Mar 31
A Big Bang shook the neighborhood this afternoon during a thunderstorm, knocking a picture frame off the wall of my office. The lightning bolt struck a sixty-foot redwood tree two blocks away and blew it up. All that was left of the giant was a jagged, shattered stump. Twisted, stripped fragments rested on …
Mar 28
On the theme of the invasion of the body snatchers, artist Sandy Sanders of the Berkeley Post Office Defenders has created this postcard (below) showing corporate invaders snatching the Post Office and the jobs that go with it. The downtown Staples store, along with dozens of other Staples elsewhere, now hosts an ersatz Post Office …
Mar 27
Growing up in the fifties and sixties we generally heard the phrase “overthrow the government” linked with communists. That’s so ancient history! In more recent times we’ve seen a white guy be the best rapper and a black guy the best golfer, and now the capitalists are the best at overthrowing governments. The capitalists overthrew …
Mar 22
Sunshine, the saying goes, is the best disinfectant. But sometimes letting the sunshine in takes extraordinary measures. Bringing the cleansing rays to bear on the rotten state of the FBI in 1971 took nothing less than forcefully breaking and entering. Betty Medsger’s new book, The Burglary, the Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI (Knopf …
Mar 20
This week’s Scientific American asks “Can U.S. Fracked Gas Save Ukraine?” The article points out that Ukraine depends on Russia for about two thirds of its natural gas, which gives Putin and his oligarchs a big hammer. So, naturally, the oligarchs in Washington are angling to replace Russian gas with American gas, if they can. …
Mar 18
Lethal but Legal by Nicholas Freudenberg (Oxford U. Press 2014) takes on one of the great paradoxes of our time: we have the scientific capacity to support healthier, longer life spans for the earth’s population, but in fact we see the spread of novel plagues more devastating than the medieval Black Death. In place of …
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