Global
Glacier National Park is drip drip dripping into a puddle.
People and companies and governments are cutting down trees to burn them to save the planet from global warming, mixing the sacrificial trees with oh-so-clean coal, and in Detroit with tires, and in North Carolina with chicken shit.
Others are hacking down old forests to grow marijuana where it’s least likely to be found: another great benefit of drug prohibition.
Over 95% of California’s wild game was mercilessly slaughtered between 1865 and 1890.
Ted Turner is liberating the remnants of the bison in the American West on the model of the liberation of Baghdad: they end up $18 a plate.
Ranchers are luring wolves with sheep carcasses and tracking wolves’ radio collars like a Saudi hit squad tracking a journalist, before playing American Sniper.
Endangered species are being hunted just as viciously by lobbyists.
The Actors’ Gang has long been among my favorite theatre companies. Over the years I’ve attended their hard-hitting dramas and trenchant satires, from Tim Robbins’ early anti-Iraq War Embedded to an adaptation of Orwell’s 1984 that commented on the Bush regime’s torture policy to the antiwar classics Bury the Dead by Irwin Shaw and the docu-play The Trial of the Catonsville Nine about the pacifist Berrigan Brothers and so on. To be fair, the intrepid troupe has presented its fair share of comedies, too - more often than not performed by thesps donning commedia dell’arte masks in original works written by Robbins, such as Harlequino - although these productions often contain heavy doses of social commentary along with hearty laughs.
But with The Gang’s Aphrodite’s Holiday Show it is, as Monty Python pithily put it, time “now for something completely different” at the Ivy Substation. In this 90 minute variety show performed without intermission the usually thought-provoking Gang here lets its collective hair down with a diversion designed to maximize merriment during this season of mirth and goodwill to all people.
I was involved in pro-peace, anti-war, anti-US Imperialism efforts during the most hideous years of the Reagan/Bush administrations (from 1980 – 1992) that resulted in the deaths and sufferings of millions of innocent people in virtually every South and Central American nation you can think of.
As I remember the many innocent – often “disappeared” - war-refugees who suffered, starved and died at the hands of my war-profiteering national leaders, I am unable to shed any tears for the guilty ones, even if they are now dead or dying, for they were war-mongers that never apologized for their misdeeds. They were members beholden to Wall Street and War Street whose intentions made them responsible for brutal massacres, assassinations, torturing, mass killings, starvation and the impoverishment of millions of innocents that wanted to live in peace in their homeland that had been targeted for exploitation by my once-beloved homeland.
A new film called A Dangerous Idea argues that the concept of the gene will be looked back on (if humanity lives long enough) in the way that we look back on claims of “royal blood” and skull size as justifications for power and social status. The film makes the case that eugenics and (its more recent name) genetics has been driven by the same interests as those past claims.
Our long-awaited “Mueller Time” has filled the punditocracy with tales of collusion and delusion. But most have missed the two-word trap door through which Donald Trump is likeliest to fall.
Yes, the Trumputins did steal 2016.
Collusion, technically, is not a crime. Treason is. So is conspiracy. But they may be hard to prove.
Yes, the Don Jr.-Eric-Ivanka-Kushner-Cohen-Manafort cabal has lied to Congress, the courts, and the people. More will arise as the Trump consiglieri flee the sinking ship.
But as predicted by Steve Bannon, here are the two words most likely to bring Trump down: MONEY LAUNDERING.
To source this for yourself, start with David Cay Johnston’s It’s Even Worse than You Think and Craig Unger’s House of Putin House of Trump.
There has been another defenestration of a television-based political commentator for touching the only real electrified third rail remaining in reporting what passes for the news. Marc Lamont Hill, a Temple University professor of Media Studies and Urban Education, who is a regular political commentator on CNN, was fired for what he said in a speech at the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, which took place last Wednesday at the United Nations. Hill called for a “free Palestine from river to the sea,” which CNN considered grounds for terminating his contract.
Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and caldron bubble.
Fillet of a fenny snake,
In the caldron boil and bake.
By Pat Elder, World BEYOND War, December 2, 2018
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Per-flouro octane-sulfo-nate or PFOS, and Per-flouro-octa-noic acid or PFOA, are the active ingredients in the foam routinely used to train soldiers to extinguish aircraft fires at U.S. military bases around the world. The toxic chemicals are allowed to leach into surrounding soil to poison groundwater. The result is one of the greatest water contamination epidemics in human history.
Doubt that? Click on Google News and enter: “PFOS PFAO Military Base.” Then, come back and read the rest of this article – and brace yourself. It’s bad.