Global

To stop Donald Trump from becoming President for Life, democracy activists must win this fall's election protection "trifecta"-- restore the voter registration rolls, make it possible for everyone to vote by mail and guarantee a fair and accurate ballot count.

The odds are formidable.

In 2000, 2004 and 2016, Republicans deregistered millions of potential voters in order to put George W. Bush and Donald Trump in the White House. In 2020, the nationwide total has been estimated in the range of 16 million. The disenfranchised would-be voters, of course, are predominantly young, low income and people of color.

In years past, the pretexts for making voting harder have been varied and creative. They range from suspicion of voting twice, to being an ex-felon, to voting in more than one state-- things that almost never happen.

This year, Republican lawmakers are stripping the registration rolls of citizens they suspect of having skipped two previous federal elections. Their determination to "clean" the voter rolls has been fierce, especially when applied to voting blocs that lean Democratic.

Remarks at Peacestock 2020

Imagine you’re stranded on a barren rock in the middle of the ocean, nothing in sight but the endless sea. And you’ve got a basket of apples, nothing else. It’s a huge basket, a thousand apples. There are various things you could do.

You could allow yourself a few apples a day and try to make them last. You could work on creating a patch of soil where apple seeds could be planted. You could work on starting a fire in order to have some cooked apples for a change. You could think of other ideas; you’d have plenty of time.

What if you were to take 600 of your 1,000 apples and throw them as hard as you could into the water, one by one, in hopes of hitting a shark, or scaring all the sharks of the world so that they wouldn’t come near your island? And what if a voice in the back of your head were to whisper to you: “Psst. Hey, buddy, you’re losing your mind. You’re not scaring sharks. You’re more likely to attract some monster than to get a message out to all the monsters in the world. And you’re going to starve soon at this rate.”

BANGKOK, Thailand -- One year after becoming an elected civilian prime
minister, military coup leader Prayuth Chan-ocha is tightening
security links with the Pentagon, increasing financial deals with
China, and enjoying applause for containing COVID-19 at 58 dead with
no transmissions in two months.

Prime Minister Prayuth's political enemies meanwhile suffered the past
year being ousted from a lopsided, junta-stacked parliament or
struggling in disarray.

Smoldering protests are starting to resume against his change from a
2014 bloodless coup leader to being sworn in on July 16, 2019 after
his coalition won a parliamentary election and packed the Senate with
appointees.

But his opponents are muzzled by Mr. Prayuth's recent Emergency Decree
restricting free speech and assembly, which he claims is needed to
contain COVID-19.

A politicized and weapons-hungry military, Thailand's need for
investments, and its strategic territorial access in Southeast Asia
attract both the U.S. and China which perceive him as a willing
partner.

As the combined impact of the corona virus and the wholesale destruction of America’s history and culture, or at least the part of it that is white, continues, it is nice to see that other nations are getting into the game that will lead to the de facto elimination of western civilization. No one is yet quite up the U.S. level of senseless destruction and looting by the heroes of Black Lives Matter (BLM) and Antifa, but in Britain mobs are beating policemen, statues including that of Winston Churchill are being attacked and the Cenotaph commemorating the country’s war dead has been vandalized. In a bizarre incident demonstrating the fundamental ignorance of the wreckers, a memorial to those who died at the 1651 Battle of Worcester in the English Civil War has suffered “significant damage”, with the letters BLM painted on the marker.

“Eugene V. Debs is Bernie Sanders’ political hero,” the Washington Post reported with evident distaste while the battle for the Democratic presidential nomination was raging in early 2016. “A picture of the socialist union organizer hung in city hall when he was mayor of Burlington, Vermont. A plaque honoring Debs is now by the window in Sanders’ Senate office.”

Human nature as a central theme of philosophy

What is human nature? Are we humans good or evil? To what extent is the character of a person produced by heredity, and to what extent by environment? Is competition more central to our existence than cooperation, or is it the other way around? How can a happy, peaceful and stable society be created? Are humans essentially the same as other animals, or are we fundamentally different? Should humans dominate and control nature, or should we be the custodians of nature? These questions are central to philosophy. Conflicting answers have been given by philosophers, scientists and religious leaders offer the centuries, from earliest times until the present.

The chemistry and physiology of emotions

Nicholson Baker’s new book, Baseless: My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act, is staggeringly good. If I point out any minor complaints with it, while ignoring, for example, the entirety of Trump’s latest press conference, this is because flaws stand out in a masterpiece while making up the uniform entirety of a Trumpandemic Talk.

Baker begins as if he has an unanswered and possibly unanswerable question: Did the U.S. government use biological weapons in the 1950s? Well, yes, of course it did, I want to reply. It used them in North Korea and (later) in Cuba; it tested them in U.S. cities. We know that the spread of Lyme disease came out of this. We can be pretty confident that Frank Olson was murdered for what he knew about U.S. biological warfare.

It’s not clear at first, as it seems later, that Baker is suggesting much more uncertainty than he actually has — presumably because that’s what you do toward the beginning of a book in order to not scare away the fragile readers.

Asia, Europe, Immorality, North America, South America

Nicholson Baker’s new book, Baseless: My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act, is staggeringly good. If I point out any minor complaints with it, while ignoring, for example, the entirety of Trump’s latest press conference, this is because flaws stand out in a masterpiece while making up the uniform entirety of a Trumpandemic Talk.

Baker begins as if he has an unanswered and possibly unanswerable question: Did the U.S. government use biological weapons in the 1950s? Well, yes, of course it did, I want to reply. It used them in North Korea and (later) in Cuba; it tested them in U.S. cities. We know that the spread of Lyme disease came out of this. We can be pretty confident that Frank Olson was murdered for what he knew about U.S. biological warfare.

“There are so many . . . primitive tribes — they don’t understand anything.”

The global movement to end racism must turn its attention to the world’s most vulnerable cultures — the indigenous people of Planet Earth — who are still enduring the forces of colonial genocide.

They are, after all, still obstacles to the planet’s moneyed interests.

I say these words not simply because protecting tribal cultures is humane, but also because it could well be crucial to everyone’s survival, including yours and mine. The dismissive arrogance evident in the above quote remains all too common. Those people are . . . savages, whatever, choose your judgmental noun.

The speaker above — the founder of India’s Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences, a.k.a., KISS, which is the world’s largest “boarding school” for indigenous children — called them monkeys. Some 30,000 indigenous, also known as Adivasi, children attend KISS, where, according to Survival International, they are shamed and forced to give up their languages and their cultures and become, you know, regular people.