During my life I have met and interacted with four women who have been diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. There is one common thread between all these four women. They all have lost their only child to accident, disease, terrorist attacks, between their ages of 7 and 10. Another trend I noticed, when I was volunteering at a drug rehabilitation center in India, is that apart from dealing with addiction, about 6 to 7 families out of 10 were also dealing with a loved one's cancer diagnosis.

In this scenario two things were noticed consistently. The person who was diagnosed with cancer was always the one who shared an extremely close bond with the person who was an addict. And second the diagnosis of cancer always came about 4 to 6 years after their loved one was suffering from full blown addiction. I have always wondered if there is a connection here between sense of loss, helplessness or any other negative feelings and dis-ease.

Joe Biden:

Today Senator John McCain is being buried together with the young woman who leaked the transcript of these funeral proceedings. John would have been honored to know that he was posthumously connected to such swift and cost-saving justice in protection of our national security — which I think should more than compensate for his being buried together with someone he would have referred to as lowlife scum. Can I get a Praise Jesus?

John McCain and I worked together with many of you and I believe every single media outlet that has been permitted into this holy cathedral today to launch and prolong a war in which we did so much damage to the world in so many ways, that my own son was killed by our open burning of all kinds of toxic waste, and I’ve barely even registered that fact. Hell, it’ll be years before it occurs to me that a lot of Iraqi people probably died too. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t use that word in a church. I mean Iraqi lowlife scum.

Remarks at Verterans for Peace Convention, St. Paul, Minnesota, August 26, 2018

There are a lot of things named Kellogg around here, and few who know why. The two biggest names in the news in 1928 were those of future white supremacist Charles Lindbergh and of Frank Kellogg. One of those names has lasted longer.

The author at Frank Kellogg’s house

Frank Kellogg was a U.S. Secretary of State, and probably the one most worth teaching people about.

Developing the tradition charted by C. Wright Mills in his 1956 classic The Power Elite, in his latest book, Professor Peter Phillips starts by reviewing the transition from the nation state power elites described by authors such as Mills to a transnational power elite centralized on the control of global capital.

Thus, in his just-released study Giants: The Global Power Elite, Phillips, a professor of political sociology at Sonoma State University in the USA, identifies the world’s top seventeen asset management firms, such as BlackRock and J.P Morgan Chase, each with more than one trillion dollars of investment capital under management, as the ‘Giants’ of world capitalism. The seventeen firms collectively manage more than $US41.1 trillion in a self-invested network of interlocking capital that spans the globe.

This year is the fiftieth anniversary of the many things that occurred in America’s most horrible year in the most tumultuous decade of the twentieth century. In some ways it’s an anniversary for me, too, because it marks when I became aware of and interested in American politics and history. I remember 1968 as a bubbling cauldron of assassinations, demonstrations, and confrontations near and far. By the time my sixth grade school year was over, there had been Tet – a former neighbor and two of my older sister’s classmates died in Vietnam – President Lyndon Johnson’s declaration that he would not seek reelection; the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy; the televised execution of a Vietcong officer by the South Vietnam chief of police; and numerous urban rebellions in cities across America. My mother had subscriptions to the weekly magazines Life, Look, and Newsweek, and I looked at them again and again. Nineteen sixty-eight was indeed, as the Temptations sang several years later, a ball of confusion.