Global
According to its website, “Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra’s mission is
to enrich and connect our community through intimate and
transformative musical experiences which exemplify and foster artistic
excellence, education and innovation.” Based on its Jan. 17 Baroque
Brass III performance at The Huntington, which included works by
Handel, Vivaldi, Purcell, Scarlatti, Bach, etc., lucky listeners could add,
to coin a term, “transport-ative” to LACO’s mission statement. In that
the ensemble’s conservatory-trained players transport world weary
audiences far from the workaday domain of routine daily existence,
with all its cares and woes, to a more serendipitous, sonorous higher
realm of bliss.
The evening opened with a quartet enticing German composer Johann
Melchior Molter’s serene 1696 “Symphony in C Major” out of their
brass instruments, setting the stage, so to speak, of a tranquil night
with an exceedingly peaceful six minutes. The four musicians - three
men, one woman - clad in elegant black outfits, played horns and
trumpets, issuing a clarion call for calm in our whirligig, troubled
Satire by comedian Mona Shaikh and Ed Rampell-
The Evangelical magazine Christianity Today's editor rebuked the president in a December op-ed entitled "Trump Should Be Removed From Office." In the interests of equal time we give the devil his due with an editorial response from a periodical on the other side of the fiery aisle:
Trump Should Reign for 1,000 Years
In our founding parchments, Lucifer explains that Satanism Tonight Dispatches will help diabolical Satanists interpret one-sided fake news in a manner that reflects their deep, utter lack of faith. The impeachment of Donald Trump is a significant event in the story of our Lake of Fire. It requires ranting and raving. And if anybody knows about witch-hunts, it’s us!
A new freely downloadable book
I would like to announce the publication of a book, which deals with the world's failure to adequately address the existential danger of catastrophic climate change. The book consists mainly of book chapters and articles that I have previously published, although a considerable amount of new material has been added. It can be freely downloaded and circulated from the following link:
Greta Thunberg's speeches at Davos, 2020
Speaking fearlessly to billionaires and heads of state like a new Joan of Arc, Greta said:
With all the media excitement focused on the impeachment of President Donald Trump, it comes as no surprise that some recent additional insights into how the United States became a torture regime have been largely ignored. It has been known for years that the George W. Bush Administration carried out what most of the world considers to be torture. Acting as if it really cared about illegal activity, the White House back at that time found two malleable Justice Department lawyers John Yoo and Jay Busby who would be willing to come up with a defense of torture. They discovered somewhere in their law books that it was possible to do anything to a suspect as long as it did not bring about organ failure. That became the bottom line for interrogations, though in practice some prisoners died anyway, which might be considered the ultimate organ failure. The only one who was subsequently punished over the illegal torture program was former C.I.A. employee John Kiriakou, who blew the whistle on it.
There has been an epidemic of inflammatory diseases that has paralleled the epidemic on iatrogenic immune stimulation with vaccines.
Extensive evidence links vaccine-induced immune overload with the epidemic of type 1 diabetes.
More recent data indicates that obesity, type 2 diabetes and other components of metabolic syndrome are highly associated with immunization and may be manifestations of the negative feedback loop of the immune system reacting to the immune overload.
The epidemic of diabetes/pre-diabetes appears to be accelerating at a time when the prevalence of obesity has stabilized, indicating that the negative feedback system of the immune system has been overwhelmed.
The theory of vaccine induced immune overload can explain the key observations that have confounded many competing hypotheses.
The current paper reviews the evidence that vaccine-induced immune overload explains the disconnect between the increase in pre-diabetes and nonalcoholic fatty liver at a time when the obesity epidemic is waning in children.
Introduction
The coronavirus test ran on Oct. 18, 2019. The goal of a global health consortium was to see what it could learn from a computer model simulating an outbreak that rippled out of South America. Three weeks later, armed with data on 65 million virtual people killed, the group reconvened with world health experts to discuss “Event 201.”
The consortium, made up of John Hopkins University, the World Economic Forum, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, named the Event 201 as the next “big one” after the 200 epidemics the World Health Organization (WHO) monitors each year. What did they find in the analysis of the data?
Governments and health agencies are nowhere near prepared to slow down, let alone contain mass infections due to a novel coronavirus pandemic.
When it comes to foreign policy, it ought to go without saying that Trump, Biden, and Buttigieg are walking catastrophes. A bit of research suggests that Elizabeth Warren is pretty much a true believer in slightly modified catastrophe. But what about Bernie Sanders?
I think that, as he is right now, Sanders would, overall, if pressed a typical amount, be a dramatic improvement over 45 out of 45 past U.S. presidents. But that’s a low bar. I’m delighted with his domestic policies and with the prospect of watching the corporate media squirm as he wins. And I think Sanders has improved enough on foreign policy, in part in response to this demand, to support him now.
I also think that LBJ would have been pretty good on domestic policy if he’d resisted militarism and understood the connections between the two, and I wonder whether Sanders understands that lesson or rather has internalized the corporate-media notion that it’s anti-militarism that hurts your domestic agenda.
The Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) has diverted over $100 million from safety and maintenance programs to executive compensation at the same time it has caused an average of more than one fire a day for the past six years killing over 100 people.
PG&E is the largest privately held public utility in the United States. A new research report shows that 91% of PG&E stocks are held by huge international investment management firms, including BlackRock and Vanguard Group. PG&E is an ideal investment for global capital management firms with monopoly control over five million households paying $16 billion for gas and electric in California. The California Public Utility Commission (PUC) has allowed an annual return up to 11%.
Between 2006 and the end of 2017, PG&E made $13.5 billion in net profits. Over those years, they paid nearly $10 billion in dividends to shareholders, but found little money to maintain safety on their electricity lines. Drought turned PG&E’s service area into a tinderbox at the same time money was diverted from maintenance to investor profits.
As we approach the 72nd anniversary of the assassination of Mohandas K. Gandhi on 30 January 1948, it is worth reflecting on one simple fact that he did not realize. His efforts to teach humanity that conflict, including violent conflict, could be resolved without violence were based on one fundamentally flawed assumption: that at least some humans were interested in, and committed to, seeking out and using nonviolent strategies for dealing with conflict in each and every context.
Unfortunately, as his own experience taught him and he showed clear signs of realizing towards the end of his life, the fundamental truth is that humans love violence and it is this love of violence that will ensure the extinction of Homo sapiens in the near term absent a profound response that shows no sign of emerging yet. See ‘Human Extinction Now Imminent and Inevitable? A Report on the State of Planet Earth’.