Tikkun Daily

Gaia and Shekhina Speak

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What can console us in the face of the Great Unknown? I thought I understood that safety was always an illusion: any of us could be struck down at any moment. But having the illusion of safety erased, that’s uncertainty of another magnitude, so vastly out of proportion to the “normal,” default reality that words can’t do it justice. When I painted the first of these self-portraits in August—the one with my hair on fire—I had no idea it would add up to something much larger and more urgent, compelling me to share with you. I soon had the idea of depicting the remaining three elements: water, earth, and air.

Tikkun Daily

I Resign

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I feel sad this morning. There is blame-slinging all around. It’s all about the last few weeks at the moment, as if all that came before had been forgotten. I’m seeing people blame sexism as the sole cause for defeating Warren, as if her own choices were entirely irrelevant. I’m seeing people focusing on the putative sexism of Sanders supporters, charging that those supporters are solely to blame for Biden’s wins.

Tikkun Daily

#IMPOTUS #Impostor #AlienInvasion

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NOTE: I was wondering what might cheer me up when this fictional narrative came to mind. Try to suspend disbelief as you read it. Those few minutes of fantasy may be just what you need. I was cleaning the residence sitting room. As usual, I was tripping on how many McDonald’s wrappers there were and where I found them.

Tikkun Daily

The Betrayal of The Working Class

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Arlene Goldbard writes that for working people, being told that college for all is the solution equals being told you are deficient, your work is unworthy, and sadly, it is too late for you to do anything about it.

Tikkun Daily

Human Rights and Wrongs

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Arlene Goldbard writes that “human rights are indivisible. If you make an exception for any group—if you paint a picture of the world in which attacks against certain groups are more forgivable, amusing, and benign than against others—the consequences will crash down on all heads. The death of universal human rights is an equal-opportunity plague. Let’s not let it loose.”

Tikkun Daily

The Secret Desire

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What we want is not the caring that comes with a tinge of incapability, nor the over-dependence, the straitjacketed gender roles we fled from in the sixties. What we want is what we give: noticing a temporary weakness or challenge without making the person suffering from it feel less than in any way; pouring out love and help without a stingy sense of quid pro quo; allowing ourselves to receive just as we gladly encourage loved ones to receive from ourselves.

Tikkun Daily

Lying for A Living Part 3:

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Arlene Goldbard asks: where on the integrity scale would you rate a candidate whose background is marked by lies and misdeeds, who is called to account and fails to show up, and who releases a glitzy campaign ad so mendacious that the Washington Post‘s fact-checker awards it three Pinocchios? I’d give Valerie Plame a zero.

Tikkun Daily

The Great Hack: Chaos for Profit

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Arlene Goldbard writes about a new Netflix documentary that exposes the distorting impact of data mining and exploitation of political processes in the U.S. and abroad. Perhaps all that analysis of our polarization just comes down to an artifact of late capitalism, capturing and exploiting data as the road to riches.

Tikkun Daily

War of Words

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The maxim “the map is not the territory” was coined by philosopher Alfred Korzybski, who also said, “the word is not the thing,” perhaps inspiring Zen teacher Alan Watts’ dictum, “the menu is not the meal.” Experience is deeply affected by (and often confused with) the way we label it. One of Korzybski’s proofs was to give students cookies in two unmarked bags; all munched happily until the plain label was torn from one bag, revealing that the cookies it contained were dog treats. Reading the words—rather than eating the cookies—was what sent students running to the toilet, clutching their mouths. Right now, a war of words is being waged over Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s use of the term “concentration camps” to describe U.S. incarceration of immigrant children at the border in circumstances Physicians for Human Rights characterized as “dangerously inadequate conditions of confinement.”

Tikkun Daily

Our Democracy—and Theirs

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The terrible conundrum of contemporary politics is that everyone is responding to more or less the same forces, but in ways too radically different to be reconciled. Take immigration. Around the globe, people are on the move, many having been forced from their homes by conflicts in their regions or economic and humanitarian crises (e.g., four million Venezuelans have fled their homeland). Approximately three million refugees have settled in the U.S. since 1980—about 22,500 in fiscal 2018. Globally, a record 70.8 million people—one out of every 108 on the planet—were displaced in 2018, according to a new report from the UN.

Tikkun Daily

Lying for A Living

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Arlene Goldbard is disturbed that to see that former CIA covert operative and antisemitic tweeter Valerie Plame is running for Congress in her New Mexico district. She would no more want to put such a person in a position to protect our civil liberties and democracy than she would appoint a fox to watch the hen-house. Would you?