Here's tonight's news from Comcast:
The legendary “Ain’t That a Shame” crooner, who scored five number one hits in the 1950s, has an arrest warrant with his name on it after missing a scheduled court appearance in connection with a recent lawsuit.
Needless to say, I have no objection to anyone wanting to throw Pat Boone in jail. It's just ironic–not to mention almost sixty years overdue– that the warrant isn't for this:
Are doomed to repeat it.
George Santayana said that, and now the saying apparently describes the CCTA Board of Commissioners.
According to Vermont Digger, the CCTA Board is poised to escalate an already hostile situation to one of extreme bitterness. They voted today to hire scabs to break the three-week-old bus drivers' strike.
Here's the operative language in today's resolution:
People who have lived in Vermont long enough will remember the 1985 Hinesburg teachers' strike, which eventually went on for eighty-seven days. In that strike not only did the school board hire scab teachers two weeks into the staff, but the board chair, Rita Flynn Villa, tried to throw out teacher pay scales, eliminate teacher grievance protection, and generally tried to bust the union.
The teachers were ultimately reinstated, but not without causing bitter divisions between teachers, management, and parents in the town.
This year it's not the teachers, it's the bus drivers, and they and their supporters have already been complaining about what they consider unfair and unbalanced press coverage of the positions of the two sides.
Hiring scabs, while it may look like an attractive short-term solutions, will only further poison relations with the drivers. The company may be legally justified in taking this action, but they should recognize that there are already calls by community groups to replace management, and those calls will only increase if the board goes nuclear.
The Report from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, discussed in today’s New York Times confirms that the worst will come.
There is no real movement to address the coming crisis from any of the large players that could actually affect meaningful change; so the worst will come.
Where is the 24/7 coverage of this, the biggest catastrophe story ever?
Four weeks and no clue later, major broadcast media still obsess over every single detail of Malaysian Flight 370, with endless panels of armchair experts speculating on what “might have happened.” They’ve barely broken the blanket coverage to bring us bits about the Ukraine, mudslides in the Pacific Northwest and (today) Korea.
With all this bread and circus driving primetime news, the very real collapse of the climate system and all the attendant calamities we will unfortunately live to see, barely get the occasional weary nod from mainstream media.
Instead, we are treated to montages of crying relatives and interviews with people on the other side of the world, who once knew someone who was on Flight 370.
I haven’t heard a single voice questioning whether Flight 370 is a hoax; yet, somehow, despite the overwhelming consensus on climate change, it is still politic to give change doubters and deniers almost equal time in the very limited media that is devoted to the topic.
And worse, it is still commonly assumed that indefinite growth is the correct model for every human endeavor.
It is that impossible and toxic assumption that has even President Obama harnessed to fossil fuels and nuclear energy!
We can make no meaningful progress on conservation and sustainable living until our leaders acknowledge that sustainability, and not growth, is the number one priority of the twenty first century if it is not to be our last.
That and that alone should be the lead story of every news cycle going forward.