On February 6th, a constitutional amendment was introduced in the California Legislature by Assembly Member Isaac Bryan. Bryan’s amendment would give voting rights to people in prison on felony convictions. Two days later, David Cruz, an ex-felon who spent thirteen years in state prison and then helped organize a non-profit called Initiate Justice, held a
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Two Iranians in their early twenties have just been sentenced to a longer period of time in jail than a murderer. What in the world could they have done to deserve this punishment? Social networking. On October 26th, the two Iranians, Astiyazh Haghighi and her fiancée, Amir Mohammad Ahmadi, posted a video of themselves dancing in
On January 25th, Meta’s president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, announced that Donald Trump will be reinstated on Facebook and Instagram. Clegg is not just any old corporate executive. He is the former deputy prime minister of England. Trump’s account was suspended for two years on January 7th, the day after the violent events of January
On January 3rd, a new study on teens and social media hit the headlines in places like StudyFinds.org and the New York Times. The headline in StudyFinds was scary: it warned of a “social disaster.” And it explained that “Children who frequently check social media face significant brain changes.” But the headline was wrong. Dead wrong. Here’s
The Russian Defense Ministry announced on December 14th that “Russia’s Yars intercontinental ballistic missile has been loaded into a silo at the Kozelsk missile formation in the Kaluga Region in central Russia,” southwest of Moscow. With a 7,500 mile range, the Yars rocket is able to hit the United States. The Yars carries multiple independently targetable
On April 14th, roughly six months ago, Elon Musk offered to buy Twitter for $44 billion. Then he pulled out of the deal. Now he is pulling back in again, offering to buy Twitter at the original price if Twitter will drop a lawsuit it filed against him after he backed out. Meanwhile folks on
Two new polls show that since the beginning of the Covid pandemic on March 11, 2020, some of us have had trouble sleeping. There are two main things keeping us awake. We are worried about the state of the world and its impact on us. And our mate in the bed next to us is
At 1:13 A.M. Pacific Daylight Time on September 7th, at Vandenberg Space Force Base, 60 miles north of Santa Barbara, California, the US Air Force Global Strike Command launched a Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile stripped of its nuclear warhead. The Space Force says that the point of the test is to prove that “the
First, let me give you the hidden bottom line of this story. If you are a man or a boy, nature has cut your lifespan off at the knees. Now for the news. On August 31st, the CDC dropped some startling statistics about your probable lifespan and mine. Life expectancy in America has gone down
Howard Bloom has been named One Of The Best TV/Radio/Podcast Hosts on the Planet by Hollywood 411 News, just below Bill Maher and just above Jimmy Kimmel. Howard Bloom has been called the Einstein, Newton, and Freud of the 21st century by Britain’s Channel 4 TV. One
On the morning of August 10th, in Aurora, Colorado, Margarita Flores Velasquez opened the door to her bathroom and discovered her 13 year old grandson, Jose, bent over with his head in the sink. She recalls, “I said ‘Jose, Jose,’… I tried moving him. He was limp, cold, his mouth and fingers were purple.” She
Nancy Pelosi’s August trip to Taiwan has not been scheduled yet, but it has already become much more than a diplomatic and fact-finding visit. Tweets Hu Xijin, the former editor of one of China’s leading official media outlets, the Global Times: “It is certain that the mainland’s response to Pelosi’s visit will …involve shocking military
On July 20th, Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, told the Russian news outlets Tass, RIA Novotni, and Sputnik that Russia wants to take the war in the Ukraine much farther than the territories that Russia now controls in the Donbas and Luhansk regions. Russia wants to move south, west, and north to the regions of
In most of the United States, hospitalizations and deaths from Covid seem to be way, way down. Covid deaths nationwide are 522 a day, a tiny fraction of the nearly 3,900 a day in February. But things are not as quiet as they look. In Los Angeles County, Covid is ripping the place up. The
By 2045, China plans on being the leading space power in the world. Yes, THE leading power. And China plans to use its space mastery to boost its position as the center of a “new world order.” A world order in which the “bully,” the United States, is sidelined. And in which China reigns supreme.
On June 24th, one of the five commissioners of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, wrote a lone wolf letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook and to Google CEO Sundar Pichai. Carr asked the heads of Apple and Google to remove TikTok from their app stores. That is a big ask. Wired Magazine reports that
Russia’s war on Ukraine has demonstrated how a major energy exporter can achieve a choke-hold over its customers, leaving them very little way to get out of it. NATO has been limited in its response to the Ukrainian invasion by Europe’s dependence on Russian gas and oil. We need energy independence to break the grip
On Wednesday May 11th, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that deaths from drug overdoses had reached an all-time high, almost 108,000 in the past twelve months. That’s massive. It’s the equivalent of all the annual deaths from auto accidents, home accidents, and murders combined. It’s more than all the American deaths in