Former Louisiana Governor Edwin Edwards, now 89 years of age, spoke to a Lafayette civic group in April 2017. A gentleman in the audience asked governor Edwards what he would do if he became king for a day enabling him to change anything in need of repair. The Governor replied without hesitation: “I would do [...]
(image: http://sealevel.climatecentral.org) Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway wrote The Collapse of Western Civilization – a View From the Future. In this study they coined a cosmic economic term – “Carbon Combustion Complex” (CCC) which describes the largest economic entity that ever existed. Anthropologists define our past history as the “Holocene” dating back 11,700 years. In 2011, [...]
Historians define “Four cradles of human civilization” as the Tigris & Euphrates, Indus River, Nile Valley and Huang He (China) as vital regions on Earth which indicate clearly our survival is intimately linked to pure, abundant water. Jared Diamond’s scholarly books point out how civilizations collapsed because their water supply dwindled. Cadillac Desert by Marc [...]
Recently, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists announced that it moved its symbolic nuclear doomsday clock minute hand ahead thirty seconds to two and one-half minutes till midnight. Midnight represents nuclear apocalypse. http://www.commondreams.org/views/2017/01/27/2-12-minutes-midnight-our-world-peril Filmaker Regis Tremblay's new film just released is entitled “Thirty Seconds to Midnight.” See the online version here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0bsrFyLz6U Potential nuclear war [...]
Children have precociously decided to jolt our adult generation of “sheeple.” Children do not believe adults are acting seriously about an issue on which the Pentagon warned all in 2004.
October 27, 2016 the UN General Assembly considered resolution L-41, a document designed to abolish nuclear weapons globally. The final vote was 123 (of 195) countries in support with 38 in opposition. There were sixteen abstentions. The USA opposes abolition.
Earlier this year our organization, the Rockefeller Family Fund (RFF), announced that it would divest its holdings in fossil fuel companies. We mean to do this gradually, but in a public statement we singled out ExxonMobil for immediate divestment because of its “morally reprehensible conduct.” (NY Review of Books, p.31)
While living in Ossining, NY during the 1960’s, I listened to my friend Jim Beach from Tarrytown, NY give honest political reports about events each evening on Radio WHUD (Tarrytown is a city on the Hudson River 25 miles north of New York City). One day Jim received a phone call from a man in Cleveland who said “Your political comments would no longer be needed.” Jim and I were somewhat shocked to discover his astute progressive political observations would be replaced by a corporate takeover.
The Kyoto protocol was an early effort to confront our global reality of planetary warming accompanied by the steady rising of ocean levels. Even rural people without University degrees who struggle to survive in developing nations know without doubt Earth is heating up.
November 2016 brought a blanket of global fear for people of color, environmentalists (don’t we all want pure air, water, food?), political progressives and maturing youths born in the 1970’s. Never in the history of our immigrant nation have researchers noted two more unpopular leading candidates.
