Articles
Have You Done the “Great Thing” You Dreamed of Doing With Your Life?
[Reprint of an article I first published in January of 2011] By Don Pelton 5:30 AM, the first day of the new year, still dark out. I peer out the bedroom window and see a small circle of new snow glistening in the light from the motion-detector on the well house, probably set off a minute ago by a passing deer or raccoon. I’ve...
[Continue reading: Have You Done the “Great Thing” You Dreamed of Doing With Your Life?]Mining Nightmare
By Heidi Zimmerman Are YOU, the inhabitants of the Grass Valley region, aware there is exploratory drilling for gold occurring right now and has been for the last year? The 90 acre parcel (was 5 different owners) is the Idaho Maryland gold mine and was the 2nd largest mine in the country back in the 50’s. Unbeknownst...
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California Knew the Carr Wildfire Could Happen. It Failed to Prevent it
Dozens of interviews and a review of records show that virtually every aspect of the blaze had been forecast and worried over for years. Every level of government understood the dangers and took few, if any, of the steps needed to prevent catastrophe. by Keith Schneider for ProPublica On the afternoon of July 23,...
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The Donald and the Fake News Media: An Affair to Remember
By Tom Engelhardt Face it: it’s been an abusive time, to use a word he likes to wield. In his telling, of course, it’s he or his people who are always the abused ones and they — the “fake news media” — are the abusers. But let’s be honest. You’ve been abused, too, and so have I. All of us...
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Midterm America: A Blue Wave From Another Universe
By Ben Fountain Reprinted from TomDispatch.Com Evil days. The midterms were bearing down on us like a runaway train with Donald Trump in the driver’s seat and the throttle wide open, the Presidential Special hell-bent for the bottom. “Go Trump Go!” tweeted David Duke, former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan,...
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Robert Reich: “The Next Crash”
By Robert Reich Reprinted from robertreich.org Sorry to deliver the news, but it’s time to worry about the next crash. The combination of stagnant wages with most economic gains going to the top is once again endangering the economy. Most Americans are still living in the shadow of the Great Recession that started...
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Code Red is an “Outdated System” (according to this NY Times article)
“The decision to issue alerts and evacuation orders rests with local authorities, and as the Camp Fire began on Nov. 8, the Butte County Sheriff’s Department decided to use what experts say is an outdated system — called Code Red — to notify residents of danger with a phone call. “But only residents...
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Brian Gibb: EVACUATION PLANNING: WHERE TO GO? (Facebook Discussion)
Editor’s Note: Nevada County resident, Brian Gibb, posted the following statement to the Facebook discussion group “Happening Now.” He kindly gave me permission to reprint it here. EVACUATION PLANNING: WHERE TO GO? I posted on this page a few days ago about the urgent need for a mass community evacuation...
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Idaho-Maryland Mine, Again
By Ralph Silberstein The Idaho-Maryland Mine was recently acquired from Emgold Mining by RISE Gold Corp, a junior mining company from Canada. The prior Canadian owner, Emgold Mining, spent years trying to get the mine opened and failed. Due to immense environmental impacts, financial obstacles and public opposition,...
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Trump’s Grand Strategy
Posted by Michael Klare at 8:02am, July 24, 2018 to TomDispatch Follow TomDispatch on Twitter @TomDispatch. By Tom Engelhardt If you don’t happen to be part of Donald Trump’s base and you’re a member of the “fake media,” it’s a commonplace to assume that our president is a creature of impulse, a giant...
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Blog
The WELL (Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link)
I just ran across this Amazon book review I wrote back in 2001, of Katie Hafners’ The Well: A Story of Love, Death & Real Life in the Seminal Online Community. The WELL, started by Stewart Brand and Larry Brilliant in 1985, was one of the...
CHRIS HEDGES | HOW ‘ANTIFA’ MIRRORS THE ‘ALT-RIGHT’
“We know now that many Germans supported the fascists because they were terrified of leftist violence in the streets. Germans opened their morning newspapers and saw reports of clashes like the one in Wedding [a Berlin neighborhood]. It looked like...
The September issue of The New Republic features this cover image: In the following Democracy Now interview, Craig Unger, author of the New Republic article, talks about his research on Trump and the Russian mob.
Why it’s a disastrous mistake for Democrats to call Trump voters “stupid”
Don Pelton September 1, 2017 Kansas native, lover of populism (the good kind, the FDR kind), historian Thomas Frank gives the most brilliant analysis I’ve heard yet of the failure of the Democratic Party and the resurgence of right-wing populism...
Giving the Gift of the Magi Every Day
Don Pelton It occurred to me recently, as I was cutting a couple of pieces of watermelon for my dear wife and me (giving her the larger piece) that in a long marriage (we’re at 52 years and counting) we exchange the “Gift of the Magi”...
They’re BACK !!! Canadian Mining Company to Re-Open Idaho-Maryland Mine
by Don Pelton They’re back? Really? We heard this siren song before, when Emgold sang it to lure investors and in the process bewitched enough people in the local community to make it look plausible for a few years. In the end, Emgold failed to...
Republicans Once Again Disregard States Rights (Water Rights This Time)
From High Country News: “This July, California Republicans cheered when the Gaining Responsibility on Water (GROW) Act passed the U.S. House. Rep. David Valadao, a Central Valley Republican and the bill’s sponsor, said the legislation was necessary...
Smoking Marijuana Triples Risk Of High Blood Pressure Death, Study Say
CBS Local — A new study is warning that people who smoke marijuana have three times the risk of dying from high blood pressure than those who don’t use the drug. Scientists, publishing their findings in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology,...
Who Benefits from the Russian Hacking Story? Centrist Democrats.
Compelling new evidence suggests that there was no hack of DNC servers (by Russia or by anyone else), but rather someone inside the DNC copied a mass of data onto a thumb drive. This explanation is supported by metadata showing that the transfer rate...
“Being rich wrecks your soul. We used to know that”
“With a billionaire real estate tycoon occupying America’s highest office, the effects of riches upon the soul are a reasonable concern for all of us little guys. After all, one incredibly wealthy soul currently holds our country in his hands. According...
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Reviews
Free Book: “The End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive”
By Dean Baker Progressives need a fundamentally new approach to politics. They have been losing not just because conservatives have so much more money and power, but also because they have accepted the conservatives’ framing of political debates. They...
Richard Tuttle A day or so ago I received this email from our friend, Dave Comstock, publisher of Comstock Bonanza Press, concerning a “book launch” on October 15th in the Nevada City Council Chamber … of judge Richard E. Tuttle’s...
Devastating New Ron Susskind Book on Obama and his Dysfunctional Economic Team
Larry Summers Napping In excerpts below from their discussion, Frank Rich and Adam Moss talk about Ron Susskind’s new book Confidence Men — published tomorrow — about president-elect Obama’s choice of his economic team in 2008,...
GOP Rule is More Dangerous to Our Health, Study Proves (100 Years of Data)
Professor James Gillligan has spent his professional life studying violence. In his latest book, “Why Some Politicians Are More Dangerous Than Others,” he summarizes his study of a whole century of data, proving that all forms of violence...
Yes, the Latest Right-Wing Paean to Sociopath Ayn Rand Is Really, Really Awful
by Brad Reed Take Lisa Simpson and combine her with Gordon Gekko and the obnoxious child-android from “Small Wonder,” and you get the perfect Rand hero. The year is 2016. Eight years of Obammunism have transformed the former capitalist paradise known...
Rich People Things: Ayn Rand, La Dolce Vita Redubbed and the Plutocrapocalypse!
Who’s suffered most in the Great Recession? Why, it’s the rich, the affluent, the meritocracy, of course! So says — satirically — Chris Lehmann in his new book, Rich People Things. From the publisher’s description: It’s...
Farming Was His Life, Until the CAFOs Came
I heard Thom Hartmann interview David Kirby, author of Animal Factory: The Looming Threat of Industrial Pig, Dairy, and Poultry Farms to Humans and the Environment. This could be one of those watershed environmental books, like Rachel Carson’s...
Corporations Have Become More Dangerous to Democracy Since Reagan
Barry Lynn, Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, talks about his book, Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction. According to Lynn (speaking in the video below), “in 1981 the Reagan administration changed the...
Amazing Buzz on New Book: Eating Animals
I’ve never seen this kind of buzz on a new book before, and since I’m a sucker for book buzz and hype, and I haven’t actually read the book yet, I’ll just pass on some of the buzz and hype about Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran...
Book Review — The End of the Long Summer
Dianne Dumanoski, in her book, “The End of the Long Summer: Why We Must Remake Our Civilization to Survive on a Volatile Earth,” writes with great breadth and depth about what she calls the planetary era. Since the beginning of this era, in...
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