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NEON is making Totally Under Control available for free today through election, and hosting various watch parties including one with Judd Apatow and the filmmakers tomorrow. 

You can also download a brand new poster here: https://we.tl/t-eJHFRsanJH

NEON’s Documentary About the White House’s Failed Response to the Pandemic Was Just Nominated for 4 Critic’s Choice Documentary Awards

"There is a kind of an official view about democracy—it says that you, the public, are spectators not participants,” activist and scholar Noam Chomsky points out in a new video. “You have a function. The function is to show up every couple of years, push a lever, go home, don't bother the important people who run the world, you’ve done your job. We can’t accept that.”

At the same time, Chomsky is vehement about the urgent necessity of defeating Donald Trump. "Sometimes it's worthwhile to take a little time away from real politics, an interlude, and make sure you get somebody out. This time it is critically important," Chomsky says in the video (produced by my colleagues with the Vote Trump Out campaign). "There's a real malignant cancer that has to be excised."

Yale Magrass and Charles Derber’s latest book is called Glorious Causes: The Irrationality of Capitalism, War, and Politics. I hope people are reading it. I worry, because after Mom, apple pie, and shopping, what are more popular than capitalism, war, and politics? Probably not . . . oh, I don’t know . . . analyses of the similarities between the histories of Nazi Germany and the United States. Those are in this book too, and are probably the most interesting parts of it.

In the book’s defense, it is part of a series called “Universalizing Resistance,” and it focuses a lot on the same cultural divide between educated, rational cosmopolitans and traditional, irrational racists that the Democrats spent a fair amount of time blaming after the last time they nominated the least popular presidential candidate they could find.

Free Press advises voters that it is too late to vote by mail. Secretary's of State in Wisconsin, Arizona, and other officials have gone on record.

NPR reports It May Be Too Late To Mail Back Your Ballot. Election Officials Stress Other Options” by Sam Gringlas. Quoted from this article:

"We are too close to Election Day, and the right to vote is too important, to rely on the Postal Service to deliver absentee ballots on time," Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson wrote in a statement on Tuesday. "Citizens who already have an absentee ballot should sign the back of the envelope and hand-deliver it to their city or township clerk's office or ballot drop box as soon as possible."

Here’s a piece of paradoxical news that puts even the looming U.S. presidential election in perspective: Nuclear weapons are now (or soon will be) . . . good Lord, illegal.

Armageddon is against the law!

Well, sort of. And the Trump administration doesn’t agree. Indeed, no nuke-armed nation has, as far as I can tell, anything but contempt for this infringement on its right to blow up the world (only if necessary, of course). War and peace, it seems, exist in parallel universes.

The Covid pandemic has given Pharma a temporary halo. Who cares about its prohibitively expensive drugs, the way it hides drug risks, the way that it "sells" diseases through TV ads and "symptom checkers" and the opioid epidemic it created? We need a vaccine and we need it now! Already Pharma has received $1 billion of our hard earned tax dollars to develop Covid vaccines.

But even if the majority of people agree to receive a vaccine and even if the virus doesn't mutate making a vaccine useless (neither scenario likely) there are burning vaccine questions that remain and the media continue to ignore.

* Why do drug makers receive government money for what they should be doing anyway? Isn't drug development their job? (They also got money to develop new antibiotics)

* If we, the taxpayers, funded the vaccines, why don't we own them? Why aren't they free?

 single election administrator in Detroit could give Donald Trump four more years.

Election protectionists warn that she was key to Trump’s illegitimate victory in 2016, and that she could do it again in 2020 if she is not removed (not likely at this point) or intensely monitored.

Four years ago, Trump was awarded Michigan’s 16 key Electoral College votes based on an official margin of less than 11,000 votes. But more than 70,000 ballots from around the state came in without presidential preferences — a state record.

These “beheaded” ballots were allegedly cast by voters who stood in line for hours, only to apparently not bother to choose between Trump and Hillary Clinton.

Sophisticated hackers can perpetrate ballot beheading with a well-known algorithm that has surfaced in numerous US elections. In 2004, a similar outcome on Indigenous reservations helped give New Mexico to George W. Bush.

Peter Kuznick answered the following questions from Mohamed Elmaazi of Sputnik Radio and agreed to let World BEYOND War publish the text.

1) What’s the significance of Honduras being the latest country to join the UN’s Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons?

What a remarkable and ironic development, especially after the U.S. had been pressuring the previous 49 signers to withdraw their approvals. It is so fitting that Honduras, the original “banana republic,” pushed it over the edge–a delicious fuck you to a century of U.S. exploitation and bullying.

2) Is it possibly a bit of a distraction to focus on countries that have no nuclear capability?

Not really. This treaty represents the moral voice of humanity. It may not have a universal enforcement mechanism, but it clearly states that the people of this planet abhor the power-hungry, annihilation-threatening madness of the nine nuclear powers. The symbolic significance can not be overstated.

With the railroaded Supreme Court appointment of Amy Barrett, Team Trump has lit the final fuse on his 2020 coup d’etat. With Barrett, Roberts and Kavanaugh, Trump’s Trifecta, because they all did it before in Bush vs Gore. Read on.

Barrett, Roberts and Kavanaugh, Trump’s Trifecta, did it all before in Bush vs Gore. Read on.

As of right now, with the all-but-certain compliance of Supremes Neil Gorsuch and Samuel Alito, and with the agreement of enough Republican-held state legislatures, there is no legal barrier to Trump’s second term, no matter what the voters say.

In real terms, the only practical wall against such a coup might be a massive anti-Trump national vote—-but it would have to be overwhelming enough to make his would-be dictatorship politically unsustainable.  

As for the Constitutional path, the road has been cleared.  The calculation is simple.

BANGKOK, Thailand -- Thailand's U.S.-backed authoritarian leader
seized power six years ago in a military coup but now appears
bewildered, vulnerable and unable to stop two months of street
protests against the government and previously monarchy.

Some people wonder if Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha can stay at the
top, who might replace him, and will bullets be used against the tens
of thousands of peaceful, idealistic youths demanding revolutionary
changes.

Many Thais predict the protesters will not be able to curtail the vast
influence and wealth of 68-year-old King Vajiralongkorn.

"Now it is understood that the country needs people who love the
country and love the monarchy,” the constitutional king said in a
speech on October 16.

Prayuth agreed and recently said, "What the government needs to do is
to protect the monarchy.

"There are millions of people who are loyal to the monarchy, and they
are in all provinces. So please help us defuse the tension."

University students and school children have been blocking afternoon
traffic in scattered cities, voicing often vulgar speeches against