Meet School Board Candidate

 

Meet and greet with Loretta Hass, candidate for La Crosse School Board on Monday evening from 5 to 7 p.m. at 1205 Redfield.

 

STOP

The Trump  administration has illegally bombed and kidnapped the president of Venezuela. This has been done without any official action from Congress which is, again, on vacation. Though there is some life in a few. It's not for "democracy," it's for oil, minerals, and more power. They say the operation is over, but continuing attacks may lead to Trump assuming "war powers," to give himself more control over domestic dissent and future elections.

Will Greenland be next? Who will stop him? 

Stop it now.

Contact 

Derrick Van Orden: (202) 225-5506

Ron Johnson: (202) 224-5323

Tammy Baldwin: (202) 224-5653

AI & Data Centers

Bernie Sanders calls for pause in AI development: ‘What are they gonna do when people have no jobs?’

Big Tech Unchecked: A toolkit for community action - Tuesday, January 13 at 6 p.m. online. REGISTER HERE. 

Join Healthy Climate Wisconsin, the Midwest Environmental Advocates, the Sierra Club-Wisconsin Chapter, and Wisconsin's Green Fire as we walk through the new toolkit: Hyperscale Data Centers in Wisconsin: Big Tech Unchecked, A toolkit for Community Action

Data Drain: The Land and Water Impacts of the AI Boom
By Jon Gorey, October 17, 2025 from The Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. 

"Absent an avalanche of new, clean power, most data centers are adding copious amounts of greenhouse gases to our collective emissions, at a time when science demands we cut them sharply to limit the worst impacts of climate change. Louisiana regulators in August approved plans to build three new gas power plants to offset the expected electricity demand from Meta’s Hyperion AI data center."

From Wisconsin Chapter Sierra Club: In Wisconsin, dozens of data centers have been proposed, and some have been approved with little comprehensive environmental review that looks at the cumulative impacts of these data centers and the infrastructure being built to support them.

Currently, there are no guardrails for data centers, including clean energy requirements, protections for customers of the utilities that will be powering these massive energy users, or limits on water use. 

Unchecked, data centers could wreak havoc on our water and climate, consuming staggering amounts of energy, and Wisconsinites could be on the hook to pay for them.

New legislation that has been proposed would address these concerns with data centers. Learn more here.

Astrophysicist and science journalist Adam Becker has his eye on the dreams of Silicon Valley’s billionaire elite—and he’s unimpressed. He says Silicon Valley’s “heartless, baseless, and foolish obsessions”—with escaping death, building AI tyrants, and creating limitless growth—pervert public discourse and distract us from real social problems.

He argues that tech billionaires have decided that they should determine our futures for us, and that the only good future for humanity is one powered by technology: trillions of humans living in space, functionally immortal, served by superintelligent AIs.

In More Everything Forever, Becker investigates what he calls wildly implausible and often profoundly immoral visions of tomorrow—and shows why, in reality, there is no good evidence that they will, or should, come to pass. Nevertheless, these obsessions fuel fears that overwhelm reason—for example, that a rogue AI will exterminate humanity—at the expense of essential work on solving crucial problems like climate change. What’s more, these futuristic visions cloak a hunger for power under dreams of space colonies and digital immortality. The giants of Silicon Valley claim that their ideas are based on science, but Becker says the reality is darker: they come from a jumbled mix of shallow futurism and racist pseudoscience.

What will the world look like as AI continues to accelerate? In this PARC Forum conversation, technologist, entrepreneur, and philanthropist Eric Schmidt joined SRI CEO David Parekh to discuss our long-term future with AI.

Contact Congress

They may be on vacation (again) but they are still supposed to be on the job. Contact Van O - we still demand an in-person town hall in La Crosse, open to the public, without pre-selected questions. DON'T let him use your group, organization, or agency to pretend everything is normal. If he won't meet with everyday constituents, don't let him meet with you.

House Democratic leaders introduced a discharge petition designed to force consideration of legislation to extend expiring ACA tax credits for another three years - and on December 17, 2025 they got the required 218 signatures!

But in typical coward fashion, and just as he did to avoid a vote on the Epstein files, Speaker Johnson is getting his GOP members out of town as quickly as possible.

Learn more here and send a letter to your member of Congress to demand that Speaker Johnson hold a vote IMMEDIATELY on the extension of the ACA tax credits.

And, from Indivisible,

The Epstein cover-up continues. Let's keep up the pressure on Republicans until ALL the files are released.

Tell your Republican Member(s) of Congress that they must ensure that all the files are released, in keeping with the law they voted for. Those who joined Epstein in preying on young girls and women must be held accountable. Epstein's survivors have shown remarkable courage in continuing to pursue justice; surely Members of Congress can find their own backbones, too.

Act here.

Visibility event

La Crosse Indivisible is hosting a half hour visibility event tonight at 6 p.m. at 314 Front St. S. There is street parking and a parking ramp on 2nd St,, a block away. The theme is Peace.