Global
“Well, thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much. Please sit. Thank you. This is without question the latest news conference I’ve ever had. Thank you. I appreciate it very much. And I want to thank the American people for their tremendous support, millions and millions of people voted for us tonight. And a very sad group of people is trying to disenfranchise that group of people and we won’t stand for it. We will not stand for it.”
It’s Wednesday morning. The election is still up for grabs as I write, creating a post-Election Day void of painful proportions. A blue wave didn’t wash over the newly constructed wall around the White House, flush out the least competent president in American history and present the planet with President Joe, the guy who would make it all better.
Stephen Wertheim’s Tomorrow, The World examines a shift in elite U.S. foreign-policy thinking that took place in mid-1940. Why in that moment, a year and a half before the Japanese attacks on the Philippines, Hawaii, and other outposts, did it become popular in foreign-policy circles to advocate for U.S. military domination of the globe?
In school text book mythology, the United States was full of revoltingly backward creatures called isolationists at the time of World War I and right up through December 1941, after which the rational adult internationalists took command (or we’d all be speaking German and suffering through the rigged elections of fascistic yahoos, unlike this evening).
Mohammad Ibrahim Ali al-Deirawi was born on January 30, 1978 in Nuseirat refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. His family is originally from Bir Al-Saba’, an ethnically cleansed Palestinian town located in the southern Naqab desert. Mohammad was arrested by the Israeli army at a military checkpoint in central Gaza on March 1, 2001. He was sentenced to 30 years in prison for his role in the armed Palestinian resistance, and was freed on October 18, 2011 in a prisoner exchange between the Palestinian resistance and Israel.
Mohammad's interrogation commenced as soon as he arrived at the Central Asqalan (Ashkelon) Prison in southern Israel, where he experienced physical and psychological torture for nearly two and a half months. He was handed his sentence by an Israeli military court on March 20, 2003.
As soon as he was released from the Nafha Prison, 100 kilometers north of Bir Al-Saba’, he married Ghadeer, the beautiful and only daughter of his prison-mate, Majdi Hammad. Ghadeer and Mohammad have two children.
Many readers will remember how Republicans rigged the elections in Florida in 2000. A violent mob prevented volunteers from completing the recount in contested southern counties. As a result, the recount could not be completed in time to meet the deadline of December 20, 2020 for legally choosing the state’s Electoral College delegation. The Bush campaign sued and took the case, Bush v Gore, to the U.S. Supreme Court, which by an infamous 5-4 decision, handed the presidency to Bush.
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.