The days of having to find a bookie to make a bet are long over.  Today, many states will oblige with a host of state lottery options, relationships with Native American casinos and legalized sports book in person and on-line. In addition to the range of choices, greater proximity and ability to gamble on your phone, the boredom and isolation of the pandemic exacerbated the tendency for many.  The rivalry of Fan Duel and DraftKings for dominance in this new arena of legalized sports betting has added a marketing presence which makes it both mainstream and alluring.  Against this backdrop, we see headlines warning of a ‘ticking time bomb’ which will go off in the coming years as people get in over their heads, despite guardrails that have been put in place to limit their financial exposure.  Some experts see the impulse for profit far outstripping the safeguards and the meager resources put into addiction programs for those who are caught up in a more invisible form of undertow than drugs or alcohol.  Keith Whyte, our guest on the podcast, is the executive director of the National Council on Problem Gambling and he has a lot to offer.  By the way, the National Problem Gambling Helpline number is 1-800-522-4700.

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America’s public lands encompass more than 600 million acres of forests, plains, mountains, wetlands, deserts and shorelines, comprising about thirty percent of the nation’s land mass.  In a country built on the concept of private property rights it is remarkable that for the last century and half there has been so little debate about the necessity for this set aside.  Both parties have generally supported more conservation with their actions, even if time the rhetoric has suggested that some of these lands should be opened up for private exploitation.  John Leshy, a former solicitor for the U.S. Department of Interior and author of ‘Our Common Ground: A History of America’s Public Lands’ has written a political history of these lands which Americans own and manage through their national government.  Matters relating to these parks are inherently political and the inclusion of formerly excluded populations, like Native Americans, in their use is one of the many trends we discuss with him on this podcast.  Today these lands offer Americans refuge for recreation, education and conservation of biodiversity and cultural resources.  The National Parks are a crown jewel, but there is so much more as you will learn.

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While much of what’s been written recently about housing in America are the exploding costs and great value of ownership, between 2010 and 2019, the number of renters in the country grew twice as fast as the homeowner population.  In fact, renters now make up a majority of residents in large American cities.  The cost of owning a home has been eating up household budgets and eclipsing the standard of thirty percent as the basis for what you should spending on housing a month.  A hidden factor in all of this is how much housing stock was gobbled up after the housing bubble of 2008 by banks, private equity firms, speculators and overseas money.  Their goal has been to maximize profit by renting or selling properties at inflated prices.  Our guest, Andrew Ross, author of ‘Sunset Blues’ lays out the conditions that have made the housing market so problematic for so many and why the American Dream is becoming unaffordable in many places. His book focuses on a particular area of central Florida to make his point, but our conversation discusses the failure of the housing market throughout urban and rural locales throughout the country.

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The last two years has demonstrated that unanticipated events, like a pandemic, can force drastic changes in the way that we live.  Climate science has been warning for decades now that we are on an unsustainable path and yet we seem incapable, or unwilling, to confront this reality.  More intense storms, raging wildfires, climate fluctuations and droughts have been dismissed by many as natural occurrences unaffected by human activity. The science says otherwise. So are we likely to make the necessary changes and can we do it it in time?  Our guest, Stan Cox, author of ‘The Path To a Livable Future’ questions whether the Green New Deal or the recent Glasgow summit on climate really address the sacrifices we need to make.  As long as America’s North Star continues to be the devotion to more and more economic growth the path he describes may lead to a ruinous end.  He discusses the need to deal with entangled emergencies, including climate change, racism and the next pandemic in this podcast.

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When you think about police reform and where the greatest responsibility for it rests, the institutions that come to mind are local governments, state governments and Congress.  Rarely does the U.S. Supreme Court and its role get much mention or discussion. The legal justification for things like stop and frisk, limits in bringing lawsuits to reform police departments and even the use of lethal choke holds rests with the Supreme Court.  Our guest documents a decades-long history of judicial failure in America, revealing how the Supreme Court has enabled racial profiling and intimidation and given legitimacy to law enforcement excesses that disproprtionately affect people of color.  Even though the Constitution clearly tries to limit police power, the Supreme Court rarely rules against police, according to Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law and author of the book, ‘Presumed Guilty: How the Supreme Court Empowered the Police and Subverted Civil Rights’.  It’s an eye-opening discussion of this august body’s tipping of the scales of justice toward police excess.

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                  Money talks in Washington DC and China and Russia sure have their attention. not  the voters  

There exists a powerful lever the West can use to weaken authoritarian governments and stop the global backslide of democracy.  Why we choose not to use it speaks powerfully to the forces at play in our own society often blunting social and political reforms in favor of profits.  You see almost every authoritarian regime is a kleptocratic one and they rely on the Western financial system to launder and safeguard their billions.  We can–and must–rein in the white collar professionals, particularly bankers at places like Goldman Sachs, BNP, Deutsche Bank and HSBC, who are selling out democracy to get rich.  And we must address the issue of some Western politicians in league with them.  As Frank Vogl, a leader in global anti-corruption efforts, shows in his book, ‘The Enablers” How the West Supports Kleptocrats and Corruption–Endangering Our Democracy’, oligarchs and authoritarians could not reap the material benefits of plundering their countries without the help of bankers, lawyers, accountants and realtors in places like New York, London and other financial centers.  So if we want to weaken their political and financial power, we must act.  First, the public needs to understand what’s happening here.  This podcast is a start.

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Death in America is undergoing a quiet revolution.  You now can have your body frozen, dissected, composted, dissolved or tanned.  Your family can incorporate your remains into jewelry, shotgun shells, paperweights and artwork.  Cremations have more than doubled and will reach nearly 70 percent by 2030.  As the grip of traditional religion is loosening on the culture, traditions of the past are giving way to DIY home funerals, personalized memorials and green burials. According to our guest, Shannon Lee Dawdy, the author of ‘American Afterlives: Reinventing Death in the 21st Century’, there have been more changes in the professional death industry in the last few decades than in the previous one hundred years.  Much of it stemming from our reaction to seeing death so vividly on 9-11, 2001.  Death is being reinvented simultaneously on three levels: disposition of human remains, new rituals and ideas about the afterlives.  It’s a fascinating discussion no one should avoid having about an issue we will all face regarding those closest to us and ourselves.

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The unipolar superpower moment America had after the fall of the Soviet Union has ended without many of us sensing a peace dividend.  We are now returning to a period of great power competition, with our fiercest competitor being China.  The question before us is how to contain their growing economic and military ambitions before their ascendance is too far along to do accomplish peaceably.  Our guest, Elbridge Colby, who served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and force development from 2017 through 2018, led the development of America’s 2018 National Defense Strategy and is the author of ‘The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict’.  In it he lays out an approach the country should pursue, urging Americans to prepare for war, above all against China–precisely to deter it.  He feels we have a defense strategy that has had little intense focus on Asia, until this point, and that we have lost valuable time in the process.  While he sees the Biden Administration turning its attention to the region, in partnership with nations like Australia, India and Japan, he is concerned that the long view may not take into account threats that are more immediate, like China’s sights on Taiwan.  It’s a critically important, and timely, discussion.

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Some say geography is destiny.  While that may be too simplistic a way to look at the world, there is much you can tell about a nation’s fortunes based upon the neighborhood in which it resides.  Take the United States, for example.  We are isolated from potential aggressors, have unique positioning between two major oceans, and have an abundance of natural resources which allow us to be self sufficient, if necessary.  Other countries live in hostile, landlocked situations which have made them vulnerable to attack and re-shaping over centuries.  And, of course, your geography provides great the key to how you will fare in the competition for vital natural resources and in an era of climate change.  We will walk you through the flashpoints in today’s world with Tim Marshall, author of ‘The Power of Geography:Ten Maps That Reveal the Future of Our World’.  He has a fascinating take on what to look for as we take a spin around the globe on today’s podcast.

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There is much confusion as to how a new technology could have been developed so quickly in response to a novel coronavirus which came to be known as COVID-19.  The truth is that the messenger RNA technology was in the works for decades and that the release of the sequence of the new coronavirus from a brave physician in China gave vacciane scientists, virologists and government officials what they needed to make the unprecedented push to bring vaccines to market in record time.  It’s a compelling story as told by our guest, Brendan Borrell, in his book, ‘The First Shots’.  You will learn not only about gene sequencing, but about the sequence of events and the colorful cast of characters racing to save the planet from even greater devastation than the virus has caused.  People like Dr. Barney Graham, Jason McClellan, Kizzmekia Corbett and Dr. Robert Kadlec are acknowledged for their work which was critical to this effort.  And the work is in no way done.  Just as anti-viral pills are being developed for market by Merck and Pfizer, many across the globe are banking on faster, more scalable vaccines in places, like Africa, where so few are yet vaccinated.  These involve different technologies than the mRNA. There are many viruses which we lack sufficient information about just waiting for their moment to affect the human population. The lessons from this pandemic must be applied to those enemies of mankind.  Hopefully, we have learned from our successes and failures in response to this outbreak.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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