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Saturday, October 31, 2026

Boo-Hoo! California’s Billionaire Snowflakes Are Scared of a One-Time, 5% Tax!

The 22 billionaires who have spent or spoken against California’s Prop 40 have seen their combined wealth increase 64% in the last 20 months, yet you’d think from their reaction the sky was falling.

Supporters of the California Billionaire Tax Act rally in Los Angeles on February 18, 2026.
(Photo by Billionaire Tax Now/X)

Chuck Collins
Oct 31, 2026

OtherWords

Americans overwhelmingly support taxing billionaires more. But some of those billionaires, including those who’ve seen their wealth balloon in recent years, are spending big to stop it.

Voters in California, for example, are considering a ballot initiative called Prop 40—a one-time, 5% wealth tax exclusively on the state’s 200-plus billionaires. But a few dozen billionaires are ponying up tens of millions to fight the tax and threatening to run away if they lose.

In an analysis for Tax the Ultra Rich Now (TURN), the Institute for Policy Studies identified 22 Golden State billionaires who have contributed substantial funds or been outspoken opponents of Prop 40. This group has seen their combined wealth increase 64% in the last 20 months. Yet you’d think from their reaction the sky was falling.

When you hear their baleful cries, echoing from the superyachts and private jets, you want to take their hands and reassure them: “It’s all going to be OK.”

The 22 billionaire snowflakes include a bunch of tech bros and crypto barons making billions off developing an AI future for the rest of us.

Several are chums of Jeffrey Epstein, including Palantir’s Peter Thiel. In the last 20 months, Thiel’s wealth increased a whopping 120.27%, from $14.8 billion to $32.6 billion. That puts his wealth at 11,319 times the median wealth of a Californian household, which is $303,000. To protect his gains, Thiel has given $3 million to the No on 40 campaign and has called on other billionaires to move out of California. (Thiel himself recently moved to Argentina.)

Venture capitalist John Doerr, an early investor in Google, Amazon, and DoorDash, gave $10 million to No On 40. In the last 20 months, Doerr’s wealth increased 47.97%, from $14.8 billion on January 1, 2025, to $21.9 billion on September 1, 2026. Doerr’s wealth is 7,227 times that of the median Californian.

Google’s Sergey Brin has been the single largest opposition donor, chipping in over $102 million to fight Prop 40. From the deck of his $450 million yacht, the Dragonfly, Brin has seen his personal wealth grow a whopping 70% in the last 20 months, from $148 billion to $253 billion. Brin’s wealth is a stratospheric 83,498 times the median wealth of a Californian household.

Not all the billionaires are cowering in the corner.

Billionaire Tom Steyer said he would vote for the billionaire wealth tax and wished it went further to reduce inequality. Jensen Huang, the co-founder and CEO of Nvidia, is worth an estimated $190 billion and supports the one-time wealth tax. He told CBS News that “it’s a privilege, it’s a responsibility” to pay taxes—and that “nothing would give me more joy” than to pay more.

California’s 231 billionaires held approximately $2.3 trillion as of September 22, 2026 and pay incredibly low taxes on their riches. According to economists Gabriel Zucman and Emmanuel Saez, from 2019 to 2025, while California billionaires’ wealth grew an average of over 15% per year, they paid on average just 0.26% of their wealth annually in state income taxes. Sergey Brin and his fellow Google co-founder Larry Page paid even less—just 0.07% of their wealth annually.

We can see why these billionaire snowflakes don’t want anything to change. Still, the one-time wealth tax would be just a small fraction of their gains in the last few years—and nevermind of their overall wealth, which will remain massive.

When you hear their baleful cries, echoing from the superyachts and private jets, you want to take their hands and reassure them: “It’s all going to be OK. You’ll have 95% of your billions and tens of thousands of your neighbors will have healthcare. You will get over this one quickly.”

Californians will decide their fate in November: a vote for oligarchy or a first step toward rebalancing our democracy? And Americans elsewhere will be watching.

This column was distributed by OtherWords.

Chuck Collins
Chuck Collins is co-founder of CARP and author of Burned by Billionaires: How Concentrated Wealth and Power are Ruining Our Lives and Planet.
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Thursday, October 29, 2026

Fresh as the microplastic-laden Sierra snow

Scientists quantify exact amounts, types of plastics in snowfall

University of California - Riverside

image:
UCR toxicologist Aleksandra Karapetrova sampling snow at a remote site in the Sierra Nevada.
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Credit: Sonya Maple/CDFW

For the first time, UC Riverside scientists have measured how much microplastic pollution falls on the Sierra Nevada during snowstorms and were surprised to find significant amounts even in the most remote locations.

Lead researcher Aleksandra Karapetrova, a UC Riverside environmental toxicologist, could not access any of the snowfall collection sites by car or even on foot. She expected plastic to be harder to find or even nonexistent in at least a few of these locations, given their distance from human activity.

“One site was accessed by chairlift. I had to ski to the rest of the remote sites. That’s how isolated they are,” Karapetrova said. “But no matter how far out the site, I always found microplastics there.”

Details about the particles, the seven locations at which they were collected, and the method used to verify their chemical properties are described in the journal Environmental Science and Technology.

Though the study did not determine how much plastic ultimately reaches drinking water, the findings have significance beyond the mountain, as the Sierra Nevada snowpack supplies about 30% of California’s freshwater.

The study also describes how snow scavenges airborne plastic from the atmosphere and carries it to the ground, far from population centers and places where the plastic is produced or used.

Microplastics enter the air when plastic products shed fibers or wear down into small fragments. Clothing can emit fibers directly into the atmosphere, including through dryer vents or just daily wear, while wind lifts particles from the ground and transports them elsewhere.

As snowflakes fall, they collect some of these tiny plastic particles suspended in the air. This process, called scavenging, helps explain why researchers measured substantially more plastic arriving with the falling snow than during dry weather.

“We are at a point where microplastics are in our atmosphere, not just the ocean, not just rivers. It comes down with the snowfall, making its way to places humans typically don’t go,” Karapetrova said.

At remote sampling locations, during the height of the storm, the snow deposited between 270 and 3,200 plastic particles per square meter, per day. At one site in the Mammoth Mountain ski area, the amount of pollution was roughly three times that found in remote sites. Between 2,600 and 7,500 particles per square meter per day there deposited in the snow. Nearby human activity and greater snowfall accumulation there are possible explanations.

“I didn’t think the plastics would stay suspended so much in the town,” Karapetrova said.

Even the large particle counts at Mammoth represent small amounts of material. At the highest estimated rate, snowfall over an acre would deliver about 1.5 grams of plastic per day.

To explore where the plastics may have originated, the researchers traced masses of air that ushered in the storms sampled in the study. Most of the storm air passed over Fresno and Madera counties, suggesting the Central Valley may be a region contributing these particles. Computer models could not identify exact sources or exclude plastic arriving in the Sierra from even farther away.

Earlier research had already established that microplastics occur in Western U.S. snow. This study examined how much is being deposited on the ground during individual storms, allowing researchers to connect measurements with particular weather events.

Confirming the particles’ identities required more than looking through a microscope. Researchers used infrared light to read chemical signatures, then compared those signatures with a reference library to distinguish plastic from soil and plant material.

Most commonly, the researchers found polyethylene, polypropylene, and polyester/PET, which are plastics commonly used in clothing and packaging. The team also found cellulose derivatives, a group of chemically modified, plant-based materials used in consumer products.

This study did not assess health effects of microplastics in the environment. However, some chemicals used in plastics have documented health effects including hormone disruption, inflammation, and cellular damage.

The particles’ familiar ingredients point to the reach of everyday plastic use far beyond the products themselves.

“We’ve reached a point where plastic pollution is falling out of the sky every day, across this entire region, even when it isn’t snowing,” Karapetrova said.

The snow appears pristine in the remote Sierra Nevada, but research uncovers a different picture.

Credit

Sonya Maple/CDFW

Journal

Environmental Science & Technology

DOI

10.1021/acs.est.6c02757

Article Title

10.1021/acs.est.6c02757

Article Publication Date

27-Oct-2026

Saturday, February 28, 2026

Of Monks and Oligarchs

by Charles Sullivan / February 27th, 2026

One of the things I have learned in my more than seven decades of life is that everything has its opposite. For instance, you wouldn’t know up if there was not also a down. You wouldn’t know warmth without cold. Darkness reveals the light. For every peak there is a corresponding valley. In the same way, good and evil reveal one another.

Not long ago, a group of Buddhist monks and a dog named Aloka completed a peace walk of more than two thousand miles from Texas to Washington, DC, in the dead of winter. Their long walk was a continuation of a trek that began in India.

Coming from India, the monks were not acclimated to North American winters. They were not ideally clothed for the journey, and they carried very little with them. Deep cold and snow had set in over most of the route. Without complaint, they endured pain and suffering. Illness befell some of them that required medical intervention. But the monks were focused on two things: mindfulness and peace. Nothing could dissuade them from completing the task they had set for themselves.

I had heard about the event, but I did not immediately give it the attention it deserved. I occasionally checked on the monk’s progress. But as the weeks passed, I began to pay closer attention to the crowds of people that had gathered to bear witness, often in severe weather.

People from all walks of life, young and old alike, came out to witness the spectacle, to offer words of encouragement, and to provide clothing, food and drink, lip balm, flowers and medicine and moral support to the monks. Some kind soul even supplied boots for Aloka. It seemed that with each town the monks passed, the crowds grew, and there was an obvious spiritual bond between them. The monks brought out the best in people.

On the final stages of the peace walk, I witnessed events that are not commonplace on this continent. The monks were humble, respectful and reverent. Their demeanor, their grace, their dignity, so rare these days in the midst of hatred, war, drug abuse, alcoholism, hubris and violence was not something I have witnessed here before on that scale. It felt surreal.

An aura of spirituality enveloped the participants. The mutual respect and reverence, the spiritual connection between the peace walkers and their supporters was palpable. You could feel the sanctity, the reverence for life and the love that radiated outward from the monks and was reciprocated in kind by the observers.

You could feel the authenticity in every gesture of compassion and empathy that passed between the monks and the onlookers. As they approached the nation’s capital, the monks and their supporters were melding into a single, integrated entity for peace, a literal peace movement.

I saw an elderly ex-marine break down in tears in the presence of the monks. I saw young children with flowers in hand and a wondrous glow of innocence in their eyes, give each passing monk a flower, a gesture of compassion and love, and I also saw the monks give flowers to the children and elderly men and women who braved the elements to share the mystical experience unfolding before them. No money changed hands but many profited. A wealth of experience accumulated like snowflakes in a winter storm.

The event and all who participated in it showed that another world is possible. It demonstrated that human beings could choose to walk humbly in a sacred manner, rather than take up arms against their brothers and sisters on other continents. We can consciously choose a path of enlightenment and spirituality over the coerced march to death and destruction that our so-called leaders are foisting upon us. The choice is ours to make.

The monks and Aloka didn’t tell us anything. Rather, they showed us the path to enlightenment through their long walk and their willingness to endure suffering. Every footstep was a prayer for peace and justice writ large in the language of motion, the act of being and doing. To walk in a sacred manner is not a symbolic gesture. It demonstrated that harmony is possible, but it requires intentionality, mindfulness, compassion and empathy for all life.

When existential stress is removed from our lives, calmness and peace of mind fills the vacuum, and peace can come to full flower. Ruthless competition yields to mutual aid and cooperation, shared prosperity, and the recognition that all is one. We have but one earth and we need to share it with every living thing. The very presence of the monks evoked peace; it awakened the slumbering hope that once animated our lives and gave us purpose. It reminded us that we can and must do better.

In contrast to the Buddhist monks, a few weeks prior, I heard Scott Bessent, the Secretary of Treasury, his pride-swollen chest puffed out, gleefully boasting about deliberately imposing suffering and misery and death on the Iranian people, including women and children, through sanctions and tariffs, frozen assets and blockades of critical resources. But this is nothing new. Our bread crumb trail of sins lead us far into the past and to inescapable conclusions about who we are and what we truly believe as individuals and as a nation.

We are not at peace with ourselves or the world. We are a people divided by socioeconomic class. We measure worth by income and social status and by material possessions and dominance. The almighty dollar owns us. We think that we can buy happiness and rule the world. Our imaginary visions of grandeur are in reality a dystopian nightmare that devours hope and human decency and leaves a trail of corpses in its wake.

Bessent’s economic statecraft is being imposed on Iran, Cuba and Venezuela and other nations, especially in the global south, that pose no threat to us. As a matter of policy, people are starving to death and being denied access to medicine and a decent life. These are the wretched of the earth, and they are our brothers and sisters. They are us. That is not statecraft. It is sadism, a crime against humanity.

Iran poses no material threat whatsoever to the US, and neither does Cuba or Venezuela, but the US seeks to humiliate them and destroy their sovereignty. It plans to turn Cuba and Gaza into another fantasy island for the Epstein class.

In a similar vein, Marco Rubio, the US Secretary of State, recently gave a sickening speech at the Munich Security Conference, in which he proposed rededication to US imperialism, by using its economic and military might to steal the resources of other nations and to enslave their populations to corporate interests and to sow chaos and misery and other forms of debauchery.

To Rubio, that is how strong people treat the weak and powerless; they dominate them and plunder their sovereign nations without regard for their people’s needs. That is the mentality of a plantation owner and a Christian fascist.

Rubio’s intentions are clear: to impose US global dominance, to reassert its powers and to turn back the hands of time to the good ole days of slavery, child labor, colonial occupation, and the subjugation of non-whites. In a shameful display of sycophancy, the European capitalists gave Rubio a standing ovation.

As if turning a knife in the back of the resistance, Rubio also skewered “godless communists” for getting in the way of US imperialism around the planet. But if communism is godless, as Rubio asserts, it would therefore infer that capitalism is a religion of godliness, and it would also accord Rubio himself the status of one of its high priests. Although I am not a Christian or a member of any organized religion, I am quite certain that the prosperity gospel does not appear anywhere in the King James version of the Holy Bible.

What Rubio and his minions propose reeks of Manifest Destiny and American exceptionalism. It is a violent and oppressive ideology that fosters the assumed superiority of global oligarchs over working people. It treats the rest of the world as subjects to be ruled and punished by the rich and powerful, as if being poor were a sin punishable by death.

By now it should be abundantly clear to anyone with a conscience and an ethical code of conduct that the Buddhist monks peace walk was spiritually enlightened and life-affirming, whereas Marco Rubio’s speech on behalf of empire was death-affirming and dark. We Homo sapiens are enigmatic creatures. We often have difficulty connecting the dots and seeing the clear picture resolving before our eyes. Good and evil make a well-defined contrast to one another, as does the enlightenment and darkness of the human soul.

The effect those monks had on the people they met on their peace walk will stay with me for the rest of my life.

On the other hand, I hope that I can soon forget the vitriolic garbage spewed forth by the likes of Scott Bessent, Hillary Clinton and Marco Rubio. The thought of them and their psychologically deformed ideology literally makes me ill. We can and must do better. We needn’t pursue another trail of tears or create more reservations and American colonies. There are too many of them already.

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Charles Sullivan is a writer/philosopher who resides in the Ridge and Valley Province of Turtle Island (North America). Email: charlessullivan7@comcast.net. Read other articles by Charles.

Tuesday, February 24, 2026

SPACE/COSMOS

Why some objects in space look like snowmen

Gravitational collapse may explain the origin of contact binaries in the Kuiper Belt, MSU simulation finds

Michigan State University

Kuiper belt image — image:
This image was taken by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft on Jan. 1, 2019 during a flyby of Kuiper Belt object 2014 MU69, informally known as Ultima Thule. It is the clearest view yet of this remarkable, ancient object in the far reaches of the solar system – and the first small "KBO" ever explored by a spacecraft.
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Credit: NASA

Astronomers have long debated why so many icy objects in the outer solar system look like snowmen. Michigan State University researchers now have evidence of the surprisingly simple process that could be responsible for their creation.

Far beyond the violent, chaotic asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter lies what’s known as the Kuiper Belt. There, past Neptune, you’ll find icy, untouched building blocks from the dawn of the solar system, known as planetesimals. About one in 10 of these objects are contact binaries, planetesimals that are shaped like two connected spheres, much like Frosty the Snowman. But just how these objects came to be without the help of a magic silk hat was an open question.

Jackson Barnes, an MSU graduate student, has created the first simulation that reproduces the two-lobed shape naturally with gravitational collapse. His work is published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Earlier computational models treated colliding objects as fluid blobs that merged into spheres, making it impossible to form these unique shapes. Thanks to MSU’s Institute for Cyber-Enabled Research, or ICER, and its high-performance computing cluster, Barnes’ simulations produce a more realistic environment that allows objects to retain their strength and rest against one another.

Other formation theories involve special events or exotic phenomena that, while possible, aren’t likely to happen on a regular basis.

“If we think 10 percent of planetesimal objects are contact binaries, the process that forms them can’t be rare,” said Earth and Environmental Science Professor Seth Jacobson, senior author on the paper. “Gravitational collapse fits nicely with what we’ve observed.”

Contact binaries were first imaged up close by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft in January 2019. These images prompted scientists to take another look at other objects in the Kuiper belt, and it turned out that contact binaries accounted for about 10 percent of all planetesimals. These distant objects float mostly undisturbed and safe from collisions in the sparsely populated Kuiper belt.

In the early days of the Milky Way, the galaxy was a disc of dust and gas. Remnants of the galaxy’s formation are found in the Kuiper Belt, including dwarf planets like Pluto, comets and planetesimals.

Planetesimals are the first large planetary objects to form from the disc of dust and pebbles. Much like individual snowflakes that are packed into a snowball, these first planetesimals are aggregates of pebble-sized objects pulled together by gravity from a cloud of tiny materials.

Occasionally as the cloud rotates, it falls inward on itself, ripping the object apart and forming two separate planetesimals that orbit one another. Astronomers observe many binary planetesimals in the Kuiper belt. In Barnes’ simulation, the orbits of these objects spiral inward until the two gently make contact and fuse together while still maintaining their round shapes.

How do these two objects stay together throughout the history of the solar system? Barnes explains they’re simply unlikely to crash into another object. Without a collision, there’s nothing to break them apart. Most binaries aren’t even pocked with craters.

Scientists long suspected that gravitational collapse was responsible for forming these objects, but they couldn’t fully test the idea. Barnes’ model is the first to include the physics needed to reproduce contact binaries.

“We’re able to test this hypothesis for the first time in a legitimate way,” Barnes said. “That’s what’s so exciting about this paper.”

Barnes expects his model will help scientists understand binary systems of three or more objects. The team is also working to create a new simulation that better models the collapse process.

As more NASA missions explore uncharted realms of the solar system, Jacobson and Barnes suspect Frosty may have more distant cousins yet to be found.

Simulation of gravitational collapse [VIDEO] |

Jackson Barnes created this computer simulation showing how a contact binary’s two-lobed shape could be formed by gravitational collapse.

Jackson Barnes created this contact binary in a computer simulation showing how the two-lobed shape could be formed by gravitational collapse.