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An Empire of Bases Poisons Water, Threatening Its Own Collapse

The U.S. military’s fire-fighting foam is contaminating groundwater and sickening people in communities near U.S. military bases around the world

Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and caldron bubble.
Fillet of a fenny snake,
In the caldron boil and bake.

Macbeth, William Shakespeare

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.

The Denomic Scution Tube

Suddenly America’s political cauldron bubbles with hope and possibility — not just because the Democrats have won races across the country, but because voters pushed back in record numbers against the forces of Trump and racism and the long-standing lies of entrenched wealth.

Now the work begins: to hold our political leadership accountable for real change —the sort of change that is too easily ducked by the powerful. The time has come to change who we are as a nation, to transform the national identity.

Here’s a simpler way to put it: “Will the new House Democrats take on the war lobby?”

Human Delusion and Our Destruction of the Biosphere: We Aren’t Even Trying!

Have you heard the expression ‘climate change’? That lovely expression that suggests a holiday in a place with a more pleasant climate.

Unfortunately, only the rarest individual has the capacity to see through the elite-promulgated delusion that generated this benign expression and its twin notions that 1.5 degrees celsius (above the preindustrial level) is an acceptable upper limit for an increase in global temperature and that the timeframe for extinction-threatening outcomes of this ‘climate change’ is the ‘end of the century’.

Opioids for Depression? Not So Fast Says An FDA Advisory Committee

The mental illness "franchise" has been very good to Pharma. While it could not "grow" the number of people with actual schizophrenia, it has successfully grown those diagnosed with amorphous "schizoaffective" and bipolar disorders and, of course, depression.

 

Thanks to Pharma’s everyone-is-mentally-ill ploy, buoyed by the Pharma-funded writers of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, an estimated one quarter of the population now takes psych drugs. Gone are the days when bad moods were attributed to problems with finance, romance, jobs, housing, family, marriages and health.

 

Report shows social-media giant has strengthened ties to right-wing goons, including Jeff Sessions, meaning our time in "Facebook Jail" might go beyond trolls

  Legal Schnauzer is an unapologetically liberal blog, and we have been in "Facebook Jail" for more than a month, dating back to the weeks leading up to the Nov. 6 midterm elections. This marks roughly a dozen times in 2018 that the world's foremost social network has placed us in jail. We have tended to attribute our ongoing problems with Facebook to right-wing trolls -- pro-Trump, pro-law enforcement types --who file baseless complaints about our content. But a recent New York Times investigation suggests our problems -- and those of other progressive voices -- rest not with trolls, but with Facebook officials themselves.

I never expected to become a conscientious objector

I never expected to become a conscientious objector.

If you would have asked me two years ago to name the first things that came to mind when I heard this title, it would have been words like coward, afraid, selfish, ignorant, and unpatriotic.

I guess it’s how growing up tends to work. Now I see that these words couldn’t be farther from the truth.

This is my story, but it’s also the story of hundreds who have come before me, only some of them known. It’s the story of every unnamed fearless lover of peace who, never needed to don the uniform to realize that violence can never be a realistic solution to any conflict. For those wise enough to understand that war has so little to do with solutions, and so much to do with ego-centricism, manipulation, wealth and power.

I now realize that those people I was so quick to dismiss as idealistic and weak, are in fact the meek that might just inherit the earth.

FINKS Theatre Review

Rogue Machine Theatre continues its look back at American leftists - and the persecution of them - with Finks, which alternates onstage at Venice’s Electric Lodge with the peerless Oppenheimer. If the latter recounted the saga of the physicist who co-invented the atomic bomb and leftwing ties in the scientific community, Finks focuses on show biz radicals during the witch-hunt of the House Un-American Activities Committee/McCarthy era during the 1950s.

 

In Finks playwright Joe Gilford dramatizes the blacklisting of his real life parents. Jack Gilford played Hysterium in 1966’s A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, acted in 1985’s Cocoon was Oscar-nominated for Best Supporting Actor in 1973’s Save the Tiger and is here called Mickey Dobbs (the inimitable French Stewart).

Jack’s wife, stage, radio and screen actress Madeline Lee, appeared in The Goldbergs; I Remember Mama; on the Jackie Gleason and Red Buttons shows, specialized in playing babies and children and in Finks is named Natalie Meltzer (Valerie Claire Stewart).

 

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