Land of the Lawless by Ralph Nader

In the late 1970s, I had lunch with the head of the Internal Revenue Service. I broached a subject long on my mind: “I have been told that the section on insurance in the tax code is so complex that fewer people understand it than understand Einstein’s theory of relativity.” He replied that he wouldn’t doubt if that were true. So I followed up and asked, “How can it be enforced?” His answer was that it largely wasn’t.

If this seems shocking, beware—lawlessness is an overwhelming fact of American life, though little attention is paid to this many-unsplendored phenomenon. How many times have we been told that our country is under the rule of law and that nobody is above it? Yet the country’s legal life is defined instead by major zones of lawlessness created, in one aspect, by noncompliance and lack of enforcement and, in another, by raw power, which can be political, economic, or armed. These multiplying zones have pushed the rule of law into little more than a torrent of dysfunctional myths.

Owed This Land: On Reparations for Black Americans Under White Supremacy

 

Law scholar Katherine Franke examines the radical potential of reparations for Black Americans - as a social transformation to address the fundamental sin of slavery and the enduring structures of White supremacy in America, and a set of policies to redress the material injustices barring Black people from reaching freedom a century and a half after emancipation. 

 Katherine is author of "Repair: Redeeming the Promise of Abolition"

In Conversation: Chauncey DeVega & Michael Wolff

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Chauncey DeVega delivers another highly illuminating conversation on his new show, The Truth Report. (he has a podcast as well eponymously called The Chauncey Devega Show).On this episode, he sits down with Michael Wolff, journalist, author and biographer who has written for Newsweek, USA Today and Vanity Fair. He is the author of numerous books including the bestselling Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House. His new book is Siege: Trump Under Fire.

Musings

HEY TRUMP AMERICA! (SUCK ON THIS…)

Fake Meat: Big Food’s Attempt to Further Industrialize What We Eat by Dr. Vandana Shiva

Food is not a commodity, it is not “stuff” put together mechanically and artificially in labs and factories. Food is life. Food holds the contributions of all beings that make the food web, and it holds the potential of maintaining and regenerating the web of life. Food also holds the potential for health and disease, depending on how it was grown and processed. Food is therefore the living currency of the web of life.

As an ancient Upanishad reminds us “Everything is food, everything is something else’s food.”
Good food and real food are the basis of health.
Bad food, industrial food, fake food is the basis of disease.
Hippocrates said “Let food be thy medicine.” In Ayurveda, India’s ancient science of life, food is called “sarvausadha” the medicine that cures all disease.

Industrial food systems have reduced food to a commodity, to “stuff” that can then be constituted in the lab. In the process both the planet’s health and our health has been nearly destroyed.

IN CONVERSATION: CHRIS HEDGES & CORNEL WEST

Listen.

Poet's Nook: "Love is Our Foundation and Our Destiny" by Richard Rohr

The most powerful, most needed,
and most essential teaching is always Love.
Love is our foundation and our destiny.

It is where we come from and where we’re headed.
“So faith, hope, and love remain,
but the greatest of these is love”.

My hope, whenever I speak or write,
is to help clear away the impediments
to receiving, allowing, trusting,
and participating in a foundational Love.

Love is who you are.
When you don’t live according to love,
you are outside of being.
You’re basically not real or true to yourself.

When you love, you are acting according to
your deepest being, your deepest truth.
You are operating according to your dignity.

For a simple description
of the kind of love I am talking about,
let’s just use the word outflowing.

All I can do is remind you of
what you already know
deep within your True Self
and invite you to
live connected to this Source.
“God is love,
and whoever remains in love,
remains in God and God in them”.

We were created
in the very “image and likeness” of God -
who sets the highest bar
for this kind of outflowing love.
Out of this generative
and infinitely flowing relationship,
all of creation takes form,
mirroring its Creator
in its deepest identity.

If this is true,
then our family of origin is divine.
It is saying
that we were created by a loving God
to also be love in the world.

Our core is original blessing,
not original sin.
Our starting point is “very good”
If the beginning is right,
the rest is made considerably easier,
because we know and can trust
the clear direction of our life’s tangent.

We must all overcome
the illusion of separateness.
It is the primary task of religion -
to communicate not worthiness but union,
to reconnect people to their original identity.
God’s job description is to draw us back
into primal and intimate relationship with Him.

Henceforth, all our moral behavior
is simply “the imitation of God.”

And what does God do?
God does what God is: Love.
God does not love you if and when you change.
God loves you so that you can change!

Why We Elect Narcissists and Sociopaths

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Bill Eddy\s new book "Why we Elect Narcissists and Sociopaths?"shares how his experience as a lawyer, mediator, and therapist led him to several years of research into what is happening with politics today. The first way we can stop electing narcissists and sociopaths is being able to spot a political candidate that is seeking power and control. Bill describes his definition of High Conflict People (HCP) and how it maps to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder (DSM) created by the American Psychiatric Association. He describes the key characteristics you should look for in any relationship and in electing officials and his six month to one year metric. Narcissists and Sociopaths prey on our emotions and create conflict. This is mirrored in media that feeds off our need to blame, have an enemy, and a story narrative. Why does GOT and House of Cards feeds our delusion? How can we be careful not to let our passion for drama affect our day-to-day lives? When our emotions hijack our normal state, we operate out of fear. The current population is divided by loyalists, wiled up resistors, mild moderates, and disenchanted dropouts. Our past election demonstrates what happens when wiled up resistors and mild moderators split the vote. Bill offers 5 ways we can stop narcissists and sociopaths from being elected.

Donald Trump Is America's Shadow by Michael Winship

 


Let’s talk about decency.

Musings

"If we have no idea what we believe in, we'll go along with anything. Truth takes courage. Courage to stand up for what we believe in. Not necessarily in a confrontational way, but in a gentle yet firm way. Like an oak tree, able to sway gently in the wind, but strongly rooted to the ground."

- A.C. Ping

Poet's Nook:"The Everlasting Self" by Tracy K. Smith

Comes in from a downpour
Shaking water in every direction —
A collaborative condition:
Gathered, shed, spread, then
Forgotten, reabsorbed. Like love
From a lifetime ago, and mud
A dog has tracked across the floor.

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 Love this meditative loop of verse, accompanied by music ensemble. It flows in a kind of soulful meta-meditation on the haunting, looping, interminable nature of the self that animates each ephemeral constellation of atoms comprising a human being.

Technotyranny: The Iron-Fisted Authoritarianism of the Surveillance State by John Whitehead

Source: Desultory Heroics

“There will come a time when it isn’t ‘They’re spying on me through my phone’ anymore. Eventually, it will be ‘My phone is spying on me.’” ― Philip K. Dick

Red pill or blue pill? You decide.

Twenty years after the Wachowskis’ iconic 1999 film, The Matrix, introduced us to a futuristic world in which humans exist in a computer-simulated non-reality powered by authoritarian machines—a world where the choice between existing in a denial-ridden virtual dream-state or facing up to the harsh, difficult realities of life comes down to a red pill or a blue pill—we stand at the precipice of a technologically-dominated matrix of our own making.