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California’s Super Tuesday primary on March 3 comes amid an atomic struggle whose outcome will hugely impact the nation and world, including the global climate crisis, the Green New Deal and the outcome of the 2020 election.

Ground Zero is Diablo Canyon, nine miles west of San Luis Obispo. Ringed by earthquake faults, the two big atomic reactors there are less than 50 miles west of the infamous San Andreas Fault. Since their mid-1980s opening, the Diablo Canyon reactors have become a symbol of everything the global No Nukes movement opposes, provoking more civil disobedience arrests (over 10,000) than any other U.S. reactor site.

The two reactors are also in the vortex of a revolution in green tech. All other California nukes have since shut down. Meanwhile, new solar and wind installations accounted for some 1,700 megawatts of new green capacity last year alone. That’s nearly three-quarters the total power of the two Diablo nukes combined.

Indies, Inclusivity, Equality

While addressing the press after winning the Best Supporting Male accolade for The Lighthouse Willem Dafoe epitomized the philosophy of the Film Independent Spirit Awards vis-à-vis big budget Hollywood studio productions. In the ceremony’s media tent, when a British reporter seized on the opportunity to ask the quirky actor about superhero flicks - because Lighthouse co-star Robert Pattinson is playing The Batman in the 2021 epic and Dafoe had portrayed the Green Goblin in 2007’s Spider-Man 3 and Vulko in 2018’s Aquaman - the thespian shut the brash Brit down.

What I loved about playwright Willard Manus’ Show Me a Hero is that it introduced me to Greek freedom fighter Alexandros Panagoulis, a significant historical figure I’d never heard of, and brought back to life the legendary journalist Oriana Fallaci, whom I was somewhat familiar with. The UK’s Independent dubbed her “arguably the most extraordinary journalist Italy has ever produced.” The fabled Fallaci (here called Luisa and played with feisty fire by Lisa Robins) joined the Italian anti-Mussolini resistance when she was only 14.

Presumably due to her early participation in the anti-fascist movement when the college dropout became a journalist Fallaci specialized in interviews with controversial political leaders, often revolutionaries like Vietnam’s Giap, Palestine’s Arafat, Libya’s Qaddafi and Cuba’s Fidel. She also interviewed reactionaries, such as mass murderer Henry Kissinger, who later rued their interaction. (Like Jared Kushner and Stephen Miller, Kissinger’s existential angst is that he wanted to be a Nazi - but was born a Jew.)

Thursday yet another mass shooting was committed by a military veteran, this one in Milwaukee. Virtually all military veterans are not mass shooters. Many peace activists are veterans. Many everything under the sun are veterans. But mass shooters are very disproportionately military veterans.

Some mass shooters who are not veterans are acting out a pretense of being in the military and/or are using military weapons. Militarism impacts a society in many ways. But one of them is through the violence of veterans, people who have been trained and conditioned to engage in violence but not always guided successfully into nonviolent post-military life.

Among males aged 18-59 in the United States, 15% are veterans.

Among male mass-shooters aged 18-59 in the United States, 36% are veterans.

A mass shooter is well over twice as likely to be a veteran.

“Excuse me, occasionally it might be a good idea to be honest about American foreign policy.”

I don’t think I’ve heard that much honesty from a mainstream-party presidential candidate in virtually half a century. And suddenly this race begins to matter in a way that seems like . . . oh my God, a return of democracy? Suddenly I don’t feel utterly marginalized as a voter, as an American, left with nothing but cynical despair as I wait to learn which “lesser evil” the Dems will serve up for me as a candidate.

The words are those of Bernie Sanders, of course, standing up to the red-baiting the moderators and some of the other candidates were slinging at him during the latest debate, trying their best to bring him down.

Bernie Sanders’ campaign has published a fact sheet on how everything he proposes can be paid for. On that fact sheet we find this line in a list of items that collectively will pay for a Green New Deal:

“Reducing defense spending by $1.215 trillion by scaling back military operations on protecting the global oil supply.”

Of course there is an obvious problem or mystery about this number, namely, isn’t it too damn good to be true? The full cost of military spending including numerous agencies plus debt for past wars, etc., is $1.25 trillion a year. While one might like to hope that Bernie is intent on leaving the military only $0.035 trillion a year, it seems highly unlikely that he means that. It’s highly unlikely that he even thinks of military spending costing $1.25 trillion a year rather than the $0.7 trillion a year or so that goes to the one agency misnamed the Department of Defense.

Move over Broadway’s recently opened musical adaptation of the 1960s’ wife-swapping movie Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice, which has nothing on LA Opera’s premiere of Gaetano Donizetti’s opera Roberto Devereux about the 1600s’ kinky hi-jinks of Bob and Liz and Sara and Duke. To be more specific, I’m referring to the ménage-a-quatre (to coin a phrase?) between the titular character, Roberto Devereux (aka the Earl of Essex), Queen Elizabeth, Sara (the Duchess of Nottingham) and the Duke of Nottingham in Elizabethan England.

Donizetti’s tragedia lirica (tragic opera) with Salvadore Cammarano’s libretto, first produced in 1837 at Naples, is loosely based on at least one play and a publication about actual historical personages. This is one of Donizetti’s works depicting England’s House of Tudor, which include the Italian composer’s operas about Anne Boleyn (King Henry VIII’s doomed wife is alluded to in Roberto as she gave birth to Elizabeth) and Mary, Queen of Scots.

George Lakey’s new book is called How We Win: A Guide to Nonviolent Direct Action Campaigning. On its cover is a drawing of a hand holding up two fingers in what is more often considered a peace sign than a victory sign, but I suppose it is meant as both.

Perhaps nobody is better qualified to write such a book, and it’s hard to imagine one better written. Lakey co-wrote a similar book in the 1960s and has been studying the matter ever since. He doesn’t just draw lessons from the Civil Rights movement, wasn’t just there at the time, but was applying lessons from earlier actions to training activists at the time. His new book provides — at least for me — new insights even about the very most familiar and often discussed nonviolent actions of the past (as well as lots of new rarely discussed actions). I’d recommend that anyone interested in a better world get this book immediately.

Soon after his distant third-place finish in the Nevada caucuses, Pete Buttigieg sent out a mass email saying that “Senator Sanders believes in an inflexible, ideological revolution that leaves out most Democrats, not to mention most Americans.” The blast depicted “the choice before us” in stark terms: “We can prioritize either ideological purity or inclusive victory. We can either call people names online or we can call them into our movement. We can either tighten a narrow and hardcore base or open the tent to a new, broad, big-hearted American coalition.”

The bizarre accusations of being “narrow” and not “inclusive” were aimed at a candidate who’d just won a historic victory with one of the broadest coalitions in recent Democratic Party history.

Enhanced Medicare for All — that wild scheme that Michael Bloomberg calls “untried” because it’s only been tested for decades in virtually every wealthy nation on earth — would cost $450 billion a year less than the current U.S. system. In the usual propaganda terms (in which you multiply by ten and then — if asked — admit that you’re talking about ten years) that’s a savings of $4.5 trillion! Let’s be honest and call it $450 billion a year.

The health coverage debate has gone on for the past century in the United States, during which numerous other studies have reached similar conclusions. The massive savings that awaits us according to these studies, does not include the potential healthcare savings of greater, more reliable preventive care, or of the reduced stress of guaranteed coverage, or the economic benefits of investing in Medicare For All.