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REBECCA SOLNIT says climate change is about “the whole planet for the whole foreseeable future.” We’ve made progress in Sacramento and Washington; now it’s time to ban fracking in California. Rebecca wrote about climate for the New York Times op-ed page, and writes frequently for TomDispatch.
Also: This year the US will observe the 50th anniversary of the Vietnam War – and the Pentagon is in charge of the commemoration. But what about the rest of us? TOM HAYDEN will comment. NYTimes p1 story HERE; official commemoration site HERE; Vietnam Peace Commemoration petition HERE.
Plus: RICHARD FORD’s new novel about Frank Bascombe, the New Jersey realtor, is “droll, bemused, hyper-observant, occasionally exasperating and punctuated by sighs of both resignation and contentment” (NYTimes). The book is Let Me Be Frank with You.
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Also: the best documentary film of 2014 is 
Rabbi Leonard Beerman of Los Angeles, who died December 24 at age 93, was a great fighter for social justice and peace over the last sixty-five years. His lifelong commitment to nonviolence, Beerman explained, came out of his experience in 1947 in Jerusalem, when he joined the Haganah fighting for Israeli independence. “Luckily, I was spared” killing anyone, he told the Los Angeles Times. “And when I came back, I became a pacifist because of what I had seen: People transformed to just hating, hating, hating. It is no way for humankind to live.”
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Also: it’s the 100th anniversary of the Christmas Truce of World War I, when, after five months of unparalleled industrial-scale slaughter, British and German soldiers stopped fighting and exchanged gifts of food. 
100 years ago, on Christmas Day, 1914, in the middle of World War I, British and German soldiers put down their guns and stopped killing each other. The terrible industrial slaughter had already taken the lives of hundreds of thousands of young men. But on that day, thousands of troops climbed out of the trenches in France and Belgium, sang Christmas carols, and exchanged food, gifts, and souvenirs. They traded German beer for British rum. They even played soccer. It’s a unique event in the history of modern warfare. . .
Hidden in the Senate torture report are stories of some heroes—people inside the CIA who from the beginning said torture was wrong, who tried to stop it, who refused to participate. There were also some outside the CIA, in the military and the FBI, who risked careers and reputations by resisting—and who sometimes paid a heavy price. They should be thanked and honored.
Torture is a crime, a violation of the Federal Torture Act. Those who engaged in the torture documented in such exhaustive detail in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s torture report should be prosecuted, and those who conspired in that torture should also be prosecuted. They include UC Berkeley law professor John Yoo, says Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean of the Law School at the University of California Irvine.
Plus: 
Q. In your new book our man Frank Bascombe says he wants to “decommission” certain words and phrases. What’s the idea here? What is on Frank’s list of decommissioned words?
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Also: How a despised immigrant cuisine became a dominant force in American eating: UCI historian 
Plus: Art, sex, and politics in Manhattan in the seventies: The rise of the gay rights movement and the simultaneous rise of photography in the galleries; photographer Robert Mapplethorpe as the partner of Patti Smith and documentarian of the city’s S&M scene; and then Sam Wagstaff as a legendary curator, and patron of Mapplethorpe: 
