Tens of millions of dollars have been donated in recent weeks to assist residents affected by last month’s deadly North Bay wildfires, but the outpouring has left some survivors of the disaster seeking greater clarity about how the relief money will be distributed.

Jil Child reached out for assistance after the Tubbs fire destroyed her Fountaingrove home in the Vintage Woods development behind Sweet T’s restaurant. She said she got $1,000 from the North Bay Fire Relief fund, spearheaded by the Redwood Credit Union, state Sen. Mike McGuire, D-Healdsburg, and The Press Democrat. While it was double the amount she received from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Child, 54, said it far from covered the cost of replacing clothing, furniture and other necessities she lost in the fire, forcing her to further deplete her savings. Many friends have had to do the same after losing their homes.

“We’ve seen very little money that’s out there,” Child said. “$1,500 doesn’t even replace a computer.”

She attempted to seek additional donations after she heard about the $17 million raised through the Band Together Bay Area concert earlier this month at AT&T Park. She ultimately was referred back to the North Bay Fire Relief fund, which received some of the concert proceeds but doesn’t allow victims to apply for assistance more than once.

After a Brief Respite, Climate Change Enhanced Drought is Returning to the U.S.

Robots are being used to deter homeless people from setting up camp in San Francisco

Homelessness Set New Records In Major Cities All Over The Nation

Millions of Americans are wrestling with the impossibility of a traditional middle-class existence. In homes across the country, kitchen tables are strewn with unpaid bills. Lights burn late into the night. The same calculations get performed again and again, through exhaustion and sometimes tears.

The US Is No Country For Older Men Or Women

The disposable deplorables. No savings and gutting Medicare…The Baby Doomers lament.

The Working Homeless

In big cities across the U.S., thousands of people trudge off to work in the morning but, lacking enough money for sky-high rent, are living at night in homeless shelters, cars, RVs, side streets and parking lots, often with their entire family.

Jail, Drugs And Video Games: Why Millennial Men Are Disappearing From The Labor Force

Last week, Goldman Sachs pointed out a very disturbing trend in the US labor market: where the participation rate for women in the prime age group of 25-54 have seen a dramatic rebound in the past 2 years, such a move has been completeloy missing when it comes to their peer male workers. As Goldman’s jan Hatzius put in in “A Divided Labor Market”, “some of the workers who gave up and dropped out of the labor force during the recession and its aftermath still have not found their way back in.” In fact, the labor force participation rate of prime-age (25-54 year-old) women has rebounded quite a bit and is now only moderately below pre-crisis levels, but the rate for prime-age men remains well below pre-crisis levels.

geographical disparities in internet access mean it’s probably not going to happen for at least another 15–20 years. The problem is, huge parts of the world have terrible cell and internet coverage and it’s uncertain whether the 4G cellular network’s successor, 5G, will be enough to power the self-driving industry. That means CAV makers might have to get creative in proposing new and potentially revolutionary networking solutions, like mesh networking.

US Household Debt Is Rising 60% Faster Than Wages, And One Rating Agency Is Worried

Wells Fargo bankers overcharged hundreds of corporate clients in order to meet their sales goals, the Wall Street Journal reports

Hackers stole the personal data of 57 million Uber riders in 2016, and the company paid the cybercriminals $100,000 to keep the data breach under wraps, according to a blog post published by Uber and a story by Bloomberg.

Californians face a mileage tax

SAN FRANCISCO (KPIX 5) — California is moving closer to charging drivers for every mile they drive.
The state says it needs more money for road repairs, and the gas tax just isn’t bringing in enough revenue.
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Electric cars are considered pollution-free as they can help keep our cities and our planet clean. However, a recent study published by the Trancik Lab of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has revealed that electric cars are NOT as green as you think and are worse polluters than petrol and diesel cars. The study claims that an electric Tesla Model S P100D saloon produces more carbon dioxide (at 226g per kilometer) than a petrol-driven Mitsubishi Mirage (at 192g per kilometer).

Parents should turn off the cameras and automatic tracking devices in their children’s Christmas presents because of the risk of hacking, the Information Commissioners’ Office has warned.

The Coast Guard’s ‘Floating Guantánamos’
November 20, 2017, New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/20/magazine/the-coast-guards-floating…

The U.S. Coast Guard is targeting low-level smugglers in international waters – shackling them on ships for weeks or even months before arraignment in American courts. The U.S. Coast Guard never intended to operate a fleet of “floating Guantánamos,” as a former Coast Guard lawyer put it. But a set of laws, including the 1986 Maritime Drug Law Enforcement Act … defined drug smuggling in international waters as a crime against the United States. Through the 2000s, maritime detentions averaged around 200 a year. Then in 2012, the Department of Defense’s Southern Command [was] tasked with leading the war on drugs in the Americas. In 2016, under the Southern Command’s strategy, the Coast Guard … detained 585 suspected drug smugglers, mostly in international waters. That year, 80 percent of these men were taken to the United States to face criminal charges, up from a third of detainees in 2012. In the 12 months that ended in September 2017, the Coast Guard captured more than 700 suspects and chained them aboard American ships. Most of these men remain confounded by their capture by the Americans, dubious that U.S. officials had the authority to arrest them and to lock them in prison. But it is the memory of their surreal imprisonment at sea that these men say most torments them. These detainees paint a grim picture of the conditions of their extended capture. The … periods of detention employed by the United States in its antidrug campaign run counter to international human rights norms.

Note: The war on drugs has been called a “trillion dollar failure” with an “overwhelmingly negative” public health impact. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on military corruption and the erosion of civil liberties.

ICE is doing DUI checkpoints now?

NEW YORK – Officers from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) arrested 25 during a 6-day period, ending Nov. 9 in Long Island in an enforcement effort dubbed, Operation Secure Streets.

In the course of Operation Secure Streets, ERO deportation officers apprehended 25 individuals, 24 of whom have been convicted of violations concerning the operation of a motor vehicle while under the influence of alcohol or drugs. One individual, who was arrested for immigration violations, did not have a DUI-related conviction. Each was taken into custody and is currently being detained pending the completion of removal proceedings.
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President Donald Trump seems determined to undo just about everything Barack Obama has done. There is one area, however, in which he is following the lead of his predecessor: drone warfare. Not that the public would know anything about it — or the dangerously loose oversight involved. And that’s by design. The Trump administration is not only expanding the use of drones, it is also obscuring the facts about how many drones are being used, how many people are being killed by them, and where

LAPD Becomes Nation’s Largest Police Department to Test Drones

After months of often-heated debate, a civilian oversight panel Tuesday signed off on a yearlong test of drones by the Los Angeles Police Department, which will become the largest police department in the nation to deploy the controversial technology.

The Police Commission’s 3-1 vote prompted jeers, cursing and a small protest that spilled into a downtown intersection just outside the LAPD’s glass headquarters — evidence of the opposition police have faced in recent weeks as they tried to reassure wary residents that the airborne devices would not be misused.

SF ushering in new era with drone use by city departments

Trump’s Secret War? U.S. Military’s Presence in Middle East Has Grown 33 Percent in Past Four Months
November 21, 2017, Newsweek
http://www.newsweek.com/trumps-secret-war-us-militarys-presence-middle-east…

President Donald Trump has increased the number of U.S. troops and civilians working for the Department of Defense in the Middle East to 54,180 from 40,517 in the past four months, representing a 33-percent rise. This number doesn’t even account for the big rise in troops stationed in Afghanistan since … late August. These numbers are no secret, which raises concerns about the apparent lack of discourse over the expansion of the U.S. military. The Trump administration has been quite vocal about the recent increase in troops in Afghanistan. But the rise in the presence of the U.S. military elsewhere in the Middle East has been relatively under the radar. Some in the U.S. military even seem to be unaware of the recent increase in personnel in the region. On November 16 … Lieutenant General Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr. was asked about troop numbers in Syria and Iraq at a press briefing, and he said, “In Syria, we have … about 503 operating. And in Iraq, we have approximately 5,262, I believe is the number. So those are the numbers.” However, the U.S. has 1,720 troops in Syria and 8,892 in Iraq. With Trump in the White House, there has been an increase in U.S. troops killed in action overseas as well as a large spike in civilian deaths from airstrikes. A United Nations report in October claimed civilian deaths had increased by 50 percent in Afghanistan compared to the same point last year.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing war news articles from reliable major media sources.

Diplomats Sound the Alarm as They Are Pushed Out in Droves
November 24, 2017, New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/24/us/politics/state-department-tillerson.html

Republicans pilloried Hillary Clinton for what they claimed was her inadequate attention to security as secretary of state in the months before the deadly 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya. Congress even passed legislation mandating that the department’s top security official have unrestricted access to the secretary of state. But in his first nine months in office, [Secretary of State Rex] Tillerson turned down repeated and sometimes urgent requests from the department’s security staff to brief him. Mr. Tillerson, a former chief executive of Exxon Mobil, has made no secret of his belief that the State Department is a bloated bureaucracy. Even before Mr. Tillerson was confirmed, his staff fired six of the State Department’s top career diplomats. None were given any reason for their dismissals. Since he decided before even arriving at the State Department to slash its budget by 31 percent … Mr. Tillerson has frozen most hiring and recently offered a $25,000 buyout in hopes of pushing nearly 2,000 career diplomats and civil servants to leave by October 2018. The number of those with the department’s top two ranks of career ambassador and career minister – equivalent to four- and three-star generals – will have been cut in half by Dec. 1, from 39 to 19. “The United States is at the center of every crisis around the world, and you simply cannot be effective if you don’t have assistant secretaries and ambassadors in place,” said R. Nicholas Burns, a retired career diplomat who was an under secretary of state. “It shows a disdain for diplomacy.”

Note: The US State Department under Rex Tillerson recently shut down a decades-old office designed to seek justice for victims of war crimes, as well as removed the terms “just” and “democratic” from the State Department’s list of desired outcomes. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing government corruption news articles from reliable major media sources.

Trump’s Swamp of Billionaires and Lobbyists Revealed in Secret White House Visitor Logs
November 22, 2017, Newsweek
http://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-white-house-billionaires-big-business…

Wall Street billionaires, corporate lobbyists and far right conservatives flooded the White House almost immediately after Donald Trump’s presidential victory, newly released White House visitor logs reveal. The White House was forced to release the list of visitors … after the Washington transparency group Property of the People sued. The searchable logs, published Tuesday by ProPublica, provide a glimpse into the creation of the president’s political agenda, spearheaded almost entirely by business interests. Officials at the Office of Management and Budget, for example, met periodically with CEOs from the health care industry and big businesses, a handful of lobbyists representing Koch Industries and several billionaires. The logs also reveal how much money can be spent by lobbying groups just to get their foot in the door. Budget chief Mick Mulvaney’s former congressional Chief of Staff Al Simpson was hired by the lobbying firm Mercury in February, soon after Trump appointed Mulvaney to run the management and budget office. Clients, including powerhouse corporations like Cemex and pharma firms like AmerisourceBergen, paid Simpson’s lobbying firm $360,000 throughout 2017. The purposes behind several White House meetings remain shrouded in mystery. For example, Mulvaney met with Jeff Bell, a member of the controversial religious group Opus Dei. Meanwhile, out of the 8,807 meetings and people listed in the logs, 2,169 names and subject matter are redacted – nearly 25 percent of the data dump.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corruption in government and in the corporate world.

Robots Are Coming for Jobs of as Many as 800 Million Worldwide

As many as 800 million workers worldwide may lose their jobs to robots and automation by 2030, equivalent to more than a fifth of today’s global labor force.

That’s according to a new report covering 46 nations and more than 800 occupations by the research arm of McKinsey & Co.

The consulting company said Wednesday that both developed and emerging countries will be impacted. Machine operators, fast-food workers and back-office employees are among those who will be most affected if automation spreads quickly through the workplace.

Shortly before 2am on Saturday, the Senate passed “the most sweeping rewrite of the U.S. tax code in three decades, slashing the corporate tax rate and providing temporary tax-rate cuts for most Americans” handing Republicans a badly needed legislative and political victory. Senators voted across party lines in a 51-49 vote, ending days of debate and “hand wringing” as leadership worked frantically behind the scenes to win over holdouts and get the proposal in line with the chamber’s rules.

6 Of The Most Radical Provisions Of The Tax Bill

Hundreds of officers lose licenses over sex misconduct
November 1, 2015, Chicago Tribune/Associated Press
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ct-police-officer-sexual…

In a yearlong investigation of sexual misconduct by U.S. law enforcement, The Associated Press uncovered about 1,000 officers who lost their badges in a six-year period for rape, sodomy and other sexual assault; sex crimes that included possession of child pornography; or sexual misconduct such as propositioning citizens. The number is unquestionably an undercount because it represents only those officers whose licenses to work in law enforcement were revoked, and not all states take such action. California and New York … offered no records because they have no statewide system to decertify officers for misconduct. And even among states that provided records, some reported no officers removed for sexual misdeeds even though cases were identified via news stories or court records. Victims of sexual violence at the hands of officers know the power their attackers have, and so the trauma can carry an especially crippling fear. Jackie Simmons said she found it too daunting to bring her accusation to another police officer after being raped by a cop in 1998 while visiting Kansas for a wedding. So, like most victims of rape, she never filed a report. Diane Wetendorf, a retired counselor who started a support group in Chicago for victims of officers, said most of the women she counseled never reported their crimes – and many who did regretted it. She saw women whose homes came under surveillance and whose children were intimidated by police. Fellow officers, she said, refused to turn on one another when questioned.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on police corruption and sexual abuse scandals.

Americans are afraid of many threats to their lives – serial killers, crazed gunmen, gang bangers, and above all terrorists – but these threats are surprisingly unlikely. Approximately three-quarters of all homicide victims in America are killed by someone they know. And the real threat from strangers is quite different from what most fear: one-third of all Americans killed by strangers are killed by police.

A recent Washington Times article, boasts that Texas law enforcement used predictive DNA imaging or ‘Phenotyping’ to guess what a suspect’s physical characteristics might be. This is not a joke, this is actually happening in police departments across the country.

The events in the video below took place in January 2016. Every U.S. citizen should watch this and share. It’s horrifying that a person hired to “protect and serve” seems to derive so much pleasure from demeaning and then executing someone he swore to defend.

Baltimore Police Now Blocking FBI from Investigating Murder of Cop Set to Testify Against Fellow Cops

How Prosecutors Turn a Protest Into a ‘Riot’
November 15, 2017, New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/15/opinion/how-prosecutors-turn-a-protest…

I traveled from Baltimore to join hundreds of thousands of protesters at counterdemonstrations around Mr. Trump’s swearing-in. Little did I know that I would be swept up into a legal nightmare that demonstrates how prosecutors intimidate and manipulate defendants into giving up their rights. Minutes after I got to downtown Washington on Jan. 20, police officers used pepper spray, “sting-ball” grenades and flailing batons to sweep up an entire city block in a mass-arrest tactic known as “kettling.” Next, prosecutors … took the highly unusual step of indicting more than 200 of those arrested. Most of the people in the group, which includes journalists, legal observers and volunteer medics, face charges of engaging in a riot, inciting a riot, conspiracy to riot and property damage. In addition to seizing the contents of at least 100 cellphones, prosecutors secured broad warrants for Facebook pages. The government has failed to provide most defendants in the case with evidence of their alleged individual wrongdoing. For example, I was offered a plea deal (to a single misdemeanor charge) on the basis of virtually nothing more than being at the site of the protest. This serves to illustrate a critical problem in the American justice system: Prosecutors have the power to single-handedly destroy lives, and there are few consequences for abuse of that power. At the same time, their main measure of success is the ability to secure convictions, not the degree to which justice is served.

So by now we’ve pointed out how 200 engineers, internet legends, nearly 1000 startups, countless internet companies, 30 small ISPs, and millions of American consumers have told the FCC its plan to repeal net neutrality is extreme and will harm competition, innovation, and the health of the internet. But we’ve also pointed out repeatedly how this makes absolutely no difference at Trump’s FCC, which appears mindlessly dedicated toward one singular purpose: pleasing entrenched telecom duopolies like Comcast, AT&T and Verizon.

The FCC Is Blocking a Law Enforcement Investigation Into Net Neutrality Comment Fraud

The FCC is blocking a law enforcement investigation into fraudulent comments designed to provide bogus support for the agency’s looming net neutrality repeal. New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman recently announced his office has been conducting an investigation into who submitted millions of fraudulent comments (some using the identities of dead people) during the public comment period

Monsanto will give cash back to U.S. farmers who buy a weedkiller that has been linked to widespread crop damage, offering an incentive to use its product even as regulators in several U.S. states weigh restrictions on its use.

Foster System Overburdened With Children Of The Opioid Crisis

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Another Record Breaking Year for Opium Production in U.S. Occupied Afghanistan

In a groundbreaking report, the World Health Organization (WHO) has declared that cannabidiol (CBD) — the relaxant property of cannabis used in medical marijuana — is beneficial for cancer, epilepsy, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and many more diseases, AND should not be a scheduled drug.

2-Year-Old Celebrates Being Seizure-Free After Using Hemp Oil

Cannabis Can End The Use of Prescription Pain Killers

Once again, the greatest percentage of damages compensated were for the influenza vaccine, and most of those were for Guillain-Barré Syndrome (GBS). Yet these facts, tucked away in a file on the Department of Health and Human Services website, are never reported in the mainstream media. So we will report them here. You can also read the report yourself in the Power Point file here.

‘Healthy’ energy drinks cause kidney damage and hypertension

Energy drinks—which can contain eight times more caffeine than a standard cup of coffee—trigger a range of serious health problems, from stress, raised blood pressure, obesity and kidney damage, a new review has found.

50 Workers Fired For Refusing Flu Shot
November 21, 2017, NBC (Chicago Affiliate)/Associated Press
https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/50-Workers-Fired…

A Minnesota-based health system has fired about 50 employees who refused to get a flu shot. Essentia Health announced last month that employees would be required to get vaccinated for influenza unless they received a religious or medical exemption. The company said it wanted to help keep patients from getting sick at its 15 hospitals and 75 clinics in Minnesota, Idaho, North Dakota and Wisconsin. Essentia says 99 percent of the company’s 13,900 eligible employees had gotten the shot, received an exemption or were getting an exemption by the Monday deadline. The United Steelworkers filed an injunction to try to delay the policy, but a federal judge denied the request. Minnesota Public Radio reports at least two other unions are filing grievances on behalf of workers who lost their jobs.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing vaccine controversy news articles from reliable major media sources.

The gene editing technique CRISPR has been in the limelight after scientists reported they had used it to safely remove disease in human embryos for the first time. Concerns are mounting that gene editing could be used in the development of biological weapons. In 2016, Bill Gates remarked that “the next epidemic could originate on the computer screen of a terrorist intent on using genetic engineering to create a synthetic version of the smallpox virus”

An international team of researchers have re-cloned the first dog to ever be cloned, to basically find out if genetically identical animals will suffer the same fate. The scientists from Seoul National University, Michigan State University and the University of Illinois had their paper on the monumental re-cloning published in the journal Scientific Reports. The group said they duplicated the original dog clone to learn more about the viability of cloning animals, and to find out if cloning animals speeds up the aging process or causes unknown birth defects.

A new pill that tells your doctor whether you’re swallowing it or not has just been approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

Customs And Border Protection Seeks Biometric ID For All Major U.S. Airports Within 4 Years

By Nicholas West Over the past several months I’ve been covering the rapid acceleration toward mandatory biometric identification at U.S. airports. At the core of…

The Rate Of Ocean Acidification Is Off The Charts

As with the effects of manmade global warming, changes to ocean chemistry are happening faster than other species can keep pace with. The latest research shows the current rate of acidification is more than 10 times faster than at any time in the past 55 million years. That means many species will have no chance of adapting to their new environment through evolution.

 California losing 2 million trees a month as drought-related plague drags on

  Arctic Temperatures Are Rising So Fast Computers Don’t Believe They’re Real

Amazon forest fires pushing climate change ‘beyond human control’

WEATHER SERVICE EMPLOYEES TETHERED BY ILLEGAL GAG ORDERS

Rothschilds, And The Geoengineering Empire – Geoengineering Watch

Nov 13, 2012 – Why would E.L. Rothschild LLC wish to have the controlling interest in the world’s leading provider of interactive weather graphics and data services for television, web, and mobil? Because when you are involved in climate decimating geoengineering programs, you must also control the “forecast” models …

DUMPING JET FUEL IN FLIGHT
… the emergency fuel dump systems used on aircraft. Fuel dumping is common on both large commercial widebody airliners and virtually all military planes.  Many aircraft require the ability to dump fuel because of landing weight restrictions imposed by the manufacturers. Although a plane may be able to takeoff at a certain weight, its structure and landing gear may only be able to withstand the impact of landing at a much lower weight.
A typical fuel dumping system employs a series of pumps and valves to eject fuel from the aircraft’s wingtips. Other designs place the fuel dumping vents in a plane’s tail or aft fuselage. When activated from the cockpit, a fuel dump system often is capable of releasing thousands of pounds of fuel per minute. Most systems are sized to release fuel at a fast enough rate that the plane’s total weight is reduced from maximum takeoff weight to maximum certified landing weight in fifteen minutes or less.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) sets requirements for when and how fuel dumping may occur in Order 7110.65P, Chapter 9, Section 5. This instruction stipulates that fuel can only be dumped above a minimum altitude of 2,000 ft (610 m), to improve its evaporation, and that a dumping aircraft must be separated from other air traffic by at least 5 miles (8 km). Air traffic controllers are also instructed to direct planes dumping fuel away from populated areas and over large bodies of water as much as possible. The same guidelines apply to military aircraft, and most air bases only permit fuel dumping in a specified area.
Despite these restrictions, environmental groups have expressed concern over the potential pollution implications of fuel dumping. It has been estimated that as much as 15 million pounds of fuel was released over the world’s oceans by commercial and military aircraft during the 1990s.  Although kerosene poses no danger to the ozone layer, it is a petroleum product that can impact water quality much like an oil or gasoline spill.  – answer by Jeff Scott, 2 October 2005

TransCanada Corp’s (TRP.TO) existing Keystone pipeline has leaked substantially more oil, and more often, in the United States than indicated in risk assessments the company provided to regulators before the project began operating in 2010, according to documents reviewed by Reuters.

Minnesota’s attorney general alleges that chemicals dumped by 3M Co. in the Twin Cities metro led to an increase in cancer, infertility and babies with low birth weights. The contamination caused $5 billion in health and environmental damage for which 3M should be liable, Attorney General Lori Swanson said Friday in a court filing.

Bitcoin vs Fiat Currency: Which Fails First?

DNA Testing Companies Adding Fake African Ancestry To White Profiles?

[Source] Who were your ancestors? What is your ethnic background composed of? Sites like Ancestry.com and 23andme have always been some go to sources in answering all of your toughest questions. But how accurate are they? In a recent interview with Cracked, one of the major ancestry testing companies, (which specific company is unknown) spilled the beans on what really happens when you purchase an ancestry kit. While I can’t say I’m surprised, you may be shocked to learn that these ancestry sites aren’t always as accurate as they claim to be. Beyond this, they’ve also admitted to tampering with the result to “screw with racists”.

When Inside Edition had a set of triplets send their spit in to Ancestry.com and 23andMe, they got wildly different results from both services. Neither gave each triplet the same ancestry results. “Tests can be a crapshoot. For DNA tests, they use genetic markers, which are little variations in the DNA one or several groups may have, but others do not. The more markers there are, the more accurate the test will be.”

Shocked yet? Yeah, I didn’t think so. A lot of my friends have taken these types of DNA Tests, and most of them come back saying, “I don’t think this is entirely accurate…”

Remember when white supremacist Craig Cobb found out that he was 14% black? Well as it turns out, there’s a possibility that those numbers could have been fudged with.

Monsanto In Court Again As Powerful New Herbicide Accidently Kills 3.6 Million Acres Of Crops

Monsanto thought they had developed an amazing scheme to corner the Midwest farming market when they developed new genetically engineered seeds that were resistant to their new herbicide called dicamba.  The resistance of Monsanto’s new magical seed crops to dicamba meant that the herbicide could be sprayed liberally by farmers to eradicate weeds and boost yields

Why are America’s farmers killing themselves in record numbers?

The 5G Network Probably Won’t Be Good Enough for Self-Driving Cars, but network of Cars might

If you’re super jazzed about getting an autonomous vehicle to chauffeur you around town while you catch up on Netflix or take a nap, we’ve got some bad news: The current

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A society whose whole idea is to eliminate suffering and bring all its members the greatest amount of comfort and pleasure is doomed to be destroyed.  ~Thomas Merton~  

The incomparable mystic priest, Father Thomas Merton, wrote these words in the 1950s when America was intoxicated with post-World War II euphoria and the delusion that material comfort and pleasure defined the meaning of life. How incisive Merton’s assertion nearly six decades ago!

Industrial civilization has had at least two “sacred” maxims: 1) The ultimate purpose of human existence is material acquisition, and 2) Humans should never have to suffer, particularly when the human in question is oneself.

These tenets are diametrically opposed to the world view of indigenous traditions which find meaning and abundance via an intimate relationship with the more-than-human world. Moreover, native peoples understand that suffering is not only a part of life but that a great deal of human experience is replete with suffering, punctuated by moments of joy, celebration, and exquisite consanguinity with one’s community of fellow earthlings. They also recognize that when humans attempt to avoid suffering or meet their survival needs through a hostile, “use” relationship with the earth, they seal their fate and guarantee their own demise.