Global

A new book called Morningside: The 1979 Greensboro Massacre And The Struggle For An American City’s Soul by Aran Shetterly provides a detailed examination, in historical context, of a largely forgotten incident in which KKK and Nazi shooters (some of them veterans of the war on Vietnam), with the complicity of local and federal “law enforcement,” shot at black people in Greensboro, North Carolina, killing five, wounding many, and dragging social progress backwards.

I was nine years old and geographically not that far away but cannot recall hearing one word about the Greensboro Massacre at the time it happened, November 3, 1979. But on November 4, 1979, the “Iran Hostage Crisis” was launched as the biggest news story for over a year to come, yellow ribbons appeared on trees everywhere, and friends at school who made casual jokes about murdering black people but never imagined living near violence or Klan rallies began doing things like singing a song in a school show with the lyrics “Bomb Bomb Bomb Bomb Bomb Iran.” (More apologies owed the Beach Boys, and the threat to Iranians has never yet gone away.)

The official Israeli army version of why it has targeted civilian areas during the intense and deadly bombardment of September 20 in south Lebanon is that the Lebanese are hiding long-range missile launchers in their own homes.

 This official explanation by the Israeli military was meant to justify the killing of 492 people and the wounding of 1,645 in a single day of Israeli strikes.

Children of artists who created blacklisted,
pro-union movie reunite for event
 

Everything is at stake. Everything is at stake with nuclear weapons.

 While working as a nuclear war planner for the Kennedy administration, Daniel Ellsberg was shown a document calculating that a U.S. nuclear attack on communist countries would result in 600 million dead. As he put it later: “A hundred Holocausts.”

 That was in 1961.

 Today, with nuclear arsenals vastly larger and more powerful, scientists know that a nuclear exchange would cause “nuclear winter.” And the nearly complete end of agriculture on the planet. Some estimates put the survival rate of humans on Earth at 1 or 2 percent.

Op-ed by Harvey Wasserman, published in The New York Times

While killing the attempt to regulate this potentially dangerous AI technology, Newsom has become America's deadliest opponent of renewable energy. In particular he is forcing continued operation of the embrittled, decrepit, uninsured nuclear plant at Diablo Canyon, which---at a cost of $8-12 billion over market prices---could turn all of California into a radioactive wasteland.

Newsom in 2018 signed an agreement to phase out Diablo this and next year while phasing in renewables and battery storage. Solar, wind, geothermal, storage and efficiency have all soared ahead of expectations. Diablo's power is a detriment, over stressing an obsolete grid while blocking far cheaper renewables. 10,000 megawatts of new backup storage far exceed Diablo's output. But Newsom's Public Utilities Commission has gutted the rate structure and devastated our once-booming rooftop PV industry, costing thousands of jobs and billions in income. Just yesterday he vetoed a bill guaranteeing the spread of panels on schools and more.

Some might argue that Antony Blinken is the worst Secretary of State that the United States has ever had to suffer under even though the competition for that accolade is fierce and includes his recent predecessor Hillary Clinton. Clinton, who more than anyone launched the war against Africa’s most developed nation, is remembered fondly for her giggled, grinning response when she was informed how deposed Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi had died after having a bayonet inserted in his anus when he was captured by rebels while on the run after being removed from power by the US and its NATO allies. She said “We came, we saw and he died!” All right, so it wasn’t exactly Julius Caesar’s terse description of the outcome of his Second Civil War battle against Pharnaces II of Pontus at Zela (modern-day Zile, Turkey) in 47 BC.