U.S. National

Nick Vasquez and me, shortly before his arrest.

Nick Vasquez and his comrade, Donald, both leaders in the Extinction Rebellion movement, a worldwide environmental group that seeks to prevent the extinction of the human race by environmental catastrophe through non-violent acts of civil disobedience, were both arrested Friday, 17th of September, in Tallahassee, FL, at the steps of the capitol building. I plan to interview them both on my podcast Vanguard Youth Radio. Nick & Donald have been traveling throughout Florida in their quest to pressure Governor DeSantis to fulfill his obligations on the environment. They have been arrested multiple times, some charges were dropped, others are still pending, and they need our support, especially from the students and youth who can join the rebellion.

Forced vaccination helped birth our nation.

As war erupted in the 1770s between American Revolutionaries and our British Imperial masters, a smallpox pandemic tore through the colonies.

The deadly disease killed by the thousands. But Supreme Commander George Washington made inoculation a decisive weapon of war.

The key insight came from a slave. In the early 1700s, an African “owned” by the Puritan preacher Cotton Mather introduced white America to the art and science of plague prevention. Stolen from his native land, Onesimus brought with him knowledge of the ancient method of inoculation.

As smallpox ravaged Calvinist Boston, Onesimus explained that injecting a small amount of infected pus under the skin of a healthy human would bring on a mild case of the disease … and then immunity. Despite intense resistance from the “civilized” white citizenry, Mather pushed the African insight.

Among those who trusted it … it worked, and countless lives were saved.

Several decades later, a 19-year-old George Washington traveled to Barbados with his brother, Lawrence. The trip was meant to cure Lawrence of tuberculosis, which later killed him.

The effort by former President Donald Trump and his ardent supporters to delegitimize Arizona’s 2020 presidential election was supposed to reach a turning point during the third week of August. But as has been typical with this hyperpartisan effort, the pro-Trump contractors empowered by the state Senate’s Republicans faced another delay, ducking an anticipated reckoning with facts and critics.

Buried deep in Joe Biden’s various infrastructure deals is a bailout every bit as insane as the original decision to stay in Afghanistan – up to $50 billion in handouts to keep old nuke reactors operating … at least until they blow up.

The cost of our arrogant lunacy in Afghanistan was thousands of lives and maybe $2 trillion.

The cost of the inevitable explosion at one or more of these crumbling jalopy nukes could be millions of lives and trillions in both destroyed property and an irradiated ecosphere.

Throughout the globe, the Solartopian technologies of wind, solar, batteries, and efficiency are skyrocketing in production while their prices plummet. But Biden’s proposed bailout would take a huge amount of capital away from clean, job producing renewables and put it into expensive, dangerous, obsolete reactors.

Richard Nixon in 1974 – amidst the Arab oil embargo – promised there’d be a thousand “Peaceful Atom” nukes in the US by the year 2000. In that year there were 104. Today there are 93, with the number still dropping – but not fast enough.

For our 61st Grassroots Emergency Election Protection Coalition zoom we note the American flight from Kabul, replicating the one from Saigon on April 30, 1975.

Has there been no learning curve?

We ask the same of REBECCA LANDAU and RAY MCCLENDON as we confront the unlikely Georgia Senatorial campaign of former NFL bust & Trump devotee Herschel Walker. 

Rebecca and Ray discuss the major post card campaign and other grassroots tactics meant to keep hold on Georgia’s US Senate seat in 2002.

With TATANKA BRICCA and others we examine the California recall; with JULIE WIENER we face the new Governor in NY.

A president in dangerous denial