Opinion

[VILLA PARK, ILLINOIS] – “No one locks their doors in Villa Park,” says village board President Kevin Patrick.

This town of 22,000 could be the set for Andy of Mayberry, a Norman Rockwell painting of America.

Patrick sports a military haircut befitting his years in the Coast Guard and steel blue eyes that reflect military determination, compassion — and fear. Fear of what could happen to his town.

We filmed Patrick while he watched the videos of bodies floating face down in another small town, in Kerr County, Texas, where the death toll from a flood in July has reached 136 and counting.

Patrick was shaken. Because it’s a horror he knows all too well.

Twenty years ago this month, Coast Guardsman Patrick was one of the first responders sent in after Hurricane Katrina drowned Gulfport and New Orleans. He told me about recovering the bloated bodies of pregnant women — or pieces of pregnant women — out of the water. He tried to pull one corpse from the flood, but the “arm slid off like a chicken wing.”

Two leading science and environment groups are going to court to challenge the Trump administration’s use of a secretively convened group of climate skeptics to prepare a now widely disparaged report in its attempt to undo the Endangerment Finding. The longstanding finding provides scientific support for commonsense emission standards to reduce climate pollution and protect people from the more powerful floods, more extreme heat waves, more frequent fires and other deadly hazards made worse by climate change. Millions of Americans are experiencing the clear and present danger of climate change in their lives as well as rising insurance costs and other impacts that are making daily life less safe and less affordable.

Some observers in the lead-up to last week’s meeting between President Donald Trump and President Vladimir Putin in Anchorage Alaska hoped that a dialogue might be established where the broader issue of creating a new European security model that would reduce tensions and make it unlikely that a conflict like Russia-Ukraine would be repeated. Both Trump and Putin came away from the three-hour plus meeting with positive remarks though little of substance, at least in terms of what they were prepared to reveal. Trump did indicate that the idea of a ceasefire had been sidelined in favor of further discussions for a comprehensive peace plan to end the war at the next bilateral talks in Moscow, but it has been suggested by critics that he was speaking only for himself personally. If he has come around to the view that a ceasefire will not work in the current context, he is probably correct.

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An emergency "pop up" protest brought nearly 200 people to the Ohio Statehouse this afternoon to condemn Governor Mike DeWine's announcement that he's sending 150 of the state's National Guard to Washington DC. Since August 13, National Guard troops in D.C. have taken over the police department because Trump claims there's a crime increase, although data shows crime is down in the nation's capital. Ohio now has the dubious distinctionf of joining West Virginia and South Carolina as states supporting the action.

The impromptu rally today mirrored the large ongoing Washington DC protests against the unprecedented National Guard mobilization. Speakers at the event chastised DeWine for capitulating to Trump's power grab, pointing out that the troops will target immigrants, the homeless and people of color.

People in cars passing by honked and waved to the protestors. An impressive number of demonstrators showed up and spoke out, with signage ready to denouce DeWine's decision. One memorable sign stated, "Trump said he couldn't call the National Guard on Jan. 6."

Like Joe Stalin at his most deranged, Donald Trump has pitched atomic power toward the abyss.

And we are all attached. 

New US nukes have been priced out by solar, wind, geothermal, battery storage, efficiency, conservation.

More than 90% of the world’s added new energy capacity is renewable. 

BUT Trump’s billionaire backers owe huge inventories of coal, oil, gas and uranium.  They're desperate to cash out those fossil/nuke assets before renewables “strand” them all.

That they kill the planet—and us—is of no apparent concern.

And their decoy—nuclear power—is dead-ending.  

Zero large atomic reactors are under construction in the US.

The final four have failed.   

Two unfinished $9 billion reactor corpses lie dead at VC Summer, SC. 

Two more at Vogtle, GA, cost $40 billion and 14 years to build. 

Now they can’t compete with renewables, burn at 300 degrees Centigrade, spew radioactive carbon and waste. 

Unproven, uninsured Small Reactors can’t impact our energy supply for a decade or more.  

In thinking about my own views on the American Empire, I considered the process of changing my own views. This after being told that I never I change my views. Not true, as I once believed that Oswald shot Kennedy, which means in retrospect I believed the most obvious (albeit state supported) lie in history, but later came to understand that Kennedy was a threat to the Military Industrial Complex and the secret, permanent government.

Basically I have reversed my opinion on Russia-gate. I once believed it was obvious that Putin supported Trump's election in 2016 by hacking the Democratic Party server and releasing information damaging to Clinton's campaign as well as using social media to break away Bernie Sander's supporters by amplifying our hatred of Hillary Clinton and the Democratic party elite. I certainly believed it without reservation during the impeachment trial.