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Audiobook Released!
Just after the Trump-Kamala debate, just in time to help you decipher the endless streams of disinformation coming from the candidates, just as the parties’ surrogates and the Red News and Blue News analysts tell you what to think, I am proud to present the completion of this labor of love.
Written and read by yours truly, in the hopes of spreading truth, clarity, compassion, and knowledge, this is an audiobook that unpacks corporate media lies and points out a path to a deeper understanding of our world.
Let me read to you, at your own preferred pace and time:
» Red White & Blind (the audiobook at Audible) «
» Red White & Blind (the audiobook at Awesound) «
Awesound.com is an alternative audiobook distributor that enables you to purchase the book outright and listen to it on any platform you like. I’m running a promo there currently.
From Bernie to Biden, from Covid to Epstein, from wars to elections, I’ve investigated dozens of recent and historical events in order to illustrate the ways we are deceived. It’s an insidious minefield out there, but I never leave you wallowing in despair over the mountains of disinformation that confront us. The book offers insights and tips from myself and others on how to develop the savvy to discern the truth behind each story—what I call media consciousness. We are in the early phases of a great unveiling, an internet-birthed era that I believe is a New Enlightenment in which we are all gradually awakening to the actual truth about many, many things.
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The Real Reason Democrats Keep Pursuing Self-Defeating Strategies Like Russiagate and Ukraine
They’re between a rock and a hard place of their own making
While Trump is thoroughly disliked by about forty percent of the country, the Democrats, as led by centrists Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Chuck Schumer (D-NY), have not only done very little to build their own popularity, they’ve actually been pursuing strategies that erode their popularity.
Ever since their disastrous 2016 loss, the Democratic leadership has spent most of its energy pursuing conspiracy theories — first about Russia, and now about Ukraine. We’ll get to the specifics of each of these theories, but suffice it to say that both are unpopular, both are unproven, and both will, on balance, help Trump and Republicans in the 2020 elections.
Worse still, the Democrats are now impeaching Trump over one of them, the Ukraine dispute. Even if the charges in this conspiracy theory are true — and they haven’t been proven — here’s the thing: no one cares.
Everyday independent voters — the people who will decide the 2020 elections — don’t care about Ukraine. What they do care about are things that affect their everyday lives: healthcare, the economy, personal debt, the environment, equal rights, immigration, and income inequality.
So why are Democrats pursuing these conspiracy theories? Why are they taking the giant step to impeach? They know Trump will be acquitted in the Senate, as Bill Clinton was in 1999, and that this drive to impeach will result in nothing but a long-running, extensively-watched, widely-discussed movie that in the end will feature Donald Trump winning. This in turn will create a stronger, vindicated candidate in November who can decry a witch hunt (with some validity), ignore attacks on his real flaws and real corruption, and pretend to have integrity in ways he currently cannot.
The question is, why would the Democrats want to lose again?
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A Sane Way to Choose Your 2020 Democratic Candidate
How to compare the candidates on consistent progressive criteria When choosing a school, a restaurant, or a licensed contractor, most of us use criteria to make our choice. But very few people actually do this when choosing the candidates they vote for. The media doesn’t help with this either by asking nonsense questions like “who would you like to have a beer with?”
I offer here a set of criteria for progressives to use when choosing a candidate to support in our partly dysfunctional 2019 American political system. Having paid attention to this wild yet somehow predictable 2020 Democratic Primary over the past year, for your reading pleasure, I also score each candidate based on those criteria, although you are invited to tweak the criteria and score them differently if you would like.
There are a lot of candidates and a lot to examine, so this is not a short piece. Grab a coffee or tea and a comfortable chair.
Let’s get two things out of the way before jumping in:
First, basic terminology. I see essentially all politics, politicians, and movements as efforts to control the distribution of wealth and power, and each channels one of three forces:
– Reactionary, seeking to concentrate wealth and power into fewer hands
– Conservative, seeking to keep the distribution of wealth and power as it is
– Progressive, seeking to spread wealth and power more broadly among peopleIf you consider these strands of political energy and find yourself instinctively reactionary, you might not find much of this article useful. I am a progressive at heart and believe that spreading wealth and power more broadly is beneficial to all and creates a stronger and healthier society, and I consider the grand arc of progressive politics stretching back to Magna Carta to be a good thing and something that I hope will continue. Today, with AI, nanotechnology, weather manipulation, and the rest of the next wave of technology arriving every day, we can and must distribute power (ie decision-making) more broadly throughout the population.
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A Balanced Media Diet for 2019
How to be an informed citizen in an era of deception.
The Media Diet Pyramid Note: there is an updated version: A Balanced Media Diet for 2021.
Welcome to the era of fake news.
The number of media sources available to Americans has exploded over the past two decades with the growth of the internet. These myriad sources present the very same event in often dramatically different ways, which can be fascinating. The problem is, each source often labels all other sources as deceptive or even malicious by flippantly denouncing them as “fake news.”
This creates a dilemma: Either accept one news source as the arbiter of truth and let it distinguish the fake from the genuine and thereby filter the news for you, or read broadly despite the warnings and trust your own intelligence to determine the veracity of the news you read.
Choosing the first path —which many do — is creating news bubbles in this country that go by the name “echo chambers” and are generally places where a small and dwindling range of perspectives are available.
This guide is for those choosing the second path.
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Five Reasons You Should Be Driving an Electric Car Right Now
Smoke from these horrendous California wildfires still blankets the enormous Sacramento-to-the-Bay region of California and poisons its 10 million residents. If you live in California, or only feel sorry for those who do, perhaps it’s worth considering right now how you are contributing to unhealthy air and how you can help us reduce air pollution.
What if a single action you could take today could improve the air in your home and in your community and also reduce climate change? What if that same action could possibly even help prevent more raging wildfires in the near future?
Your greatest contribution to poor air is quite possibly your choice of individual transportation. Transportation is responsible for a huge 40 percent of this state’s greenhouse gas emissions, and it accounts for (more…)
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A 2018 Voting Guide for Thoughtful and Progressive Californians
Focused on the Bay Area
It’s that magical time of the year when the air gets chilly and we’re formally asked our opinion about our government. If you’re living in California — in the Bay Area in particular — I offer up my take on this election’s races below. Further down, below my recommendations, I offer some thoughts on the degraded state of our politics and media.
If you strongly support one of the two corporate political parties and also primarily follow the corresponding news media (New York Times, NPR, MSNBC for Democrats; FOX News, Wall Street Journal, talk radio for Republicans), you might find my writings and endorsements surprising or disappointing, as I increasingly see both parties and both sets of news organizations as corrupt, militaristic, and authoritarian (and occasionally helpful).
Or perhaps that will make my take on things particularly interesting to you.
One other thing: There’s no way to know whether your vote will count. Sorry! I desperately wish it were otherwise. But both major political parties have ensured this continues to be the case, and worsens, while blaming each other for it. I’ve researched this extensively and this is the biggest problem we face right now as a society as it prevents us from addressing nearly every other issue. I write more about this problematic state of affairs at the end of this piece. Please inform yourself about the dysfunctional state of our elections and vote counting, and the ways that its covered up.
Still, VOTE! Voting remains essential. More on that too in my full full voting guide for this election.
This article also appeared at:- Medium
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I Actually See Both Sides of this Brett Kavanaugh Confirmation Circus
Certainly it’s akin to political heresy, but I see both sides of this Supreme Court confirmation hearings brouhaha. If you’re horrified by this statement, you’re probably one of the approximately 43% of the country who remain emotionally invested in one of the mainstream political parties.
Brett Kavanaugh appears to be an aggressive man, a serial liar, an aloof product of privilege, and altogether far too authoritarian in his legal decisions to be a judge in this country, let alone to join the Supreme Court. His opinions on surveillance and torture, to name just two, are far out of step with what most Americans want and believe. Whether at the heart of your political sensibility you more highly value liberty or progress, you should see that this man has no business making final decisions about the laws of this land.
As for sexual assault, there is way way more unreported sexual violence in this country than there are false accusations. (more…)
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If You’re Voting in this June 5 California Primary
Like christmas trees in windows and jack o’lanterns on front porches, your mailbox swelling with political mail signifies the arrival of a particular season of the year: election season. If you’re living in California, this bizarrely inspiring time is here once again.
I’ve written very little politically since the (unfortunate) political turns of 2016 and the (fortunate) arrival of my son, so take these voting recommendations with a grain of salt and a sprinkle of curiosity. In fact, I don’t have a particularly cheerful outlook on our political situation right now, and, worse, the reasons to believe that your vote will be counted fairly are decreasing, but I’ll discuss that at the end of this piece.
First, I do recommend you vote, and to see how I’ll be voting in Tuesday’s June Primary, please view my full guide here.
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The DNC is Attempting to Kill Off Another Progressive Movement
Establishment candidate Tom Perez chosen to lead the DNCToday the Democratic National Committee defeated, once again, even the possibility of the semblance of progressive leadership in the party.
Rather than let Keith Ellison win, the DNC chose Tom Perez, a man who entered the race recently at the behest of establishment leadership, to fill the corrupt shoes of Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and Donna Brazile.
It’s an awful move, but unfortunately at this point it’s hardly surprising.
This selection basically says to voters and rank-and-file Democrats that yes, the party will give you more of the same, more status quo Wall Street-driven decisions, more superdelegates choosing nominees before races even begin, more tone-deaf weak corporate politics at the top, and more losses and more excuses for the next four years.
The way this all went down — so similar to what I saw in Philadelphia last year at the convention — shows that the DNC is more determined to defeat progressives than to defeat Republicans. Think about that. (more…)
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Monkeys, Demons, and Ten Days on a Cushion
(An account of a 10-day vipassana meditation retreat in 2008)
“Just observe,” said the guru’s voice. “Whatever the sensation, just observe.”
I had been seated cross-legged, eyes closed, for what felt like hours and had probably been at least 15 minutes. The pain shooting through my back was excruciating.
“Limit your awareness to the triangular area below the nostrils and above the upper lip.” He had a perfect Indian guru accent and said the word ‘nostrils’ as if it were ‘nose-strils’. It made me smile. My ‘nose-streels.’ I desperately wanted to know if anyone else was smiling, and so for the first time in what had to have been at least 18 minutes now, I opened my eyes.
There we were, 200 or so of us, seated silently on the floor of a vast, wood-walled, slightly drafty hall that was vaulted like a church, but if there was a Jesus up there above the raised dais on which sat the solemn ‘assistant teachers,’ He had been carefully and discreetly covered by white cloth sheets.
Down here on the floor, we meditators were seated in precise rows, as if on a chessboard. I was in spot F-9. The guy on my right, F-8, was starting to slouch forward, forward, to stretch his back. The guy right in front of me, E-9, was unmoving, a solid rock of a meditator. I was surrounded by men. On the other side of the ‘A’ row was an aisle, and the women were seated on the other side of the aisle. Indeed, throughout the entire ten days, the men and women were strictly segregated and we never saw each other. I discreetly glanced around me; many men were silently shifting positions in discomfort.
There were no smiles. (more…)
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Bold Vision of a Bernie Sanders-Led People’s Party Launched by New Group
Could Bernie Sanders lead a new political party?A group of former staff and delegates from Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign have joined with hundreds of others this week to launch a campaign called “Draft Bernie For A People’s Party.”
The goal is to convince Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) that the Democratic Party is corrupt beyond redemption, and that the creation of a powerful new party is not only possible but one of the best things that could happen for the country and planet right now.
The launch of “Draft Bernie For A People’s Party” is led by Nicholas Brana, former national political outreach coordinator for Bernie 2016.
“People are yearning for something positive and honorable that they can build as their future,” says Brana, adding that the new party intends to capitalize on the desire for progressive change that the Sanders campaign so prodigiously tapped into. “While Trump is busy dividing us, Bernie can continue to do what he did during the campaign—unite us — only this time outside the corporate, neoliberal constraints of the Democratic Party.”
A new People’s Party, with Sanders at the helm, would launch with at least half of the Democratic Party (more…)
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