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Daniel Ellsberg, infamous for releasing the Pentagon Papers that exposed government lies and coverups during the Vietnam War, is now publicly supporting a fellow whistleblower in trouble. Ellsberg wrote a letter of support for “hackivist” Jeremy Hammond who is facing 10 years in prison for hacking into a corporation’s private security and public safety servers and releasing the garnered information to Wikileaks.

Hammond faces sentencing on November 15 after a non-cooperating plea agreement he accepted on Thursday, May 30, 2013 in a Wikileaks related hacking case. He was arrested in March 2012 for his role in the LulzSec hacking attacks. The LulzSec collective was a subset of the worldwide hacktivist group Anonymous, which was responsible for a number of high profile actions including a hacking attack on the private security corporation Stratfor. Hammond has been held in solitary confinement since January without visits from his family and will not have full visitation privileges for at least another year.

I felt the music and the fire as the civil rights movement rose from its slumber.

“Repair . . . justice!” went the call and response last week, in the basement of an old Chicago church at the corner of Ashland and Washington. “Restore . . . life! Rebuild . . . community!”

There was Gospel music and hand-clapping, passion and politics. The Reclaim Campaign launched and the Rev. Alvin Love said, “This is just the beginning. It’s going to take all of us. We’re going to leave this place mobilized, energized and activated. The work begins NOW.”

Reclaim “Chiraq.”

The kids are dying. That’s what they call Chicago: “Chiraq.” The situation has to change; the community has to rebuild.

“Why is so much violence acceptable?” high school senior Keann Mays-Lenoir asked the audience of about 300 people. “Why are adults sitting back and allowing it to happen? We’re in fear of our lives at school. We don’t know who will be shot down next. It is not OK for any child to die senselessly.

“It is not OK that my friends and I have already planned our funerals.”

The first prophetic sign to follow CNN's irrelevant Pandora's Promise is this: the Dallas-based Luminant Power Company has cancelled two mammoth reactors.

Pandora's box score for atomic America 2013 is five announced early reactor closures, nine project cancellations and six ditched uprates. Today, 100 U.S. reactors operate where 1,000 were once promised. New orders are zilch.

Even more critical: For decades the nuclear industry said zero commercial reactors could explode. When Chernobyl blew, they blamed it on the Soviet design. Now, three General Electric reactors have exploded at Fukushima. Unfortunately, as they age and deteriorate, there may be more to come.

"Atomic energy makes global warming worse. Its truest promise is for ever more meltdowns—in health, the ecology and economy."

“No matter what.” These three words have caused the President a tremendous political headache over the past couple weeks, and as such his credibility is ostensibly on the chopping block. We needn’t recall the campaign details from 2008 and 2012 to remember the slogan, “if you like your insurance plan you can keep it, no matter what.” The remarkable ability of Mr. Obama to condense something as complex and fluid as the insurance market to a memorable one-liner was indeed an assurance to the many Americans who supported the Affordable Care Act when it became law. As with many slogans, however, this one turned out to good to be true.

It is now understood that somewhere around five percent of Americans will be dropped from their health insurance policies and forced into the health insurance exchanges. For five percent of the country, then, ‘no matter what’ did not take effect. Millions of people will have their lives sharply interrupted, like it or not. This is a large number and should not be ducked as a detail in the grand scheme of things.

BANGKOK, Thailand -- A ten-day meeting of the World Council of Churches (WCC) ended in South Korea after expressing support for the world's lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex community, reunification of the war-torn Korean peninsula, African rape victims and others.

"Some 5,000 Christians, representing more than 300 churches from more than 100 countries" gathered in Busan from October 30 to November 8 at the WCC Assembly which meets every seven years, the organization said on its Facebook page.

In the WCC's closing prayer, South Africa's Father Michael Lapsley mentioned his "Facebook friends" and said "God is not limited in the way wisdom is delivered to the human family. For example, I regularly read my NRSV Bible downloaded free on my Samsung phone."

Lapsley also expressed support for HIV-AIDS sufferers, African rape victims, and honored "the Armenian genocide" of 1915.

The same week in which a Washington Post columnist claimed that interracial marriage makes people gag, a USA Today columnist has proposed using the U.S. military to aid those suffering in the Philippines -- as a backdoor means of getting the U.S. military back into a larger occupation of the Philippines.

While the Philippines' representative at the climate talks in Warsaw is fasting in protest of international inaction on the destruction of the earth's climate, and the U.S. negotiator has effectively told him to go jump in a typhoon, the discussion in the U.S. media is of the supposed military benefits of using Filipinos' suffering as an excuse to militarize their country.

The author of the USA Today column makes no mention of the U.S. military's history in the Philippines. This was, after all, the site of the first major modern U.S. war of foreign occupation, marked by long duration, and high and one-sided casualties. As in Iraq, some 4,000 U.S. troops died in the effort, but most of them from disease. The Philippines lost some 1.5 million men, women, and children out of a population of 6 to 7 million.

FAST FOR FUKUSHIMA: Today, Monday, November 11, many of us will begin our first "Eleventh Day Fast for Fukushima." Along with so many others, I won't be eating from dawn to dusk. I will do liquids. But the fast will be meant to honor the victims of this horrible disaster, and to focus our efforts on finding ways to survive it.

The fast comes exactly 32 months after the disaster began. Many of us will fast again each 11th day of the month until Fukushima ceases to threaten the health of the planet, which will almost certainly take a long long time. Hopefully the fasts will be good for the planet's health as well as our own.

NEW PETITION: Many of you wrote noting I omitted the link for the new petition from Arnie Gundersen, asking Tepco be removed from Fukushima.

Here it is

We already have 715 signers, and hope for many many more.

We’ll never know, we’ll never know, we’ll never know. That’s the mocking-bird media refrain this season as we commemorate the 50th anniversary of America’s greatest mystery – the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson hijacked a large chunk of her paper’s Sunday Book Review to ponder the Kennedy mystery. And after deliberating for page after page on the subject, she could only conclude that there was some “kind of void” at the center of the Kennedy story. Adam Gopnik was even more vaporous in the Nov. 4 issue of the New Yorker, turning the JFK milestone into an occasion for a windy cogitation on regicide as cultural phenomenon. Of course, constantly proclaiming “we’ll never know” has become a self-fulfilling prophecy for the American press. It lets the watchdogs off the hook, and excuses their unforgivable failure to actually, you know, investigate the epic crime. When it comes to this deeply troubling American trauma, the highly refined writers of the New Yorker and the elite press would rather muse about the meta-issues than get at the meat.