Environment

Here’s the good news: The debate is over. 75% of US citizens believe climate change is human-caused; more than half say we have to do something and fast.

Rogue Machine’s world premiere of Disposable Necessities contains plot points that could be dramatized in a Eugene O’Neill or Arthur Miller play about family and friend dynamics. But innovative playwright Neil McGowan has mixed things up by injecting sci fi elements plus a heavy dose of comedy into his two-acter so that Disposable’s Tottens would not only be right at home with A Long Day’s Journey Into Night’s Tyrones and Death of a Salesman’s Lomans, but with Hanna-Barbera’s loony cartoony Jetsons.

If that animated futuristic family was 1962’s humorous prediction of what tomorrow may hold for us (hey! while I’m stuck in traffic on the 10 Freeway, I’m still waiting for my winged car, and while we’re at it, for dogs like the pit bull mix named Babaloo to talk back to me!), set in 2095, Disposable has a more sophisticated scientific vision of, as H.G. Wells put it, The Shape of Things to Come.

Without former Cambridge University professor Alexander Kogan’s desire to obtain Facebook data for his research, Cambridge Analytica would never have had access to the 87 million profiles they used to elect Trump in 2016. But Dr Kogan was not the only academic who worked with parent company SCL and Cambridge Analytica itself as they developed methods for data gathering, analytics and rolled out unethical campaigns, for Donald Trump, the UK’s Brexit campaign and worldwide. Many of the firm’s academic and commercial collaborators remain unknown, and some universities are actively obscuring their staff’s involvement.

BOMBSHELL Film Review

Estranged Bedfellows: What the FOX is Going On?

By Ed Rampell

The star-studded anti-FOX News movie Bombshell is perfect for the #MeToo era, as it dramatizes the struggle of those “FOXy” ladies in front of and behind the camera against sexual harassment at the unfair and unbalanced cable “news” TV network. Classically beautiful atomic bomb Charlize Theron, who can currently be glimpsed in a sensuous perfume ad on the boob tube, won an Oscar for “disfiguring” herself as an ugly murderess in 2003’s Monster. It took me about five minutes to realize that the actress portraying the far more conventionally attractive Megyn Kelly in Bombshell was also Theron. The gifted thespian submerges herself into the role and not only looks like the beleaguered Kelly but preternaturally sounds exactly like the former FOX News host.

The rubber is about to hit the road! Barring catastrophe, and all of this is preparing you to prevent catastrophe, the starting gun is about to go off and in four to six weeks, depending on your calendar and the size of the drive, the first meeting of this new community organization will be launched. It’s now time for the first organizing committee meeting setting everything in motion.

Remember at this point, you have already gotten a prospective member of the committee to host the meeting at her house. You have also identified key people who are willing to be on the committee and come to this meeting. At least as an organizer, you think you have. A rule of thumb is that you need the committee to be about one percent of the total number of households in the designated community. In other words, you want fifteen for an area with 1500 families, twenty for 2000, and so on. To get that number at the first organizing committee meeting you are going to have to have one-and-one-half to two-times the commitments to attend as you want bottoms in the chairs at the meeting. (We’ll come back to this time after time: organizing math matters!)