Completely electric flying taxis called eVTOLs (for electric vertical take-off and landing) could be in use in the United States by 2026. United Airlines has already advance purchased 200 of them to air-taxi folks above LA traffic to the airport and has also investigated a significant amount of money for developing the technology that flies them.
Depending on your perspective, the air taxis look like large drones, or small helicopters. They will be piloted on rollout but pilot-free flying is under consideration for future operations. eVTOL technology is being developed by Brazilian company Eve Air Mobility.read more
In ancient China, millet was the common grain crop grown for flour. But dry farming technology discovered in the Sui Dynasty (A.D. 581-618) made wheat a viable crop and by the Tang Dynasty (A.D. 618-907), wheat had replaced millet as China’s largest crop. There was enough time in the growing cycle to harvest wheat if millet crops failed and experimentation with wheat flour when it became available, proved it to be an almost endlessly versatile cooking ingredient. It is used in China to make noodles, breads, desserts and dumplings, which became foundational staples of the Chinese diet.read more
Tom Lehrer performs his parody about National Brotherhood Week – that difficult week in February when Americans, “…are supposed to stop whatever we’re doing … burning, killing, whatever and love everybody else … and it’s really quite a strain.”
Some of Tom’s lyrics:
Oh the Protestants hate the Catholics and the Catholics hate the Protestants, and the Hindus hate the Moslems and everybody hates the Jews!
But During National Brotherhood Week, National Brotherhood Week, step up and shake the hand of someone you can’t stand. You can tolerate him if you try … It’s only for a week so have no fear. Be grateful that it doesn’t last all year!
“Injustice Anywhere is a threat to Justice everywhere.” ~ Dr. King
This is an update from a Standing Rock volunteer. It’s not pleasant.
Friends,
I have returned from Standing Rock with my mind blown, my heart broken and my spirit troubled with foreboding of a deepening tragedy. Volunteering as a legal observer with the Water Protector Legal Collective I witnessed several confrontations between Water Protectors (WP) and law enforcement: national guard, sheriffs and private security (LE).
On 1/18/17 – 1/19/17 I observed WP with their hands in the air chanting “hands up don’t shoot” being fired upon at a range of 10 to 15 feet. Tear gas canisters and rubber bullets ( rubber bullets are regular bullets covered in rubber) were used against unarmed WP who had been singing and praying. I observed national guard chasing WP off the Backwater bridge, firing at people running away. I heard people choking and gagging from tear gas. I saw access to the WP medic vehicles being blocked. I spoke with medics and WP who described bullets penetrating flesh and causing terrible injuries, including to one media person who nearly lost his finger when his camera was targeted.
I talked with a media person and was told of 4 media people on the bridge that night, 3 had their recording devices shot and the 4th, his hand. I saw a photo of a sheriff aiming a rifle directly at a media woman who was standing apart from the crowd. I heard testimony of the back of the medic pickup truck being awash in blood after evacuating wounded.
I watched, and then, inadvertently became a part of, WP being forced off the bridge by national guard who were hiding behind WP vehicles parked along the road and firing rubber bullets at fleeing people. Many people were shot in the back, the neck, the head. When LE fired at people at close range, many were shot in the genitals or in the face. I received information about DAPL security breaching the short wave radio channels of the WP with taunts such as ”come out and fight like men you faggots or we will come to Camp and fuck your women.”
There are some young warriors, who, without the support of their elders, many who want the camps cleared to mitigate the economic and social damage being suffered by the local community in having the bridge closed, have vowed to not leave the camps or to let the last section of pipeline be built.
Driving away from the area on Monday I saw a convoy of construction vehicles heading to the drill pad. Last night an indigenous website live streamed reports of drilling and construction noises coming from the drill pad.
Without the eyes of a free press these attacks and trespasses continue, with the human rights and sovereignty of indigenous peoples denied. The UN Committee on Transnational Corporations and Human Right Abuses was in Standing Rock this week to take testimony of the many transgressions against people: crop dusters spraying poison pesticides and fertilizers on the camps; hair samples indicating the presence of these chemicals; people who have been injured, beat up, arrested, strip searched; media and medics being targeted by snipers; (one medic told me he stopped wearing his Red Cross vest due to medics being targeted); praying people being attacked and the refusal of DAPL and our government to abide by the Rule of Law.
We need to stand up for our brothers and our sisters, for their way of life and, I believe, for our social contract as a democracy which is now threatened.
Please share this so word gets out what is happening, thank you.
Over at the Palmer Report, Bill Palmer tells us the way National Park employees found to stand up to Trump, who is blocking federal employees from commenting on climate change to the extent that he has issued a gag order to prevent Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from mentioning it and has deleted tweets made by the National Park Service (NPS) and even suspended the Twitter account of one park account that tweeted about climate change. An anonymous group of individuals has created an unofficial Twitter account for park and climate change news that Trump can’t touch.
The anonymous Park Service account is @AltNatParkSer, which bills itself as The Unofficial “Resistance” team of U.S. National Park Service. Not taxpayer subsidised!
Here are the details of what happened:
In his first days in office, Donald Trump has made a point of censoring and restricting what the National Park Service can and cannot say on its various official Twitter accounts. After the NPS tweeted photos of Trump’s small inauguration crowd, he temporarily suspended its Twitter privileges. And when the Badlands tweeted about climate change today, those tweets were then deleted. But now some unnamed individuals within the National Park Service have created an unofficial Twitter account that Trump can’t touch.
Trump doesn’t have the ability to shut down a Twitter account, or to suspend it from being usable; only Twitter the company would be able to do that. Instead he’s been sabotaging the National Park Service Twitter accounts by presumably threatening to fire people if they dare to tweet things he doesn’t like, or if they tweet during times when he’s put them in the penalty box. But he can only do that if he knows who’s tweeting.read more
Here’s the scoop on Rep. Scott Garrett vs. Josh Gottheimer – New Jersey’s 5th District Congressional candidates:
Josh Gottheimer supports a strong federal safety net for seniors and food insecure families with children. He also supports fair wages and working conditions for food and farm workers. Incumbent Scott Garrett has voted repeatedly to cut hunger reduction and nutrition programs like SNAP; and he opposed measures that would reduce the misuse of antibiotics in food.
Join the March for a Clean Energy Revolution on Sunday, 24 July 2016 in Philly.
Únese a la Marcha por la transición inmediata a la energía renovable el domingo 24 julio 2016.
Find a bus or carpool to the march. Buscar transporte por bus ó ride compartido a la marcha.
Scholarship tickets available. If you need one contact Matt Smith 201-321-1967.
Los pasajes se pueden obsequiar para los que necesitan una mano para poder asistir la marcha. Contáctame por email ó al teléf 862-203-8814 por mayor información.
Break Free Albany 2016 on May 14 in Albany, NY is a mass demonstration for climate justice … a unified demand to keep fossil fuels in the ground and implement renewable energy now. Anyone interested in clean energy and a renewable energy future is welcome to attend.
Sign up for a bus departing the New Jersey area from Teaneck, Wayne, West Nyack and South Jersey. $35 round trip if you can afford the cost and scholarships available if you can’t.
Michelle Alexander, attorney and celebrated author of The New Jim Crow, wrote a provocative article recently – Why Hillary Clinton Doesn’t Deserve the Black Vote. This week, she shared a post on Facebook explaining why she’s not going to continue belaboring the Hillary v. Bernie argument. This is a lady who really knows how to elevate important issues above the noise and the point she makes is an excellent one: no matter what happens in the external world of politics, each of us needs to busy ourselves with the hard work of improving society. Ms. Alexander writes:
This is the last post that I intend to write about the primaries for quite awhile. I am sharing this article because it makes two important points that seem to be lost in all the sensational media coverage of Hillary vs Bernie:
1) Although Bernie ultimately voted for the 1994 crime bill, he argued strenuously in opposition to it on the floor of Congress, calling it a “punishment bill” and chastised legislators for their obsession with proving their toughness on crime while millions of people were going hungry and sleeping on the streets. He said “let’s not keep putting poor people into jail and disproportionately punishing blacks.” This was around the same time Hillary was calling black children “super-predators” and saying they must be “brought to heel.” Bernie reportedly voted for the 1994 crime bill only because the Violence Against Women Act was attached. I wish he had voted against the bill. But I think it ought to be acknowledged that while our nation was awash in “get tough” mania, Bernie stood up and spoke out against a bill that aimed to escalate the wars on poor communities of color.
2) Despite all evidence to the contrary, the media still seems to act as though there is some real question whether Bernie has been a steadfast supporter of civil and human rights throughout his life. This article ought to end that debate. Whether or not one agrees with every position Bernie has taken throughout his political career, there is not doubt of his longstanding commitment to civil rights.
This is my last post about the primaries for awhile because I fear the discussions are too often toxic and unproductive. There is much more that I could say about this election, but the conversation that I most want to have right now doesn’t have to do with Bernie or Hillary. What I most want to talk about is this: What kind of revolution do we think we want and need? And what, exactly, are we willing to do to bring it to life?
I am grateful that Bernie Sanders has called for a political revolution, and that millions are responding with energy, enthusiasm and a genuine desire to build a movement that will give our nation a chance at having a real democracy where people actually count more than corporate dollars. But the truth is that the political revolution did not begin with Bernie Sanders and it certainly will not end with him – whether or not he is elected. And it’s also true that we need much more than a political revolution; we also need a moral, cultural, and spiritual revolution – an awakening to the dignity and value of each and every one of us no matter who we are, where we came from, or what we’ve done.
We saw this revolutionary spirit on the streets of Ferguson, Baltimore and beyond when signs were held high saying “Black Lives Matter” even as tear gas flowed. We saw this revolutionary spirit when undocumented students literally risked everything by coming out of the shadows to protest mass deportation. We saw this revolutionary spirit when thousands flooded the streets in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street, calling for an end to corporate exploitation and greed – greed that not only caused a global economic crisis but that is driving climate change and threatening life on the planet itself.
It is this revolutionary spirit – a revolutionary love for all people and for life itself – that will ultimately determine our collective fate. The work of defining and building this revolution will remain exactly the same no matter who is elected president. This is not to say the election doesn’t matter. It matters a great deal. But whether or not a bold and beautiful revolution is born has nothing to do with Bernie, Hillary, Trump or any other candidate. It has everything to do with us – whether we, as a people, decide that we will no longer play politics as usual and will dare to imagine that we can make America what it must become. The odds are against us, for sure, but we are destined to lose in the long run if we never muster the courage to stand up for what we truly believe and build a multi-racial, multi-ethnic nonviolent army of artists, activists, teachers, health care workers, formerly incarcerated people, currently incarcerated people, parents, students, elderly people, academics, hourly workers, health care workers, and everyone of conscience who is willing to bring an end to the politics of punitiveness and division, and birth a new America.read more
Screen shot from One Word – Episode 25: Christopher Columbus
CUT.com invited Native Americans to free-associate one word with Columbus. They got fabulous responses worked into a short video, which made me feel very thoughtful.
Although American schoolchildren do learn about the destruction Columbus brought to our land and the First Nation people who were already living here, we are also taught to idolize both the destroyer and the destruction Columbus initiated. Which means that from a very young age, our schools are teaching children to idolize cruelty, thievery, genocide and to value the monetization of natural resources. Resources which – when left intact or at least, used sustainably – remain treasures of Mother Earth with the power to nurture and allow us to live surrounded by beauty, in comfort.
School lessons about Thanksgiving and the “discovery of America” also exercise a subtle, insidious effect on their minds, as these lessons require students to discard accurate perceptions of what fairness is and to replace them with interpretations of reprehensible acts as acts of charity and kindness. Internalizing these fallacies create in students’ minds a state of cognitive dissonance, and may create a mental imbalance that follows them throughout their lives.
These powerful, monied interests keep us complicit in the Earth’s destruction by inveigling us to labor at enriching the industries that are destroying it and then spend our leisure hours shopping for the largely useless goods that those industries produce. The industrialists seem hopeful of disabling challenges to the narratives they have injected into and made dominant in our society by limiting our ability to communicate with each other on a mass scale via the internet and by blocking upcoming generations from the acquisition of critical thinking skills by destroying public education.
Big Money designed narratives to destroy morality, intellect, the love for truth and belief in its innate rightness in order to create generations of confused and frustrated, but compliant laborers and consumers who are easily led … and on both sides of the consumption coin we are enriching them to the point that .1% of society now owns as much as the lower 90%. But truth can be our remedy to this grand manipulation.
Let’s circle back to truth talk and to life lessons of intrinsic value. I love the truths spoken by Native Americans in CUT’s video and if you do too, please share it widely.
Please also share your ideas, if you have any, on whether Thanksgiving Day can be transformed from a celebration of wrongdoing into a celebration of goodness … and how. My family’s approach is by supporting Newark’s Share the Harvest and Break Bread With You Celebrations in Newark, where we help to share a festive day and delicious home-cooked food with 3000 plus underserved, elderly and NWNAs (Neighbor With No Address) families and individuals in northern New Jersey.
Here’s my comment to the USDA about GMOs in less than the 1024 characters allowed. I hope you will add yours!
GMO plants:
1 Kill whole ecosystems.
2 Many GMO crops have pesticides in them. Insects that survive eating them become immune to pesticides and descend on other farmers’ land like locusts, consuming everything.
3 GMO seeds are patented and are bankrupting farmers. Seeds are investments for farmers and many do not understand that GMO seeds must be “re-purchased” every year. In India, every 30 minutes a bankrupted farmer drinks pesticide to commit suicide.
4 In silent GMO forests pesticides built into the trees’ DNA poison everything except the trees. Nothing else lives: no insects, birds, animals big or small. No undergrowth.
5 We do not know the long term effect that GMOs will have on human bodies.
I urge the USDA to place strong mandatory regulations on GMO crops to protect our environment, farmers and food supply. The public needs to know what we’re ingesting & feeding our families. Big chemical companies that profit from selling GMO crops should not be allowed to influence laws. Thanks for listening!
Take a look at the terms and tell me what you think …
A special land sale that Economic and Housing Development has organized for St. Valentine’s Day – Saturday, 14 February 2015, 9:00AM – 12:00PM at Newark City Hall (920 Broad Street). In the spirit of St. Valentine’s Day, we are doing a sale of city lots exclusively to COUPLES. Transforming non-tax producing city owned lots to occupied, tax producing properties with new homes built on them. We will be selling 100 lots at $1,000 a lot. This sale is NOT for developers or investors. The sale is exclusively for couples who are looking to live in Newark.
The rules are as follows:
You must be a couple (straight or LGBT)
Only one lot per couple
Lots will be awarded on a “first come, first served” basis
Lots will be sold for $1,000 each
All final sales are subject to Municipal Council approval
Buyers will be required to make a $500 down payment
Buyers will be required to pay an additional $500 at closing
Buyer is responsible for all closing costs
Buyer must submit a City Planning Board approved site plan to close on the property
Buyer must have a commitment letter from a financial institution AND/OR proof of cash to cover the cost of the infill new construction to close on the property
Construction must be completed within 18 months of closing
Buyer must reside in the property for 5 years after issuance of C.O.
Anyone from anywhere is eligible to participate except employees of the EHD Property Management Division
