Oil trains pose a threat to the environment and public safety in Washington State Here’s Burlington Northern’s menu coming to your town on “virtual pipelines” of 100 car unit trains. For your entree: Bakken light, a shale specialty, close enough to gasoline to make it a highly explosive experience for…
Posts published in “Uncategorized”
If we are to discuss science, then I must be up front about ethics. Scientists look to governments or other dubious sources of funding for research money. Then the financier gets to claim ownership of newly discovered sources of power. Some scientists never even think of ethics; they can torture…
“Equality matters because human beings are creatures that thrive in societies where we are treated more as equals than as being greatly unequal…We work best, behave best, play best and think best when we are not laboring under the assumption that some of us are much better, more deserving and…
“It’s clear there are times where what is lawful is distinct from what is rightful. There are times throughout history, and it doesn’t take long for an American or a German to think about times in the history of their country where the law provided the government to do things…
Operation Uphold Democracy (part 1) [Editorial note: Operation Uphold Democracy, lasting from September 1994 to March 1995, was a military mission authorized by the United Nations Security Council to return elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power. Aristide had been overthrown by a military coup in 1991.] September 1994 86th Signal…
The system and its discontents If you don’t agree with the present state of things, there are basically two ways to deal with it: you try to reform it, or you try to abolish it. Both points of view share the conception that things (political institutions, economic systems, etc.) are…
fiction masquerading as fact pushed WikiLeaks back into the spotlight The Fifth Estate by director Bill Condon sets a tone that has one believing it would be about WikiLeaks, instead it concentrates on how Daniel Domscheit-Berg, the former spokesman for WikiLeaks, perceived the founder, Julian Assange. The book on which the…
El poeta Latino Americano Juan Gelman falleció hace pocos días. El es poco conocido en la Republica de las Letras y los “salonnieres” oficiales del idioma Ingles a pesar de ser el ganador de varios premios internacionales, como el Premio Cervantes en el 2007 (el premio mas prestigioso de la…
The Latin American poet Juan Gelman died January 14. He is little known within the Republic of Letters and the literary “salonniers” of the English word in spite of being the winner of many international literary awards, including the Cervantes Prize in 2007 (the most prestigious award in the in…
Scientists love a good idea. If you want to please scientists, tell them their idea seems elegant. Of all the good ideas out there, none is more attractive than gravity. But seriously folks, if we no longer wish to remain ignorant of the real world, we need to address science.…
It is said that a journalist with a personal stake should not report on a story. I disagree. I think that someone with a stated point of view is much more trustable than someone who is hiding their agenda behind a veil of ‘objectivity’. So full disclosure: I am about…
If those in charge of our society – politicians, corporate executives, and the owners of the press and television – can dominate our ideas, they will be secure in their power. They will not need soldiers patrolling the streets. We will control ourselves. -Howard Zinn On Jan 1, 2014, public…
Education as a strategy for addressing poverty depends on not being poor in the first place The way we understand poverty determines what we do about it. That’s the argument Sasha Abramsky makes in his new book, The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives, published by…
More important than what was put into the Murray-Ryan deal, is what was left out In mid-December I went online to find out what the highly celebrated Murray-Ryan (or as the Republicans like to call it, the Ryan-Murray) bi-partisan budget deal involved. I ended up spending hours day after day,…
Liquor Control Board recommendations threaten state’s medical marijuana system In November 2012, Washington State voters passed Initiative 502, legalizing recreational marijuana use. Although I-502 proponents promised that it would not change the existing medical cannabis system, the state now aims to merge patients into the future recreational scheme. Legislators are…
It was another enjoyable screening at the Olympia Film Society Capitol Theater. I wish Robert Reich’s film, Inequality for All, had addressed the problem of biological carrying capacity. Industrial society has grown to exceed planetary biological carrying capacity. This is one of the downsides of the growth-based industrialized economic paradigm.…
Global Warming This is the dawning of the Age of Precarious Is it getting hot in here or is it just me? Tantamount to suicide, I’d say To people pulling into Texaco, Chevron… Were they able to hear me through the tint But they have silenced me with their…
The Cascadia Freedom Caravan brought people from Olympia, Portland, and Las Vegas to the Tear Down the Walls National Activist Gathering in Tucson, Arizona, where over four hundred people came together to strategize on building a more unified, powerful movement for transformational change in the United States. When I first…
In 2010 PFC Chelsea Elizabeth (Bradley) Manning, a 26-year-old whistleblower, provided Wikileaks 260,000 documents on war crimes—illegal surveillance, mass killings, tortures, and corruption. Her reasons for being a whistleblower were transparency, world-wide debates, and world-wide reforms. Her willingness to expose the government caused an end to the Iraq War. What…
For the Community Sustaining Fund Besides being the state capitol of Washington, what is so special about Olympia? Easy. It’s our cohesive and dynamic progressive community. Its foundations laid in the creation of The Evergreen State College and in the subsequent establishment of the Olympia Food Co-op by Greeners in…
In support of the use of power: The naïve hope of a democratic system is that elected officials work on behalf of those who elect them. We’ve devolved from that as Susan Clark and Woden Teachout suggest in their book Slow Democracy. They argue that the dominant conception of democracy—voting—is analogous…
Napping as the world goes by A brief demographic profile of Hispanics The US Census Bureau places Latinos as the largest and fastest growing demographic group with a total of 53 million or 17 percent of the total population. Between the years 2000 and 2010 Latinos accounted for more than…
Olympia resident shares his story of blatant police misconduct and persecution Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” Martin…
Works in Progress December 2013 Images, Slideshow
To all peace and social justice advocates/activists, we need to quickly create a local group to defeat House Bill 1771, which will “establish standards for the use of public unmanned aircraft systems.” Between 1998 – 2007, the legislative work I have accomplished primarily focused on providing an educational and informative…
A dangerous existential choice If you happen to live in the US, and are asked about what you consider to be the most dangerous jobs in the world, your mind probably gravitates to loggers, crab fishermen in Alaska, land mine removers, helicopter cable repairmen, and workers in meat processing plants…
In 1979 the Frente Sandinista para la Liberación Nacional (FSLN) was victorious in their protracted revolution against the US-backed dictator Anastasio Somoza. Under the guise of the red scare, the US funded a counterrevolution (contra war) that cost tens of thousands of Nicaraguan lives and prevented the country from flourishing…