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The annual defense budget, passed recently by both the House (377-48) and Senate (82-8), came in at $738 billion for 2020, up from last year a sweet $22 billion.
War hits the motherlode every year.
“The money just isn’t there” for virtually anything that matters — you know, healthcare for all, free college tuition, clean water, eco-sustainable energy production — but we’ve sold the national soul to the war god so long ago that the perfunctory, bipartisan passage of the National Defense Authorization Act comes and goes every year with, at most, a few marginal cries of outrage and a big shrug from the media.
Why in the world should Elizabeth Warren choose to run for vice president?
The obvious answer that can save you the time of reading further or, you know, thinking, is my blatant sexism. Clearly, every time I’ve supported female candidates in the past for City Council, House of Delegates, Congress, and the White House has been part of an elaborate plot — no doubt hatched in Moscow — to create a cover for my secret but very real sexism, which I was saving for just this crucial moment. Also, my considering a dozen male candidates to all be dramatically worse than Elizabeth Warren is an obvious pretense and scam, as also therefore must be the positions I’ve taken on public policies for decades.
Or, there could be some other reasons worth considering. Here are six.
1. A Bernie Sanders – Elizabeth Warren ticket would take the nomination, and take it early, allowing the pair of them to focus on defeating Trump-Pence.
We’re now seven weeks away from the Iowa caucuses, the first voting in the Democratic presidential race. After that, frontloaded primaries might decide the nominee by late spring. For progressives torn between Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren — or fervently committed to one of them — choices on how to approach the next few months could change the course of history.
As a kindred activist put it to me when we crossed paths last weekend, “Bernie speaks our language” — a shorthand way of saying that the Bernie 2020 campaign is a fight for a truly transformative and humanistic future. “Not me. Us.”
I actively support Bernie because his voice is ours for genuine democracy and social justice. Hearing just a few minutes from a recent Bernie speech is a reminder of just how profoundly that is true.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, it is estimated that the total number of passenger pigeons in the United States was about three billion birds. The bird was immensely abundant, as illustrated by this passage written by the famous ornithologist, naturalist and painter John James Audubon:
BITTER DISPUTE OVER PG&E'S BANKRUPTCY STILL RAGES WHILE DIABLO REMAINS UN-INSPECTED....
TIME TO ACT!!
Time (again!) to call the governor, the legislature, the CPUC, the courts, the utility, potential investors, stakeholders, etc....
btw....if you think CA's nuke war is brutal, check out Ohio: (https://tinyurl.com/OHSierra1e )
Powerful forces are quickly moving Pacific Gas & Electric towards a settlement on its hideously complex multi-billion-dollar bankruptcy case. Thankfully, Gov. Gavin Newsom has put at least a temporary hold on a final agreement.
Here’s the good news: The debate is over. 75% of US citizens believe climate change is human-caused; more than half say we have to do something and fast.
The following quotes (except as noted) Are From: https://newrepublic.com/article/120559/honduras-charter-cities-spearheaded-us-conservatives-libertarians
“In the early 1950s the United Fruit Company hired legendary public relations expert Edward Bernays to carry out an intense misinformation campaign portraying then-Guatamalan president Jacobo Arbenz as a communist threat.” -- Scott Price, IC Magazine
Rogue Machine’s world premiere of Disposable Necessities contains plot points that could be dramatized in a Eugene O’Neill or Arthur Miller play about family and friend dynamics. But innovative playwright Neil McGowan has mixed things up by injecting sci fi elements plus a heavy dose of comedy into his two-acter so that Disposable’s Tottens would not only be right at home with A Long Day’s Journey Into Night’s Tyrones and Death of a Salesman’s Lomans, but with Hanna-Barbera’s loony cartoony Jetsons.
If that animated futuristic family was 1962’s humorous prediction of what tomorrow may hold for us (hey! while I’m stuck in traffic on the 10 Freeway, I’m still waiting for my winged car, and while we’re at it, for dogs like the pit bull mix named Babaloo to talk back to me!), set in 2095, Disposable has a more sophisticated scientific vision of, as H.G. Wells put it, The Shape of Things to Come.
Without former Cambridge University professor Alexander Kogan’s desire to obtain Facebook data for his research, Cambridge Analytica would never have had access to the 87 million profiles they used to elect Trump in 2016. But Dr Kogan was not the only academic who worked with parent company SCL and Cambridge Analytica itself as they developed methods for data gathering, analytics and rolled out unethical campaigns, for Donald Trump, the UK’s Brexit campaign and worldwide. Many of the firm’s academic and commercial collaborators remain unknown, and some universities are actively obscuring their staff’s involvement.