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I'm genuinely excited today to announce the release of my new book, With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful. As of this morning, it is available in bookstores as well as for shipping online. The book focuses on what I began realizing several years ago is the crucial theme tying together most of the topics I write about: America's two-tiered justice system - specifically, the way political and financial elites are now vested with virtually absolute immunity from the rule of law even when they are caught committing egregious crimes, while ordinary Americans are subjected to the world's largest and one of its harshest and most merciless penal states even for trivial offenses. As a result, law has been completely perverted from what it was intended to be - the guarantor of an equal playing field which would legitimize outcome inequalities - into its precise antithesis: a weapon used by the most powerful to protect their ill-gotten gains, strengthen their unearned prerogatives, and ensure ever-expanding opportunity inequality. This is how I described that development in the book:

To upgrade our thinking patterns is a beginning step to an upgrade in human consciousness, and is necessary if we are to succeed in adapting to our rapidly and inevitably changing world. In other words, if we don't enact a change, or learn to adapt to the incoming energies of change and transformation, our presence is likely to be no longer required, or needed. It is a sobering thought.

In late 2009, Charles Robinson was able to interview Peter Joseph, the creator of Zeitgeist: The Movie, Zeitgeist: Addendum, Zeitgeist: Moving Forward, several lectures and a presentation; Founder of The Zeitgeist Movement and a friend of Jack Fresco, in his home. He described himself and his life in details in what is likely a rare interview. He was kind enough to provide him with previously unreleased media and video and in turn Charles did his best to create a documentary (albeit kinda poor in quality compared to his work!) that would help express who this person is. Peter Joseph was born in North Carolina to a middle class family. He has said in interviews that his mother's role as a social worker helped shape his opinion and impressions of American life. He later moved to New York to attend art school. Currently he lives and works in New York City as a freelance film editor/composer/producer for various industries. Due to the controversial content of his films and a desire to keep his day job private, he has not released his full name to the public.

David Graeber currently holds the position of Reader in Social Anthropology at Goldsmiths University London. Prior to this he was an associate professor of anthropology at Yale University. He is the author of 'Debt: The First 5,000 Years' which is available from Amazon. Interview conducted by Philip Pilkington, a journalist and writer based in Dublin, Ireland.

Working on design-impacted change is inherent to the responsibility of architecture. Check out the portable modular housing solution that People's Architecture Office proposes for China, where land is held exclusively by the government and the construction of private homes is reserved for the very wealthy.

I have begun reading Eric Mielant's "The Origins of Capitalism and the Rise of the West." The book reminds me that the "transition debate" is not just about dry, academic disputes over whether turnips were more critical to the rise of capitalism than sugar. As should be obvious from the title, "the rise of the west" addresses the question of how Great Britain and then the United States became hegemonic. Bourgeois historians and sociologists prefer to talk about the "internal" factors in Europe-Great Britain in particular-that supposedly led to capitalism. To admit that the rise of the west was accomplished by stepping on the backs of slaves and the corpses of indigenous peoples crosses the boundaries of what is ideologically acceptable, to put it in Chomskyan terms.

Yesterday's Sunday Times devoted the lead slot of its front page to a long examination of the effects of the web on the attention spans of teenagers. In the tradition (yes, it is now a tradition) of Nick Carr, the piece concludes that, essentially, our smartphones - and our Facebook and our YouTube and our web in general - are robbing kids of their ability to concentrate. Neuroplasticity! "Researchers say the lure of these technologies, while it affects adults too, is particularly powerful for young people," the piece notes. "The risk, they say, is that developing brains can become more easily habituated than adult brains to constantly switching tasks - and less able to sustain attention."

"Social scientists, in turn, are beginning to reexamine human history from an empathic lens and, in the process, discovering previously hidden strands of the human narrative which suggests that human evolution is measured not only by the expansion of power over nature, but also by the intensification and extension of empathy to more diverse others across broader temporal and spatial domains. The growing scientific evidence that we are a fundamentally empathic species has profound and far-reaching consequences for society, and may well determine our fate as a species. What is required now is nothing less than a leap to global empathic consciousness and in less than a generation if we are to resurrect the global economy and revitalize the biosphere."

An Arab country with neither secret police nor censorship is unprecedented in recent decades. Tunisia is inspiring similar demands in Egypt and Jordan. When skeptics wonder if the Revolutions of 2011 would really change anything essential in the region, they would be wise to keep an eye on these two developments in Tunisia, which, if consolidated, would represent an epochal transformation of culture and politics. Arguably, Tunisians are now freer than Americans. The US government thinks our private emails are actually public. The FBI and NSA routinely read our email and they and other branches of the US government issue security letters in the place of warrants allowing them to tap phones and monitor whom we call, and even to call up our library records and conduct searches of our homes without telling us about it. Millions of telephone records were turned over to George W. Bush by our weaselly telecom companies. Courts allow government agents to sneak onto our property and put GPS tracking devices under our automobiles without so much as a warrant or even probable cause. Mr. Obama thinks this way of proceeding is a dandy idea.

Since the financial crisis of 2008, one of the most revealing spectacles has been the parade of financial elites who petulantly insist that they are the victims of societal hostility:  political officials heap too much blame on them, public policy burdens them so unfairly, the public resents them, and -- most amazingly of all -- President Obama is a radical egalitarian who is unprecedentedly hostile to business interests.  One particularly illustrative example was the whiny little multi-millionaire hedge fund manager (and CNBC contributor), Anthony Scaramucci, who stood up at an October, 201o, town hall meeting and demanded to know:  "when are we going to stop whacking at the Wall Street pinata?" The Weekly Standard now has a very lengthy defense of -- including rare interviews with -- Charles and David Koch, the libertarian billionaires who fund everything from right-wing economic policy, union-busting, and anti-climate-change advocacy to civil liberties and liberalized social policies -- though far more the former goals than the latter.  In this article one finds the purest and most instructive expression of billionaire self-pity that I think I've ever seen -- one that is as self-absorbed and detached from reality as it destructive.  It's really worth examining their revealed mindset to see how those who wield the greatest financial power (and thus the greatest political power) think of themselves and those who are outside of their class.

The real face of war is unknown to people, because the media is not showing the real facts. The war is nothing but a bussines, where young men are sent to die, for some to get richer and richer. These are the horrors of the war. Please share!

[Barring unforeseen events, I'm going to leave this post at the top of the page for today and tomorrow, as I think the events it examines, rather in detail and at length, are vitally important and merit much more attention than they've received] The Obama DOJ's effort to force New York Times investigative journalist Jim Risen to testify in a whistleblower prosecution and reveal his source is really remarkable and revealing in several ways; it should be receiving much more attention than it is.  On its own, the whistleblower prosecution and accompanying targeting of Risen are pernicious, but more importantly, it underscores the menacing attempt by the Obama administration -- as Risen yesterday pointed out -- to threaten and intimidate whistleblowers, journalists and activists who meaningfully challenge what the government does in secret. The subpoena to Risen was originally issued but then abandoned by the Bush administration, and then revitalized by Obama lawyers.  It is part of the prosecution of Jeffrey Sterling, a former CIA agent whom the DOJ accuses of leaking to Risen the story of a severely botched agency plot -- from 11 years ago -- to infiltrate Iran's nuclear program, a story Risen wrote about six years after the fact in his 2006 best-selling book, State of War.  The DOJ wants to force Risen to testify under oath about whether Sterling was his source.

As intense protests spawned by Occupy Wall Street continue to grow, it is worth asking: Why now? The answer is not obvious. After all, severe income and wealth inequality have long plagued the United States. In fact, it could reasonably be claimed that this form of inequality is part of the design of the American founding -- indeed, an integral part of it.

Society management software is cloud-based and has automated functionality for generating monthly maintenance and a member can view their bill status on their account. The main functionality of the software is that there is an online bill payment system. This software allows members to log in with their own account and gets updated with society happenings like events, meeting schedule, meeting call.

"Kya Bola??" is as much a call for design resolutions to curb honking, as it is to assist the evolution of the modest horn. "Kya Bola??" is a research initiative and not a competition. Inviting all creative minds to participate As the #KyaBola campaign gains ground, Psychiatrist & Cognitive Therapist Dr. Shefali Batra - one of the esteemed #ExpertPanellists on the #KyaBola jury shares behavioural nuances behind the act of honking. Check it out here

Sergey Makhno Architects design Kofan, Ukraine's new, unconventional bar, where seating is flexible, lighting is eccentric, and the finishing is unpretentious. Check it out…

Learning is an on-going process. And especially for children below the age of six, the environment around them is a constant facilitator. Specialist designer for children' spaces, Kajal Gaba throws light on how balance is important and over-indulgence needs to be kept at bay, while designing learning space interiors for children. Check it out here.

Assuming philosophy should be relevant to the way we choose to live our lives, three questions guide this paper. What are some moral foundations for revolution? Do you realize what is happening? Are you willing to do anything about it?

"You can't sustain a democracy in an oligarchic state. The writers on Athenian democracy understood that 2000 years ago," says Chris Hedges, whose new book The World As It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress explores the problems of a crumbling empire, inside and out. Chris joins Laura in studio for a conversation about the death of Bin Laden and the continuing concern over terrorism, the end of empathy in the U.S., and what avenues are left for progressives to fight back.  "The elites are not going to help us," he warns, "We're going to have to help ourselves."

monogamy is the right choice for many couples; they are exalting options, not any particular option.