Opinion

At GREEP Gathering #227 we mourn the horrific MAGA murders in Minnesota with St. Cloud resident HEDY TRIPP.

We look in growing detail at the “Christian Nationalist” movement with radio host LYNNE FEINERMAN, who discusses ANDRA WATKINS & her great work on right-wing cults.

From Indivisible we hear MIMI “SPRINGTIME” about her Episcopalian roots & their warped Evangelical off-shoots.  

A wonderful award-winning poem from DANIELLA GIUSEPPE underscores the larger female hippocampus which provides more empathy than men can command.

From Columbus, Ohio, we hear SANDY BOLZENIUS reporting about the various marches ranging from NO KINGS to Pride to Doo Dah & more.

 In Santa Monica, Dr. NANCY NIPARKO reports on functional brain studies showing large hippocampi among taxi drivers, along with other contributions of her great genius

Nancy gives us a pretty specific laundry list on the development of the brains in the Republican v. Democratic skulls.

There were 8k people at La Palma Park in Anaheim, according to DAVID SONNEBORN, who’s pushing SB42 for public financing of California elections.

The current administration is not a supporter of “clean energy” alternatives

Brad Plumer and Harry Stevens report on the Trump/Republican aim to end the “clean energy boom” that occurred during the Biden administration (https://nytimes.com/2025/05/13/climate/ira-republican-tax-bill-clean-energy.html). 

“The party’s signature tax plan would kill most Biden-era incentives,” they write. Overlooked by the Republicans, “G.O.P. districts have the most to lose.” They refer to “wind farms in Wyoming, to a “huge solar factory expansion in Georgia. Lithium mines in Nevada. Vacuums that suck carbon from the air in Louisiana.” 

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When deciding what to make for dinner, many of us think about how to balance making something affordable, delicious, and healthy. And we might consider ethical questions, like whether our food is locally sourced, our meat is humanely raised, or our meals have a low climate impact..

We probably don’t wonder whether child labor is involved. But unfortunately, that’s increasingly likely. In recent years, federal investigations have uncovered children working in dangerous conditions to create the food we eat.

Shouts and cheers, honking horns, people banging on drums. Oshkosh! No kings – at least not today. I’m with my si  ster and great nephew, attending the nearest national rally, about twenty miles south of their home in Appleton, Wisconsin. I’m up here with them because I’m getting cataract surgery (left eye tomorrow), but what the heck, Saturday is open. Let’s go to the No Kings rally.
   One of multi-thousands of rallies across the country. Oh, yes!
   More than a thousand people are crowded in the park in the center of town. Most of them are holding signs. The collective vibration is enormous. Honk! Honk! Save the country! But as we walk among them, as the cheers and claps reverberate, I can’t stop feeling small and cynical – by myself, a spectator among the participants. Does creating change amount to nothing more than joining the cheers?

People move — is a part of life as old as time, as basic as breathing. But U.S. immigration laws have been written through scapegoating, not sensible debate. They are not logical, and do not work the way they did over a century ago, when my relatives came to this country. They also do not work the way most people think they should, or want them to.

The first vote I ever cast was for a Democrat. I believed in the Democratic Party, and I want to believe in them again. But most of them aren’t listening, and they’re not meeting this moment with the bold ferocity it requires. Until they do, I’ll remain skeptical, critical, and vocal.

Indivisible Central Ohio recently hosted an empty-chair town hall meeting for Ohio’s 15th Congressional District. Here’s how they described the event after it ended:

This article first appeared on Reel Time with Richard Ades.

As a documentary about a woman who deals with trauma with the help of exercise, Jeannette reminds me of a movie I wanted to make years ago. The main difference is that my film never got made, probably because I didn’t know how to create a space in which the woman in question felt safe enough to tell her story.

Director Maris Curran, obviously, does know how. She partly accomplishes this by avoiding the kind of probing interviews one generally sees in documentaries. Instead, she allows her subject to simply live her life in front of the camera.

Curran’s subject is Jeannette Feliciano, a survivor of 2016’s horrific mass shooting at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida.

Besides being a survivor, Jeannette is also a lesbian, a single mom, a Latina, a personal trainer and a competitive bodybuilder. All of these facets of her life are represented in the documentary’s one hour and 18 minutes, though some are given more space than others.

One of the more interesting aspects of the expanding war between Israel and Iran is the way the media and the crowd of “experts” have avoided any discussion of the possible, or perhaps even likely, upcoming decision of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to dig deep into his secret nuclear weapons arsenal to enable the total destruction of Iran’s prime targets. Such targets are likely to include Iran’s own apparently civilian use nuclear develop program, which is protected deep underground in Natanz and elsewhere. Iran’s surviving military and civilian leaders are also now believed to be well protected underground after the recent debacle which saw the Israeli first strike kill a number of generals and other top officials. Netanyahu would like to finish the job by making a leaderless Iran unable to defend itself and maintain sovereignty as an independent nation.