Michael Parenti, Ph.D., (born 1933)
Political Scientist, Historian, Author, Lecturer, and Culture Critic
U.S. commitments are not to the ordinary people of other lands, but to the privileged reactionary factions that are most accommodating to Western investors . . . right-wing government maintains the existing privileged order of the free market, keeping the world safe for the empowered hierarchies and wealthy classes of the world.
The project received funds from sources that back organisations lobbying against action on climate change . . . Funding came from a number of sources, including charitable foundations maintained by the Koch brothers, the billionaire US industrialists, who have also donated large sums to organisations lobbying against acceptance of man-made global warming . . . Since the 1950s, the average temperature over land has increased by 1C, the group found . . . [T]hey emphasise that anthropogenic global warming (AGW) driven by greenhouse gas emissions is very much in their picture.
Read more . . .
In three decades as one of the world’s biggest rock stars, Jon Bon Jovi has eaten in some of the world’s best restaurants, savoring the best food the planet has to offer.
Yet there’s no place he’d rather have dinner than The Soul Kitchen, a “pay-what-you-can” restaurant he and his wife Dorothea established in a former auto body shop near the Red Bank train station in central New Jersey.
Read more . . .
Mark Edmundson, Ph.D. (born 1952)
University Professor, Romantic Poetry, Literary Theory, Author
On how reading changes your life?
We all get socialized one time around, by parents, and teachers, and schools, and Priests, and Ministers, and what have you. And for a lot of people those values will do just fine. They’re community values, they’re long tested, and they’re long tried, and there’s something eminently respectable about them.
But there are other people who, for whatever reason, just don’t fit right in established values. They find themselves disgruntled, dissatisfied even with the best-meaning teachers, and parents. Those people go a lot of different directions, but one of the best directions they can go is to become obsessed readers. They read, and read, and read until they start to find people who see the world in way that’s akin to theirs. And then they feel that they’re home. They got a second set of parents, and a second set of teachers, and they can start seeing the world for themselves. A little bit different from the way the community sees it often.
. . . [T]he so-called “Protect Life Act” (HR 358), a bill that will endanger women’s lives across the US with an extreme ban on abortion coverage while expanding permission for health professionals to refuse to provide reproductive healthcare services, even in life-threatening situations. . . The Catholic bishops’ actions show an unhealthy obsession with sexual issues. They appear to be hell-bent on wasting real and political capital on dictating to all Americans what their sexual choices should be.
Read more . . .
Wow! Quite impressive
Another purveyor of religious hate, and bigotry!
The latest scandal centres on baby-trafficking by Church, government officials and clinics over several decades. As many as 300,000 babies may have been the victims of a practise that saw infants taken from “morally or economically deficit” parents and sold to couples deemed more acceptable . . . [A] right-wing Catholic doctor, Eduardo Vella, said to have been complicit in the money-spinning business. Dr Vella stands accused of telling women that their babies had died when they hadn’t, and handing over the infants to other couples for cash . . . Typically, doctors and nuns would tell mothers their babies had been born dead, or that they had died shortly after birth. Then they would sell the newborns to adoptive parents and forge all official documents.
Read more . . .
