IMPORTANT READS

COVID WATCH - California’s COVID-19 deaths are skewing younger, with the average age dropping seven years in September.

CLIMATE WATCH - More than 1.2 million Americans are currently displaced from their homes because of climate change impacts—including increasingly severe storms, wildfires, and flooding. 

CA POLITICAL REVIEW - The working class have spoken, with their votes, that they support Governor Newsom’s bloated, sleepy, and sloppy bureaucracy that caters to the upper class:

COVID WATCH - In the late 19th century, people protested against mandatory smallpox vaccines. Despite them, today we live in a world without smallpox.

DATELINE BEJING - Chinese hardliners just had their stance justified by the erratic, verging on unhinged, behavior in the United States and by its military. 

TOM DISPATCH-Yoda, the Jedi Master in the Star Wars films, once pointed out that the future is all too difficult to see and it’s hard to deny his insight.

THe SUPREMES - Democrats cannot disgrace the Supreme Court by packing it (adding seats to it). It is already a disgrace.

TERRORISM ROOTS-Two decades after 9/11, the role of Saudi Arabia in the attack remains in dispute despite unrelenting efforts by the U.S. and Saudi governments to neutralize it as a live political issue. 

CAPITAL & MAIN-This year, natural disasters across the country — including epochal drought conditions and devastating wildfires in California —

WOMEN'S RIGHTS - Back in the 19th century, Texas was awash in vigilante groups. In those dark years, various self-appointed “law enforcers” modeled after the Texas Rangers embarked on a decades-long campaign of ethnic cleansing of Indigenous peoples in the western territory.

GUN SAFETY - Anti-LGBTQ congresswoman and gun nut Lauren Boebert (R-CO) says she’s very concerned about children’s safety, like when she falsely claimed that transgender people prey on children.

HOUSING - California’s eviction protections will almost certainly not be extended once they expire after Sept. 30, the state Assembly Housing chairperson said today.

PEACE VOICE - We pretend to have enemies, but mostly what we “have” are people whose lives simply don’t matter.

COMMENTARY-Humanity emerged from the 20^th century leaving behind the Spanish Flu, two World Wars, the Great Depression, Nagasaki and Hiroshima, the Cold War, colonialism, overt racism, imperialism, the military-industrial complex. . .lots of really bad stuff that we were relieved to see in our rearview mirror. 

COMMENTARY - They weren’t kidding when they called Afghanistan the “graveyard of empires.”

TEXAS GONE WILD - One of the many preposterous claims coming from supporters of the vicious new Texas law against abortion is that bounty hunters — standing to gain a $10,000 reward from the state — will somehow be “whistleblowers.”

9-11 PERSPECTIVE - Twenty years have now passed since 9/11.

REMEMBERING 9-11 - September 11 is approaching – the 20th anniversary of the most startling event in the lifetime of most adults.

WEALTH WATCH - Is it not extraordinary that in a country that claims to be as enlightened and advanced as ours, the combined wealth of three individuals – Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, and investor Warren Buffett – exceeds the total wealth of the bottom half of Americans?

CLIMATE CHANGE - I'm a climate scientist and on Wednesday night, I watched the rain outside my New York City window break the local record for the most accumulation in an hour.

 ERIC PREVEN"S NOTEBOOK - Mark Ridley-Thomas was absent same day as Sheila Kuehl was absent.  I wouldn't break out the tin foil hat or anything, a lot going on.