Good Morning, 99%'ers!

I was expecting to be traveling today, heading south to Florida for my 50th high school reunion. Instead, we decided to leave a day early because my husband had some business he needed to take care of today. Because of this and my own procrastination, this open thread diary is being constructed on the fly. Today's diary is a personal one.

As of Tuesday night, we are now in Tallahassee, but will head down to St. Petersburg for my high school reunion on Friday. We have the three dogs and will board them in a nearby kennel that we have used for a long time. Then onward to the reunion.

I have mixed emotions every time I go back for these reunions but I continue to go. Every time, I say that it will be my last one, but when the next one rolls around, I give into a combination of peer pressure and of curiosity. But for the 50th, I realized that I should make every effort to attend.

So what is it that makes me hesitant? First and foremost, I do not like reminiscing. And this is probably the biggest drawback for these things. It is the same with almost any get together. I prefer to live in the here and now and look toward tomorrow rather than looking to the past. This is a strange contradiction for someone (me) who enjoys history and feels we can learn from the past. Otherwise, it is the painful remembrances of being a geeky teenager when geeky was not cool.

My graduating class had nearly five hundred graduates. We have lost 55 that we know of and another 65 have not been located. Still as of last count, we will have 126 of us plus our significant others attending. To me, the sheer number is amazing. We will have a social get together on Friday night and then on Saturday night, we will have a dinner and dance. In between, there are other events.

The one event I am most looking forward to is on Saturday morning when anyone who is interested will be able to tour St. Petersburg High School, which we all called St. Pete High. St. Pete High dates back to 1898 and the current building was constructed in 1926. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It still looks the same on the outside, but it will be interesting to see what it looks like inside.

Back when I attended St. Pete High, we were known for having great teams in two sports, basketball and track. St. Pete High had a wonderful football/track facility on site which is still used today. But our basketball facility was unique. We played our home games on the auditorium stage which also functioned as a full size basketball court. The stage was three feet off the ground and was so big that there was even seating for some spectators on it for the basketball games. I have never seen anything else like it and wonder if they still use the stage for basketball games.

And so I will return just as I have for everyone of these every ten years. And many of my class mates who have not attended previous reunions are also returning. And as much as I hate nostalgia, maybe I might even get a little bit nostalgic this coming weekend too.

I have not had time to read all the posts here in the last two days, so if I repeat any news items that were previously posted, I apologize in advance.

Generally, I avoid partisan political news items for my open threads, but this one seemed worth linking. Apparently, socialism is not a dirty word to grassroots Democrats.

 Yet even as the Democratic Party tended to grow more cautious, a substantial portion of the party’s base continued to embrace Harrington’s left wing of the possible. In the upper Midwest, activists warmly embraced Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone, who talked up the uniquely radical legacy of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor party, and Iowa Senator Tom Harkin’s pro-labor, pro-farmer prairie populism. Wellstone and Harkin didn’t identify as democratic socialists, but they kept alive an old-school progressive-populist sensibility. More recently, Sanders, their friend and frequent ally, has returned that sensibility to center stage with bolder language and bolder plans for ending austerity, taxing the rich, and tipping the balance in favor of working Americans.

A worldwide ban on fracking? A coalition of activists is calling for exactly that. One can always hope that real visionary leadership will speak louder than dirty money.

In Washington, D.C., activists planned to deliver the letter as part of a rally staged outside the White House.

"President Obama should go to Paris as a real Climate Leader in Chief," said Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch. "The only way he can show true and necessary leadership during the negotiations next month is to stop facilitating the greenwashing of fracking and to do everything in his power to move our nation quickly towards a renewable and energy efficient future."

Organizations in a total of 63 countries are preparing for similar actions, collectively referred to as the Global Frackdown to Paris.

Here's an interesting article on the red baiting of the science of climate change.

In the late 1970s, scientists first came to a consensus that global warming was likely to result from increasing greenhouse gases released by the burning of fossil fuels. This idea had been around since the turn of the century, but the development of computer models made it possible to make quantitative predictions. Almost immediately, a small group of politically connected and conservative scientists began to question this consensus. As empirical scientific data mounted up, their attacks became more unprincipled. These conservative scientists used data selectively and often misrepresented the conclusions of many studies undertaken by the scientific community.

This article links climate change with global unrest and wars, a topic that has received very little attention.

The IPCC report, however, suggested that global warming would have devastating impacts of a social and political nature as well, including economic decline, state collapse, civil strife, mass migrations, and sooner or later resource wars.

These predictions have received far less attention, and yet the possibility of such a future should be obvious enough since human institutions, like natural systems, are vulnerable to climate change. Economies are going to suffer when key commodities - crops, timber, fish, livestock - grow scarcer, are destroyed, or fail. Societies will begin to buckle under the strain of economic decline and massive refugee flows. Armed conflict may not be the most immediate consequence of these developments, the IPCC notes, but combine the effects of climate change with already existing poverty, hunger, resource scarcity, incompetent and corrupt governance, and ethnic, religious, or national resentments, and you're likely to end up with bitter conflicts over access to food, water, land, and other necessities of life.

The subtitle of this article in the Guardian by George Monbiot say it all. Governments are liberating global corporations from the rule of law and leaving them to rip the world apart.

And the financial crisis is just one of the multiple crises – in tax collection, public spending, public health and, above all, ecology – that the same counter-lessons accelerate.

Step back a pace and you see that all these crises arise from the same cause. Players with huge power and global reach are released from democratic restraint. This happens because of a fundamental corruption at the core of politics. In almost every nation the interests of economic elites tend to weigh more heavily with governments than do those of the electorate. Banks, corporations and landowners wield an unaccountable power, which works with a nod and a wink within the political class. Global governance is beginning to look like a never-ending Bilderberg meeting.

I will be in and out much of today, but will check in on a regular basis. Have a great day 99%'ers!