Global

Happy Year of the Rooster!

Thank you for inviting me. Thank you to Archer Heinzen for setting this up. Of course I wouldn't have come had I known UVA's basketball team would be playing Villanova at 1 o'clock. I'm kidding, but I'll catch it on the radio or watch the replay without the commercials. And when I do I can guarantee only this: the announcer will thank U.S. troops for watching from 175 countries, and nobody will wonder whether 174 wouldn't be just about enough.

I wish I could also guarantee that UVA will win, but this is where sports monkeys around with rational thinking. I don't actually have any say over whether UVA wins. So I can turn my wish into a prediction "We will win" and then declare that "we" won as if I'd been involved. Or let's say that UVA blows it. Then I can remark that "we" decided to keep London Perrantes in the game even though he had a sprained wrist and the flu and had just lost one leg in a car accident, even though the obvious fact is that were I really the coach I would never have done that, just as -- if I fully controlled the U.S. government -- I wouldn't actually spend a trillion dollars a year on war preparations.

California can require Monsanto to label its popular weed killer Roundup as a carcinogen, although the corporation maintains that the product is harmless, according to a ruling by a judge in Fresno, California.

California would be the first state to order this level of labeling if this decision by the California Carcinogen Identification Committee is sustained by further court action. . Monsanto previously sued the nation's foremost agricultural producing state by filing court motions to the effect that California’s carcinogen committee acting under the powers given to it by Proposition 65, had illegally based their decision for mandatorily requiring the warnings on “erroneous” findings by an international health organization based in France.

What is Roundup and what is the problem with its chief ingredient, glyphosphate?

The sense of resistance was fierce:

“Grab ’em by the profits” . . . “Keep your hands out of my wherever” . . . “NOT DECLAWED” . . .

But it was also, oh Lord, joyous — in a scraped raw kind of way, you might say. For instance, the young woman with the bullhorn, who led the chant where I was walking, had almost no voice left as she shouted “Show me what democracy looks like!” But as soon as the marchers shouted back, “This is what democracy looks like!” she threw her vocal cords back into it, and somehow, oh, somehow, I could feel it: the birth of a movement.

Here's why I ask. Maddow devotes many minutes on MSNBC stirring up hatred of Russia in order to establish that there is a vague possibility that President Donald Trump might be corrupted by a foreign government.

s advertised, Trump’s inaugural featured a strong promise to put America first, without really articulating just what that means. The original America First movement in the late 1930s was dedicated to staying out of war with Nazi Germany. Whether Trump wants to stay out of any war, or disengage from the multiple wars we’ve been fighting since 2001, is far from clear (and mostly goes unaddressed). Nothing Trump says smacks of isolation, and his opening sentence addresses the “people of the world.”

The next sentence can be read as a warning to the people of the world: that Americans are rebuilding, restoring America’s promise, and together “will determine the course of America and the world for many, many years to come.”

Nonviolent action is extremely powerful.

Unfortunately, however, activists do not always understand why nonviolence is so powerful and they design 'direct actions' that are virtually powerless.

I would like to start by posing two questions. Why is nonviolent action so powerful? And why is using it strategically so transformative?

When an activist group is working on an issue – such as a national liberation struggle, war, the climate catastrophe, violence against women and/or children, nuclear weapons, drone killings, rainforest destruction, encroachments on indigenous land – they will often plan an action that is intended to physically halt an activity, such as the activities of a military base, the loading of a coal ship, the work of a bulldozer, the building of an oil pipeline. Their plan might also include using one or more of a variety of techniques such as locking themselves to a piece of equipment ('locking-on') to prevent it from being used. Separately or in addition, they might use secrecy both in their planning and execution so that they are able to carry out the action before police or military personnel prevent them from doing so.

Here we are on Day 5 of the Donald Trump presidency, and he's got "special" forces of the U.S. military in two-thirds of the world's nations. He's engaged in serious occupation and/or bombing campaigns in Iraq, Libya, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen. He just sent malicious robot airplanes armed with missiles to blow to pieces a bunch of vaguely-identified but never indicted "criminals" in Yemen. Their body parts were widely scattered and their loved ones devastated. The injured writhed in agony.

We made it through a presidential campaign in which a debate moderator asked if a candidate would be willing to kill thousands of innocent children, and in which Donald Trump promised to "kill their families" and "steal their oil." And here we are on Trump's very first Terror Tuesday, and he's already in possession of the most expensive and extensive military machine ever seen on earth. His speed is remarkable. Already he has troops in 175 nations (and announcers are thanking them for watching sporting events as if it were all just normal).

What are the grounds for impeachment?