The world has always been complicated. The world has always been big. Pace Tom Friedman, but the world has always been flat. The only thing that was small and simple was our own experience, and what people are really wishing for is not that the world become simple again, but that they become ignorant of its complexity.

Bill McKibben, Citizen of Eaarth, was released from jail in DC today and greeted by our own Jane Hamsher and Lt Dan Choi. Bill had this statement upon his release…

It was bad enough that the Feds stopped enforcing the law. Now they want the State Attorney Generals, including Eric Schneiderman of New York, to stop enforcing the law. But only as to banksters. Pot smokers are still fair game.

Electric Daisy Carnival Experience is the closest thing to being at a rave that you can experience in a movie theater. Body and mind moving music, colorful costumes, joyous faces as 100,000 attendees spin to the lights and music fantastic at the 2010 Electric Daisy Carnival, held at the Los Angeles Coliseum.

I’ve found one of the saddest yet most common defenses of President Obama’s handling of his job to be the weird argument that it simply wasn’t possible for him to do a better job, or to do anything different from what he did. It always reminds me of the mantra of the misguided extreme optimist Dr. Pangloss in Candide, “all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.”

Ezra Klein is up with another post defending Obama with this same basic argument.

Throughout the Libya war, there has been quite a bit of skepticism about who the rebels being armed were exactly and whether they could govern Libya after Gaddafi was defeated. A political body to represent the rebels, the National Transitional Council (NTC), began to solidify early in the conflict. Its leader, Mustafa Abdul Jalil, has been chairman of the NTC since February. Jalil was Libya’s justice minister, who was sent to deal with the uprising in Benghazi when it began. Jalil “quit in protest” after witnessing the “excessive use of violence against unarmed protesters.”

Academy Award winning screenwriter Dustin Lance Black’s play 8 covering the Proposition 8 hearings starring Morgan Freeman, Anthony Edwards, Cheyenne Jackson, Christine Lahti, Rob Reiner, Yeardley Smith and Marisa Tomei hits Broadway on September 19 in a one-time staged reading at the Eugene O’Neil Theater to benefit the American Foundation for Equal Rights. Tickets start at $500.

Critical action is being taken right now to stop the machine and create a new world. We are writing to urge you to participate.

From now until September 3rd in Washington DC, Stop the Pipeline!-The Tar Sands Action is fighting to stop what will be an ecologically destructive Keystone XL pipeline, a pipeline also with great potential for massive leakage, that would run through the United States from the tar sands in Canada to refineries on the Gulf of Mexico. Protestors are demanding that President Obama reject any permit for the pipeline. The pipeline will send 900,000 barrels a day of the world’s dirtiest oil to US refineries, allowing further development of the Alberta tar sands. If this is allowed to occur it could mean ‘game over’ for the climate in the word of the nation’s leading climate scientist, NASA’s James Hansen. -October.2011

The Fukushima nuclear disaster fell off the front pages this summer, and the media stopped monitoring the day-by-day battle at the stricken plant. If you didn’t think about it, you might be excused for believing that the worst was avoided. But the truth is much more ominous. The Japanese government is preparing to declare a large zone around the plant uninhabitable, probably for decades, due to contamination at unsafe levels.

The two-day detention of many of the protesters in front of the White House opposing a proposed tar sands pipeline from Canada to Texas has not so far inhibited other activists. Over the first two days, 110 activists have been arrested for sit-ins at the tar sands protests, including FDL colleagues Jane Hamsher and Scarecrow. Today, in Day Three, Nebraskans who will be directly impacted by the pipeline came to Washington to demonstrate.

Join the Tar Sands 14 Day White House Sit-In.