Occasionally individuals complain that I fail to address one subject or another. One Berkeley denizen got in my face and announced: “You leftists ought to become aware of the ecological crisis.” In fact, I had written a number of things about the ecological crisis, including one called “Eco-Apocalypse.” His lack of familiarity with my work did not get in the way of his presumption.

Years ago when I spoke before the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom in New York , the moderator announced that she could not understand why I had “remained silent” about the attempt to defund UNESCO. Whatever else I might have been struggling with, she was convinced I should have joined with her in trying to save UNESCO (which itself really was a worthy cause).

People give me marching orders all the time. Among the most furiously insistent are those fixed on 9/11. Why haven’t I said anything about 9/11? Why am I “a 9/11 denier.” In fact, I have written about 9/11 and even spoke at two 9/11 conferences (Santa Cruz and New York), raising questions of my own.

Fast forward to 2048. The world is greatly changed, and in this year China invades France, occupying Paris and a good portion of the nation. The French are massacred, evicted, raped, chased, and terrorized. Towns are destroyed. Every town and village has its name changed to a Chinese name, and its prior existence erased from any history books produced from then forward.

Portions of France not yet under Chinese control shelter refugees by the millions. French citizens captured in their homes are held as "prisoners of war" and freed to become refugees in distant parts of France. China changes the name of its occupied areas from France to Chance. The remaining parts of the country are just referred to by their local (Chinese) names, as if they were part of no nation at all and yet somehow Chinese in the end.

Has it really been a third of a century since President Jimmy Carter installed solar panels on the White House roof? Has it really been over a quarter century since President Ronald Reagan yanked them down?

Yes and you betcha.

"On June 20th, 33 years ago, President Jimmy Carter installed solar panels on the White House roof. Seven years after that, Ronald Reagan took them down," writes Brian Merchant in motherboard.com. "It was the end of 70s, a decade wracked with stagnant economic growth and a pair of debilitating oil price spikes—the second, caused by the Iranian revolution, actually occurred in 1979. The nation had seen firsthand the danger of rely ing too heavily on oil, and ordinary folks were sick of being besieged by high gas prices. So Jimmy Carter made what seemed to be a reasonable move: He started organizing a framework by which to wean us off the black stuff."

Today, as America limps through a recession that will never recover without the stimulus and savings promised by renewable energy, perhaps it is time to revisit the the "Carter Initiative" on a grander scale.

With the passing of Gore Vidal, we should honor his memory by reading his most historically significant work: his introduction to U.S. Congressman John Conyers' report on the 2004 election entitled, "What Went Wrong in Ohio: The Conyers Report on the 2004 Election.'

While other liberal and progressive writers turned away from Bush's open theft of the 2004 election, Vidal was on record prior to election asserting that Bush would lose the election in terms of actual vote count. But, Vidal wrote, Bush would likely win the election through a creative propaganda campaign and election rigging. Vidal had been clear-eyed in what was happening in our country, telling the Times of London in September 2009 that "We'll have a dictatorship soon in the United States."

Vidal acted courageously in lending his name to that Congressional report that concluded, "With regards to our factual findings, in brief, we find that there were massive and unprecedented voter irregularities and anomalies in Ohio."

Disintegration: The Splintering of Black America
by Eugene Robinson
As a professor of African American history, I often remind my students that the black community is not monolithic, nor is there any one black experience. There is no one voice speaking for all of black America–this idea is the creation of white America–just as there is no longer such a thing as an all encompassing state of black America, the Urban League’s annual report notwithstanding. Indeed, African Americans are as diverse as any other race. According to the Pulitzer Prize winning Robinson, “Black America, as we knew it, is history,” done in by integration, suburbanization, Reaganomics and the global economy. Instead, Robinson reports that there are now four distinct black communities.