Category: Philosophy

Words of Wisdom from Dr Zach Bush: On Humanity’s Awakening, Hope for Humanity & Finding Light in the Darkness | Luke Storey

Dr. Zach Bush is an internationally recognized educator and thought leader on the microbiome as it relates to health, disease, and food systems. He founded Seraphic Group and the nonprofit Farmer’s Footprint to develop root-cause solutions for human and ecological health. He sees that there is a dramatic need for a radical departure from chemical farming and pharmacy, and his ongoing efforts are providing a path for consumers, farmers, and mega-industries to work together for a healthy future for people and the planet.

So, really, there’s never been a better time to sit down with Dr. Bush — because our society and planet clearly need some help right now.

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As you remember, Zach Bush MD is a physician specializing in internal medicine, endocrinology, and hospice care. He’s also an internationally recognized educator and thought leader on the microbiome as it relates to health, disease, and food systems. Our last conversation, which felt like an energy vortex of connectedness and truthfinding, episode 304, is one of my most streamed ever.

This week, he weaves at least a dozen thought patterns that might change your life forever. He is both flatly at peace with the end of all life and truthfully optimistic on our chances. You’re going to want to settle in for this one. Open your mind, and your notebook. Zach is a deep pool of mindblowing knowledge and perspective. I’m so excited to bring you this conversation.

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(Book Review) The Gift in the Heart of Language: the Maternal Source of Meaning by Genevieve Vaughan (Mimesis International 2015) by Kaarina Kailo

Genevieve Vaughan has published her third book regarding the reality and transformative potential of the gift economy, a logic and matrix of practices that imply the liberation of all genders. The new theory provides solutions to the most urgent need in neoliberal capitalist societies: to overturn the civilizational crises that capitalism and patriarchy have caused with the distortion and appropriation of the Gift. The Gift in the Heart of Language provides sobering and mind-altering perspectives on the gift economy in all of its manifestations. The Gift has mostly been discussed in sociology and anthropology, and in relation to Indigenous people. Vaughan’s contribution is to have made its presence visible in many other fields, where it is taken for granted but where it, in fact, represents the pillar holding societies together. Where French feminism has invented bisexual or feminine writing, Vaughan shows that language, itself, is maternal at its root, not part of the Symbolic, or a symptom of the Law of the Father (Lacan). She shows that the Gift is a more typical matrix of values and worldview among women, but not exclusively so. References to societies still engaged in ecosocially sustainable gift practices serve to explode the taken-for-granted views claiming that patriarchy and exchange have been universal and without alternative.

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THE CANCER STAGE OF CAPITALISM (2): Second edition of McMurtry’s book updates cancer diagnosis | Giorgio Baruchello (2013) | CCPA Monitor

A review essay of the second, revised edition of John McMurtry, Understanding the Cancer Stage of Capitalism: From Cancer to Cure (London: Pluto, 2013). Published in the November 2013 issue of the CCPA Monitor, Canada.

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Corporate Child Abuse: The Unseen Global Epidemic | Prof John McMurtry (2013)

“There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul”, Nelson Mandela says, “than the way in which it treats its children”.

Who would disagree?

Yet today children may be assaulted, diseased, or killed by pervasive corporate drugs, junk-foods and beverages, perverted by mindless violence in multiple modes, deployed as dead-end labour with no benefits, and then dumped into a corporate future of debt enslavement and meaningless work. How could this increasing systematic abuse be publicly licensed at every level? What kind of society could turn a blind eye to its dominant institutions laying waste the lives of the young and humanity’s future itself?

The abuse is built into the system. All rights of child care-givers themselves – from parent workers to social life support systems – are written out of corporate ‘trade’ treaties which override legislatures to guarantee “investor profits” as their sole ruling goal. Children are at the bottom, and most dispossessed by the life-blind global system. The excuse of “more competitive conditions” means, in fact, a race to the bottom of wages and benefits for families, social security, debt-free higher education, and protections against toxic environments to which the young are most vulnerable. At the same time, escalating sales of junk foods, malnutrition, and cultural debasement propel the sole growth achieved – ever more money demand at the top.

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Dr. Edward Bynum: Our African Unconscious: The Black Origins of Mysticism and Psychology (2021)

Are we a species at war with itself? What does our African unconscious reveal about all of us? Dr. Edward Bruce Bynum urges people to come together in his new book Our African Unconscious: The Black Origins of Mysticism and Psychology. Science, evolution, and deep religion all point us in the same direction. According to Dr. Bynum, ultimately, we must love each other or die.

He also a licensed psychologist and Diplomat in clinical psychology, and a senior fellow in the National Association for Applied Psychophysiology and Biofeedback. His focus is psychosomatic medicine, hypnosis and individual psychotherapy.

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Sustainability – The law | Dieter Legat (2020)

20 min presentation on the law of sustainability, presented by Sally Goerner, Bernard Lietaer and Robert Ulanowicz.

  • Why we need this law: our world is not sustainable.
  • The law of sustainability and its key terms defined: flow of energy, matter and information; sustainability; resilience; efficiency
  • More important for mankind than Newton’s law of universal gravitation.

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Foundations for Sustainability: A Coherent Framework of Life-Environment Relations | Dan Fiscus & Brian Fath

Abstract: This presentation reviews key concepts in sustainability and asks deep questions about why there are so many symptoms of environmental crises present in the world today (climate disruption, mass species extinctions, nitrogen cycle disruption, ocean acidification, crises with food, energy, and water, and many more). These symptoms relate to the prevailing approach, in which we use reductionist mental models and treat living and environmental systems as if they are mechanisms. However, contrary to machines, ecological systems show much resilience and capacity to self-organize, regenerate, increase their organization and complexity, and improve their environment over time. We propose that achieving a sustainable world will require a shift in the way we approach life and life sciences. The good news is that such a shift is possible now, without the need of waiting for new technologies, and is limited only by our willingness.

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From Sanction Theology and Peace through Victory to Sabbath Theology and Peace through Justice | John Dominic Crossan (2021)

How Can We Christians Choose to Follow Jesus, The Prince of Peace, in a Chaotic World?

The theme for Crossan’s remarks is Divine Violence in the Christian Bible. The morning lecture, from the Old Testament, is on Sanction Theology or Sabbath Theology. The afternoon lecture, from the New Testament, is on Peace through Victory or Peace through Justice.

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After the End of the World: Entangled Nuclear Colonialisms, Matters of Force, and the Material Force of Justice | Karen Barad (2019)

Abstract This essay is an invitation to take up the nature and problematics of hospitality in its materiality. It begins and ends with the Marshall Islands, at the crossroads of two great destructive forces: nuclear colonialism and the climate crisis. In the after-math of sixty-seven US nuclear bomb “tests” visited upon the Marshall Islands, the concrete “dome” built on Runit Island by the US government was an act of erasure and a-void-ance — an attempt to contain and cover over plutonium remains and other material traces of the violence of colonial hospitality that live inside the Tomb (as the Marshallese call it). Taking the physicality of the hostility within hospitality seriously, and going into the core of the theory that produced the nuclear bomb, I argue that a radical hospitality — an infinity of possibilities for interrupting state sanctioned violence — is written into the structure of matter itself in its inseparability with the void.

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“On Touching the Stranger Within – The Alterity that Therefore I Am” Karen Barad

Both the quantum physicist and the poet make prescient guides to living into the mystery, the unsettled, the unknown. Never simple abstraction, such exploration has material consequences for how we live and make the world; it opens new ways and doors to examine what it means to be a self and to work towards justice together. Reaching out to explore intimacy, interconnection, and intra-action, to feel the touch and hear the voice of the void, the quantum physicist feminist theorist Karen Barad writes from within and deeper into the quantum indeterminacy that is the space of all possibility. In this lecture, we will follow Barad into the inhuman and the infinite, finding the vastest of multitudes in the smallest particle, and spirited ghosts teetering in the void.

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