It's our pumpkin spice episode! Ok, no it's not but we needed a placeholder until we can get the show notes up. They will be chock chonk full. Believe that. In the meantime - enjoy this episode where we talk about the radical book about mass collaboration. Binding Chaos: society and disassociation and how we aren't living in a society but an unsociety.

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Credits

Season Two Recorded at Bob's Basement Studios, Michigan

Produced and edited by Sara Kaye Larson

Intro/Outro Music: ‘Shifting pt. 2 (instrumental)’ by Rie Daisies

Executive Producer Kate ML Rogers

Season One Recorded at Troubadour Studios in Lansing, MI (now in Traverse City, MI!)

Audio Engineer Corey DeRushia

Edited by Rie Daisies at Nighttime Girlfriend Studio

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Have some feedback? Praise? General thoughts? Want to be on the show? Know how to pronounce something? Are you a religious scholar? We'd love to hear from you. Leave a message right from your phone or computer by clicking here. Recordings may be used in future episodes.

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https://www.bitingalltheapples.com/

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We're back after already being back and then gone again. The fall has brought us many adventures and one gnarly head cold. But SK & JV made it to the microphones to talk about insane campaign ads, the Mackinaw Bridge, and a few chapters in Binding Chaos.

Last episode we discussed the first sections of Binding Chaos that covered the problem with democracy. In this edition we cover the dangers of group affiliation and natural and negotiated rights. It will give you so much to think about it won't matter if we don't get another episode out next week. But we will. We really will.

Here's a link to Binding Chaos: https://samim.io/dl/Binding-Chaos-Mass-Collaboration-on-a-Global-Scale-by-Heather-Marsh.pdf

And here's an auto-generated list of what's in this episode:
• living through major historical shifts and noticing how fast the social baseline changes
• using Marx as a lens for how economies shape relationships and identity
• why democracy drifts toward oligarchy when groups speak louder than individuals
• how campaign ads weaponize othering and sell “difference” as threat
• why group affiliation can drive bigotry and make moral people commit atrocities
• swapping nouns for verbs as a practical culture shift
• “the greater good” as a pathway to mob rule and rights violations
• Patriot Act logic and how surveillance expands under child safety rhetoric
• natural rights, negotiated rights, and the social contract built on individual dignity
• basic needs as rights, not privileges, and what happens when society blocks them
• the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, what it says, and how caveats hollow it out
You can send us an email at bitingalltheaples at gmail.com.
You need to like, follow, rate, comment, share this amazing podcast for your health and for the health of America.

And here are some links for things related to this episode:

KARL MARX: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marx/
Genius of the Modern World - Episode 1 - Karl Marx (BBC Documentary, 2016)
https://youtu.be/V45wESzJ9xc?si=8GOXPNRsZQLYGygj

NAFTA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Free_Trade_Agreement
How NAFTA affected the US: https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/naftas-impact-u-s-economy-facts/

Onion Article "Area Man Passionate Defender Of What He Imagines Constitution To Be"
https://theonion.com/area-man-passionate-defender-of-what-he-imagines-consti-1819571149/

The Verve Pipe
Freshman: https://youtu.be/1umEXpGHc0E?si=Gt947PATi1yloJ12

THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR LISTENING! LET US KNOW WHAT YOU THINK OF BINDING CHAOS! email us at bitingalltheapples AT gmail DOT com

Send us Fan Mail

Credits

Season Two Recorded at Bob's Basement Studios, Michigan

Produced and edited by Sara Kaye Larson

Intro/Outro Music: ‘Shifting pt. 2 (instrumental)’ by Rie Daisies

Executive Producer Kate ML Rogers

Season One Recorded at Troubadour Studios in Lansing, MI (now in Traverse City, MI!)

Audio Engineer Corey DeRushia

Edited by Rie Daisies at Nighttime Girlfriend Studio

Leave us a voice mail

Have some feedback? Praise? General thoughts? Want to be on the show? Know how to pronounce something? Are you a religious scholar? We'd love to hear from you. Leave a message right from your phone or computer by clicking here. Recordings may be used in future episodes.

Website

https://www.bitingalltheapples.com/

Find us on YouTube and BlueSky

Hello we are BACK! Back with our book pick: Binding Chaos by Heather Marsh ---- plus our own special Michigan flavored tie-in.

Just a few weeks after the Michigan Primary Election, Joanna spills the tea about the Michigan Democratic Convention and how the Michigan Dems came to spend 81 million dollars on a losing candidate that they all knew darn well was not supported by the people. The people, as we all now know, elected Abdul El-Sayed. And yes, Joanna has met him. They are BFFs. Ok, maybe not BFFs - just checking to see who reads the show notes.

It makes sense when we look at the system through the lens of Heather Marsh's Binding Chaos. This two party election stuff is only meant to serve those in control of the system. She tells us democracy always ends in oligarchy. We do try to be objective/curious readers but we have a hard time finding proof that she is wrong about that. Representative democracy isn’t just messy, it’s structurally incapable of representing individuals and constantly screws over vulnerable minorities. Can you feel it? Are you awake? You will be if you make it through this awesome episode.

Maybe you'll start to imagine your own ideas about what structures we the people need to create in the new world.

Give a listen and hear the inside tale of the convention, sample our latest haikus (amateur poetry warning!), and join in our discussion of the first section of Binding Chaos. We'll be talking about the book for a few more episodes and we really want to know what you think so be sure to leave a comment or send us a text or voicemail.

Extra karma points for sharing this episode with friends, family, and casual acquaintances.

Send us Fan Mail

Credits

Season Two Recorded at Bob's Basement Studios, Michigan

Produced and edited by Sara Kaye Larson

Intro/Outro Music: ‘Shifting pt. 2 (instrumental)’ by Rie Daisies

Executive Producer Kate ML Rogers

Season One Recorded at Troubadour Studios in Lansing, MI (now in Traverse City, MI!)

Audio Engineer Corey DeRushia

Edited by Rie Daisies at Nighttime Girlfriend Studio

Leave us a voice mail

Have some feedback? Praise? General thoughts? Want to be on the show? Know how to pronounce something? Are you a religious scholar? We'd love to hear from you. Leave a message right from your phone or computer by clicking here. Recordings may be used in future episodes.

Website

https://www.bitingalltheapples.com/

Find us on YouTube and BlueSky

We recorded this episode with a storm radar glowing beside us, true summertime style!

Join us as we joke our way through Michigan good-weather guilt and then pivot into a serious as in seriously thought-provoking new book that questions the political truths we’re taught to accept.

Heather Marsh’s Binding Chaos: Mass Collaboration on a Global Scale, pushes us to ask why representative democracy so often turns into oligarchy and what technology changes about power, voice, and responsibility.

Here's the auto-generated highlights for those of you that dig a table of contents:
• Michigan daylight guilt and how screens keep kids inside
• Why weather is not small talk when it shapes daily life
• Moving from care-centered society toward political truisms
• Introducing Heather Marsh’s Binding Chaos and its core claims
• The argument that representative democracy trends toward oligarchy
• How majority rule can erase the most vulnerable
• Real-world examples of who gets to debate trans health care and women’s bodies
• Fear, algorithms, and distraction versus climate and disaster realities
• Heather Marsh’s background in programming, human rights, and open information work

Liking, following, commenting, and sharing this podcast really helps our indie efforts and RESPELLS THE WORLD!

The Book(s): https://georgiebc.wordpress.com/binding-chaos/

See what others have said about "Binding Chaos":

https://app.thestorygraph.com/reviews/07e8305b-c1f8-4dd6-8d70-364d108d9f0c

https://www.loomio.com/blog/2014/04/15/heather-marsh-government-as-mass-collaboration/

Binding Chaos on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/bindingchaos/

Envision This interview with Heather Marsh: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAt6sWE18Bk

Send us Fan Mail

Credits

Season Two Recorded at Bob's Basement Studios, Michigan

Produced and edited by Sara Kaye Larson

Intro/Outro Music: ‘Shifting pt. 2 (instrumental)’ by Rie Daisies

Executive Producer Kate ML Rogers

Season One Recorded at Troubadour Studios in Lansing, MI (now in Traverse City, MI!)

Audio Engineer Corey DeRushia

Edited by Rie Daisies at Nighttime Girlfriend Studio

Leave us a voice mail

Have some feedback? Praise? General thoughts? Want to be on the show? Know how to pronounce something? Are you a religious scholar? We'd love to hear from you. Leave a message right from your phone or computer by clicking here. Recordings may be used in future episodes.

Website

https://www.bitingalltheapples.com/

Find us on YouTube and BlueSky

"Imagination is a memory moving both forward and backward in time."

- Barbara Mor, The Great Cosmic Mother

Now just imagine that both yesterday and tomorrow have the full show notes and not the autogenerated ones and you just so happened to visit on this day. We're joking of course - the autogenerated notes are temporary - new ones will be updated soon. All the contact info is correct!

--------Autogen summary

The world can feel like it’s sliding into something colder and meaner, and we’ve both caught ourselves wondering why so many people seem numb to it. So we turn back to the last two chapters of The Great Cosmic Mother, where the authors name the end result of patriarchal religion and patriarchal power: a profane world stripped of spirit, where bodies and the Earth get treated like objects, markets demand endless consumption, and “meaning” gets replaced with control.

We talk through the chapter’s brutal clarity about addiction to artificial energy, the way systems train us to blame victims, and how power keeps itself alive by pitting us against each other. Then we step into the book’s answer: politics alone cannot carry us, and spirituality that ignores politics is just another escape hatch. What we actually need is a refusion of spirit and flesh, a return to the lived truth that we are connected, and a commitment to respell the stories that run our minds.

That’s where “witchy” stops being a costume and becomes a metaphor for reclaiming imagination. We connect the dots to modern capitalism, AI anxiety, and the tech-bro dream of mechanizing everything, then bring it back to what we can do right now: make something, sing with people, take a library craft class, build tiny pockets of real community, and let creativity become a form of resistance.

After you listen, tell us what story you’re ready to respell, then subscribe, share the show with a friend, and leave a review so more magic children can find us.

Send us Fan Mail

Credits

Season Two Recorded at Bob's Basement Studios, Michigan

Produced and edited by Sara Kaye Larson

Intro/Outro Music: ‘Shifting pt. 2 (instrumental)’ by Rie Daisies

Executive Producer Kate ML Rogers

Season One Recorded at Troubadour Studios in Lansing, MI (now in Traverse City, MI!)

Audio Engineer Corey DeRushia

Edited by Rie Daisies at Nighttime Girlfriend Studio

Leave us a voice mail

Have some feedback? Praise? General thoughts? Want to be on the show? Know how to pronounce something? Are you a religious scholar? We'd love to hear from you. Leave a message right from your phone or computer by clicking here. Recordings may be used in future episodes.

Website

https://www.bitingalltheapples.com/

Find us on YouTube and BlueSky

Mother’s Day and Memorial Day show up like clockwork, but the stories we tell about them are missing the peaceful roots. We go back to the nineteenth century to recover what got sanded down: Julia Ward Howe’s Mother’s Day Proclamation is not soft-focus nostalgia, it’s a direct anti-war demand for women to refuse a world that sends husbands home “reeking with carnage” and trains sons to injure other people’s sons.

From there, we follow the on-the-ground organizing that made “Mother’s Day” real before it became a greeting-card script. Anne Reeves Jarvis builds Mother’s Day work clubs to fight epidemics with sanitation and community care, then uses that same infrastructure to insist on reconciliation after the Civil War. We also track how peace activism collides with World War I, and how Mother’s Day messaging gets co-opted into a patriotic storyline that praises sacrifice while making dissent feel shameful.

We then connect the holiday arc to The Great Cosmic Mother by Monica Sooj and Barbara Mor, which argues that patriarchy sustains itself through a perpetual state of war, backed by the global religion of money.

Finally, we share the lesser-known origins of Memorial Day in Charleston, South Carolina, where freed Black communities honored Union dead with reburial, flowers, hymns, and a massive procession in 1865, an act of memory that looks a lot more like coming together than propaganda.

If this reframes how you think about American patriotism, the military-industrial complex, or the meaning of remembrance, subscribe, share the episode, and leave a review. What part of this history hit you hardest?

Show Notes Will Be Updated Soon!

More info:

Mother's Day https://www.history.com/articles/mothers-day-peace-movement-origins
Memorial Day https://time.com/5836444/black-memorial-day/

MUSIC STUFF:

THE MOTHER’S DAY Music by Bomb Sound from Pixabay

National Anthem by Ievgen Poltavskyi from Pixabay

PATRIOT song Music by Florews from Pixabay

MoneyCha-Ching Sound Effect by u_byub5wd934 from Pixabay

Spirit of Victory Music by Hoà Huỳnh from Pixabay

Doom sound effect Sound Effect by MrDwarf92 from Pixabay

Civil War FanFare Sound Effect by Sergei Chetvertnykh from Pixabay

Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye Music by LAURENT BUCZEK from Pixabay

John Brown's Body Music by Lisa van Beergen from Pixabay

Send us Fan Mail

Credits

Season Two Recorded at Bob's Basement Studios, Michigan

Produced and edited by Sara Kaye Larson

Intro/Outro Music: ‘Shifting pt. 2 (instrumental)’ by Rie Daisies

Executive Producer Kate ML Rogers

Season One Recorded at Troubadour Studios in Lansing, MI (now in Traverse City, MI!)

Audio Engineer Corey DeRushia

Edited by Rie Daisies at Nighttime Girlfriend Studio

Leave us a voice mail

Have some feedback? Praise? General thoughts? Want to be on the show? Know how to pronounce something? Are you a religious scholar? We'd love to hear from you. Leave a message right from your phone or computer by clicking here. Recordings may be used in future episodes.

Website

https://www.bitingalltheapples.com/

Find us on YouTube and BlueSky

America loves the word “freedom,” so why do so many of us feel spiritually starved, politically cornered, and weirdly isolated from our own bodies? We pull a thread from The Great Cosmic Mother and it turns into a whole tapestry: patriarchal religion doesn’t just shape private belief, it builds the rules of the modern world. When the sacred gets split from the lived, you end up with what the book calls the American split, a culture that can offer abundance and ideology but not wholeness, ecstasy, or a shared vision worth living for.

We walk through the historical tension that still haunts US politics: Puritan Christianity feeding fundamentalism and Protestant capitalism, while many founders leaned Deist and helped birth secular humanism. That gap helps explain why “Judeo-Christian nation” rhetoric keeps resurfacing, and why people who aren’t religious still live inside religious structures. We also dig into the book’s critique of the all-male divine family, the virgin birth story, and how women’s unpaid labor, sexuality, and guilt get converted into fuel for institutions that claim to speak for God.

Then we hit the hardest link: control female reproduction and you can control the workforce. We talk capitalism, labor rights, reproductive autonomy, and what it means to live inside a machine that tries to turn humans into mechanisms.

It's way more fun than it sounds, trust us. Press play and be sure to share the episode everywhere!

SHOW NOTES WILL BE UPDATED EVEN MORE SOON

Here's some stuff we talked about:

"One nation under god" - added to the pledge of allegiance in 1954:

https://www.history.com/articles/pledge-allegiance-under-god-schools

"In God We Trust" first appeared on U.S. coins in 1864 during the Civil War. It was added to paper currency much later, with the first bills entering circulation in 1957 following a 1955 law requiring it on all money. The phrase was added to reflect religious sentiment, with paper, and to distinguish the U.S. from "godless" communism during the Cold War:
https://history.house.gov/Historical-Highlights/1951-2000/The-legislation-placing-In-God-We-Trust-on-national-currency/

And here's Thomas Jefferson's Bible:
https://americanhistory.si.edu/jeffersonbible/#1

Paine’s Anti-Slavery Legacy:
https://thomaspaine.org/resources-essays/paines-anti-slavery-legacy/

Little background on the Comstock laws that affected women's access to reproductive information and birth control: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/pill-anthony-comstocks-chastity-laws/

Send us Fan Mail

Credits

Season Two Recorded at Bob's Basement Studios, Michigan

Produced and edited by Sara Kaye Larson

Intro/Outro Music: ‘Shifting pt. 2 (instrumental)’ by Rie Daisies

Executive Producer Kate ML Rogers

Season One Recorded at Troubadour Studios in Lansing, MI (now in Traverse City, MI!)

Audio Engineer Corey DeRushia

Edited by Rie Daisies at Nighttime Girlfriend Studio

Leave us a voice mail

Have some feedback? Praise? General thoughts? Want to be on the show? Know how to pronounce something? Are you a religious scholar? We'd love to hear from you. Leave a message right from your phone or computer by clicking here. Recordings may be used in future episodes.

Website

https://www.bitingalltheapples.com/

Find us on YouTube and BlueSky