq and implementation of a doctrine of pre-emptive war were war crimes under international law. The federal government’s ongoing wholesale surveillance of the citizenry, another legacy of the Bush administration, mocks our constitutional right to privacy. Assassinating a U.S. citizen under order of the executive branch, as the Obama administration did when it murdered the radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen, revokes due process. The steady nullification of constitutional rights by judicial fiat—a legal trick that has enabled corporations to buy the electoral system in the name of free speech—has turned politicians from the two ruling parties into amoral tools of corporate power. Lobbyists in Washington and the state capitals write legislation to legalize tax boycotts, destroy regulations and government oversight, pump staggering sums of money into the war machine and accelerate the largest upward transfer of wealth in American history, one that has involved looting the U.S. Treasury of trillions of dollars in the wake of the massive financial fraud that set off the 2008 economic collapse. The ruling elites, by slavishly serving corporate interests, created a system of government that effectively denied the citizen the use of state power.

Thich Nhat Hanh: Being Peace

Source: Being Peace

J. Cole on Meditation, Social Media, Celebrity Worship & Donald Trump

 

This young brother is wise beyond his years much like Kendrick Lamar, Joyner Lucas, Immortal Technique, Brother Ali, Saul Williams & Prince Ea. Young ears need to learn something from these cats...old, ignorant bastards too!! hahaaaa!!....

Authority & Expectations

/

According to Wray Harris, The idea that the military goes around spreading freedom is twisted. If they had done at home what they did to people in other countries would they be celebrated as heroes? Would the nation be appreciative? Would everybody feel free? Listen to this young veteran transcend his post-traumatic stress disorder as he reveals the sufferings served by the Iraq war.

As a young boy he grew up in poverty, the product of a broken home and his mother’s many dysfunctional and abusive relationships.  At the age of fourteen he believed with all his heart that self-sacrifice was a good thing. Then 9/11 happened and everybody was convinced that people in far away lands needed the men and women from a certain country to go over there and give them freedom. So when graduation approached, Wray Harris hoped that the war wouldn’t end. He didn’t want it to be over before he got a chance to go and fight. In 2005 he joined the infantry and it literally transformed his life. Only after 14 weeks of basic training, his identity was erased.

The military is full of eager soldiers who are irreversibly changed by meaningless combat. Wray Harris fought in Iraq for fourteen months invading, interrogating, and slowly deteriorating. Wray admits that he played into the group mentality that ridiculed anybody who didn’t fit in. He says that the drinking was encouraged; in fact it was the way in which they were taught to deal with their problems.

Now he staggers through the craters of his thoughts with the hidden wisdom that only comes to a man who has been to war.  He speaks openly about how annoying it is when people find out he’s a veteran and ask ‘have you ever killed anyone?’ or they say ‘thank you for your service’. If they only knew the truth about what happens at war and what it does to the mind, they would definitely react differently. “Dead politicians,” he utters, “not dead soldiers.”

Amid raw footage of intense gunfights, the voices of men shouting inside of a Humvee on assault, and a clear view of a mosque under attack, the gravity of Harris’ depictions impress the mind. He states that soldiers at war are not fighting for freedom or a flag… they are fighting for the men with guns. Watch this thought-provoking film now.

Musings

Poet's Nook:"among the multitudes" by Wislawa Szymborska

I am who I am.
A coincidence no less unthinkable
than any other. 
I could have different 
ancestors, after all. 
I could have fluttered 
from another nest 
or crawled bescaled 
from another tree. 

Nature's wardrobe 
holds a fair 
supply of costumes: 
Spider, seagull, fieldmouse. 
each fits perfectly right off 
and is dutifully worn 
into shreds. 

I didn't get a choice either, 
but I can't complain. 
I could have been someone 
much less separate. 
someone from an anthill, shoal, or buzzing swarm, 
an inch of landscape ruffled by the wind. 

Someone much less fortunate, 
bred for my fur 
or Christmas dinner, 
something swimming under a square of glass. 

A tree rooted to the ground 
as the fire draws near. 

A grass blade trampled by a stampede 
of incomprehensible events. 

A shady type whose darkness 
dazzled some. 
What if I'd prompted only fear, 
Loathing, 
or pity? 

If I'd been born 
in the wrong tribe 
with all roads closed before me? 

Fate has been kind 
to me thus far. 

I might never have been given 
the memory of happy moments 

My yen for comparison 
might have been taken away. 

I might have been myself minus amazement, 
that is, someone completely different.

                                                                   ********


(From Poems, New and Collected )

Dump Trump. Now! by John Nichols

It is time to be done with Donald Trump.

Not in 2021. Not in 2020. Now.

Musings

[
. .
[Intro: Akala (speaking)]
Once upon a time in an obscure part of the Milky Way Galaxy, there was a spinning ball of water and rock ruled by the forces of evil.

The Devil himself, proud of the magnificent achievements of his children, decided to call a special banquet for the greatest thieves in all the land

He sent invites to thousands of the greatest murders, rapists and general-assorted scum, inviting them to attend his palace at the dawn of the new moon. Each thief would be given a chance to stake his claim as the greatest messenger of murder upon the planet, and the Devil himself would then decide who should be crowned king.

After many days of deliberating, all of the petty thieves, such as street criminals, have been found far short of the required level of wickedness and there were just four sets of thieves left in the competition

They were: the monarchs of empire, a cartel of bankers, the heads of religious orders, and the third-world dictators. Each set of thieves appointed a spokesman to give his case to the Devil. We have recorded these events for posterity