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“I’m going to perform a magic trick by reading your mind,” I tell a class of students or an auditorium or video call full of people. I write something down. “Name a war that was justified,” I say. Someone says “World War Two.” I show them what I wrote: “WWII.” Magic![i]

If I insist on additional answers, they’re almost always wars even further in the past than WWII.[ii] If I ask why WWII is the answer, the response is virtually always “Hitler” or “Holocaust” or words to that effect.

This predictable exchange, in which I get to pretend to have magical powers, is part of a lecture or workshop that I typically begin by asking for a show of hands in response to a pair of questions:

“Who thinks war is never justified?”

and

On September 2, the Israeli government approved a proposal that allows the military to indefinitely withhold the bodies of Palestinians who have been killed by the Israeli army. The proposal was made by the country’s Defense Minister, Benny Gantz.  

Shut up and let corporate America — and also, for that matter, corporate Taiwan — get on with its business. We have ethane to crack and plastic to produce. We dare not let America run out of shopping bags!

Environmental racism? Don’t be ridiculous.

This is the message the activists of Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley” — a heavily industrialized, 85-mile strip of land along the Mississippi River, between New Orleans and Baton Rouge — have gotten from the local powers that be regarding their determination to prevent the construction a gigantic, highly toxic, 14-plant plastics-production complex in their midst.

BANGKOK, Thailand -- Thailand's democracy activists, angered by Hong
Kong's police brutality, joined an international "Mulan" boycott which
expanded after Disney thanked China's security forces for help with
filming in a desert where one million Uighurs and other Muslims are
imprisoned or suffer other rights violations.

"It just keeps getting worse!" Hong Kong's leading activist Joshua Wong tweeted.

"Now when you watch #Mulan, not only are you turning a blind eye to
police brutality and racial injustice -- due to what the lead actors
stand for -- you're also potentially complicit in the mass
incarceration of Muslim ethnic Uighurs. #BoycottMulan," Mr. Wong said.

"We have still not forgotten that Mulan's leading actress supported
the police use of violence against Hong Kong protesters who fight for
freedom and democracy,” announced prominent Thai student activist
Netiwit Chotiphatphaisal.

"I would like to invite everybody to #BoycottMulan, #BanMulan, so that
Disney and the Chinese government realize that state violence against

On 16 August 1819, an estimated 60,000 pro-democracy and anti-poverty activists were peacefully protesting the utterly corrupt nature of the Parliament in Westminster and demanding the reform of parliamentary representation (which afforded less than 2% of people the right to vote). The gathering took place in St Peter’s Field, Manchester in England.

The protest was precipitated by the acute economic slump, including chronic unemployment and harvest failure, following the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars as well as by enforcement of the Corn Laws which kept the price of bread high, by blocking (or imposing tariffs on) the import of cheap grains, at the expense of ordinary people.

After arresting some key figures on the speaker’s cart at the gathering, the cavalry was ordered to disperse the crowd. Charging with sabres drawn, approximately eighteen people were killed and nearly 700 seriously injured, with the event dubbed the ‘Peterloo massacre’ by radical media in a bitterly ironic reference to the bloody Battle of Waterloo some four years earlier. See ‘The Peterloo Memorial Campaign’.

Ballots are in the mail. Vote centers are opening. 

Wherever you can, cast your ballot NOW. 

Then become a poll worker and Election Protection volunteer.

Do NOT wait until November 3rd, or even late October. 

If your ballot arrives in the mail, check all the boxes on the envelope, see that your signature matches your best ID, that your name and address are perfect, and that required documents are copied and included. Call the election board and/or an Election Protection group to go over the details, and to find out if you can walk in your ballot. 

At a time when long-winded polemics and punditry about the upcoming presidential election are all over the place, a longtime progressive populist author and agitator has just summarized it all in less than a minute.

“Hi, Jim Hightower here,” a just-released video begins, “with a message for progressives who don’t like Joe Biden’s corporate-hugging politics. Neither do I! But — and it’s a very big ‘but’ — Trump is a crackpot, a total plutocratic toady who’s literally destroying the lives of workaday people and killing America’s progressive possibilities.”

Hightower continues: “Trump has to be gone before we the people can move forward with our agenda of fairness and justice for all. So I don’t care if Biden is a 200-pound sack of concrete, we have to carry him into the White House to eject the Orange Menace. I urge all of you, especially in swing states like mine, to suck it up and do this heavy lifting. Let’s dump Trump, then we’ll take on Biden!”

Solartopia Green Power and Wellness Hour - ELECTION MADNESS STARING US IN THE FACE