Hundreds Gather At Louisville Mosque To Paint Over Hateful Graffiti - Antonia Blumberg in Huff Po

"Everyone is working together and in unison and that's the true spirit of the city and its residents."

Nearly 1,000 people showed up at the Islamic Center of Louisville, Kentucky, on Friday to paint over anti-Muslim graffiti that appeared Wednesday night, according to a center director.

Representatives from all major faith groups and congregations were there to show support, along with students from private, public and Catholic schools, Ozair Shariff, a board of directors member, told The Huffington Post.

"I think it's very apparent that whatever the intended message the perpetrator had, it certainly backfired," Shariff said. "Everyone is working together and in unison and that's the true spirit of the city and its residents."

After Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer, the mosque president and other faith and community leaders made brief comments, volunteers took turns painting brush strokes over the messages that read, "this is for France" and "Moslems leave the Jews alone." Supplies for the painting were donated by local residents and organizations, Shariff said.

Matt Goldberg, development director of the Jewish Community of Louisville, joined the cleanup crew, along with more than 100 volunteers from the Jewish community.

The full article is available here

Exxon Knew Fossil Fuel's Role in Global Warming in 1977 - Climate News

It was July 1977 when Exxon's leaders received this blunt assessment, well before most of the world had heard of the looming climate crisis.

At a meeting in Exxon Corporation's headquarters, a senior company scientist named James F. Black addressed an audience of powerful oilmen. Speaking without a text as he flipped through detailed slides, Black delivered a sobering message: carbon dioxide from the world's use of fossil fuels would warm the planet and could eventually endanger humanity.

"In the first place, there is general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels," Black told Exxon's Management Committee, according to a written version he recorded later.

It was July 1977 when Exxon's leaders received this blunt assessment, well before most of the world had heard of the looming climate crisis.

Exxon responded swiftly. Within months the company launched its own extraordinary research into carbon dioxide from fossil fuels and its impact on the earth. Exxon's ambitious program included both empirical CO2 sampling and rigorous climate modeling. It assembled a brain trust that would spend more than a decade deepening the company's understanding of an environmental problem that posed an existential threat to the oil business.

Then, toward the end of the 1980s, Exxon curtailed its carbon dioxide research. In the decades that followed, Exxon worked instead at the forefront of climate denial. It put its muscle behind efforts to manufacture doubt about the reality of global warming its own scientists had once confirmed. It lobbied to block federal and international action to control greenhouse gas emissions. It helped to erect a vast edifice of misinformation that stands to this day.

The full article is available here

Donald Trump and the Ghost of Totalitarianism - Rabbi Michael Lerner in Tikkun Magazine

Identifying Trump as a fascist is accurate, but not enough. What is necessary are analyses in which the seeds of totalitarianism are made visible in Trump’s discourse and policy measures.

In the current historical moment in the United States, the emptying out of language is nourished by the assault on the civic imagination.

A resurrection of historical memory in this moment could provide important lessons regarding the present crisis, particularly the long tradition of racism, white supremacy, exceptionalism, war mongering, and the extended wars on youth, women, and immigrants.

Identifying Trump as a fascist is accurate, but not enough. What is necessary are analyses in which the seeds of totalitarianism are made visible in Trump’s discourse and policy measures.

A new thoughtlessness drapes the U.S. public in the abyss of ignorance, infantilism, consumerism, militarism, and environmental stupidity.  Against this, there is a need to create those pedagogical spaces in which shared faith in justice replaces the shared fears of precarity, hatred of the other, and a fear of the demands of justice.

Against the savage brutalism of the new totalitarianism, there is a need to develop new discourses, vocabularies, values, desires, and a sense of spirituality that brings people together around a need for critique, passion for justice, and a desire for new modes of collective resistance and struggle.

We may be in the midst of “dark times” but the light of hope is never far off and while it offers no guarantees, it posits the possibility of a future that will not mimic the horrors of the past and present.

The full article is available here