Clear and Present

Catastrophic Global Warming

Talk about being clear and present. This is clearly the most dangerous situation presently before us.

Here is a link to a hair-raising article I had to read three times to assure myself I was really reading what I thought I was reading.

Jim Hansen, Bush's top climate modeller at NASA  and considered by some to be one of the most creative and productive scientists in the world ,says the following:

Unless we get a grip on carbon dioxide emissions within the next ten years the temperature of this planet Earth will rise one degree WHICH IS WARMER THAN IT'S BEEN IN 500,000 YEARS. Go back and count the zeroes. That's a half a million years.

Torture in America

It's easy to get outraged over the "processing" of political detainees  - which this administration outsources to other countries for torture. Many of them disappear forever. 

Let's look a little closer to home, though.  Let's look at the systematic, brutal, demoralizing torture which goes on daily in our most disgraceful penal institutions.

Specifically, all concerned and compassionate Americans should familiarize themselves with the Louisiana State Penitentiary - the largest prison in the United States. This hellhole is known as Angola - because most of its original inmates were stolen from the country of Angola as slaves. Today, 75% of its inmates are black.

If you don't believe that racism is alive and kickin' in America; if you don't believe that we have political prisoners in this country I encourage you to investigate the story of the Angola Three.

Two of the three have been held in solitary confinement for over thirty years for crimes they insist they did not commit.

Tell me this isn't torture.

Reality Shows

Time magazine has an article this week about how Reality TV shows are faked. Next week they're running a cover story posthumously outing Liberace.

Apparently some of they ways in which they're faked are by actually over-dubbing comments, splicing together scenes shot days apart or out of context to give the illustion of heightened conflict. One little nugget dropped in the article is that the apartment the would-be Apprentices inhabit in Trump's epic ego-fest is actually a set in a studio.

Okay, so there may be one or two mouth-breathers left who rush home for their latest fix of "Reality" - convinced that it's gospel. But hasn't the question on most minds been: