This
past weekend, America paused to honor the thousands of men and women who fought
and died to preserve ExxonMobil’s First Amendment rights, and protect it from
the tyranny of justice.
Or
at least that’s the way a lot of Congressional leaders and climate deniers are
playing it.
The
effort to cast Exxon as victim of a cabal between state Attorneys General,
environmentalists, and other ne’er-do-wells followed reports by journalists
from InsideClimate
News, the Los Angeles Times, and
the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.
They uncovered a howlingly
hypocritical contrast between Exxon’s longtime internal embrace of climate
science and its external support for climate denial.
Decades
ago, Exxon began to ignore its own scientists’ warnings on the prospects for
global disruption from climate change, opting instead to focus on climate
change’s threat to the fossil fuel business model.
Following the pattern set by
tobacco, pesticide, asbestos and tetraethyl lead producers, Exxon circled the
tankers and fought against progress on climate.
Charlestown and World War II, Part 3 No Room at the Ninigret Wildlife Refuge Headquarters
By Frank Glista
From the Charlestown Press, August 2, 2007
In August of 2007 I
invited my friend, Mark Godden, to join me at the Groton-NewLondonAirport for an
adventure.Mark, never knowing what to
expect from me when I used the word "adventure", looked puzzled.
Years earlier, I requested that he ride along
with me on my third cross country motorcycle trip.Each owning a Harley-Davidson, we left Charlestown in May of 1979 and rode to California and back in about six weeks.So what was I up to now?I told him that we were going to go back in
time.....for about an hour.
Nearly 40,000 Verizon workers who have been on strike since April 13 are
celebrating big gains after coming to an agreement in principle with the
company.
After 45 days of the largest strike in recent history, striking CWA
members have achieved our major goals of improving working families’ standard
of living, creating good union jobs in our communities and achieving a first
contract for wireless retail store workers.
Home
Depot’s Yellowstone National Park. Merrill Lynch’s Yosemite National Park.
Exxon Mobil’s Grand Canyon National Park.
You’re probably shuddering at the
thought of these national treasures being linked to corporate sponsors, but
thanks to new federal rule changes, this possibility is closer than you think.
Since
it was established, the National Park Service has thwarted attempts to
commercialize these nature preserves.
In the past, the parks have limited
commemorations of large donations to modest, easy-to-overlook plaques.
The military veterans
group VoteVets is blasting presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald
Trump as a “fraud,” after it was revealed that his claim that he raised $6.5
million for veterans was a lie.
AWashington
Postreportuncoveredthe
truth behind yet another wild Trump statement:
One
night in January, Donald Trump skipped a GOP debate and instead held his own
televised fundraiser for veterans. At the end of the night, Trump proclaimed it
a huge success: “We just cracked $6 million, right? Six million.”
Now,
Trump’s campaign says that number is incorrect.
Campaign
manager Corey Lewandowski said the fundraiser actually netted about $4.5
million, or 75 percent of the total that Trump announced.
Trump used the $6 million figure as a public relations talking
point for himself in the days following the fundraiser, while he campaigned for
votes in the Republican primary.
Yet when asked by the Post to account for all
of the money he allegedly collected, Trump refused.
Republicans have
pessimistically said it can’t be done, that renewable energy can’t do for us
what oil, gas, and coal have done for generations.
But Germany just put Republicans in their place and proved that
clean energy can do just that if given the chance.
On May 15, Chancellor Angela Merkel had good reason to celebrate
as renewable energy sources provided nearly 100 percent of the nation’s energy
needs for the first time.
Scientists use laser
scanners to study sleeping trees
Vienna University of Technology
Most living organisms adapt their
behavior to the rhythm of day and night. Plants are no exception: flowers open
in the morning, some tree leaves close during the night.
Researchers have been studying the
day and night cycle in plants for a long time: Linnaeus observed that flowers
in a dark cellar continued to open and close, and Darwin recorded the overnight
movement of plant leaves and stalks and called it "sleep".
But even to this day, such studies
have only been done with small plants grown in pots, and nobody knew whether
trees sleep as well. Now, a team of researchers from Austria, Finland and
Hungary measured the sleep movement of fully grown trees using a time series of
laser scanning point clouds consisting of millions of points each.
Getting a manufacturing job is no longer your ticket to the middle class. Busted unions, off-shoring destroyed the American Middle Class (photo from the Library of Congress collection)
Bring
back manufacturing jobs: For years this has been put forth as the silver bullet
that would reverse the decline in U.S. living standards and put the economy
back on a fast track.
The
only problem is that today’s production positions are not our grandparents’
factory jobs.
In
fact, they are often as substandard as the much reviled McJobs of the service
sector.
The
latest evidence of this comes in a report by the UC Berkeley Center for
Labor Research and Education, which has issued a series of studies on how the
growth of poorly paid jobs in retailing and fast food have burdened government
with ever-rising social safety net costs.
Now
the Center shows how the same problem arises from the deterioration of job
quality in manufacturing.
State
Representative Blake “Flip” Filippi (District 36) is a master at turning
concocted controversy into self-aggrandizing media opportunities. He’s so good
at it that he has actually given classes to other political candidates,
probably those as shallow and self-serving as himself, on his techniques.
We’ll
go into some examples of that later, but let’s look at Flip’s
latest stunt which is to claim that he has been “blacklisted” from speaking at the Charlestown Memorial Day Parade.
This has put him directly at odds with the Parade Committee’s long-time chair,
Jim Mageau.
Filippi
is being aided in his fight by none other than Charlestown Citizens Alliance
(CCA Party) leader Tom Gentz, boss of the Charlestown Town Council, who demanded that Filippi be given a speaking slot on the agenda.
Boss
Gentz also has demanded that the independent, non-profit Charlestown Memorial Day Parade
Committee oust Mageau for not giving Flip what he wants.
I
rarely ever agree with Jim Mageau on anything – as even a cursory glance
through Progressive Charlestown articles on Mageau will show (154 articles: CLICK
HERE) – but on this matter, Mageau is right. And Flip and Boss Gentz are
totally out of line.
Let’s
start with a consistent principle Mageau has applied to the Charlestown
Memorial Day Parade. Mageau does not allow this annual ceremony honoring
America’s veterans to be sullied by partisan politics.
Tom
Gentz, for all his feigned “shock” at this controversy, knows this all too
well, because Gentz has not been allowed to use the Parade as a political
platform either.
In
the Channel
10 news coverage of this flap, Flip attempts to portray Mageau’s decision
as a “pay-to-play deal,” that Mageau expected Filippi to come up with a
legislative grant for the Parade and, because Flip doesn’t believe in
legislative grants on principle, Mageau “black-listed: Filippi.
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