My latest @Salon "Unfriending" America: The Christian right is coming for the enemies of God" People like you and me. bit.ly/UnfriendingAmerica

France ordered big businesses to cover their parking lots in solar panels, and the businesses are embracing it. Carrefour is putting solar canopies over 350 of its store lots, 180,000 parking spaces, and using the power to run its supermarkets. Disneyland Paris started even earlier: its guest lot now has more than 80,000 panels over 11,200 spaces, producing about 17% of the resort's electricity. France passed the law in 2023 requiring most large outdoor parking lots to put renewable-energy canopies or other qualifying shade over at least half the lot. Many businesses don't pay a cent upfront. Carrefour isn't even fronting the construction cost. GreenYellow is financing the entire installation and operating it under a 20-year power agreement. Carrefour uses the electricity and says the project will significantly reduce its energy bills. The government estimates it could add up to 11 gigawatts of solar. In full sun, that's about as much as 10 nuclear reactors. The US has somewhere between 700 million and 2 billion parking spaces. Most of them are bare asphalt baking in the sun. Why aren't we doing more of this?

Gatorade used to have brominated vegetable oil in it, BVO, which is patented as a flame retardant and was banned in Europe and Japan. A 15 year old named Sarah Kavanagh read the label in 2012, looked it up, and started a petition that got 200,000 signatures. PepsiCo took it out in January 2013 and said it wasn't a safety decision, FDA allowed it, they were responding to customers. Coke and Pepsi took it out of everything else in 2014. Mountain Dew kept it until around 2020. FDA didn't ban it until August 2024, after NIH studies found it builds up in tissue and affects the thyroid. It had been sitting on FDA's interim additive list since 1970. By the time they got around to banning it, every major company had already taken it out on their own, and the reason they did was a 15 year old with a petition.

James Talarico is disseminating a link to his interview with Jimmy Kimmel on YOUTUBE. Talarico's team is billing it as the "interview with James Talarico that the FCC Doesn’t Want You To See" piped.video/watch?v=WLDE9LrG…

We have a need for an enlightened, watchful articulate opposition. We have no need for semi-secret societies who are absolutist, dictatorial and would substitute for a rule of law and reason an indiscriminate assault on the institutions that must be held sacrosanct. Rod Serling

Come hear some heartening success stories on Wednesday, September 9th, 2:30–4:30pm, from activitists in Bucks County PA and Tarrant County TX who challenged the Christian Right -- and won. Find out how! us02web.zoom.us/webinar/regi…

.@AOC is right: We must expand Medicare to cover dental, vision and hearing and lower the eligibility age to 55 as part of the movement toward Medicare for All. Let’s get it done.

“However [political parties] may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.” — George Washington

Yes, they were. We were. In the Orwellian way — the courage to see the absolutely obvious. But the most important way they were right was in the insistence on speaking out, on showing up, on organizing. To be right doesn’t mean debating down to the finest point and feeling righteous — it means working together and winning the future. It can be done.

RT @PeterHotez: Coming up on the third anniversary of my paper on the partial overlap between antiscience and antisemitism, how Einstein’s…

Please join PRA on Wednesday, September 9th, 2:30–4:30pm ET for a webinar, "Challenging the Christian Right: Success Stories". Find out how local organizers in Bucks County, PA and Tarrant County, TX fought back and won. us02web.zoom.us/webinar/regi…

A woman one month into a new job at the FDA was handed an application to approve a sleeping pill. It looked routine. They gave it to her because she was new and it seemed like an easy one to start on. She read the file and something was missing. No evidence at all that the drug was safe in pregnancy, and it was being sold as a remedy for morning sickness. The drug was thalidomide, and West Germany was getting through a million doses a day. Frances Kelsey asked for more data. The company sent representatives to her office, then telephoned her at all hours, then went over her head to her supervisors. Between them they contacted her and her boss around fifty separate times. She later said most of what they called her could not be printed. Ten million tablets were already sitting in warehouses waiting for her signature. She said no six times. And while she held the line, doctors in Germany and Australia were piecing together what was happening to babies whose mothers had taken it. Limbs that had never formed, hands and feet attached directly at the shoulder and hip, in at least 4,000 children across Europe. The company withdrew its American application in 1962. Seventeen cases turned up in the United States, all from free samples doctors had handed out before any approval. Without her it would have been thousands. Congress passed a new law that same year requiring companies to prove a drug is both safe and effective, and requiring informed consent from anyone in a trial. Those rules are now used worldwide. Kennedy gave her the highest civilian award in the country and she was the second woman ever to receive it. She stayed at the FDA another 45 years and died in 2015 at 101. Every American woman handed a pill in pregnancy is downstream of one woman refusing to sign a form six times while men shouted at her. smithsonianmag.com/science-n…

RT @PeterHotez: The evidence that vaccines don’t cause autism is overwhelming. Also there’s the absence of a plausible mechanism for a vacc…

I was given my name by the Iroquois Nation many hundreds of years ago. By 1660 my name was printed on maps by the Europeans as they accepted the Native name which means Beautiful waters. In 1867 the Canadian government decided to use my name for their providence.

“We're developing a new citizenry. One that will be very selective about cereals and automobiles, but not very able to think.” — Rod Serling

NEW: Three fired Stars & Stripes journalists have filed federal civil suit here at DC court against Pete Hegseth & Hegseth spokesman Sean Parnell Suit alleges "Defendants are attempting to fire Plaintiffs for speaking up as private citizens in support of the press’s freedom"

Wearing @PostGuild red today. I was able to challenge my @washingtonpost firing — and win reinstatement plus back pay — all thanks to being a part of the @WBNG32035 Guild. Binding Arbitration is a part of our contract. This is why unions matter!!!

“I don’t want Jews in positions of elected office and I don’t want Jews having financial ties to the Democratic Party. I don’t like Judaism. If I could wave a magic wand, I would round up Jews and deport them from America. Most Democratic voters agree with me.” I don’t want to sound like a broken record on this but can you imagine if a top adviser to, and ally of, President Joe Biden had said this? It would be the *only* story in America. For days and weeks on end. Biden and Dem members of Congress would be asked about nothing else by rightly outraged reporters. So every American political reporter, editor, anchor, executive producer, reading this right now: ask yourself, why aren’t you as outraged when it’s Muslims not Jews, and Trump’s ally not Biden’s?

Today, I was informed that the Department of Defense is firing me for insubordination after I told a CBS reporter that I work for Stars and Stripes – not the Pentagon, not any administration, and not any policy maker.