PROGRESSIVE INDEPENDENT JOURNALISM: “A Message From the Future With Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez” / The Intercept ☮

What if we actually pulled off a Green New Deal? What would the future look like? The Intercept presents a film narrated by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and illustrated by Molly Crabapple. Set a couple of decades from now, the film is a flat-out rejection of the idea that a dystopian future is a forgone conclusion. Instead, it offers a thought experiment: What if we decided not to drive off the climate cliff? What if we chose to radically change course and save both our habitat and ourselves? We realized that the biggest obstacle to the kind of transformative change the Green New Deal envisions is overcoming the skepticism that humanity could ever pull off something at this scale and speed. That’s the message we’ve been hearing from the “serious” center for four months straight: that it’s too big, too ambitious, that our Twitter-addled brains are incapable of it, and that we are destined to just watch walruses fall to their deaths on Netflix until it’s too late. This film flips the script. It’s about how, in the nick of time, a critical mass of humanity in the largest economy on earth came to believe that we were actually worth saving. Because, as Ocasio-Cortez says in the film, our future has not been written yet and “we can be whatever we have the courage to see.”

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MUSIC – Jazz: “Halie Loren – A Whiter Shade of Pale” / Video by Marie Maurice ☮

Halie Loren – A Whiter Shade of Pale Lyrics By – Gary Brooker; Music By – Keith Reid Album – They Oughta Write A Song Released – 2008 Label – White Moon Productions Credits – Bass – Mark Schneider; Drums – Brian West; Piano – Matt Treder; Trumpet – Tim McLaughlan; Vocals – Halie Loren _____ Winner of the Best Jazz Vocal Album Just Plain Folks Award out of over 42,000 entries as well as countless critics raves from around the world . (..). They Oughta Write A Song deserves to take a place among the great vocal jazz albums.’ (Wildy Haskell, Wildy’s World). _____ “A Whiter Shade of Pale” is the debut single by the British rock band Procol Harum, released 12 May 1967. The single reached number 1 in the UK Singles Chart on 8 June 1967 and stayed there for six weeks. Without much promotion, it reached number 5 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in the United States. One of the anthems of the 1967 Summer of Love, it is one of the best selling singles in history, having sold more than 10 million copies worldwide. The original writing credits were for Brooker and Reid only. On 30 July 2009, Matthew Fisher won co-writing credit for the music in a unanimous ruling from the Law Lords.

HAPPY HITCH DAY! “The Hitch” / Documentary / Christopher Hitchens ☮

CAPITALISTS AND CLERGY: “Freethought of the Day” / Rosa Luxemburg ☮

On this date in 1871, Rosa Luxemburg was born in Russian Poland to a middle-class Jewish family. A revolutionary agitator by her teens, she moved to Zurich, in part to avoid possible imprisonment. She studied at the University of Zurich, receiving her doctorate in 1898. From Warsaw, Luxemburg tried to help the Russian revolution. She wrote more than 700 pamphlets, articles, speeches and books, advocating mass strikes by proletariats. She was in and out of prison, once for advocating during World War I that German soldiers turn their guns upon the government and overthrow it. In 1919, she and two leaders of the German Communist Party, which Luxemburg helped found, were arrested. She was knocked out, shot and thrown in a river. Although socialism, not freethought, was her life’s passion, she wrote the article “Socialism and the Churches,” in 1905, first published by the Polish Social Democratic Party. Luxemburg, who strongly believed in freedom of conscience, sought to show that the church, originally considered a refuge for workers, was now clearly oppressing them. D. 1919.

SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE: “Spotlight on Freethought” / Freedom From Religion Foundation / Dan Barker and Annie Laurie Gaylor ☮

What is Freethought? FFRF Co-President Dan Barker and Annie Laurie Gaylor discuss freethought in history. Learn more about the Freedom From Religion Foundation at ffrf.org.