Non-Profit Status and Political Action
Life in a Destabilized California
Why This Country Might Want to Lower Its Expectations
I still hate electoral politics, but you don’t always get to choose the terrain you’re fighting on. Through its machinations at the federal, state, and county level, the Republican Party has been all but screaming its plans to steal the next presidential election.
I knew that the IRS wasn’t visiting me as part of an audit of my returns, since I hadn’t filed any for eight years. My partner and I were both informal tax resisters — she, ever since joining the pacifist Catholic Worker organization; and I, ever since I’d returned from Nicaragua in 1984. I’d spent six months traveling that country’s war zones as a volunteer with Witness for Peace.
New technology under development by Raytheon BBN Technologies could unleash swarms of small, autonomous air and ground vehicles, working in tandem and under the control of remote operators.
For the sake of the world, let us hope that this time Cassandra will be believed.
In 2019, the average debt of those earning a graduate degree was $71,000 on top of whatever the former students had already shelled out while in school. And that, in turn, is before the “miracle” of compound interest takes hold and the debt starts to grow like a rogue zucchini.
A Climate View from California
The U.S. “national security” budget is still the third rail of politics in this country.
These days, all I want to do is weave. The loom that’s gripped me, and the pandemic that’s gripped us all, have led me to rethink the role of work (and its subset, paid labor) in human lives.
If we do succeed in destroying ourselves, it seems increasingly likely that it will be by fire, whether the accelerating heating of the globe over decades, or a nuclear conflagration any time we choose. The good news, the flame of hope, is that we still have time — at least 100 seconds — to prevent it.
Perhaps the horrors of 2020—the fires and hurricanes, Trump’s vicious attacks on democracy, the death, sickness, and economic dislocation caused by Covid-19—can force a real conversation about national security in 2021. Maybe this time we can finally ask whether trying to prop up a dying empire actually makes us—or indeed the world—any safer.
For the last four years, Donald Trump has made war on the people of this country and indeed on the people of the entire world.