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Now it is Milwaukee. On Saturday, a car with two African-American men was stopped for “suspicion.” The men fled, the policeman pursued, and the driver, reportedly armed, was shot and killed.

And Milwaukee exploded. Angry crowds confronted police, set fires, threw rocks. At least half-dozen businesses — including a grocery store, a gas station and an auto parts shop — were robbed or destroyed. The Saturday shooting was part of a weekend filled with violence in Milwaukee. Five people were shot and killed overnight Friday.

Milwaukee law mandates an investigation of any police shooting. Immediately, focus goes to the harsh relations between police and the community. But to understand the reaction to the shooting, it is necessary to go much deeper.

Photo of Bonnie Raitt
 

This article first appeared on Reader Supported News

Only so long you can keep this charade
Before they wake up and see they’ve been played
Too many people with their livin’ at stake
Ain’t gonna take it.
The comin’ round is going through
The comin’ round is going through.

t’s not often a single stanza can sum up a whole political system. But those words from Bonnie Raitt ring truer every day as this pathetic “selection” season lurches ever deeper into astounding ugliness.

As evidenced by her new album, Dig in Deep, and her current concert tour, the opposite is true of Ms. Raitt, whose astonishing talent and endless heart just keep growing.

By way of disclosure, I’ve had the privilege of working with Bonnie on nuclear and other issues since 1978.

At the end of July I had the good fortune to see her perform at the Greek Theater in Los Angeles. She is on a long tour now, and if you get the chance to catch one of her shows, don’t pass it up.


 

I realize that, living here in the United States, the nation doing the most in the world to create wars, proliferate nukes, and destroy the habitability of the earth's climate, I really have a duty to pick someone in the United States as the worst individual human being alive.

It’s the smallest thing in the world. Does the tennis ball land inside the line or outside? But somehow, as I watched this 60-second YouTube clip of an Australian tennis match last January, and heard an explosion of joyous approval surge from the crowd, I could feel the planet shift.

Or at least it seemed that way for an instant.

In the clip, a tennis player named Jack Sock tells his opponent, Lleyton Hewitt, whose serve has just been declared out, that he should challenge the call. A little humorous disbelief bounces around the court, but eventually Hewitt says, “Sure, I’ll challenge it.” A judge reviews the tape and declares that the serve was in . . . and the crowd lets loose an enormous cheer.

Black man and white woman sitting on a couch

The Manson tribe was not the only wolfpack of murderous maniacs to inhabit a remote ranch in L.A. County in order to foment a helter-skelter race war in America. Before the U.S.A. entered World War II, Nazi sympathizers endeavored to create a Hitlerian enclave at Murphy Ranch in Rustic Canyon, according to the new drama Blueprint for Paradise. Members of the Silver Shirts - a pro-Nazi organization with militia-like aspects - were suspected of drilling and training at this 50 acre compound near Pacific Palisades. Perhaps even more mindboggling is that in their effort to build this dystopia dedicated to the eugenicist “ideals” of the blonde-haired, blue-eyed Aryan super race, an African American architect was hired to render the eponymous blueprints for the goosesteppers.

In this riveting world premiere written by Laurel Wetzork the

Police strangling a black man at Watts riot

Responses to recent police killings of Black men show just how deep the racial divide is in this country. There is an “us” versus “them” mentality at play. The “enemy,” according to some, are the Black Lives Matter protestors who are challenging the continued assault on the lives of Black people by the police. The police are being undermined by criticisms of their behavior and unable to do their job of protecting the public. If we accept what Donald Trump is shouting and tweeting at us, we live in a country overwhelmed by crime and violence, and we need to return to the good old days when America was great and safe. Well, Donald Trump and I share a common birth year and skin color but very little else – even the America that we both grew up in.

If your name is Donald Trump, or Dick Cheney, or George W Bush, then don’t bother reading this.  This article is to help the rest of us to better understand how Donald Trump et al think.  The psychiatric literature has long known that people with narcissistic personality disorder, also called the narcissistic sociopath, are far more common at the upper end of politics and business in the United States.  About 1% of people in general show the criteria of the condition, yet 20% of CEOs in “Fortune 500” companies and many politicians in this country have these characteristics. 

So it pays to know how these people think since it allows us to accurately predict their behavior.  The cause of narcissistic personality condition can be summarized in three words: low self-esteem.  The person’s thinking process is overwhelmed with the need to show them as powerful and important.  It is much more common in men than women, and, thus, testosterone, one of the key driving forces of emotional behavior, powers this condition. 

 

Reliable, verifiable medical records from presidential candidates – what’s so hard about that?

n May 2008, presidential candidate Barack Obama released a summary letter of his general health signed by Dr. David Scheiner, who had been Obama’s primary care physician for 21 years. Providing limited detail, the doctor found Obama to be in “excellent health” and “in overall good physical and mental health needed to maintain the resiliency required in the Office of the President.” The Obama campaign indicated at the time that it was not planning to release any further medical records, and it didn’t.

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