January 6, 2014

Woo v. Science: A DU Tempest in a Teapot

About 50 years ago, I took my first LSD trip. Together with the wondrous colors, hyper aliveness of trees, clouds, people, rocks, was a new awareness that took several days to come fully into focus. Undergirding the sensory tsunami of dancing energy patterns was some new piece of important information that would profoundly change how I viewed my world. In my "new" world the jig was up, there was an inherent sense of knowing that all things are intricately and delicately connected and inter-related somehow. Spirit and matter were no longer at odds with one another, and truth could take me wherever it led without my "science v. spirit" blinders.

This new insight, simply stated, was this: That there is nothing inherently oppositional or problematic about the seeming dichotomy of "science v. spirituality", because they are ultimately one in the same thing. The endless war of words about "science v. spirituality" is nothing more than a proxy war for those at the top of their respective authority structures seeking personal/professional advantage. Truth does not oppose itself, but humans -- when possessed by greed and avarice -- have an unfortunate habit of misusing truth to abuse one another.

During the intervening 50 years, advances in the field of quantum physics and string theory have pretty much confirmed the voracity of my experience on acid: i.e. that all things are alive and somehow interconnected in ways that cannot be adequately explained with the Newtonian mechanistic worldview, that there is life-force energy permeating everything, etc.

So please forgive me if I find this "woo v. science" kerfuffle on DU 50 years later to be downright laughable.

January 2, 2014

Why Is the IRS Fighting Efforts to Unmask Karl Rove & U.S. Chamber Political Money Laundering?

Why Is the IRS Fighting Efforts to Unmask Karl Rove and U.S. Chamber Political Money Laundering?
The IRS is fighting the whistleblower instead of pursuing the alleged criminals.

December 31, 2013 - An IRS whistleblower lawsuit that attempts to finger an overseas non-profit affiliated with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce as a dark money conduit that put tens of millions into Karl Rove’s hands during the 2010 elections may soon die in an obscure federal court—unless the judge allows evidence-gathering over the IRS’s objections.

Robert Jacobson, a Tuscon, Arizona physician who brought the lawsuit, believes that a nonprofit created by the State Department in conjunction with the U.S. Chamber to build a much-ridiculed exhibition at the 2010 Shanghai Expo in China had another purpose—diverting large slices of the $70-plus million in donations to Rove for campaigns to retake the House. The idea was that money from GOP-friendly corporations and even the Chinese government would evade oversight by flowing through barely regulated nonprofits.

“I took it to U.S. Tax Court to do discovery,” Jacobson said this week (discovery is the legal term for gathering evidence). “We were in the midst of doing informal discovery, which is the process the IRS has to avoid trials. The [tax agency’s] chief counsel hates whistleblowers… They have a routine to kill whistleblowers.”

Suffice it to say that federal courts have ruled, and the Supreme Court has affirmed, that the IRS doesn’t have to pursue whistleblowing investigations if it finds there is no penalty money to be collected. Jacobson filed his case against Shanghai Expo three years ago. Between 2008 and 2012, the IRS received 33,064 whistleblower complaints and made 630 awards, recouping $1.46 billion and paying $180.1 million in awards, it reported to Congress. Last year, the IRS concluded that since the Shanghai Expo nonprofit had disbanded there was no point in pursuing a further investigation.

http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-and-right/why-irs-fighting-efforts-unmask-karl-rove-and-us-chamber-political-money