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AND WHAT DO WE DO NOW?

Last month, they emptied the storage locker and took all the displays to individuals’ homes. On Saturday, an immense funeral pyre consumed the
6,800 wooden tombstones.
 
Members of the Northwest Ohio Peace Coalition  (NWOPC) have decided they will no longer mount their “Arlington Midwest” memorial to the Iraqi and Afghan civilians and American soldiers killed in over a  decade of war and occupation.
 
It cost about $1,000 a year to store the massive display, but mostly it’s ending because for some time now, nobody with a highly visible acre of land has been willing to offer their property to set it up.  Fact is, when you ask people on the street, just about everyone says the  wars are over – except for a heartbreaking number who respond, “What war are you talking about?”
 

IT’S SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT…ISN’T IT? ©

Georgia State Jim Crow Style Graduations

The systematic practice of discriminating against and segregating Black people, especially as practiced in the American South is called “Jim Crow”. This practice is still alive and well in Georgia. How do I know this you say? In 2009 the Montgomery County High School in GA continued to have two prom nights, as all the years before with the first prom night for “White Only” students and the second prom night for “Black Students”. The Black students, of course, weren’t allowed to attend the “White Only” prom (remind you this was in 2009) however the White students could and some did attend the “Black Prom” against their parents’ wishes. The white parents of Montgomery County High School have made it clear that they don’t want their white children “mixing” with black children in a “social environment”. One white mother stated “those niggers aren’t going to grind on my daughter”. Another said “We’re not having any mixed children in our family”. This was said at a “meeting” at one of the white parents’ home to discuss the situation with several students/parents.

Microtransactions Are Breaking Mobile Gaming

All the way back in 2007, Apple’s introduction of the iPhone seemed like it would revolutionize mobile gaming. Though Nokia had tried a hybrid phone/portable game console all the way back in 2003—the questionably-designed and forgettable N-Gage—there was a lot of promise for smaller game developers in a phone that happened to be smart enough to play video games, even if it wasn’t designed specifically for it. Prior to the modern smartphone, gaming away from a TV set meant buying a dedicated device for it, a market dominated by Nintendo. And while Nintendo did a lot of great things with portable gaming, it wasn’t an environment with much room for indie designers. The iPhone and subsequent Android smartphones let game designers sell their games to people who might not be “gamer” enough to own a Game Boy. And then, like so many other things, greed and market stupidity broke it. On the dedicated gaming side of things, a new game for the Nintendo 3DS costs $35-40.

THE WAR TO END ALL WARS

“Peace, as we have seen, is not an order natural to mankind: it is artificial, intricate and highly volatile. All kinds of preconditions are necessary.” — Michael Howard, The Invention of Peace And here comes World War I, wrapped in World War II, wrapped in the Cold War: tremors on one of Planet Earth’s human fault lines. We have enough angry, manipulable people on this planet to carry out the game plan of the political ideologues and war profiteers, who are always on the lookout for the next war, the one that’s too volatile and “inevitable” to stop. As David Swanson, author of War Is a Lie, put it: “The search for a good war is beginning to look as futile as the search for the mythical city of El Dorado. And yet that search remains our top public project.” And the searchlight stops at Ukraine, full of neo-Nazis, corrupt oligarchs, nuclear reactors, an unelected government, a wrecked economy, a simmering civil war. God help us. Old animosities and ideological divisions come back to life. The United States and NATO stand off against Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Thirty-one people — maybe more — die in a burning building in Odessa.

Possibly the Biggest Unknown Known Risks Exposure

 

 

A petition to the President and the Attorney General has just been posted by several organizations, including one I work for, asking that the Department of Justice stop threatening New York Times reporter James Risen with prison if he refuses to reveal a confidential source.

This story, among other stunning features, I think, threatens to expose an unknown known of the highest magnitude -- by which I mean, not something lying outside Donald Rumsfeld's imagination, but something that everyone paying attention has known all about for years but which would explode the brains of most consumers of corporate media if they ever heard about it.

Here's a great summary of the matter at the Progressive.  The focus there and in the petition is on the threat to freedom of the press.  But read this offhand bit of the explanation carefully:

Mental Illness Advocate vs. Mental Illness Advocate

All advocacy involves a lot of debate. We live in a society that has yet to agree on whether the toilet paper goes over or under, so it isn't surprising that something as complex as mental illness advocacy brings out the claws. We only have to look to Facebook to see the anger that some folks show toward political candidates they disagree with. Democrats and Republicans will be in conflict from now until the end of time. And, without muddying the waters with political debate, that makes sense. Those two parties are on different sides, with sometimes wildly different views. But what about the massive disagreements of people that are, in theory, on the same side, who should have similar views? Mental health issues are serious. They are life-threatening. But more than anything, they are personal. The outcomes fill a spectrum from inspirational to devastating. I work in an industry where the typical advocate is either a person living with the illness or a person who has had a loved one, most often a child, die from this illness. Most of us have, on some level, watched someone we love suffer. The most affected of us will carry the emotional scars of someone we love having died.

HEALTH INSURANCE CEO PAY SKY-ROCKETS IN 2013

Philadelphia, PA - May 1, 2014 - Chief executive officers at Fortune 500 health insurance companies, who have opposed new regulations under the Affordable Care Act, emerged this month as one of the ACA's greatest beneficiaries. Recently filed financial reports show that average compensation for these top nine health insurance CEOs rose by more than 19 percent in 2013, while several of the nation’s largest insurers more than doubled CEO pay.   The biggest winner was Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini, who received a staggering $30.7 million compensation package in 2013. This marks the largest payout to any health insurance executive since passage of the ACA and exceeded the compensation of the next two highest paid health insurer CEOs combined. The Bertolini pay package, which included a large “special one-time performance-based retention award,” represented a 131 percent increase over his $13.3 million compensation in 2012. (See table below.)   Molina Healthcare and Centene, both Fortune 500 insurers that specialize in privately managed Medicaid plans, roughly doubled CEO compensation in 2013. J.

Global Warming and the Inevitability Trap

From the wholly updated new edition of The Impossible Will Take a Little While: Perseverance and Hope in Troubled Times, edited by Paul Loeb (Basic Books $18.99 www.theimpossible.org).  Other contributors include Maya Angelou, Diane Ackerman, Marian Wright Edelman, Wael Ghonim, Václav Havel, Seamus Heaney, Jonathan Kozol, Tony Kushner, Audre Lorde, Nelson Mandela, Bill McKibben, Bill Moyers, Pablo Neruda, Mary Pipher, Arundhati Roy, Dan Savage, Desmond Tutu, Alice Walker, Cornel West, Terry Tempest Williams, and Howard Zinn.  Global Warming and the Inevitability Trap By Paul Loeb   Is the biggest hurdle on climate change outright denial? Or is it the sense that of being overwhelmed and too late, that there’s nothing we can do?  As K.C. Golden writes in an excerpt from my newly updated political hope anthology The Impossible Will Take a Little While, defeat is certain only if we accept it as such. What we often call preordained only becomes so through our resignation.

Woman groped by NYPD officer at protest faces seven years for flinching

 

 

On March 17, 2012 Occupy Wall Street veterans gathered in Zuccotti Park to commemorate the six month anniversary of the beginning of the Occupy movement. What followed was a mass of New York police in riot gear with batons marching in to crush the protest. Some protestors left, others sat down or linked arms. The results were extreme even for the New York Police Department (NYPD), which has acquired a reputation for brutality. Reported injuries among the protestors included a broken thumb, a broken jaw and at least one protestor struck repeatedly in the back with a nightstick as he fled the park. Multiple witness accounts claim that officers used their boots to hold protestors’ faces to the ground while handcuffed and awaiting the pre-arranged bus to jail.

In Search of a Good War

Seven percent want military options considered (poll by McClatchy-Marist, April 7-10), up from six percent a bit earlier (Pew, March 20-23), or 12 percent for U.S. ground troops and 17 percent for air strikes (CNN, March 7-9). Polling is similar on U.S. desire for a war with Iran, or for U.S. military involvement in Syria. Many more Americans believe in ghosts and UFOs, according to the polls, than believe that these would be good wars. The U.S. public never got behind the war on Libya, and for years a majority has said that the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan never should have been launched. The search for a good war is beginning to look as futile as the search for the mythical city of El Dorado. And yet that search remains our top public project. The U.S. military swallows 55.2 percent of federal discretionary spending, according to the National Priorities Project. Televised U.S. sporting events thank members of the military for watching from 175 nations. U.S. aircraft carriers patrol the world's seas. U.S.
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