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American motorists have recently gone through a bipolar gasoline market. From the heights of a national average gas price of $3.49 per gallon on March 8th of 2014, $2.18, a month ago, to $2.45, today.  But such gyrations don’t reflect the huge difference in prices from state to state, especially in the last few weeks, California bearing the brunt of it.

California on March 8th topped off at $3.43 per gallon, with the national average at $2.45 and Wyoming’s tiny market spending a mere $2.14 a gallon. I believe that this disparity is no accident and primarily relates to price manipulation …

The documentary film Blue Gold: World Water Wars (Distributor: Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) 2008) examines the implications of the planet’s dwindling fresh water supply.

Malcolm McDowell narrates the film by starting with a story about Pablo Valencia, who traveled on foot from Mexico to California in 1906, seeking gold. He survived seven days without water, enduring long enough to document his living hell.

Pablo’s story

His saliva thickened, and a permanent lump formed in his throat. His tongue swelled so large that it squeezed out past his jaws, and his swollen throat made it difficult to breath, creating a sense of drowning. Because …

Given Western civilization’s debt to Greek society, you might think haughty Berlin, itself not long removed from the days of marauding hordes descending on urbane Rome from the thicket of the Black Forest, might have it in them to declare a debt jubilee for the long-suffering Greeks. Sorry, say the neoliberal ideologues that peer down from the commanding heights of the world’s second largest economic zone. We forgave 100 billion euros in 2012 and look where it got us: nowhere. Instead, elite northerners sneer pitilessly at the southern Europeans, whose troubles, they say, are self-inflicted, induced by their apathy-infected …

News item: California’s Right to Rest Act would give homeless people the right to use public space without discrimination. It also describes the right to rest in public, to protect oneself from the elements in public, to eat in public and to occupy a legally parked car.

*****

I first became aware of the complex of societal problem related to poverty when — one winter in downtown Toronto — I was confronted by a homeless man. In fact, I had to step over …

They are asking for only $14,000, and their request greatly strengthens recognition of the Palestinian cause. THEY are a group of dedicated activists who are devoting time and energy to create an initial Nakba Museum of Memory and Hope within a building of the Adam’s Morgan neighborhood, Washington, D.C.

Total exposure to a world that is apathetic to the violence committed on the Palestinians will require a huge but not impossible sum from the wealth in the bank accounts of those who sympathize with the Palestinians, which is probably 90 percent of the world’s people. It is time to …

You know the safety net is in danger when lawmakers fire away and claim they’re trying to save it. On the first day of the new Congress, the House warned that Social Security benefits might need “saving”. The Congressional Budget Office twice ran the numbers on “saving” Medicare by raising the starting age from 65 to 67. It’s a shame, the story goes, but the money just isn’t there.

It isn’t? The far-sighted authors of the 1974 Employee Retirement Income Security Act might beg to disagree. The bill created tax-deferred retirement savings accounts, a landmark win for workers—and, over the …

US policy toward Venezuela is a microcosm of its larger strategy toward Latin America. The intent is to reverse the region’s independent foreign policy and to restore US dominance; to curtail the diversification of trading and investment partners and re-center economic relations to the US; to replace regional integration pacts with US centered economic integration schemes; and to privatize firms partly or wholly nationalized.

The resort to military coups in Venezuela is a strategy designed to …

Apart from inadvertently making the case for equal time by his Israeli pre-election opposition, the spectacle of Benjamin Netanyahu’s wild diatribe at the joint session of Congress amidst the feral cheers of his congressional yahoos will be remembered as a textbook case of propaganda unhinged from reality.

Starting from his preposterous premise that Iran, a poor country of 77 million people with an economy nearly the size of Massachusetts’, is planning a caliphate to conquer the world, Mr. Netanyahu builds his case on belligerent words by Iranian leaders, who believe they are responding to Israeli belligerence backed by its ultra-modern, U.S. …

(Sebastopol, California) — Sonoma County’s premium wine industry in the San Francisco North Bay has become a magnet that attracts developers from around the country, across oceans, and nearby. They move heavy industrial operations into rural areas and expand them to become event centers and commercial bottling operations. Under the pretense that they are merely agriculture, rather than alcohol-producing factories, large wineries seek to avoid Environmental Impact Reports (EIR) and the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA).

Such wineries over-use precious, limited resources—such as water, air, and land—which threatens the environment and the quality of life in our semi-rural region. The contiguous Napa, …

A little inculcation of my friend John Steppling’s blog, over here, now, read, please:
The House of Tards
The very idea of language, of putting that raging and pulsating syntax and grammar to work, with precision and poetry, well, this is a time of fifty book wonders, folks who write nothing, really, pick your topic, and those I am feeling the old stomach turning on the most are tied to climate change, faux social justice, renewable energy, all the lies about a new green economy, a la the corporate model.
Language is a …

In recent weeks the Ebola epidemic in West Africa has slowed from a peak of more than 1,000 new cases per week to 99 confirmed cases during the week of February 22, according to the World Health Organization. For two countries that have taken diametrically opposed approaches to combating the disease, the stark difference in the results achieved over the last five months has become evident.

The United States, which sent about 2,800 military troops to the region in October, has announced an end to its relief mission. Most soldiers have already returned. Pentagon Press Secretary Rear Admiral John Kirby declared …

In an age when man has forgotten his origins and is blind even to his most essential needs for survival, water along with other resources has become the victim of his indifference.
— Rachel Carson

It’s not as if we in the Inland Northwest have a shortage of adherents of the mother of modern environmentalism, Dr. Rachel Carson, whose seminal work, Silent Spring (1962) is both the bible and standard manual for today’s activists looking to stave off environmental and societal collapse.

I’ve had the pleasure of running the Spokane River, Little Spokane, Coeur d’Alene, and parts of the Columbia with some passionate …

On Wednesday, February 25, the Wisconsin Senate passed a so-called “right-to-work” bill, which will almost certainly be approved by the Republican-dominated state Assembly next week and signed by Governor Scott Walker. As debate began, I was arrested and dragged away by at least six police officers along with my brother. We were standing in a hallway outside the Senate chamber; the police deemed that we as Wisconsin citizens had no right to be there, in our own house of government. I was processed and held at the county jail, and charged with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. Resisting arrest is …

Yoan Moncada, the 19-year-old Cuban baseball phenom, agreed on Monday to sign with the Boston Red Sox. He is the latest talent from the baseball-crazy nation to join the Major Leagues. Moncada will receive a $31.5 million signing bonus, which should make him financially secure for life. But because of the U.S. government’s continued economic war on the Cuban people, in the form of the 54-year-old embargo, Moncada — unlike MLB prospects from any other country on the planet — will be forced to surrender residency in his native land to realize his professional dreams.

Since September 2013, the Cuban …

Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad to hear that Congress members will skip Netanyahu’s speech no matter what reason they offer. Here are some of them:

It’s too close to Netanyahu’s election. (That doesn’t persuade me. If we had fair, open, publicly funded, un-gerrymandered, verifiably counted elections, then “politics” wouldn’t be a dirty word and we would want politicians to show themselves doing things to try to please us before, during, and after elections. I want them acting that way now, even with our broken system. I don’t want the U.S. interfering in Israeli elections, but allowing a speech …