Global
By David Swanson
We should be very grateful to Francesco Duina for his new book, Broke and Patriotic: Why Poor Americans Love Their Country. He begins with the following dilemma. The poor in the United States are in many ways worse off than in other wealthy countries, but they are more patriotic than are the poor in those other countries and even more patriotic than are wealthier people in their own country. Their country is (among wealthy countries) tops in inequality, and bottoms in social support, and yet they overwhelmingly believe that the United States is “fundamentally better than other countries.” Why?
Duina didn’t try to puzzle this one out for himself. He went out and surveyed patriotic poor people in Alabama and Montana. He found variations between those two places, such as people loving the government for helping them a little bit and people loving the government for not helping them at all. He found variations between men and women and racial groups, but mostly he found intense patriotism built around identical myths and phrases.
By Tony Jenkins, World BEYOND War
Photo caption: Peaceful protestors in Cameroon calling for an end to violence, Anglophone marginalization, and arbitrary arrest. (Photo: Screen capture from the cover of the Amnesty International Report “A Turn for the worse…”)
Deadly violence in Cameroon is at the precipice of civil war and the world is not paying attention. World BEYOND War calls for immediate action by state and non-state actors, the media, and international civil society to bring an immediate end to this deadly conflict.
In his Los Angeles theatrical debut in Shakespeare’s Henry IV Tom Hanks proves he is as talented a stage actor as he is on the screen in Saving Private Ryan, Forrest Gump, The Post, etc. Wearing (I hope for Rita Wilson’s sake) a fat suit, bearded and with long flowing grayish/ whitish hair, Hanks - almost unrecognizable as the portly, comic character Sir John Falstaff - not only opened the epic about England’s power struggles but rescued the play during a “medical emergency.”
When the action during the first act of this Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles production was interrupted due to an ailing theatergoer, Hanks took to the boards, good-naturedly waving his sword at viewers, “ordering” them back into their seats and so on. Hanks’ improvisational panache saved the moment and in that hallowed show biz tradition, eventually the show went on, performed under the stars at the West L.A. V.A. Campus’ Japanese Garden. (Although the delay added time to the play’s already three hour-plus length, putting me in mind of the title of Orson Welles’ 1966 Falstaff film Chimes at Midnight).
amantha Bee is a smart, talented, funny, incisive, edgy, 48-year-old Canadian/American mother of three. She is also the star of the TBS show “Full Frontal with Samantha Bee,” now in its third year. In 2017, Time magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world.
I don’t blame all of the planet’s ills on the Republican Party, but I find hope in the possibility that it’s on the verge of collapse.
I’m not talking politics here. I’m talking deep vision of humanity: a sense of who we are and how we impact Planet Earth and all its occupants. A smallness of mind has a chokehold on American political power and awareness. Maybe what I mean is that it has control over the money.
“The money just isn’t there” — to provide universal healthcare, to create environmental sustainability . . . to ensure that everyone has clean drinking water. I could name dozens more “nice ideas” that are financial impossibilities, relegated to the trash bin of wishful thinking. We all could.
But “the money,” whatever that actually is, remains quietly, unquestionably present to maintain a suicidal status quo of expanding war, prisons, border “protection” and, of course, environmental exploitation.
Is it simply human stupidity that’s at the center of such irony?
Minnesota’s Republican Party is hoping that good-hearted, environmentally-conscious Minnesotans who appreciate clean drinking and fishing water will subvert their ideals, ignore their better angels and vote for the Republican Party’s “red state” agenda next fall.
Supporters of America’s current “Polluter-in-Chief” Donald J. Trump, whose environmentally-destructive policies could literally turn the waters of northeastern Minnesota’s Partridge, Embarrass and upper St Louis Rivers into red, highly acidic, sulfuric acid-contaminated water that cannot support activities of normal life, (including fishing, boating, swimming or the growing of wild rice).
<<<The Hector Mine Earthen Dam Rupture>>>
Note that the break in the abandoned Hector mine pit near Biwabik on April 24, 2018 discharged massive amounts of toxic red-stained water into the Embarrass River, which then emptied into the Embarrass Lake, with uncertain, but probably devastating long-term consequences. See photo below.
Join in five full days of gaming from June 13-17 at the Greater Columbus Convention Center. Events include collectible and trading card games, eclectics, live action role-playing, miniatures. tabletop games, and True Dungeon. There will be an Art Expo, costume contest, film festival and live podcast.
You can sign up for games on-site as part of your registration, (or if you pre-register, as a separate action), but you can also purchase any number of generic tokens to use as you wish. Generics come in $2.00 increments, and they match up with the cost of our events. If you see a game you want to play, and there is space available, you can just sit down and join in! You simply give the appropriate number of Generics to the game organizer. You will want to pay particular attention to three pieces of information that each game will have listed: Minimum Age, Experience, and Complexity.
Registration runs from $35-$70. See http://originsgamefair.com/registration/ for more information.
On October 25th, 2002 the last great hero of the common people in the US Senate was very likely murdered by agents of the shadow US crime cabal government otherwise known as the Bush-Cheney regime. His wife and daughter and two pilots also died in the air crash. Paul Wellstone’s story deserves to be retold and Americans need to be reminded that criminals in and out of our government still need to be punished for their unindicted crimes. This article was written as both a tribute to an outstanding American patriot and a reexamination of his probable assassination by criminals still on the loose.