Health
March 21 marks the one-year anniversary of the day Vermont’s troubled nuclear power plant license to operate expired. One year later, the plant is still splitting atoms but for the first time in almost forty years, Vermonters are not buying any. Entergy remains at odds withstate leaders who are contesting the plants future in Federal Court, beforestate regulators and among activists who have dubbed March 21 – ...
It’s been a little more than a year since I launched the present series of posts on the end of America’s global empire and the future of democracy in the wake of this nation’s imperial age. Over the next few posts I plan on wrapping that theme up and moving on. However traumatic the decline and fall of the American empire turns out to be, after all, it’s just one part of the broader trajectory that this blog seeks to explore, and other parts of that trajectory deserve discussion as well.
The more rational a culture seems to be, the more irrational will be its underside when the dark times come, the veils lift, and more is revealed than most want to see.~Michael Meade, Why The World Doesn’t End~
For most modern human beings, it is difficult to imagine that the Western world was essentially dominated by religion from approximately the fourth through the fifteenth centuries. For more than a thousand years, humans functioned in a world without a scientific perspective and with little that resembles what we know as scientific exploration in the...
In something of a stealth maneuver during the 2012 holiday season, the U.S. Department of Energy set about to give every American a little more radiation exposure, and for some a lot, by allowing manufacturers to use radioactive metals in their consumer products – such as zippers, spoons, jewelry, belt buckles, toys, pots, pans, furnishings, ...
Activism, Commerce, Economics, Health, Governance, Foreign Policy, Politics, Trade, Environment, Energy
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Burlington- Despite a period of bitterly cold temperatures, Vermonters and other New Englanders are keeping the heat turned up on a variety of issues dealing with human rights and climate justice. Arriving in force at the State Capitol; organizers from the Vermont Workers’ Center continued to apply pressure in Montpelier as Governor Shumlin made his annual budget address to a joint session of the Vermont legislature on Wednesday.
In their counter address that preceded Shumlin’s, the red-shirted...
By Richard Watts
Bill Sorrell and David Fredericks answer questions from the press in front of the Thurgood Marshall Federal Court House, Foley Square, Manhattan.
At a few minutes before 10:00, the court room on the 17th Floor of the Federal Court House in Manhattan fell silent. More than 80 dark-suited (mostly) lawyers and observers turned quiet as they waited to hear the arguments in the latest round of Entergy et al. v. Vermont et al this cool...
Activism, Business, Economics, Health, Media, Governance, Foreign Policy, Elections, Military, Politics
The Vermont Congressional delegation and other elected officials still refuse to explain why they support basing the first strike nuclear-capableF-35 in the midst of Vermont's most populated area even though the Air Force itself says the single engine jet is so loud it will destroy private homes as effectively as if they were bombed.
When 16 concerned, multi-denominational clergy wrote an open ...
The Shumlin administration proposed legislation, introduced in the Vermont Senate, that was hardly more than a page long: “A person may remain in school or in the child care facility without a required immunization, if the person, or in the case of a minor, the person’s parent or guardian, states in writing that the person, parent, or guardian has religious beliefs opposed to immunization.” The bill’s purpose was to eliminate the words “or philosophical convictions” from the previous legislation.
This upset Jennifer Stella of Waitsfield. Both of her children had very scary life threatening reactions. For her, the...
Promised Land, the new movie starring Matt Damon, is a movie in part about fracking, the new and extremely problematic way of getting natural gas out of shale rock far below the earth’s surface. It’s a very good movie, with good acting, particularly by Damon in a very different role than, for example, his Jason Bourne trilogy. Instead of being a kick-ass former CIA assassin on a mission to reclaim his memory and the truth about what was done to him, in Promised Land Damon is a conflicted, conscience-stricken, corporate hot shot “land man” using bribes and threats, when necessary, to...
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