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2 CDs Israeli general and later prime minister Ariel Sharon said of the Palestinians: “We’ll make a pastrami sandwich out of them. We’ll insert a strip of Jewish settlements in between the Palestinians and then another strip of Jewish settlements, right across the West Bank, so that in 25 years’ time neither the United Nations nor the United States, nobody, will be able to tear it apart.” Sharon said that in 1973. Today, there are more than 600,000 settlers in the occupied territories. They are facts on the ground, as the Israelis like to say. All of the settlements are outside Israel’s internationally recognized borders, and are unambiguously illegal under international law. Thomas Friedman, in The New York Times, says the settlements constitute “a tacit annexation of the West Bank,” and then he adds, “and is not winning Israel friends in Europe or America.” This event was presented by the Lannan Foundation.

What’s the shelf life of empires? Decades, maybe centuries. All things come to an end. Recall Shelley’s great poem Ozymandias about the Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses the Great and his seemingly invincible kingdom. Ozymandias was Greek for Ramses. I met a traveller from an antique land,  Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone  Stand in the desert. And on the pedestal, these words appear My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;  Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!  Nothing beside remains. Round the decay  Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare  The lone and level sands stretch far away.” It is difficult to discuss imperialism because there is virtually uniform elite opinion that the U.S. is not an empire. Washington will not willingly concede its global superpower position. But remember the omnipotent British Empire? Where is it today?

We all almost automatically think of ourselves as somehow evolved and enlightened and free from bias. Hey, I look at someone and judge that person on the merits of his or her character. Race, class, gender, age, sexual orientation, geographical origin, accent don’t factor in at all. We might be kidding ourselves to think we are free from prejudice. Cognitive shortcuts, based on negative stereotypes, can cause problems when we are unaware of them and can lead to wrong decisions and discriminatory practices. Take for example the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims. All the same? Hardly. But the media are not into subtleties. They need simple descriptions. Muslims are like this. Islam is like that. Bias tends to be deep and requires work to identify and root out. Recognition is the first step in eliminating bias.

In its long history, Capitalism has undergone many booms and busts. It is, simply put, an economic system in which a relatively large group of people, workers, sell their labor and production to a small group of people, the owners, for a wage. It generates a lot of money for the few and some for others down the economic scale. Since the crash of 2008 and the bank bailout, the share of income and wealth flowing to the top 1 percent has accelerated. In fact, the top 1 percent took more than 90 percent of all new income.

Sovereignty: preeminence of the people, self-rule. The framers of the Constitution, having lived under the tyranny of King George the Third were fully aware of the corrupting nature of absolute power. And the need for the citizenry to exercise independence and control. But under the contemporary doctrine of neoliberalism there has been a steady erosion of sovereignty, a transfer from popular control to powerful and largely unaccountable transnational institutions. So-called free trade agreements, negotiated behind closed doors, have fast track provisions and special panels and tribunals that do an end run around sovereignty. Most of our putative representatives, wooed by corporations, do their bidding. The people are marginalized and rendered to the sidelines. Well, not entirely. You can turn out and vote then you can go home and watch a Law & Order rerun or something truly profound like Keeping up with the Kardashians.

What’s your favorite flavor? Trump? Hillary? Maybe Jill Stein or Gary Johnson? Or maybe you were one of the 13 million Bernie Sanders voters? A lot of people invest heavily in emotional terms in elections. Hopes are raised to the skies, then there are disappointing defeats or if your candidate wins and assumes office disillusionment sets in. And you say, Oh, man, how could I have been so wrong? Know the feeling? Maybe that emotional investment is misplaced. Often real change comes not from elected officials but from activists and movements that pressure elected officials. Some of the great social and political advancements have come far removed from the ballot box. Think of Mahatma Gandhi. Think of the suffrage movement and the handful of women who began it in Seneca Falls, NY or Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Floods, fires, droughts, and rising temperatures are all on the increase in frequency and intensity. The terms unprecedented and record breaking are now so often used that they are becoming routine. Climate change is generating climate refugees from island nations in the South Pacific to small coastal communities in Alaska and Louisiana. They won’t be the last places to go under water. Elizabeth Kolbert, the Pulitzer-prize winning New Yorker writer says large parts of Miami are in danger of being submerged. As many as 200 million people could be displaced by 2050 because of climate change. And watch out for the heat. The Middle East has had recent scorchers of 129 Fahrenheit, that is 54 Centigrade. And India and Pakistan were almost just as hot. Our planet is in distress. Can Eco-Socialism provide a sustainable way out of our collective quandary?

Gerrymandering. The word was coined after the redrawing of election districts by Governor Gerry in Massachusetts in 1812. He signed a bill that benefited his party. One of the contorted districts in the Boston area was said to resemble the shape of a salamander. How does this notorious political practice work? Two of the most common gerrymandering techniques are called packing and cracking. In the former, the party in charge of redistricting tries to pack voters from the rival party into as few districts as possible, to minimize the number of seats the opposition is likely to win. In the second, blocs of opposition voters are meted out among several districts, to achieve the same goal. Gerrymandering occurs in countries where elected politicians are responsible for defining constituency boundaries and by doing so tilt elections. To prevent gerrymandering some primitive countries, such as Canada and Australia authorize non-partisan organizations to determine how districts are configured.

Olympic athletes to corporate executives at Volkswagen tell lies. Remember Tony Montana, the mobster in Scarface played by Al Pacino, when he said, “I always tell the truth, even when I lie.” The trick is to be convincing, have oodles of guile and be a smooth talker. In politics lying is an art form. There’s the joke about, How can you tell when a politician’s lying? Whenever you see his or her lips moving. When they are caught in a lie the PR damage control gurus rush in and coat the mendacity in, Well, it was taken out of context or the ever popular he or she misspoke. Lying in politics is strictly non-partisan. Eisenhower about the U.S. coup in Iran, Kennedy about Cuba. Johnson about Vietnam, Nixon on just about everything, Clinton. You get the picture. The list goes on and on.

In the wake of a rising number of racist incidents at the University of Missouri, nicknamed Mizzou, black athletes threatened to boycott football games. Wow. Did that get people’s attention. So much of the economy of state universities is tied to football, the multibillion-dollar TV contracts, the multimillion-dollar coaching salaries, and the small fortunes that pour into small towns on game day don’t happen without a group of young men willing to take the field. The emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement threatens the lucrative operation of this machinery. The Southeastern Conference, where Mizzou plays, field teams that, in the words of sociologist Harry Edwards, ‘look like Ghana on the field and Sweden in the stands.’ Athletes have tremendous influence on and off campus. Speaking out and acting collectively, they can bring the powerful to their knees.