Despite copious evidence that we may be currently living in a dystopia typically found in richly imagined novels, a Kingdom of Stupidity ruled by an overgrown baby wearing bespoke suits over his diapers, here’s a an important bulletin: Everything isn’t falling apart. At least here in Los Angeles, California, everything hasn’t fallen apart. Yes, we...
Our nation’s newly installed Attorney General, the honorable Senator Jefferson Sessions, from Alabama, one of the five United States that celebrate Jefferson Davis, leader of the Confederacy, on Martin Luther King Day, has been in the news this week. Some liberal blowhards have a problem with a meeting he might have had with some Russian...
Faced with that minor distraction we call the Presidential Election, focused on a brash-talking demagogue of our own, many of us Americans may have only noticed in passing that the Philippines, long our ally in the Pacific, has devolved into deadly violent chaos. Since May, more than 3,000 people have been killed. Based on the...
We have two friends who don’t know each other and couldn’t be more unlike. One identifies as a “progressive” concerned with social, economic and environmental justice. The other identifies as a capitalist-libertarian concerned with immigration and security. The second friend, call him “S,” has been a vocal supporter of Donald Trump from the start of...
Welcome to your free Life Coaching session. A little bit about me before we get to the more interesting subject of you: I’m “in recovery” from nothing. I have no substance abuse issues. Never been bankrupt. Never been arrested. Height-weight appropriate; free of any chronic physical ailments; all systems working properly. Regardless of external circumstances,...
Good afternoon. Thank you for this opportunity. I know your time in the shark tank is valuable, so I’ll get right to the pitch. We’re seeking start-up capital to launch our premium lifestyle brand of Himalayan air: K2O2. As some of you might know from high school geography, K2 is a very high mountain peak...
Anything’s possible. And that’s what’s so great about being alive at this particularly time in human history, when we’ve advanced so far beyond our ancestors that their antiquated ways of thinking seem mildly pathetic and our fresh, new ways of thinking are bravely innovative. Evolution has brought us far from our monkey origins. Now we...
An offshoot of the Occupy movement, Strike Debt is helping defaulters retire debt for pennies on the dollar. They’re also helping the 99% understand that the design of our financial system is built to keep masses of workers indentured to creditors. In Strike Debt’s easy-to-understand book, “The Debt Resistor’s Operations Manual,” the entire concept of who owes...
The novel “Mortal Coil” is a clever chameleon that passes itself off as, variously, a thriller, a fantasy, a romance. But this splendid book is foremost a work of intensely considered philosophy, a metaphysical exploration of heaven and earth, reality and imagination, humans and angels. The author is Amnon Buchbinder, a Canadian screenwriter, director and...
Excerpted from “How the Revolution Started: Essays and Impertinent Thoughts.” If you voluntarily buy burritos from Chipotle or pay for TV programs owned by Discovery, companies whose CEOs earn 1,000 times more than the average employee they oversee, then you probably don’t have any problem with wealth and income inequality. You’re certainly not going to...
The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension…is itself a frightful despotism [serving] always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which finds a facilitated access to the government itself…
Writer, poet, artist, improviser, lyricist, former television personality, and generally decent person.
Aficionados of the weird and wonderful, rejoice! Pianist-arranger Cory Smythe’s “Accelerate Every Voice,” gives new meaning to term “original music.” The recording offers strange and alluring sounds emanating from electronic keyboards and loopers, but the main sonic source is a quintet of human voices orchestrated into a collage of aural splendor that’s hard to describe...
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